Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 11/28/23: Bibi Rejects Two State Solution, Man Arrested For Shooting Palestinians, WH Blames Social Media For Economic Worry, Home Sales Drop, AI Breakthrough And Altman Ouster, Ireland Censorship After Riots, AIPAC Bribes Tlaib Challengers, RNC Funding Plummets, And Santos Spills On Colleagues

Episode Date: November 28, 2023

Krystal and Saagar discuss Netanyahu rejecting Biden's call for a two state solution, suspect arrested after shooting of three Palestinians, White House blames social media for economic concerns, home sales drop to decade low, AI breakthrough and Sam Altman, McGregor investigated after Ireland riot tweets, AIPAC caught trying to bribe challengers to Rashida Tlaib, RNC funding plummets, and George Santos accuses colleagues of adultery and corruption. BP Holiday Merch LIVE NOW (Use code BLACKFRIDAY for 15% off Non-Holiday Items): https://shop.breakingpoints.com/collections/breaking-points-holiday-collection  To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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to take care of ourselves. A wrap-away, you got to pray for the providers, but we also have to learn to take care of ourselves. A wrap-away, you got to pray for yourself as well as for everybody else, but never forget yourself. Self-love made me a better dad because I realized my worth. Never stop being a dad. That's dedication. Find out more at fatherhood.gov. Brought to you by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Ad Council. High Key. Looking for your next obsession? Brought to you by the U.S. the way she about to yank my bank account.

Correct. And one thing I really love about this is that she's celebrating her daughter. Oh, I know. Listen to High Key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, Ready or Not 2024 is here and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways

we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show. Good morning, everybody. Happy Tuesday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed, we do.

A lot to get into. Very latest coming out of Israel. Both an extension of that temporary pause and also some indications of what is going to come next. So we'll get into all of that. We also have the White House panicking over so-called misinformation about the economy. Break that one down for you. Some behind-the-scenes details about what may have transpired that triggered the temporary firing of Sam Altman before he was brought back at OpenAI. It says a lot about the future of AI and the direction that that whole industry is going in.

We also wanted to dig into those violent riots that unfolded in Ireland. It's quite shocking. And some of the untold details about what may have caused that outburst of anger and violence. So we'll get into that. Also, AIPAC apparently extremely desperate to get Rashida Tlaib out of office. You now have multiple candidates who say that they have been offered $20 million to fund a campaign against Rashida Tlaib coming from AIPAC-affiliated donors. To break that down for you, I've also got some news about what's going on at the RNC,

not looking good in terms of their finances. Maybe they should talk to those other donors. There seems to be a lot of money flying around. And George Santos is going ham on his colleagues. He's going out with a bang. Yeah, it's sort of a Madison Cawthorn kind of vibe. Hey, maybe he's telling the truth this time, okay? This might be the most believable thing he has ever said.

With all of that, though, before we get to that, we have our excellent merchandise that's currently on sale for the holiday season. We've got these cozy socks, which I wear all the time. But, of course, we've got the sweater. We've got the ornament. We have the travel coffee mug. All of that, if you will, all of it available on shop.breakingpoints.com or at a link just from

our website and at the same time you know as a thank you for everybody and i know it's the holiday season and this also includes existing premium subscribers who would like to gift a subscription uh we are currently discounting our yearly membership at 90 a year so go ahead and take advantage of that all of that at breakingpoints.com it helps support the show helps uh really our expansion efforts we're're prepping, of course, for the 2024 election, which we're kind of in the middle of. A lot more new focus groups and other new ideas and cool stuff that we're able to bring to all of you. So any of those, buying merch or signing up for membership, giving a gift, any of those really does help us out a lot over here. But with that, let's get to Israel.

I also want to say shout-out to Kurt, who was wearing a beautiful, sweatshirt. Oh, that's right. You actually saw one in the wild. Last night at a Rheingram's book event here in the city. And he looked fantastic in it. And yeah, it was fun to see. You know, I'm jealous because, Kurt, you have a sweater before I have a sweater. I know. That's exactly what I said, too. I don't even have one.

It looked great on him, though. All right. Let's go ahead and get to what is, of course, very serious news. I want to start with this, even though we do have the news about the ceasefire temporarily extended, we're going to break that down for you as well. But as a way to set the tone for this segment, we've been talking about how Netanyahu is under tremendous pressure. Basically, everyone in Israel wants him gone. He's just been trying to hold on by, you know, the skin of his fingertips as long as he possibly can, delay, delay, delay any sort of accountability to try to maintain his grip on

power. We now have a scoop. This is from Israeli media about, put this up on the screen, about the case he is making to his fellow Likud party members, Likud being, you know, his right-wing party that he has been the head of for some time. He says he should stay in government because, quote, I'm the only one who will prevent a Palestinian state in Gaza, Judea and Samaria, which is the name that Zionists call the West Bank. He says I'm the only one who can withstand U.S. pressure. He goes on to say it's because he knows Biden for 40 years, which has the ring of truth because Biden is so like relationship based, very similar to Trump in that way. And I know how to manage American public opinion. Now, keep in mind that consistently from the beginning of this outbreak of conflict, the one thing that Biden has always said is I'm committed to a two state solution. Afterwards, we've got to get to a two state solution. So here you have the head of government actively admitting at this moment, not only is he not interested in peace, he is making an

affirmative case that they should keep him in power because he is damn sure determined to make sure that Palestinians never have a state. So incredibly important context to keep in mind in terms of what may unfold in Gaza going forward, what the political dynamics are going to look like inside of Israel. And also, I mean, this is just thumbing the nose at the U.S. president at a time when we've provided them with unequivocal and totally unconditional support, including comments that there are no red lines for their operation here. For me, that was the biggest takeaway because it's obvious Bibi has said it many times before about preventing Palestinian statehood, about how the Likud party and others should actually be hopeful that Hamas remains in

power because that's the perfect cudgel to say that there's no reason we should move forward with the peace process. But I thought the fact is, is that he's willing to say this to his own party to try and save his own skin at the very same time that he's not an idiot. He knows what we can't read or hit Google Translate. We obviously can see clearly about what is happening. Don't forget either, Crystal. We have a pretty good visibility apparently into Israeli spy networks because we had those discord leaks. And one of the things that came out from those classified files, which we reported on here on the show, was specifically about our visibility into Mossad

and their effort to try and thwart Bibi eventually coming back into power. So at a spy level, I'm almost certainly we're getting updates in the same way that we spied on the Ukrainians about like, hey, what are they actually saying to each other? And the fact that it's now spilling out into the Israeli press about what the end state here, it just shows you how the fundamental long-term goal for Bibi Netanyahu and for the United States, and really, I think anybody who is legitimately pro Israel is just diverging to a point where it has to be untenable. I mean, Bibi should have gone, I think, really the day after October 7th, or at the very least at the beginning of the war, to ensure real, like, coalitional support inside Israeli society and to give anybody who's pro-Rizal in the U.S. the unequivocal support

that they would want. But the issue is that while they have that, with the stated goal of U.S. policy going all the way back to Bill Clinton, honestly even before that is a two-state solution. It has remained unchanged. Now, actionable-wise, it wasn't a priority under the Trump administration, the Biden administration, or the Bush administration. Let's all be honest. The same with Obama. But it still remains the thing that we are all supposed to be working towards. And if he is directly opposed to the desired end state, as articulated by the American president and really by the American Congress, by all of the Western allies who are supportive of him so far, then why is he currently, you know,

getting the 100% support from the U.S. Congress and from that administration? So he's putting them in a place where, look, you know, they can beat the drum of, like, we support Israel's right to defend himself. I think that'll last up until the end of the war. But, you know, eventually the bombs will end. Eventually the military campaign has to come to a close. And at that point, if they're going to, you know, already while they're, you know, John Kirby has said there are no red lines, Secretary Blinken has been like, there will be no mass expulsion from the Gaza Strip. There will be no, you know, uh, leaving to Egypt and never coming back. There will be no, uh, you know, mass deportation. They are going to remain in Gaza and there will be a state. Now we're a long

way away from that, but that is the stated goal of the U.S. policy. So for me, that's the big story, is that he's laying it out that his only future is one directly opposed to U.S. policy and, in my opinion, U.S. interests, which it always has been, to have a two-state solution. Well, I would also say it's counter to Israeli interests, given that, you know, this direction of denying any sort of a state and propping up Hamas, has that led to security for the Israeli people? I think that's clearly has not worked in that direction. And, you know, there's a lot to say about this because you always hear this rhetoric about how there's no partner for peace on the Palestinian side. And of course, that's always been the goal of Netanyahu and people on,

you know, on the right wing of Israeli politics, which is the majority of the Israeli public at this point and have, you know, been dominating politics. They always say there's no partner for peace on the Palestinian side. And, you know, that has some legitimacy, even though Hamas, actually even Hamas, has now at points accepted the 1967 borders. But you can look at this as a terrorist organization, like all of that, that's fair, okay? But this is pretty clear, you don't have a partner for peace on the other side either. And there is such a fantasy version of Israeli politics that gets articulated by American politicians and American press. This is not a surprise. This has been Netanyahu's goal for years and years and years. He stated it plainly. The continued expansion of settlements in the West

Bank. Just ask that settler that Isaac Chotner interviewed that we covered here in the show. And she said, yeah, the settlements are because we don't want a Palestinian state. And she goes on to say, it's very simple to understand. It is very simple to understand because the more you expand those illegal settlements, the more impossible it makes it to ever envision a Palestinian state. The more you build up Hamas and the more you keep the Gaza Strip and the West Bank separate, the more that you make it impossible to have a Palestinian state. That has always been the goal of Netanyahu. That has always been the goal, even more so, of his coalitional partners who are, you know, in a lot of ways, this is something that Daryl Cooper of Martyr Mates says. The right wing of Israeli politics has always been more honest, honestly, than the left wing or liberal part of Israeli politics. They're very upfront about this

as a settler colonial project. Very upfront about, you know, what we ultimately want to see. Is Gazan dispelled from the Strip any final solution for us to take back all the land. They're quite upfront about their goals. And here in the U.S., American politicians just, like, put their thumbs in their ears and pretend like they're not hearing it and pretend we still live in this, like, fantasy land of the Oslo Accords and a quote-unquote peace process. Yeah, so that's actually I think the big problem is most Americans, as usual, have a Disney-fied version of basically anything that goes on abroad. If you want to look to what's going on in Israel, maybe you should ask people who live in Israel. If you actually want to go to Israel, you maybe shouldn't go on an AIPAC-guided tour or your birthright. Sorry to break it to you.

Just going on birthright doesn't mean you actually know that much. You probably should spend some time there. Now, I'm not claiming to be an expert, but I spent a decent amount of time. And I actually know people who live there and, but I spent a decent amount of time and I actually know people who live there and also have spoken to a pretty wide array. And then also you look to people who have spent years and years of their life. And what quickly emerges is a very dynamic, complex, politically very split, even religiously split in many cases, and ethnically split society, which is why it is always so difficult to describe Israel as a single polity. It's both a Jewish state, it's a sovereign state,

it's an economic miracle, but it's also a security nightmare, at least for the United States and for the Israeli people. So to break it down, really, I think this is what Daryl also brings out from the Martyr Made podcast, is he's like, look, the biggest issue is that you have these very small factions of the Israeli right and of the Palestinian right who have always at every turn resorted to violence at critical moments to derail the peace process and inflame the tensions. And that is a deeply unfortunate reality. And it reminds you of the power of these single incendiary, you know, even fringe eras of society which are able to use this violence to then flare things up to a level where they make it politically impossible. You can also

read the Hamas attacks in that same vein, which is Hamas and the Palestinians were realizing, and the PA, everybody was open and honest about this, that the Abraham Accords and the normalization of relations between the Gulf Arab states and Israel was an existential threat because it meant that the Arab states would no longer even pretend that Palestinian statehood was a political priority for them. So what did they do? They carried out this heinous political attack. They inflamed the tensions of the Gulf monarchies and of the actual populations, which are way more pro-Palestine and, let's be real, pro-terrorists than the actual Gulf monarchs. And so now the monarchs are stuck in a place where they're like, we can't normalize relations.

Our people hate you. And so to have them in a scenario where they're normalizing relations and there's like bilateral agreements and all that stuff, not even just in secret, but out in the open, impossible now, probably for a generation at this point. So you have to always remember what the meta context of this is. And that's where moving towards a Palestinian statehood, and at least if you wanted to make that the goal, I think you would conduct your military operation very, very differently. And same with the US, part of why we are just stuck in such a rock and a hard place between our domestic political support for Israel and the geopolitical reality of what the future on the ground there is going to look like. You can't lock people in a cage for decades and think there's not going to be some sort of response.

And there have been attempts at, you know, everybody always said, oh, where's the nonviolent Palestinian resistance? I mean, there have been real attempts at that. The Great March of Return that happened that was met with, you know, sniper fire and people being killed and massacred and their legs shot. That was a genuine grassroots attempt in Gaza at nonviolent resistance. And so you can't think that you're going to lock people in what has been described by many as an open air prison and what has been described by some as a concentration camp and think that there's not going to be a response. Now, as to the U.S., and I do want to get to the immediate news here in a minute, Biden likes to feign, you know, they're leaking to the press, oh, they're really trying behind the scenes, like he's really pressing Bibi and he's giving

them a hard time about X and Y and Z and trying to push more aid and et cetera, et cetera. This leak also reveals that any sort of gains that have been made here in terms of the hostage deal and the temporary ceasefire, this didn't have anything to do with us. This was all because of domestic political pressure and the grassroots movement and the energy of the families of the hostages and the pressure that they applied from day one saying, hey, my family members are in Gaza and we have to bring them home. That's what he was responding to. And then the other piece of this is, you know, all this feigned impotence. Like, oh, well, we asked him really nicely. Like, we're really trying behind the scenes. Yeah, but you're not willing to do the one thing that would matter, which is to say, no, you're not getting our weapons. You're not getting our money. We are

going to, you know, we're not going to provide you endless diplomatic cover at the UN unless you conduct this operation in a way that is consistent with trying to achieve Palestinian statehood and with trying to achieve the minimal amount of civilian casualties possible. But, you know, instead, not just the words, but the deeds have been no red lines and unconditional support. The Intercept had a piece about how we lifted all the restrictions on our weapons stockpile. There's normally a process that involves, you know, supposed careful determination of what weapons goes to whom, trying to ensure that they're not going to be used against civilians. All of that completely lifted in this conflict. Let me go ahead and get to the very latest in the news. As I mentioned now a couple times, there has been, put this up on the screen, a two-day extension of the ceasefire

as additional hostages are released. Qatar said mediators had secured that deal to prolong the temporary truce by two days. The U.S. is welcoming that extension and said it would like to see the pause has extended further beyond the additional two days. You guys will probably remember the deal here. It was initially 50 hostages for 150 Palestinians who were being held in Israeli prisons. For every additional 10 hostages that Hamas was able to locate and release, they were going to extend the pause for an additional day. The hostages, they go on to say here, releases have received near wall-to-wall media coverage inside of Israel while thousands of Palestinians have gathered each evening outside of Ofar prison between Tel Aviv and

Jerusalem, letting off firecrackers to celebrate the prisoners release and bolstering Hamas's political standing. So this is the absolute focus of attention right now in Israel. But again, to this question, I mean, the U.S. is getting a little uncomfortable, you might say, with the level of civilian death and atrocities that have been committed here. And so there's a push for let's extend the ceasefire as long as possible. But the Israelis are very clear that this is not the end of their bombing campaign. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant, go ahead and put this up on the screen, says that it will be bigger. The fighting, when it resumes, will be bigger, the fighting when it resumes will be bigger and take place around the Gaza Strip. Quote, the enemy will meet first the bombs of

the Air Force and after the shells of the tanks and the artillery and the scoops of the D-9 bulldozers and finally gunfire of the infantry troops, we will fight in the entire Strip. So, of course, the initial bombing campaign was throughout the entire Strip, but concentrated on the northern part of Gaza, which has now been effectively completely destroyed and rendered uninhabitable. People were told to flee to the south. They're now being told to move to, like, what is a very small part of the south for this expansion, planned expansion of the bombing campaign. As they've now said, Hamas leaders have moved to the southern part of the Strip

and located in Khan Yunis. So that is the plan for the military campaign going forward. Effectively, no end in sight as far as they're concerned. Yeah, that's right. And this just kind of brings us back to what we're talking about in terms of the political realities of the future. If we can put the next part, please, up on the screen.

Can the Palestinian Authority really govern Gaza after the war? This was written by Stephen Erlinger. He's a fantastic reporter. I've followed him for many, many years, a foreign correspondent, currently working over at the New York Times. But what I think he hits on correctly is that Abbas, the PA, have never had less political legitimacy than at this time. That the goal from 2005 onward to establish the PA as a legitimate governing authority, mostly propped up by the United States and the international community, not really by the actual Palestinian people, and then do you know, docilely accepted ish by the Israeli government has actually made it so that the entire generation that's grown up

under them feels as if they are not advocating for their interests and are instead either puppets or props of the West and or docile companions of the Israelis, which I can understand. I was going to say, I don't think they just feel that way. I think that is the reality. I'm only describing how they would put it in the kindest possible way. The problem, you know, and this was the dream really of Oslo to have legitimate political representation. And then the falling apart of that dream 2005 really onward has made it so that the US dream of simply installing some sort of PA government over the Gaza Strip really bears any question of whether the population would accept it. because many of the

Gazans who now have been through this horrific ordeal, and while they may not support Hamas, and in fact, you know, there's a lot of indication about Hamas support and all of that, that it's not nearly as ironclad as everybody says. You know, everyone's like, oh, well, they voted them in 17 years ago. I'm like, yeah, well, it's been 17 years. And they've also been rife with corruption. They've siphoned off aid for themselves. They've enriched themselves to the tunes of millions of in 17 years ago. I'm like, yeah, well, it's been 17 years and they've also been rife with corruption. They've siphoned off aid for themselves. They've enriched themselves to the tunes of millions of dollars and built all of these tunnels. The population, arguably, nobody has suffered more than the actual Gazans who have lived under Hamas rule, many of whom are not fundamentalist Islamic, you know, they're not fundamentalist Muslims either. This is a very, very different population.

So put that, all of that aside. They are, and any sovereign nation wants legitimate political representation. Yeah. And that is just where the big question of what can operationalize the wants and the needs and the desires of these 2.2 million, which is acceptable to them and also acceptable to the international community. And that is, it just does not appear to be what the Palestinian authority is. And then you run into the same Iraq problem where any authority which is deemed acceptable to the West and or to Israel is automatically seen as a puppet that will have no actual

governance capability. And then people either don't show up to the elections or they support Islamic terrorism like the Sunnis did in Iraq, and they had no legitimacy in terms of the Iraqi elections. And then the only legitimately elected Iraqi leaders end up being people who are hopelessly corrupt and can only stay in power by giving the finger to America, even though they're ones who pay all of their bills. We ran into this with Karzai in Afghanistan and his eventual successors. We ran into this over basically every person who ruled over Iraq all the way up until today. I think we're running into the same problem right now with Palestine.

The PA basically cooperates with the Israeli security. And so in the West Bank, where you have, you know, repeated settler incursions and violence pushing Palestinians off their land, and the people who are supposed to represent there are nowhere in sight to protect them from this. Like, of course, how are they going to feel about that? And so you do have this dichotomy of you'll see some polls that are like, oh, Palestinians overwhelmingly support Hamas. And then you'll see other indications that you're pointing to, Saga, that's like, actually, no, they're very frustrated with Hamas because of their failures of governance and just like basic, you know, ability to live your life and, you know, be able to get food and a job for your family,

et cetera. Well, those are basically their only two political option, putting aside a lot of smaller parties. So you've got either Fatah, which is, you know, PA and is effectively an Israeli collaborator, or you've got Hamas. I thought this article was really interesting because they actually talked to Palestinians about how they view the political situation. They spoke with a housewife, a 30-year-old housewife from Ramallah that's in the West Bank, asked if the Palestinian Authority could run Gaza. She said, absolutely not. The PA is just sitting, she said, with many years without elections. The one who does for the people should be in charge of the people, she added, referring to Hamas.

They also talked about, you know, the reason that Hamas gained support. Because if you look at, support for violent resistance versus, you know, more moderate forces throughout Palestinian history, what you see is when peace is being negotiated, it's a legitimate possibility, you see support for the armed violent resistance plummet when there's an actual prospect of real peace. So this article points out the failure to reach a negotiated peace has made the other obvious alternative, that of armed Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation, more acceptable and popular. Go on to quote a moderate Palestinian who is the president of Al-Quds University. From the Palestinian point of view, he said, October 7th looked like a miracle.

This fortress Israel suddenly seemed vulnerable. This professor goes on to say that he abhors the violence that was perpetrated but was clear about the impact. Who is Palestinian leadership now? It's Hamas, like it or not. Professor goes on to say that he abhors the violence that was perpetrated but was clear about the impact. Who is Palestinian leadership now? It's Hamas, like it or not. At the moment, Hamas is seen by Palestinians as the foremost representative of Palestinian interests. And why? Because no one else is. The PA does not figure in people's minds.

Another prominent Palestinian pollster said in his latest survey not yet published, 66% of Palestinians in the West Bank regard the PA as a burden. These are the people that we want to put in charge of everybody. Everyone already hates them. Some 85% want Mahmoud Abbas, who is the head, to resign, and that means more than 60% of his own rank and file in Fatah want him to go. So what they're saying is that one of the only possible, like, potential political solutions would be an agreement to disarm Hamas and actually bring them in as part of a more legitimate governing coalition. Because the PA has no legitimacy whatsoever. And that's all that is left. And, in fact, if you put this next piece up on the screen, there are Arab leaders who are trying right now to get Hamas to lay down their arms. They are saying like, listen, you stand no chance.

You may as well lay down your arms now before you are destroyed. And they also suggested that should Hamas disarm, they could join the leadership of the PLO as a purely political party. So this is an active conversation. There's one other peace saga that I want to mention before I get your reaction to all of this, which is, you know, a lot of people say, oh, who could be the, you know, who could be the head? Who has legitimacy among the Palestinian people? Who's a possible leader here? And the person that I keep seeing brought up is Marwan Barghouti, who is right now being held in Israeli prison because of his involvement with the second intifada. But this is someone who has, unlike Mahmoud Abbas,

he is not Hamas, and he has widespread support and legitimacy among the Palestinian people. So if you're actually serious about a potential post-war government, he would seem like a logical potential choice. The problem with all this is it makes sense on paper. And if you were to ask me how this will eventually end up decades from now, it'll probably look like this. The issue is that through all of human history, it's the bitterest pill on earth to swallow, to look a man in the face who's tried to kill you and who ordered people who you know's death. And the only really way to get there is a ton more death. And I don't condone it, but that's honestly, that's the reality. For the Israelis to accept something like that,

they are going to have to go through a brutal occupation regime. They're going to have to exhaust every other possibility. But we would have to effectively force it. Yeah, we, A, we would have, even if we force it, I'm not sure they could accept it at this current moment or even in the next year or even two years. The memories of October 7th are just going to be too big to swallow. But 20 years from now, in the same way the US commanders who spent their entire careers trying to kill the Taliban eventually found, I mean, imagine an insane situation where you have the commander of CENTCOM whose entire job was to kill Taliban, then on the phone with the Taliban negotiating an exit from Kabul.

That's a surreal moment. But honestly, that's mostly how those things end up. Even in the First World War, if you ever look at any sort of negotiated solution where you don't have unconditional surrender, it just takes like millions and millions of people to die for people to even entertain the possibility of sitting across from people who have tried to kill you in the past. Obviously, that's really unfortunate. However, though, in the same way that those conflicts were easily foreseen as how they would eventually end up, this one also just seems very, very obvious to me. It just seems that politically it's going to be incredibly difficult. It would take America to force it, and it would

take Israel honestly suffering a tremendous loss, either in soldiers or in economic costs, and possibly both, before they could entertain it. And of course, Netanyahu would have to be long, long gone before you could get to it, which is part of why I think it's even worse, because you just know how much of a Gordian knot that this is going to remain. And around, I think, all of international politics for honestly decades, decades to come. I don't see how it can end. Unfortunately, I agree with you that it seems impossible to imagine that out of this, we actually get a peace problem. We actually get a two-state solution and rights for Palestinians.

But there's also no doubt in my mind that even if you just care about security for Israelis, that's the direction things should go in. Because you can't keep people locked up. You know, you can't keep them in this apartheid system in the West Bank with settler violence and continued incursions on their land. You can't keep the indefinite blockade. You can't keep destroying them and mowing the grass in these horrific wars and think that this is going to provide peace and security for your own people. At the same time, there's new reporting about internal dissent

within the White House about the way that they have provided unconditional support to Israel, both publicly and through their actions, as we were saying before. This was a really interesting and revealing piece of reporting. Put this up on the screen from The Washington Post. They start off by talking about how earlier this month, a group of about 20 distressed White House staffers requested a meeting with Biden's top advisors. The diverse group had three main issues they wanted to discuss, and this was with White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients, Senior Advisor Anita Dunn, Deputy National Security Advisor John Feiner. They wanted to know the administration's strategy for curbing the number of civilian deaths, the message it plans to send on the conflict, and its post-war vision for the region.

The aides, they say, listen respectfully, but participants felt that they fell back on familiar talking points and basically did nothing to alleviate their concerns in this private meeting. There's some interesting details here about why Biden has gone in the direction that he's gone. And it harkens back to what Bibi was saying about, hey, I've known this guy for 40 years. I can control him. Don't worry about it. That's why you got to keep me in place. Biden went and visited Israel back in 1973 and met with then Prime Minister Golda Meir. And at the time, you know, Israel was a very different state politically. It was basically left leaning. It was, you know, much less of a sort of military behemoth than it is now. Now it is this incredibly right-wing state with, you know, the occupation more vicious and brutal than it's ever been.

But he still has this, like, nostalgic view of his trip there and meeting with Golda Meir. So that's part of, I mean, it's classic Biden, right? That's part of why. I'm laughing, but it's not funny. Yeah, right. He has not updated his view since 1973 is basically the view that you come away with. Biden aides are admitting that this is kind of a disaster. The division inside the White House is to some degree between Biden's senior longtime aides, they say, and an array of younger staffers of diverse backgrounds. But even top advisers say they recognize the conflict has hurt America's global standing. Quote, we are taking on a lot of water on Israel's behalf.

So even the people who are most inclined to back Biden's support of this war on Gaza, even they know this has been really bad for us. And there's one other piece here that I wanted to lay out that got a lot of attention. You guys might remember Biden called into question the death counts coming out of Gaza and, you know, really trying to undermine the idea that there has been just mass civilian death in this indiscriminate bombing campaign, including 70% women and children who have been killed here. Apparently, he has, they say, at times wrestled with his own emotions regarding the war. On October 25th, he voiced skepticism about that Gaza death toll. He says, I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed.

The very next day, Biden met with five prominent Muslim Americans who protested what they saw as his insensitivity to the civilians who were dying. All spoke of people they knew who had been affected by the suffering in Gaza, including a woman who had lost 100 members of her family. And he appeared to be affected by their account. He said, I'm sorry, I'm disappointed in myself. He told the group, according to two people familiar with the meeting, I will do better. Meeting was supposed to be 30 minutes, ended up lasting for an hour. So even behind the scenes, even he admitted that he was wrong to call into question the rate of civilian death that is unfolding in Gaza.

Well, I mean, the thing is, instead of trusting the Gaza health ministry or any of that, we have just looked to what Israeli sources are saying. And the Israelis are like, yeah, it's between 10,000 to 20,000. That's what the Israeli military says. So even if you don't believe them, you should believe the others. And my thing is I instinctually am going to distrust most of what is put out by either of these parties. But one of the things that reporting-wise was Ryan Grimm just going and checking the names of people who were claimed dead and then going.

That's actually a journalistic possibility. Not sure why more people hadn't looked into that. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, yeah, leave it to Ryan to be like, let me just actually check. Oh, turns out it was accurate. If anything, it was understating the deaths. Yeah, and you can also look at past conflicts where the same Gaza health ministry run by Hamas was accurate, more or less, in their counts. So, you know, we have history to judge by. So in any case, it shows you that even within the White House, despite their bluster and their continued insistence on, like, staying the course with unconditional support, even the people who most support this direction know that in terms of world standing and in

terms of the politics, it's been an utter disaster. Yeah, well, you know, referencing earlier book that I had here in the work of John Mearsheimer, he called all of this a long, long time ago. He's actually done a couple of podcasts working on trying to get it. Yeah, we'd like to have him back for sure. I really would like to have him sit with him

because he was a big influence on my thinking around this subject and has basically on every subject for a long time. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder.

I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case.

They've never found her and it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother.

She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never got any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. High key.

Looking for your next obsession? Listen to High Key, a new weekly podcast hosted by Ben O'Keefe, Ryan Mitchell, and Evie Oddly. We got a lot of things to get into. We're going to gush about the random stuff we can't stop thinking about. I am high key going to lose my mind

over all things Cowboy Carter. I know. Girl, the way she about to yank my bank account. Correct. And one thing I really love about this is that she's celebrating her daughter. Oh, I know. Listen to High Key on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Here's the deal. We gotta set ourselves up. See, retirement is the long game. We gotta make moves and make them early. Set up goals. Don't worry about a setback. Just save up and stack up to reach them. Let's put ourselves in the right position. Pre-game to greater things. Start building your retirement plan at thisispretirement.org,

brought to you by AARP and the Ad Council. So at the same time, we wanted to give you an update out of Vermont. You may have been following the story already. Put this up on the screen. A suspect has been arrested in the shooting of three men of Palestinian descent. This occurred near the University of Vermont. That suspect has already now pled not guilty to the shooting. Two of the victims here are in stable condition. The third is being treated for more serious injuries. The suspect who was arrested is named Jason Eaton. He is 48 years old, made his initial court appearance. This is now being investigated

as a hate crime. The FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives are assisting Vermont authorities in that investigation. And basically what happened here is these three men who are from Palestine, from the West Bank, they were actually out walking in Burlington. They were going to one of their grandmother's house for Thanksgiving dinner. They'd gone bowling. They were just to one of their grandmother's house for Thanksgiving dinner. They'd gone bowling. They were just coming back. Two of them were wearing the keffiyeh scarves, which are synonymous with Palestine and with the Palestinian liberation struggle as well. So they were easily identifiable as Palestinian or Arab. They were speaking, they said, a mix of sort of Arab and English.

And this person came out and shot them. We now have a little bit of details about, I mean, you know, everybody goes and scrapes the social media accounts to see what they can figure out about who this person is and what, you know, what possible motive you could potentially discern here from their actions. Put this up on the screen. In a now locked account on X, Jason Eaton described himself as a radical citizen who patrols democracy, misspelled with a K, and capitalism for oath creepers. His banner image features bold texts saying libertarians want trans furries to be able to protect their cannabis farms with unregistered machine guns. Okay. I don't know what to make of any of that. His archive posts

are apparently a little more moderated. He's got a lot of criticism of the IRS and the Fed, describes himself as a libertarian, expresses support for both Democratic and Republican lawmakers. He also had a sub stackstack. The one that remains up there is apparently some long dissertation on how restaurants can keep dishwashers employed. But there were a lot of previous sub-stack posts that were apparently deleted. Some of them were anti-vax.

There was one that was titled Thought Crime that Vice describes as an anti-vax screed that labels COVID-19 as a government conspiracy. The scale and scope of this operation was next level, he wrote. They also were able, the Daily Beast was able to talk to his mother. And there were a lot of headlines that were all about like, oh, his mom says he's a great guy, which was, you know, not a great way to leave these pieces. But anyway, she said they just spent Thanksgiving together, saw nothing amiss with her son, made no reference to the Israel-Hamas conflict, which has, of course, been sharply polarizing.

But she did say that he had struggles with mental health in the past and described him as a, quote, very religious person who regularly reads the Bible and finds connection to various religious figures. So that's kind of everything we know at this point. That's what we know. I mean, we don't yet have a motive that has been released by Burlington PD. Really what struck out to me, Crystal, is everything about this, and we were actually finally talking about this before the show. Anytime you're in a position like this, you're kind of a magnet for schizophrenia. I can't tell you how many times I've received scribbled dossiers in the mail and other things with delusions of connections. And I've seen it all from QAnon to others.

And really what stuck out to me was this quote, religiously reads the Bible and finds connections to various religious figures. Nothing wrong with that per se, but it's also a textbook symptom of schizophrenic or schizophrenia-type behavior. Especially when mom says he's got mental health issues. Exactly, when mom says you have mental health issues. Maybe he's been undiagnosed, but belief in conspiracy, the ramblings, unable to hold a job, if he indicates he was a dishwasher and the best way to treat them. These are exactly the type of people who float at the fringes of society.

He was actually a financial consultant in some way. And so he was giving advice to business owners in that Substack post. He wasn't coming from the perspective, the perspective of the dishwasher. I don't know. I didn't read the post. That's just how it was characterized in this piece. But, you know, when you have three men, college students, two of whom are wearing the keffiyeh, just walking down the street, talking to each other, going to grandma's house for Thanksgiving, and someone comes out and, you know, wantonly tries to kill them, of course, this is going to raise questions about whether this was a targeted hate crime because of their race and because of their religion. So that's what it's being investigated as. And that's

effectively what we know about it at this point. And thank goodness they're all three alive. Although, as I said, one of them is in really serious condition. One of them is in serious condition. Yeah. And we'll bear out the investigation is what we said yesterday, by the way, is, you know, with all these things, it's probably just better to wait for information and to characterize it responsibly rather than just rushing to judgment, unlike Fox News with their Canadian terrorist attack that ended up just being a high-speed car crash. Let's move on to the economy. There's a lot going on in the world, not only of inflation, of grocery prices and all of that, but of course, around the election, because how people feel about the economy is usually the single biggest determinant of how they will eventually end up voting and or not voting. So for President Biden,

the economy remains a problem. What have they done for that? Have they instituted policies or spent a lot of time talking and thinking about it? No. instead, there is a new, it seems, effort. Let's put this up there on the screen, actually reported by our friend Jeff Stein, where in response to a viral $16 McDonald's meal that is explaining voter anger at Biden, they say a White House official says the administration is now working with TikTok creators to tell positive stories of Biden's economic stewardship while also working with the social media platforms to, quote, counter misinformation. And so anytime we see government working with social media platforms to counter misinformation, we, of course, have to ask, what is misinformation? And it brings me back to Ken

Klippenstein's report about the Department of Misinformation within the DHS where they would try and label in the same bucket of misinformation stuff about COVID having microchips with criticism of the Afghan withdrawal. And you're like, well, hold on a second here. One of those may be misinformation. The other one is a legitimate political critique. And having watched now the viral TikTok with you, Crystal, what does the guy say? He goes, can you believe this? Here's my receipt of McDonald's. Here's a burger, a soda, and some fries that cost me $16. Where is the misinformation in that? Nothing. And in fact, you know, I see these sometimes too, just because

I guess this is where my mind goes, around like egg prices in the grocery store. That's not misinformation. And when people make reels or TikToks or whatever about them, it's because they feel as I do when, have you ever seen eggs that cost $10 before in your whole life? I just saw it yesterday. $10.92 is burned into my memory. They're pasture-raised eggs, to be fair, they're the most expensive whatever ones on the shelf. But I'm skipping them. I'm burned into my memory. They're pasture-raised eggs, to be fair. They're the most expensive of whatever ones on the shelf. But I'm skipping them. I'm like, no way. I'm not paying $11 for 12 eggs.

That's almost a dollar an egg. That's insane. I mean, the cheaper ones were like $4, I think, something like that. And same thing. I mean, look, I understand that prices can go up over time. But we're talking about in a rapid period of three years, you saw year-over-year inflation come to like 40%, 50%, 60% in the case of some goods, especially whenever it comes to staples like beef, eggs, and then many other animal-based products,

which for a variety of supply-based constraint reasons and inflation and all of that have just gone way up, combined with restaurant bills, which have skyrocketed from both the input costs going up and labor. So the point of all of this is to say, it's not misinformation, it's a real concern. And actually, just to show you what I guess they're trying to push back against, there was a TikTok that went very viral of a nurse who's living in Pennsylvania who described, I think, of what a lot of Americans are feeling currently at this moment, which is why it touched a lot of people. Here's what she had to say. I feel like my husband and I are doing everything right. We both have good jobs. I'm a nurse. I'm a registered nurse. I work full time.

He works full time. We just got paid this past Friday, right? We paid the mortgage, bought some groceries, put some gas in the car. And guys, it is Tuesday. And we have like two or three hundred dollars to last us until next Friday. I don't know what to do. I'm in school full time. I work full time. He works more than full time. He works overtime every week. This isn't how it's supposed to be. You know, growing up, we were told, you know, go to college, get a degree, work to support your family. Here we are. Did that. Now what?

I feel a lot of sympathy for her because, you know, let's think about some of the line items in this woman's budget. She's talking about mortgage. Now, she lives in Pennsylvania. It's not even a particularly expensive state, at least if you compare it to other people in the East Coast. I just looked it up. Gas there is $3.56 a gallon on average, which is quite high. It's on the higher end for the United States. Then, really, what did she mention?

She mentioned her schooling. And I think why that hits a nerve is she probably works in one of the best industries that you can work in in the United States, nursing. Nursing, there's a shortage of nurses right now. They get paid all kinds of money. And what she's talking about is I'm going to assume on her part, her and her husband, a six-figure income, two working adults. And I think it just bears really out the entire two-income trap that Elizabeth Warren wrote about a long time ago, but of runaway inflation costs for housing, for schooling, and then food. And you put those three cores of society together, and you get a breaking point like what that woman felt like. And again,

why it went off and took viral is I just think millions of people feel exactly the same. And, you know, it's not right. It's not like she doesn't look like a profit gets spent. Look, we don't know her financial situation. Right. But if what she's saying is true and she's just, you know, those are the major line items in there. I'm just going to have to assume schooling is taking out a ton of that. And that's wrong. It's not supposed to be that way. Yeah. Well, I mean, even if you put the current inflation aside, school, healthcare, housing. And kids. Have skyrocketed in cost. And those are like the basic bedrocks of feeling like you have a stable, potentially middle-class life. And so, yeah, people are stretched incredibly thin. And even if she's lying and she's acting and this isn't true or whatever, even if this is technically

fake news, you can just go and look at the statistics and know that there are millions and millions of Americans who are working two jobs or a husband and a wife are both working and they're trying to raise the kids and they're trying to do everything right. And they're still barely making it paycheck to paycheck. And, you know, to get back to Jeff Stein's piece about the $16 McDonald's meal and the White House effort to combat misinformation about the economy, et cetera, et cetera. It really gets to this core debate of like, are Americans, how, what is the reality of the economy? Are Americans being influenced by social media to think it's really bad? Or is there something real here? And if you just look at the course of the Biden administration, and I've said this a million times, but let me just say it again.

The beginning, some relief gets passed for COVID. If you look at the statistics in terms of during the COVID period, when you had this much larger social safety net that was erected and you had child tax credits going out and you had direct checks going out, you had beefed up unemployment insurance, et cetera. Guess what? Those things really helped people. The student loan debt pause. Those things really, really helped people. And the story of the Biden administration has been deconstructing all of that social safety net. So is it any wonder then that people then look and say, I'm doing worse off now? Of course you are. Because all

of the things that were helping you and that were bolstering your income and giving you a little bit extra in your savings account, all of those things are gone. And in addition, prices have gotten much higher. So to me, I'm like, it's no mystery. And I'm sure you can find things that are inaccurate, that are being told online about the economy, et cetera, et cetera. But there's a reason why people feel the way they do. And it's not because they're crazy or because they are brainwashed. And in fact, you know, we have this piece that we can show you of some of the numbers here. Americans are getting very close to maxing out their credit cards because this is one of the mysteries is people say, oh, well, we know that they're really like they're lying about the economy or they're fooled about the economy because they're still spending a lot of money.

Well, perhaps this will help you solve the mystery. They're racking up a lot of debt to continue to spend that money. American borrowers are getting closer to maxing out. This is per the Wall Street Journal. They say all of this highlights that some American spending habits might not be sustainable, at least when it comes to their credit cards. Some people might be starting to consume more of their available credit from month to month, could hit the wall once those lines are exhausted.

Recent note published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston found that as of July, consumers with annual household incomes of less than 50K whose accounts were delinquent were on average utilizing 80 to 90% of their available credit. Of course, that leaves them with a tiny cushion. And across all cardholder income groups as of July, the ratio of outstanding card account balance to the accounts credit limit was above February 2020 levels. So you have this indication that people are having to use more of their available credit and effectively max out their credit cards to be able to maintain what they have been doing over this time period.

Yes, exactly. And that just means more keeping up with the Joneses and then more feeling like that, paying the minimums and feeling perpetually like you don't know what you're doing. Well, it may not even be keeping up with the Joneses and then more feeling like that, paying the minimums and feeling perpetually like you don't know what you're doing. Well, it may not even be keeping up with the Joneses, just being able to keep up, keep ahead above the water. It's probably a mixture.

Well, depending on the income strata that we're looking at here. If you're 100K and you're starting to use a lot more, although I'm assuming that a nurse and somebody else who's working more than full-time is probably making somewhere in that range. Whenever you start to feel like that and the walls close in, that's whenever you make desperate decisions. And that's really whenever you can make life-changing financial decisions that will

have a massive impact on you for decades to come. This is always my biggest beef with student debt. Most people have no idea what they're even signing up for. And many of their parents didn't experience the same cost and so emotionally can't really understand what it means to have 25 years of debt hanging over you. Well, and you're told like, this is the way to do it. Yes, I get it. Like this is the path to you making it and being in the middle class.

I don't blame anybody involved except for the government and the debt purveyors. So it's not the actual people taking it out. Although a lot of people do like to switch that. The overall lesson of this though is that when you're getting closer and closer to maxing out is you eventually do face some sort of penalty. And so the way the Wall Street Journal posts this is like, oh, it could be good for retailers. Because it's like, yeah, in the short term. But what about six months from now?

What about a year from now? Like whenever you're maxed to the max, what are you going to do? Maybe you're not going to get any more credit. What about next holiday season? And look, I'm not naive. I know in America eventually, you know, things usually move around and full-blown collapse and all that stuff. But every piece that you look at at a consumer level, the government is like you're doing better off than ever. Everyone just yesterday was making fun of Americans for feeling bad because yesterday, Sunday, was the biggest travel day in the

history of the United States, according to TSA. It's as if they haven't heard of putting a flight on a credit card. Right. Just because, you know, maybe they spent three years locked at home and you have a relative across the country. I actually met some people like this when I was in San Diego for Thanksgiving. And they were like, you know what? Now's the time.

And it's not necessarily because you have the money. It's because you've been separated from your relatives or your family or you wanted to go do something for so long until you decide that now is the appropriate time. Money can be a constraint, but don't forget also about the trauma that I think a lot of Americans have been through over the last couple of years. So long way of saying it's not misinformation, White House. It's an actual economic problem. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder.

I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her. And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator

to ask the questions no one else is asking. There's so many questions that we've never got any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Here's the deal. We got to set ourselves up.

See, retirement is the long game. We got to make moves and make them early. Set up goals. Don't worry about a setback. Just save up and stack up to reach them. Let's put ourselves in the right position. Pre-game to greater things. Start building your retirement plan at this is

pre-tirement.org brought to you by aarp and the ad council high key looking for your next obsession listen to high key a new weekly podcast hosted by ben o'kee ryan mitchell and evie oddly we got a lot of things to get into we're gonna gush about the random stuff we can't stop thinking about. I am high key going to lose my mind over all things Cowboy Carter. I know. Girl, the way she about to yank my bank account. Correct. And one thing I really love about this is that she's celebrating her daughter.

Oh, I know. Listen to High Key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's move on to the next part here, a topic I know so many of you are so interested in. Let's put this, please, up there on the screen. An indication at the very basic level, and a lot of what we'll actually talk about today, about economic feeling and others, is housing. And the housing market right now is just the worst of all worlds. You have high prices and high interest rates. You have also a feeling for a lot of people of being trapped because home sales have now fallen to a 13-year low in October, the lowest since 2011. And from

these economic forecasts, what you're seeing is that while there has been a slight dip in price, high rates have predominantly had the effect not of pushing down prices, but instead of locking homeowners in to where they currently are and refusing to move. This has a lot of issues. One, if you are in the entry of the housing market, there's probably never been a worse time to try and buy a house with a high interest rate and with a high price. Two, so you decide to rent a couple more years than you would have in the past when you had, if you had the down payment and the ability to buy. Well, what does that do? That causes rent inflation to continue to go up. And lo and behold,

every single time you look at the CPI, rent and housing inflation remains one of the top drivers of the overall consumer price index. So the housing crunch, both at a price level in terms of the inability to sell, and then the massive pressure on the rental market, combined with, if you're a developer right now, why are we building a house exactly if I can't sell it? And if I have to pay 8% interest on my construction loan? So you have a supply crunch, a rent crunch, and a housing crunch all wrapped in to the same time. I honestly think this is on par with this 1970s level stagflation, where at that point, it was unemployment that was getting all the attention.

But here, housing just floats under the rug. People just don't talk about it as much. And yet, we have seen a tremendous amount of audience interest, because I think this is probably at the top of so many of your heads, especially if you're younger. For a lot of the boomers, they've got what they need. And I guess that's why cable news and others would ignore it. And if you're rich, none of this really applies to you. But if you are even upper middle class or lower, you're having a tough time out there right now trying to buy a house, especially with average home price in a major metro area has crossed half a million dollars.

I'll never forget that poll that we looked at that was like people were praying for a housing crash because they were like, how else am I ever gonna afford a house? And instead, you've had the worst of all worlds. Mortgage rates have gone way up. And housing prices have still gone up. And so, yeah, the market is just completely frozen.

Rents are still wildly expensive. And people just feel like, I will never be able to make it. This will never be sustainable. I will never be able to be in a stable position as a homeowner building something. And that's why I put this next piece up on the screen. You have so many people saying in a new Wall Street Journal poll that the American dream is dead. It's slipping out of reach. Fewer people believe that anyone who works hard can get ahead. Only 36% of voters in this poll say that the American dream still holds true. That is way fewer than the 53% majority who said that just back in 2012 and the 48% who said it back in 2016

in similar surveys asked by a different pollster. There was also a Wall Street Journal poll last year that asked whether people who work hard were likely to get ahead and some 68% actually said yes, nearly twice the share as in this American dream poll. Now, those are slightly different questions, but it shows you still there has been a deterioration even in the past year. The American Dream, they say, seem most remote to young adults and women. Some 46% of men were actually like, okay, yeah, American Dream's still real. Only 28% of women said the ideal of advancement for hard work still holds true, as did 48% of voters age 65 or older, but only 28% of those under age 50. And I would be curious to see, you know, under age 30, what are those numbers? I bet it's even lower than 28% who feel like the American dream is still even a possibility.

Yeah. So to have it just flip completely in the span of not even a single generation, but really in a decade is one of the more profound economic stories of all American history. There have been very few as transformative times as we're in right now. This is on par with the great, really, I think, extension of the Great Recession and the attendant social fallout. We had the Great Depression, which is really the only other previous time in modern industrial society that we've seen anything like this. And we instead don't, we try to pretend and we live with the day-to-day. And of course, we're talking about Israel and open AI and Ireland and all this other stuff. But this is by and large the single biggest determinant of how you're going to live your life, how you're going to get a job, whether you're able to get married, what it actually looks like, what your prospects are to the future. If you have and

want to even work to anything in the future or why you would even choose to go into debt to get some schooling, you only do that if you think that you're going to come out better on the other side. And the same holds true for really any investment they're going to make. So nihilism has a really downstream, terrible impact economically. And then of course, on a personal and life level, it's just, it's an awful way to live. And the way that that comes out in politics is the primal screams. You have Trump. You have Bernie. You have all these flash-in-the-pan moments. The establishment panics.

It tries to co-opt and all of that. But I think at this point, they have failed so dramatically to grapple all the way from 2001 onward that they don't deserve a single ounce of trust anymore. And it's really a generational gap between people who are our age, Crystal, and the people who are 25, 30 years older who can remember the 1990s, who were adults at that time, and who were living large. Whereas for the rest of us, that's a distant memory. It's like something that exists in the past.

I've been re-watching Friends recently. It's like a time capsule. And I think one of the reasons why people love the show so much is, man, what an awesome time. 1998, they had cell phones, the stock market was going like 20, no, 9-11, and just like the carefree

nature in which you could just watch six people screw off at a coffee shop. It really does show you what America was like at that time, as opposed to what's popular now for most people. I mean, it wasn't exactly an accurate depiction. Why did it hit?

Why did it hit to the core of the zeitgeist? Then. But it still hit. The nostalgia now, yes. My 15-year-old re-watched the whole thing and was obsessed with it and whatever. You know, on the American Dream piece, there's a great book that I've mentioned on the show before, and we've actually had the author Justin guest on the show as well called the new

minority. And it's a look at the white working class. And part of one of the sections, it's actually a comparison of the white working class in the U S in Youngstown, Ohio, and the white working class in a like working class of London. And they actually found that in some ways, the belief in the American dream was kind of insidious. And the reason why is because if you have this pervading mythology of like, if you work hard, you can make it. And it's all about you, right? Your individual work ethic and agency and all of that, then it leads people to blame themselves when, like that nurse that we played earlier, when they're going through it and they're struggling. And I mean, she says something, she's like, I did everything right. Like I did everything right. And there's all this shame

wrapped up in it. And what he found through, you know, like a statistical analysis is that that belief, that persistent belief in the American dream actually undercut activism because it led people more to look inward and be like, I must be doing something wrong. I must be a failure. And anyone can look at their life and find like, oh, I shouldn't have bought that or I shouldn't have made that decision or maybe I'm doing this wrong or maybe I'm doing that wrong. Everybody can do that, right? But it led them to focus inward rather than engaging in collective action to actually change government policy, which I thought was a really, you know,

a really interesting insight. So with regards to American Dream, something I've been thinking about, and we've actually had the author of this book, The New Minority, on the show, which looks at the white working class. And he did an analysis comparing the white working class in Youngstown and the white working class in a suburb of London. And one thing that he found is that the idea of the American dream is actually, in a sense, kind of insidious. Because if the idea is, you know, if you work hard, you can make it, then if you don't make it, the natural instinct is to say, well, I must have done something wrong. And so, in a sense, Sagar, it sort of short circuits the type of collective action that could push the government

to make different policy decisions. So on the one hand while of course it's bad that people feel like they can't make it and the American dream is dead I'm actually for establishing some new mythology

that's not all about like if you don't make it it's your fault you should feel shame you should feel horrible you should examine everywhere that you went wrong in your life. And instead looks at not only personal agency, we can keep still, you know, hold open some piece of personal agency, but also looks at the manifest ways that elites and our government have completely failed the American people over

decades. Yeah, I think the story of the U.S., just to tie a bow on it, is a battle between rugged individualism and then labor capitalism. And so the transition of the expansion west and, you know, like the California gold rush, you can go out there, you can make it on your own. Oops, a bunch of people go bust. And then we have like financialization and we have mass industrialization. And you have, if anybody ever watched the TV show, one of my favorite shows, The Gilded Age, the current season is actually really working through some of this where you have these Titans of like robber baron type capitalism but you also have Union Union officials that are emerging a movement at the same time and there's a scene where one of the guys tries to buy

one of the union leaders off he's like you don't really get what's going on here do you and whenever he goes back and then that struggle is really the story of the modern industrial economy. It played out here. It played out all across Europe. And the way that US and Britain really separated themselves from Germany and from Russia and others that went in a much more communist direction is that their elites recognized that you have to treat and pay people better and enshrine their rights into law. And they basically acquiesce, whereas the Russian and the German monarchies were like, yeah, we're not doing basically any of that. And what happened to their – their societies collapsed, broke down, saved capitalism in a lot of ways, which is what FDR and his predecessors did, is recognize those rights and incorporate it both into the rugged American story, as well as recognizing that structural factors are, of course, going to impact, you know, everyday people's

lives. And so, anyway, I think the reason that we are currently in the scenario that we are is that we've swung much more back in that direction and have really forgotten, I think, a cherished part of our history, which has been missing now for a long time. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder.

I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband. It's a cold case. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. I've never found her. And it haunts me to this day.

The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for.

If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sometimes as dads, I think we're too hard on ourselves. We get down on ourselves on not being able to, you know, we're the providers. But we also have to learn to take care of ourselves. A wrap-away, you got to pray for yourself as well as for everybody else.

But never forget yourself. Self-love made me a better dad because I realized my worth. Never stop being a dad. That's dedication. Find out more at fatherhood.gov. Brought to you by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Ad Council. Looking for your next obsession? Listen to High Key, a new weekly podcast hosted by Ben O'Keefe, Ryan Mitchell, and Evie Oddly. We got a lot of things to get into. We're going to gush about the random stuff we can't stop thinking about. I am high key going to lose my mind over all things Cowboy Carter.

I know. Girl, the way she about to yank my bank account. Correct. And one thing I really love about this is that she's celebrating her daughter. Oh, I know. Listen to High Key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So last week, we covered all kinds of turmoil over at OpenAI. Sam Altman, the CEO, he was out, kicked out by the board. He was brought on by Microsoft. Then he was brought back in over at OpenAI.

There were a lot of questions about, like, what is going on and why is this happening right now? Reuters got a look at a potential reason for why this action was taken at this moment. Let's put this up on the screen. So they say ahead of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's four days in exile, several staff researchers wrote a letter to the board of directors warning of a powerful artificial intelligence discovery that they said could threaten humanity. This was according to two people familiar with the matter. That's what they told Reuters. That previously unreported letter and AI algorithm were key developments before the board's ouster of Altman, according to those two sources.

So OpenAI declined to comment, but they did acknowledge in an internal message to staffers a project called QSTAR. The OpenAI spokesperson said the message, sent by a longtime executive, alerted staff to certain media stories without commenting on their accuracy. Summit OpenAI believed that QSTAR could be a breakthrough in the startup's search for what's known as artificial general intelligence. One of the people told Reuters, OpenAI defines AGI as autonomous systems that surpass humans in most economically valuable tasks.

So we have a lot of details about what this alleged breakthrough is or even additional reporting about whether this is in fact accurate. But the reason that this potentially tracks Sagar is because the divide in the AI community as reflected in the divide within open AI is between the tech optimists who are basically like, let her rip, let's go make tons of money,

let's just develop this like crazy, let's see what we can do, let's push the boundaries here. And more of the, it's actually a lot of like effective altruists, but that side of the tech community that is very worried about the risks of AI development, what it could mean for humanity, what it can mean for jobs, what it could mean for, you know, potential dangers for the future. And with Sam Altman being brought back in, effectively, his side of the tech optimist piece won out. And the people who want to just profit as much as possible, put it in the hands of corporations like Microsoft and develop it to its fullest extent right now with few guard

rails, that side of the equation seems to be winning out. Yeah, I have complicated feelings on this because I understand that that's a useful framework. But the thing is about Sam and these effective altruists and others is that, yeah, they believe in the profit and all of that. But really what they believe is it's like responsible AI. And what they mean by that is pairing with giant corporations like Microsoft and regulation and control so that they're the only ones that really get to use the technology. So I kind of find myself in a more anarchist position with AI, where my deepest suspicion doesn't actually come through, you know, like, oh, they're going to replace us and all this.

My fear is exactly what's happening right now, which is total corporate capture and control, where effectively we're watching Microsoft develop the world's greatest office enterprise technology and all of the money being funneled into how to make Word, Excel, and Skype calls and Teams more efficient, which is, in my opinion, the worst use of research dollars and other things, as opposed to actually helping people. And so watching really what it is, is the titans of Google and Facebook and Microsoft now basically capture the entire stream of AI development and others makes me more worried about the future

than any sort of AI breakthrough that's going to, you know, replace all of our jobs and other this. So some of this was captured in the CNBC interview where they talk here about how Microsoft's Satya Nadella really is the true winner. Here's what they had to say. The golden child, Altman, is ultimately really in Microsoft's hands. And I think the way they played this was a poker move for the ages for Nadella. And I think as it plays out, you had the little kids playing checkers at the kids' table in terms of this, the open AI board. And then the master, chess master came in here.

And I think right now it's Microsoft just that much more of a flex the muscles on AI. What you want to see from Jassy and AWS. Okay, what do you bring it? Show us the technology. How could I have confidence from a share perspective that you're not going to be potentially the third player behind Microsoft, behind Google? This is an arms race playing out. And right now, Microsoft and they're popping

champagne in Redmond because of the way Nadella played this out. Cap profit structure that Sam instituted in 2019. The idea here was to cap investors' profits at 100 times their original investment, because he suggested that if open AI could get to so-called artificial generalized intelligence, which is this sort of more sophisticated AI that we seem to be moving toward quickly, that it could be so powerful and so lucrative that he wanted these investors not to sort of hold all of the value in the world. In fact, he spoke at one of my events for Strictly VC, which is now a subsidiary of TechCrunch. And he said that if OpenAI manages to crack this particular nut, it could, quote, maybe capture the light cone of all future value in the universe.

And that for sure is not OK for one group of investors to have. Yeah. So the future value of all, who's going to own that? OpenAI and Microsoft. So really, again, let's look at who he actually replaced the board with. Let's put this please up there on the screen that Kevin Roos wrote about AI belongs to the capitalists. You have freaking Larry Summers here on the board. I mean, like a cartoonish figure of, quote, unquote, responsible corporate capitalism. And then you have a former Dropbox executive and Adam D'Angelo of Quora. So if you put all this together, Crystal, where I look at it is I am most afraid of exactly what's happening right now, where AI is becoming a corporate tool of not only white-collar industry, but just plussing up any sort of HR and other stuff, as opposed to funneling towards technology that

would actually help most Americans in their daily lives. They're trying to focus on reducing HR costs and legal fees and all that. Listen, I support all of that. But should that really be the sole driver of our innovation? This is why I think some of the conversation around this can get really muddled. Well, there's a lot of different levels. Yeah. So the piece you're pointing to, you know, what are corporations incentivized to develop? They are incentivized to develop anything that's going to be profitable to them.

There will be many applications, potential applications of AI that would benefit humanity that would not be particularly profitable. Those are not going to be developed. That's the reality. On the other hand, what do corporations love to do? Eliminate human beings and their usefulness and their jobs because human beings cost a lot of money and they take sick days and they have babies and they're complicated and whatever. So let's get rid of them. Let's get rid of their jobs. And so there will be huge incentive to develop AI that can enable the elimination of jobs. So that's the corporate piece that you're pointing to. But, you know, my feelings about AI sort of ranges from terror to comedy. I don't know if you guys saw, there's a story about, was it ESPN or Sports

Illustrated that got caught using these AI generated articles and they were preposterous. Like they were so bad. The writing was so weird and clunky. It was like an alien, you know, trying to write about volleyball or whatever it was. And then on the other hand, you have this story reported out by the New York Times that the deployment of AI-controlled drones that can make autonomous decisions about whether to kill human targets is moving closer to reality. Lethal autonomous weapons that can select targets using AI

are being developed by the US, China, and Israel. Killer robots that can autonomously decide whether you're going to live or die. So, and obviously for the military industrial complex, that is very profitable as well. So that's like the nexus of both the terror of what this could mean for humanity and also the profit motive. So that's why it's troubling that the people, it's not just who was put on the board. The people who were taken off the board were the people who were like, you know, the more of the academics, the technologists who were concerned with some of the direction, both in terms of the corporate capture and also in terms of what this could mean for jobs and what

this could mean for the future of humanity. Those people are taken out. And freaking Larry Summers brought it. Yeah, I know. The Summers piece is particularly offensive to me. It also, though, part of what I get the most skeptical about are all these AI safety advocates. I'm like, what are we saying here? Like, what are you trying to program in here? And I see the government and Biden stepping in being like, we need an AI bill of rights.

And I'm like, well, maybe conceptually, but I don't actually trust you to be able to implement this into the technology at all. I think there needs to be some level of democratic input. So I'm genuinely very— But the democratic input, I mean, that's what the government is supposed to be. Yes, well, but the White House is not supposed to be. That's the idea that the government is supposed to be where the democratic input comes from. Yes, but I think it needs to come through Congress and not from the White House and top down. And actually, my bigger fear is less about the government, at least right

now, because they're not doing anything. It's all these fake nonprofits that are out there being like, we're developing the AI code about this and that. There's already been problems with chat GPT around political bias and all these other things. And that's where, again, where I fear is the concentration of AI in basically woke capitalism, where through Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Facebook applied almost entirely to enterprise technology. And you're just going to have software rule your drone cubicle life if you happen to even make the cut for afterwards. And I genuinely think that is what the future of this is going to look like, as opposed to all of our daily lives changing. I just think white is what the future of this is going to look like, as opposed

to all of our daily lives changing. I just think white-collar work is the only thing which will marginally change, but in my opinion, probably in a worse direction where things are more automated. But the hope that I have here is that in every case, like the Sports Illustrated and others, these things have turned out to be so clownish that it just reveals to us how, in some ways, it's so far away. Like, we're not even close to AI being able to replace a human journalist. It would take five to maybe 10 years. And we heard for years about car development. I talk about the self-driving car thing a lot. Yeah, you know, automated autopilot is cool. But can it turn left really well yet?

No. And it's taken them, what, Tesla's been around since 2008, you know, working on this technology. And they have billions and billions of dollars that they've thrown into it. And they still haven't really mastered it. So, and, you know, we saw the Austin example about all those self-driving cabs that come like this. This is a really, really difficult problem to solve. solve. I'm less worried as some people are. The military application to me is really scary because let's imagine, I mean, we can already see like what Israel is doing in Gaza right now, that there isn't a lot of concern for who's a civilian and who's a combatant and who's a woman and a child and who's an actual Hamas militant, etc.

So while the technology may not be all the way there in terms of discriminating, they may not really care. I don't think that there's any evidence that they would really care. And so if it's an autonomous drone that's murdering people, there's no chance of accountability. At least if it's a human operator or there's some sort of a chain of command, at least there's a possibility of holding some sort of human being accountable. If you have drones that are able to themselves decide who gets to live and who gets to die, and this is actively in development by us, China, and Israel, and getting closer and closer to fruition, yeah, that's something I'm very concerned about right now in the near term. I think that's fair. I just, look, humans are always going to have to make

some sort of decision. So this is something I talked about with Marc Andreessen. It's like, at the end of the day, like humans are going to have a level, a tremendous level of input. And, you know, we can think about that. What is the true difference between where we are right now, where Israel decides where to bomb, and yet they use a JDAM, a guided precision bomb, which where we pick the target and then the missile and computer targeting systems work to hit that. There will always be some level of decision making that gets programmed into it from what the actual want of the person is.

So what truly separates that? Is it just that we can deliver the bomb in a quicker manner? Because at the end of the day, like the human discretion and the political determination of how and what it will be used, I don't think that's going away anytime soon. Maybe the AI can roll this clip of me 100 years from now and make fun of me while, you know, my grandchildren are living in the Matrix. But we'll see. Let's move on to Ireland. There's been a lot happening in Ireland that you might have seen that's broken out over the last week or so. Riots and violence exploding in downtown Dublin.

Let's go ahead and play some of this footage. Absolutely crazy, crazy stuff. There are buses on fire. Middle of a Western European capital. And of course, there's been a lot of, I think, media misinformation and reporting around all of this. It's even ensnared the UFC King Conor McGregor. And so anyway, what exactly is going on behind the scenes here? So at a very,

very basic level, here is what happened. There was a stabbing incident, which involved a foreign national, whoever though had actually lived in Ireland since 2003. So let's please put this tear sheet up there on the screen, which from the Times of England, which actually has some of the best reporting that we've seen on the subject. Quote, the suspect arrived in Ireland in 2003, applied for asylum. His application was rejected. His deportation ordered, but he successfully challenged it, and he now has full residency rights. There are suggestions that his mental health had deteriorated after he was diagnosed with

a brain tumor about two years ago, and his friends had told the police that his behavior was changing radically afterwards. He was then arrested in possession of a knife in Dublin last May and appeared before the district court in June. The outcome is unclear. He went on to stab multiple small children in Ireland. The riots essentially then were set off with anti-immigrant sentiment.

However, Crystal and I, we were talking about this, and I think they have really mischaracterized a lot of what is happening here. Yes, a lot of this is downstream of immigration, but Ireland is facing a very, very serious housing crisis right now, which has a huge part to do not only with Islamic refugees, but also a lot of Ukrainians. So let's please put this up there. And I'm also going to read some statistics. Quote, Ireland demography has been transformed in decades. A fifth of the 5 million people now living in Ireland were

born elsewhere. And a recent increase in refugees from Ukraine and other countries has fueled a backlash amid concern over a housing shortage and straining public services. The number that is housed by the state has jumped from 7,500 in 2021 to 73,000 in 2022. Quote, Ireland has received more than 141,000 immigrants in the last 12 months through April. That is the highest total in Irish society since 2007. And the influx of migrants has driven an 11% increase in Irish population over the last 11 years,

which has contributed to a steady increase in housing prices. So really what I think this is, Crystal, is a story not only of mass immigration, but of, frankly, Ukrainian refugees and other refugees from around the world that are flooding into Western Europe, as these Western European capitals have to grapple with their tremendous social safety net, their Western liberal politics. But frankly, disregarding, and this is what I think the reason that this really touched here, was their own domestic population whose houses are getting so unaffordable as they're watching foreigners get housed in state housing as you have Irish citizens and others who are homeless on the street, that was like the core of the spark here. And I haven't seen that particularly well articulated

in Western media as to what's happening. And we'll get to the crackdown in a second if you want to comment on any of this. Yeah. I mean, and listen to state the obvious, just as when we're analyzing what happened on October 7th, it's not a justification. And as we're analyzing what happened with these riots, also not a justification. But yeah, when you couple the highest homelessness that Ireland has ever seen, massive housing crisis. Ireland, they were one of the countries that got the most screwed in the 2008 financial crisis and have in some ways never recovered. So when you couple this, but I think the housing piece seems to be really central, you know, based on the analyses that we're able to read. And like I said, the very high homeless homelessness rate, when you couple that

with, you know, a large influx of people from other countries, you have created a tinderbox in which, yeah, the easiest thing for people to do is going to be, and for cynical politicians and influencers and whoever, is to blame the immigrants. And it's classic scapegoating. That's very common to see what unfolded here. And there was misinformation about who this person actually was. The context of, this dude's been here for 20 years, by the way, was not in there whatsoever, but it lit the spark that explodes in these unbelievable riots that unfolded. Also worth mentioning that the man who disrupted the attack, who hit the dude who was stabbing children over the head with his helmet, was a recent immigrant from Brazil. Yeah, from Brazil. He was actually thanked by Conor McGregor. So let me tie it in to-

Just to be clear. But yeah, I think we have had this idea of the Ukraine war and that it's obviously beautiful that all these countries have taken in refugees. And we covered yesterday how the US was really central. I mean, the reason that this war has gone on and on and on and on. And we can't deny the fact that especially in a time when countries' safety nets are stretched, when inflation is tough, when people all over the world are feeling very stretched economically, that this is the type of politics that oftentimes results. Well, I mean, I just looked it up. The average sale price of a home in Dublin is 1.3 million euro as of last month. And people feel like they can no longer afford to live in the neighborhoods where they grew up and where their family is, et cetera. They feel like, you know, and like they have no hope and all of

this, again, not justification, but just to understand these things don't come out of nowhere. And so instead of focusing classic, like, you know, sort of neoliberal political move, rather than focusing on those core problems, well, what should they do instead? They're going to crack down on the misinformation. And let's get to that because this is what the response of the Irish government has been, which is, no, we don't need to maybe reconsider our refugee resettlement population, or we don't need to reconsider our housing policy. We need to crack down on hate speech, which is what incited these riots, which is why Conor McGregor is under investigation. Here is the prime minister laying some of this out as a response to the riots.

In addition to that, I think it's now very obvious to anyone who might have doubted it that our incitement hatred legislation is just not up to date. It's not up to date for the social media age. And we need that legislation through. And we need it through within a matter of weeks. Because it's not just the platforms who have a responsibility here, and they do. There's also the individuals who post messages and images online that stir up hatred and violence. And we need to be able to use laws to go after them individually as well. Got to go after the people who are talking about how it's BS that Ukrainians are getting free

housing when an average home price is 1.3 million. Yeah, that sounds like the right thing to do. Here is one of their Green Party senators. This is a very viral clip, but it really represents this ideology that's prevailing all throughout Western Europe about what freedom of speech actually means to them, and basically nothing. Take a listen. When you think about it, all law, all legislation, is about the restriction of freedom.

That's exactly what we're doing here, is we are restricting freedom, but we're doing it for the common good. You will see throughout our constitution, yes, you have rights, but they are restricted for the common good. Everything needs to be balanced. And if your views on other people's identities go to make their lives unsafe, insecure,

and cause them such deep discomfort that they cannot live in peace, then I believe that it is our job as legislators to restrict those freedoms for the common good. There you go. Safetyism in a nutshell. Sounds like a bunch of conservatives right now talking about anti-Semitism on college campuses. I had to slip that in there. No, I mean, you're not wrong. It's true. It's true. And here's the thing. This is leading to now Conor McGregor's investigation for this following tweet. Let's put this up there on the screen. I'm going to read it to you directly. He says, innocent children ruthlessly stabbed today by a mentally deranged non-national Dublin in Ireland today. Our chief of police had this to say on the

riots of the aftermath. Not good enough. There is grave danger among us in Ireland that should never be here in the first place. There has been zero action done to support the public in any way, shape, or form with this frightening fact. Not good enough. Make change or make way. Ireland for the victory. God bless those attacked today. We pray. That's what he said. And they're claiming that he glorified violence. And yet they're ignoring that he thanked the Brazilian immigrant, Brazilian Irish immigrant, who actually stopped the violence. He says, I don't condone last night's riots. I don't condone attacks on our first responders in their line of duty. I don't condone looting. Last night's scenes achieved nothing towards fixing this issue. I do understand the frustrations, however, and I understand a move must be made to ensure the change that we need is ushered in. That's what he said. What's wrong

with that exactly? Even if he did say something wrong and heinous and terrible. Let's put that aside. Yeah, but he still should be able to say those things. And it's such a dodge to just be like, oh, we're going to crack down on the misinformation. As if that's going to solve the underlying problems. I mean, it's just like very similar to here. They don't want to admit the actual problem here. And, you know, Ireland's a small country. They've got 5 million people.

140,000 people is a lot of people. And, you know, 20% of your population being foreign born. And I'll press the red button and I'll go to what Margaret Thatcher said of her own country. Europe is about history. America is about an idea. It's like, these are very different populations with very different understandings of immigration. They, I think, behave in a completely irresponsible manner whenever it comes to refugee resettlement and all of this. And you combine that with their generous welfare states and neglecting their own population. I mean, I just think, Crystal, the more I did research into this, I was honestly shocked at the way that it has been

portrayed. It's when you look at, you know, political science analyses of countries with large immigrant populations, when things are going well, it's fine. You know, when people feel like I can buy a house, I can have a family, I can have a job, I can have a good income. But when things are not going well, then guess what? Again, you're gonna look for scapegoats.

And this is a tale as old as time. So in any way, in any case, the idea that you're going to fix it by cracking down on social media and Conor McGregor is silly.

Not going to happen. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend.

I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her. And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there.

Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sometimes as dads, I think we're too hard on ourselves.

We get down on ourselves on not being able to, you know, we're the providers. But we also have to learn to take care of ourselves. A wrap-away, you got to pray for yourself as well as for everybody else, but never forget yourself. Self-love made me a better dad because I realized my worth. Never stop being a dad. That's dedication. Find out more at fatherhood.gov brought to you by the U S department of health and human services and the ad council. Looking for your next obsession. Listen to High Key, a new weekly podcast hosted by Ben O'Keefe,

Ryan Mitchell, and Evie Oddly. We got a lot of things to get into. We're going to gush about the random stuff we can't stop thinking about. I am high key going to lose my mind over all things Cowboy Carter. I know. Girl, the way she about to yank my bank account.

Correct. And one thing I really love about this is that she's celebrating her daughter. Oh, I know. Listen to High Key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, let's talk about some domestic politics here. This is stunning. This is brazen, even for the pretty brazenly typical corrupt state of American politics. You now have two candidates who are right now in the Democratic primary for Senate

in Michigan who have been offered separately $20 million by a donor to drop out and primary Rashida Tlaib, who of, has come under incredible fire for her public stance in favor of Palestinians and Palestinian humanity and calling for a ceasefire. Let's take a listen to, we actually talked to this candidate, Nasser, on this show recently about how he was approached and offered $20 million to drop out and primary Rashida Tlaib. Take a listen. I was offered $20 million to withdraw from the senatorial race and run against my friend Rashida Tlaib. The pro-Israel lobby will go to any length to remove anybody from the U.S. Congress that has any opposition to their agenda and their total unequivocal support

for Israel, good, bad, or indifferent. We need to make sure that money is not the main catalyst to get people elected because the pro-Israel lobby is the only tool. And what they use to threaten politicians is the amount of money they're going to spend against them or for them. America, let's come together and elect people who truly represent our values. So the other candidate was a gentleman named Hill Harper. Put this up on the screen, another Senate candidate in Michigan who Politico originally got this report that he was offered $20 million to drop out and run against Rashida Tlaib. He confirmed the story. He says, I didn't intend for a private phone call to turn public, but now that it has,

here's the truth. One of AIPAC's biggest donors offered 20 mil if I dropped out of the U.S. Senate race to run against Rashida Tlaib. I said, no, I won't be bossed, bullied, or bought. One of the crazy things here, too, by the way, and AIPAC denies, I should add, he says the group was absolutely not involved in any way in this matter. Our records indicate this individual has not contributed to AIPAC in over a decade. So that's their side of the story. But one of the really crazy things about this, Dagger, is that both Hill Harbor and Nasser Beydoun, they both are like calling for a ceasefire and standing up for Palestinian civilians being killed right now. And I think the idea is just, you know, they know with Rashida Tlaib that she is a tireless advocate. They know she's outspoken. They know she's been a leader in this moment of calling for a ceasefire.

I mean, she's Palestinian-American here. And so they sort of feel like we don't care who it is. We'll take anyone other than Rashida Tlaib because of her dedicated commitment on the issue. Yeah, I mean, I think that this is really just a matter of we do it because we can. And it's one of those where they want to take her out just to show that it is possible. To teach a lesson. Warning shot. Absolutely.

I don't like Rashida Tlaib. I think she's actually incredibly, I think she's done a disservice to her own Palestinian cause. We could talk about that in a different way. Wildly disagree with that. Well, I mean,

she's just conducted herself in a ridiculous manner. And she's honestly just fulfilled, like, in my opinion, the worst characteristics of totally being unable to. No, that is not true. I mean, she's condemned the Hamas atrocities.

That's not what we're talking about. She's been standing up for ceasefire and Palestinian civilians. I think her inability to correct the record on the hospital attack just fulfilled the wildest dreams. Which is still in dispute, by the way. The UN, what is it, Human Rights Watch came out yesterday and claimed. They bombed like every freaking hospital in Gaza. I am only going to say that she did herself no favors by doing that and by putting herself out there. And in my opinion, fulfilling the worst dreams of her critics.

If you're a politician, you should know whenever you're going up against the wildest lobby in all of American politics, you should probably not just hand them on a silver platter. But look, that's her life. She can do what she wants. I'm saying I don't like her. I don't think she's done herself any real service for a pro-Palestinian cause. But I don't support primarying her

or getting her taken out by a major lobby for a foreign government. To me, I find that particularly offensive. So anyway, I'm looking at this and AIPAC and all their influence, and it's government. To me, I find that particularly offensive. So anyway, I'm looking at this and AIPAC and all their influence, and it's just shocking to me, you know, with the John Fetterman case as well, to watch how they have co-opted so many of these Democratic politicians in recent times, even people who had expressed differing views whenever they would come over the top and help them in some of their primary processes.

So Ryan's done a lot of great work on this. I know we've covered it here on the show as well. The Democratic majority for Israel, for example, coming in. I mean, I think, didn't they think they'd work against Nina Turner? Oh, yeah. So Ryan has all these details in his new book, The Squad, which I recommend. And it's actually incredible how much reporting he has on AIPAC, Democratic majority for Israel and other sort of allied groups. And he said when he was writing the book, he was like, am I crazy for including so much of this? But it ended up being so central to shaping the Democratic caucus and trying to mold uniform views on Israel and Palestine. And so he has the behind the scenes story of Fetterman, who sees all

this money coming in to crush Nina Turner. The first expenditures were actually against Bernie in Iowa, you know, coming in against Summer Lee, who's able barely to survive the onslaught. He sees all this coming in and he just goes, someone's like, tell me what I should say. And they had drafted a position paper and they sent it in to Democratic majority for Israel and were like, how's this? And they're like, oh, we'll make some changes. And they're like, good, done and dusted. Here you go. This is what we're gonna stand for now.

Summer Lee, on the other hand, because she had previously sent some really basic, I think it was during the Great March of Return, some really basic tweets in support of like, hey, maybe Israel shouldn't be killing innocent civilians who are trying to peacefully protest. She knew she was going to be a target and there was no way out of it. And she was open with Ryan about that. Like in her head, if there was a way of doing the, pulling the John Fetterman, it wasn't that she was like, oh, I would never do that. She was like,

I knew it wouldn't work because I was already a target. And so, yeah, this was determinative in a number of races. And they, you know, secured the obviously very outspoken support now of Senator John Fetterman. And now they've said that they're going to spend even more money going forward. And we see these incredibly clumsy and naked attempts. And by the way, potentially illegal, because you can't you can't just give a candidate $20 million. And so if it's going to go through a super PAC, you also can't coordinate with them. And then there's a question of whether these are like straw donations. I didn't even think about it. Yeah. So it's also like not really legal to do this, but anyway, it just shows you how disturbed they are that there is any dissent on the issue. And the other thing that comes through in Ryan's book, which is really interesting too, is this is the one time when the squad has actually

really stood up to Democratic leadership and President Biden. And a lot of it is because, you know, Rashida Tlaib, obviously this is an issue she was passionate about. Ilhan Omar, obviously an issue she was passionate about. AOC really didn't know anything about Israel and Palestine. Admittedly, she admitted to that coming in. And some release, same thing. This wasn't like a major focus of her, but because the adversaries were so fierce, it really sort of hardened them in their positions because they know they're never going to win them over. So they're like, well, why not just say what I actually think since there's no way I'm going to keep these people from trying to primary me and destroy my political career. And I actually, I mean, I think it's a human thing on any level.

Someone's going to be like, hey, screw you. You're like, well, hold on a second. I'm maybe going to think a little bit for myself. And if you're going to come out oppositional from the gate, I mean, remember that horrible, what was it, the AOC firing line interview? This happened like right after she was elected. She looked like such an idiot. Yeah. the AOC firing line interview. This happened like right after she was elected. She looked like such an idiot throughout it. But to underscore your point, we have this tweet from Mark Pocan, the congressman who's from the Progressive Caucus. Let's put it up there. He says,

quote, the truth is that AIPAC is a conservative org raising money from rich Republicans and tries to buy Democratic primaries with it. Distorts campaign finance law in the worst way. Their big money influence is toxic to democracy. Forget what they claim. Look at their record, toxic money. And that's extraordinary coming from a Democratic congressman. I'd be remiss too if I didn't mention Thomas Massey, who's been putting them also on blast for running ads against him because he has a consistent policy. He's a libertarian where he says, I don't vote for foreign aid, period. And he said, I don't do it for Israel. I don't do it for Saudi Arabia. I wouldn't do it for Palestine. He's like, this is just not something that I do.

And they are running millions of dollars of ads against him in Kentucky. So look, if anything, actually, I support people coming out and breaking with AIPAC kind of publicly because I think they saved all this political capital and all this. And they blew it on the Iran deal. It's the single biggest mistake they ever made because they put themselves in direct opposition with the president of the United States, and they put all this ideological space open for people who agreed with the Iran deal and Democrats, and then they tarred them as anti-Israel. And they're like, well, if you're going to tar me as anti-Israel, I'm going to say what I actually think.

And anti-Semitic. And anti-Semitic. Well, that came a little bit later and that came now. And now we have Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and others. And you have an entire generation of younger people too, who, you know, it drives me crazy. People are like, she's pro-Hamas. Okay. As I just laid out here, I think she conducts herself like a fool. I don't think she's pro-Hamas. That's a ridiculous statement. When you say you're pro-Hamas, you say, I support the terrorist attack of October 7th. So words have lost meaning on anti-Semite, anti-Israel, anti-Zionism, pro-Hamas, pro-Palestinian. And they've tried with great success, I think, to use that for their tactics of the past. In the modern age, though, people

just see right through it. It's just totally ridiculous. Maybe, but that amount of money, because remember, it's not like when they're spending that money that every ad is about. Right. It's about other stuff. It's about whatever they can find to try to dislodge this person from power. So, you know, I mean, Ilhan Omar, actually, they kind of messed up last time around because they didn't really spend a lot of money against her and she narrowly won. I was going to say, so if I remember, she ran 18 points behind Biden in her district, but she still did win. I don't remember the numbers. She won, but it was much closer than they expected. And so a lot of these members who have supported a ceasefire, they have a target on their back. And, you know, they're denying the hundred million

number that got reported of the amount of money that they're going to flood into these races. But, you know, that's not it's not something to sneeze at. And clearly they're making an aggressive effort to try to make sure that there is no sentiment in favor of Palestinian statehood or criticism of the Israeli government or certainly, you know, the current moment calling for a ceasefire. And it is remarkable because you remember Ilhan Omar put out that tweet. Remember, it's all about the Benjamins with regard to AIPAC money. And she was censored for that. And it is remarkable because you remember Ilhan Omar put out that tweet. Remember, it's all about the Benjamins with regard to AIPAC money. And she was censored for that. And it was a whole thing. And so to now see Mark Pocan, who's much less of like a radical than she is, saying

effectively the same thing in potentially more polished terms. But you're right. The mask is kind of off and people now feel more comfortable calling out exactly what's happening here. Can we all just now acknowledge it was like a temporary insanity in American politics? She's obviously right. And she's still right today. She was right. Yes. That's a whole other conversation.

Justice for Ilhan. Okay. Let's talk about the RNC funding. All right. So there was this moment in the debate. You guys probably remember the last debate that everyone hated and nobody watched. Whatever. But Vivek came out of the gates swinging.

And it was a bit of an unusual target that he selected here in RNC, Rana Romney. McDaniel, are we supposed to drop the Romney now? According to Trump, we should have dropped the Romney. Okay. Anyway, here's what candidate for president, Vivek Ramaswamy, had to say. We've become a party of losers at the end of the day. We're a cancer to the Republican establishment. Let's speak the truth. I mean, since Ronna McDaniel took over as chairwoman of the RNC in 2017, we have lost 2018, 2020, 2022, no red wave that never came. We got trounced last night in 2023. And I think that we have to have accountability in our party. For that matter, Ronna, if you want to come on stage tonight,

you want to look the GOP voters in the eye and tell them you resign. I will turn over my yield my time to you. And frankly, look, the people they're cheering for losing in the Republican Party. Think about who's moderating this debate. This should be Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan and Elon Musk. We'd have 10 times the viewership asking questions that GOP primary voters actually care about and bringing more people into our party. You think the Democrats and we've got Kristen Welker here. I think it's preposterous to blame Ronna McDaniel for the losses in Virginia, for, you know,

the losses on all the abortion ballot measures, the underperformance in the midterm. I mean, it's very clear what the big factors were here. But there is some interesting reporting about something that, you know, is going on behind the scenes. I don't think he has a point. But anyway, put this up on the screen for The Washington Post with regard to the RNC's funding. Apparently, the Republican Party's finances are incredibly worrisome to party members, advisors to former President Donald Trump and other operatives involved in the 24 election effort. They just disclosed they have $9.1 million in cash on hand as of October 30th.

That is the lowest amount for the RNC in any federal election commission report since February of 2015. Compares with about $20 million at the same point in the 2016 election cycle. So they've got less than half of what they had at that point in 2016. And about $61 million four years ago when Trump was in the White House. The DNC has a lot more money, roughly double, $17.7 million as of October 30th. And as to what's going on here, there isn't a lot of insight. You've got a Tennessee RNC member who said it's just a revenue problem. We're going through the same efforts we always go through to raise money, the same donor meetings, retreats, digital advertising, direct mail.

But the return is much lower this year. If you know the answer, I'd love to know what the staff has managed to tighten down on expenses to keep the party from going into the red. Donors have not cut as many large checks to the RNC in recent years. And the party's small donor program has also suffered. I wonder what your analysis is of what is going on here. Because my guess is that, I mean, Trump is the Republican Party. And we know the way that he really burns through his fundraising lists and exhausts donors with just constant repeated requests. And so I think he's burned their donor base. And also is just like it is him that is the party

So there's less incentive to then give to like the official party apparatus. I'll bring it back to Where I was talking about with a I think at a point in terms of partnering with NBC, which I think stupid But let's put that aside. Yeah, and let's think about the RNC as it's constructed. You are right macro level It's never gonna change anything But I know a lot of people who actually worked at the RNC, and they were very proud because of a lot of money that they brought in in 2012, is that they invested a ton of the Romney money and all the other things in that time for a voter outreach system, which dramatically outperformed the DNC's similar

technology in 2016, which again, it's mostly because of Trump. But for these party apparatuses, it's all about infrastructure for smaller organizations. And candidates, like ActBlue has been a massive success for Democrats. And WinRed has been ish, not as good. I think what Vivek, and the legitimate point I think he makes here, and also that this shows, is that bad stewardship of the party really is about investment at the party level, where you're able to help people in BS, in some race nobody's ever heard of. You can put some money in at the last minute. You can give them technology. You can connect people with volunteers. And that stuff just costs tremendous, tremendous amounts of money. So Ronna McDaniel

has also, I think, been a bad RNC chairwoman, A, because she hasn't been able to raise money properly. B, she can't pick a lane. Are you either pro-Trump or not? Like, what are we doing here? Are we going to do, you know, we're endorsing a primary process. We're putting on debates, which Trump is not showing up to. So in some ways, she's oppositional to him, but she's also going to be supportive of him if he eventually becomes the nominee. She's tried to govern in this very like middling direction. And I think that has both led to lack of fundraising, lack really of, also lack of relationship management with Trump, where why don't we have like the ground apparatus? Why are we not sharing the

mailing list and all these other things? I know this can sound boring, but the party itself has not performed at a good level. A lot of that is due to Trump, abortion, you know, all this other stuff. But in stuff that they can control, at least from what I understand, even the consultants and all these other people are very dissatisfied with her leadership. I mean, I have no idea. It's entirely possible that she's been a terrible leader. But I also would say, like, I think the biggest problem for them is probably structural. There's been a drop in

grassroots fundraising across the board, Democrats, Republicans, you know, independent organizations. There's been a huge drop in grassroots fundraising. There may be a variety of reasons for that. One is people feeling really stretched. Another is they feel sort of like, you know, nihilistic, like why would I give my money at this point? There may be a whole host of reasons, but that's kind of been an across-the-board phenomenon. In terms of the big donors, if you're thinking about it, like if you're a Trump person, you're going to give to Trump. Yeah. If you're an anti-Trump person, you're going to give to Nikki Haley or you're going to give to Chris Christie. Why would you give to the

RNC if your project is either, because Trump is the central dividing line in our politics and certainly in the Republican Party. So if you're a pro-Trump person, he is effectively the party. That's where you're going to invest your resources. And if you're an anti-Trump person, like Ronna McDaniel is effectively his, you know, he supports her and supported her staying in as RNC chair. So it doesn't make a lot of sense to give the money there. And, you know, and then you also have hanging over all of this, like all of the stuff that was happening in the House. And they can't get a speaker and they can't pass any legislation. And they're just sort of like in chaos and aimless and kind of a mess over there as well.

So it also doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in the organization of the Republican Party institution itself. But I really think the key thing, if I had to guess, is just the fact that Trump has subsumed the party. He is a much larger, like it's no longer about the Republican Party. It's about the person of Donald Trump. And so to me, that's probably the bigger story. That's definitely, of course, that overlays it. I'm more saying it's like terms of what she can control. There was also an interesting moment last night on Laura Ingraham's show where Ron DeSantis was pressed on Ronna McDaniel whether she should stay. And he was tripping all over himself on this answer.

Let's take a listen to that. We'll be able to do it nationally. So you think there should be no change at the RNC? No change. It's working out well? I actually, I called for change after the midterms. I was the only presidential candidate running that called for change. I wasn't running at the time, but my view was we've lost all these elections in a row. Why are we continuing to do it? But here's the thing, as the nominee, I will be responsible for doing it and I will get the job done regardless of who the chairman of it

is. I led the drive in Florida. I'll lead the drive nationally. We can do it. We just need leadership. We need a Republican party that has a message beyond just, you know, Biden bad. So anyway, I think what Laura is reflecting there is there is a lot of activist energy that I see that is against RNC and the fact that DeSantis kind of has to pick and choose his way through. Interesting to me. Very interesting. Yeah. I just, last thing on this, the focus on Ronald McDaniel just to me seems like coke because they don't want to say it's Trump's fault. Or abortion. They don't want to say it's abortion. Like those things are uncomfortable because then you have to deal with like, you know, a core part of your base or a core part of the party platform,

or you got to deal with the guy, Donald Trump, which almost all of them are afraid to do. And so she's like, you know, a useful scapegoat here. And, you know, you look at the fundraiser and you're like, oh, it's your fault. That must be the reason that we're losing. Maybe it's like 10th down the list of important factors in these elections. But a lot of it, this is a dodge to avoid dealing with the real central problems. Absolutely. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder.

I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her. And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there.

Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter.

She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never got any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

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Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sometimes as dads, I think we're too hard on ourselves. We get down on ourselves on not being able to, you know, we're the providers, but we also have to learn to take care of ourselves. A wrap-away, you got to pray for yourself as well as for everybody else, but never forget yourself. Self-love made me a better dad because I realized my worth.

Never stop being a dad. That's dedication. Find out more at fatherhood.gov. Brought to you by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Ad Council. All right, let's move on to the next part. George Santos, he's facing possibly an expulsion vote in Congress sometime this week, but he's going out with a bang. He did a X Spaces, formerly known as Twitter, in which he really went off on some of his colleagues, alleging some pretty debaucherous behavior behind the scenes. Now, look, he's a proven liar. Should we believe him? Maybe, maybe not. Although I suspect this may be the truest thing that he's ever said. I have colleagues who are more worried about getting drunk every night with

the next lobbyist that they're going to screw and pretend like none of us know what's going on and sell off the American people, not show up to vote because they're too hungover or whatever the reason is, or not show up to vote at all and just give their card out like fucking candy for someone else to vote for them. This shit happens every single week. Reporters don't care to write about adultery anymore. And trust me, there's been plenty of this Congress. And nobody writes about it anymore because George Santos is here. They should look at it this way.

Look, George, with George being around, a lot of this shit's going to go under the rug because none of the reporters write about it anymore. Just putting that out there because I think it's relevant. Who has no real track record of trading. This member has been able to outperform every single pointed measure of stock trading this year so far. I mean, talk about insider trading. And there's so much proof to just pinpoint to dates and times of when trades happen and when information was bought in front of that specific committee. He is going to be undermined all throughout this election process by the very people that should be supporting him. These people will undermine him. They will get in his way. They will redirect voters from him to others. Make no mistake, there is a lot of members in this body who

hate Donald Trump. So this has been his strategy, is to wrap himself in the shroud of Trump and be like, I'm on Trump's side, that's why you shouldn't take me out. As if it's not- That's why he cares so deeply about adultery. Yeah, he cares a lot about adultery. That's why he had an OnlyFans account that he paid for with his campaign finance funds. My favorite is when he went, what if he went on TV and he claimed he didn't know what OnlyFans was and then is exposed to have been cocaine in front of him, he drew a huge ire from Kevin McCarthy and others who forced him to apologize. Again, it was possible he was telling the truth, too. But all of this is in the backdrop of Santos facing an expulsion vote.

Let's go ahead and put Axios, please, up there, where it currently looks like Santos says that he will not resign, that he will not resign, but is facing a vote of expulsion after that ethics committee report was released, which was the thing that Kevin McCarthy and Mike Johnson and others had held onto. Johnson said that he spoke with Santos yesterday and that they're looking at a variety of options and he's kind of thinking about what he wants to do. But Santos has been pretty unequivocal that he won't resign. But of course, it'd be pretty humiliating to get expelled from Congress. He would be the only sixth person in American history. This man is impervious to humiliation. That's true. American congressman just tells everybody what they want to hear

whenever they, oh, you played volleyball? I played volleyball. Oh, you're Jewish? I'm Jewish. Oh, you have a connection to the 9-11? Oh, my mom was killed in that attack. So, listen, for him, for Madison Cawthorne, whatever, we are all prepared to believe the most salacious

things you have to say about your colleagues there, but you gotta bring some receipts, okay? Especially at this point. Credibility is not exactly at a high watermark, shall we say, right at this moment. So, you know, if you're gonna spill the tea, good. Bring some receipts. Tell us who.

Take some videos. Yeah, go ahead. Send me the video. I'll publish it. Expose the truth. Expose the truth. We're all cheering for you, buddy. Anyway, so will he get expelled or not?

We'll see. It remains to be seen. If the vote will likely happen sometime this week, I mean, the Democrats are almost 100% on board. There have been some dear colleague letters that have been circulating of Republicans being like, hey, we shouldn't, maybe we shouldn't kick him out. But the biggest issue for Santos is that even his Republican Party, remember this, at home, they want him to go. They want him to resign.

The people who are in his office say that they won't work with him. The mayor and others say that I absolutely refuse. So the local apparatus, the population, the Republican Party, and now House leadership and others, I don't see, I don't think he's going to last. If it comes to a vote, of which it's very possible, I don't think he'll last at all. It looks like the swan song days for our great times with George Santos. I'll miss his fashion and his lip filler and so many other things. The baby he was carrying around. Still don't know about that one.

Maybe husband, whether it's true or not. There's so many things I'm going to miss about Mr. George Santos, as you said, America's congressman. Okay, guys, thank you so much for watching. I know it's been a long show today. We've got the merchandise on for sale. We, of course, have our discount going for our yearly subscription. We appreciate it. We love all of you. We have a great counterpoint show for everyone tomorrow, and we'll see you all on Thursday. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Over the years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned no town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend.

I've heard from hundreds of people across the country with an unsolved murder in their community. I was calling about the murder of my husband. The murderer is still out there. Each week, I investigate a new case. If there is a case we should hear about, call 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Here's the deal. We got to set ourselves up. See, retirement is the long game. We got to make moves and make them early. Set up goals. Don't worry about a setback. Just save up and stack up to reach them. Let's put ourselves in the right position. Pre-game to greater things.

Start building your retirement plan at thisispretirement.org. Brought to you by AARP and the Ad Council. High key. Looking for your next obsession? Listen to High Key, a new weekly podcast hosted by Ben O'Keefe,

Ryan Mitchell, and Evie Audley. We got a lot of things to get into. We're going to gush about the random stuff we can't stop thinking about. I am high-key going to lose my mind over all things Cowboy Carter. I know. Girl, the way she about to yank my bank account.

Correct. And one thing I really love about this is that she's celebrating her daughter. Oh, I know. Listen to High Key on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast.