Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 11/29/22: Elon Musk, BlockFi, Balenciaga, Georgia Senate, Julian Assange, Biden Rail Strike, Loneliness Epidemic, FTX, Fifa, and MORE!

Episode Date: November 29, 2022

Krystal and Saagar bring the news about Elon Musk, BlockFi, Balenciaga controversy, Georgia Senate Runoff, Julian Assange, Biden averting Rail Strike, the Loneliness Epidemic, inside the FTX collapse, and Fifa's takedown of Breaking Points video.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it means the absolute world to have your support. What are you waiting for? Become a premium subscriber today at breakingpoints.com. Good morning, everybody. Happy Tuesday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed, we do. A lot of big news breaking this morning. So we have big news from the president calling on Congress to basically Bigfoot railroad workers, deny them their democratic say in what their working conditions should be and calling on Congress to pass a deal and impose it upon them. So we'll break all of that down for you. We also have Elon Musk going to war with Apple. So that is very interesting. There's actually a lot to say about it. It's sort of complex and nuanced and all of those good things. BlockFi, another big crypto company going down, bankruptcy.

Sager has some personal stakes involved in this one. I'll share my losses with the world when we get to that. We're going to dig into the controversy surrounding Balenciaga. Kim Kardashian is involved. We also have the very latest out of Georgia, where voters are already headed to the polls. The runoff date is next week. That came up really quickly. And we also have the New York Times finally stepping up to defend Julian Assange, saying that press freedom is at risk if the Biden administration continues the prosecution of him. So we'll break that down for you as well. But before we get to any of that, live show.

Live show. Put it up there on the screen. New York, Boston, we are coming next week. It's going to sneak up on all of us. Last chance, last couple of days to go ahead and buy tickets. The link is going to be down there in the description. We have a great show planned for all of you, and you are going to meet some of our new team members. So we will exclusively reveal it there. How about that? That's a little bit of a tease of some content on top of multimedia and just a fun environment. As you can all see, we're getting into the holiday season. It's going to be nice

to be in New York. Shout out to Colvin for doing the decorations for us. Shout out to our man, Colvin. He did a painstaking job here. I think he did a great job, especially of placing my dinosaur nutcrackers on this. That thing is adorable. I love it. I forgot about it. Shout out to Target. Shout out to Target.

Okay, let's go on to Elon Musk. So some major news actually yesterday. It's setting up like a Titanic showdown in tech and actually exposing some of the major and bigger issues kind of at play. Let's put this up there on the screen. Musk tweeting two separate and important things. Quote, Apple has mostly stopped advertising on Twitter. Do they hate free speech in America? Question. Second, Apple has threatened to withhold Twitter from its app store, but won't tell us why. I think that secondary one is probably a lot more important. Yeah. Well, the first one is nonsense. I mean, anyone can stop advertising on Twitter at any time. And by the way, there are many companies that have chosen to do so because for good reason, given how chaotic this whole situation is.

Let's go to the secondary part, though, which is why the App Store one actually sets up a big fight, especially given previous fights that they've had around Fortnite and major court cases involving the Department of Justice. Let's put this up there on the screen. Previously, it was taken with great notice just seven days ago that the top Apple Store executive, Phil Schiller, actually had deleted his Twitter account, which was fueling speculation over really their dissatisfaction by Apple with the moves that Twitter is making and possibly even content moderation on the platform. Now, of course, the reason that all of us need to pay attention to that is it is not without precedent for Apple to remove a app,

specifically a social media Twitter-type clone called Parler, from its app store specifically because it said it violated its terms of service. So it matters on several different levels, which is that the app store itself has long been a frustration with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs because it is a completely black hole process. Right. They publish their, quote, terms of service. Sometimes apps can take weeks or months in review.

They can get rejected for issues that they don't even really know about in the actual HQ of the apps. They have to reform. And it's really, it's almost like us playing with the YouTube algorithm. Like, we don't know what it is. We know it matters. We know it matters a hell of a lot. And every once in a while, you're always tinkering around the edges. Sometimes you just get nuked for no reason and nobody will ever tell you what's going on. That's basically that. It has massive monopoly power given the iPhone platform and it extracts major rents from many of the apps that do business on there. They take approximately a 30% cut on any

business or app that is pulling over $1 million. So Fortnite, the game, had already set up a major battle with Apple over that. But this has been over a decade and a half of simmering conflict in Silicon Valley that's now coming to fore with Twitter. And it exposes both the fakery, essentially, of like, quote, security concerns and all of that when TikTok is literally on the App Store. It's just completely up to Tim Cook and his guys as to what goes on there and what's not. But it matters because of what, you know, the one billion or so iPhones that are in circulation across the U.S. Right. Yeah, well, I mean— Sorry, the world.

Let's first say no one should necessarily take what Elon is saying at face value. Like, are they being threatened with removal? Who knows? Yeah, we don't know. But, I mean, as you pointed out, it's not without precedent. You also have the specter of the dude who runs the App Store deleting his Twitter account, so obviously unhappy with what's going on there. And I think that happened right after Trump was allowed back onto Twitter.

So, I mean, you can read into that what you will. So, it's certainly plausible that this is a reality that's happening behind the scenes. I mean, the problem here is monopoly power. Like, very clearly. It's very simple. Matt Stoller can come on and tell you all about it. Like, the reality is, the issue is that Apple has so much power

in this marketplace that even if you are a relative giant, like Twitter, I mean, Twitter, obviously like a big player, you still are subject to the whims of what they decide to do. Let alone if you are a smaller developer and not only are they subject to the whims of like whether they decide to let you exist on the app store, you're also subject to exorbitant fees. I mean, they take a massive cut. It reminds me a lot of Ticketmaster, to be honest with you. But like, you have no choice. So really at bottom, the issue that this all comes down to is monopoly power. And if we can, let's actually

skip ahead to the fourth element that we have here. One of the former employees of Twitter wrote an op-ed for the New York Times. The head of trust and safety says this is what could become of Twitter. And, you know, there were a lot of pieces of this that were kind of interesting. But in particular, relevant for this conversation is he actually talks about the process that they were subjected to while he was there in order to maintain their presence on the app Store, he says, In my time at Twitter, representatives of the App Store regularly raise concerns about content available on our platform. On one occasion, a member of an app review team contacted Twitter saying with consternation that he had searched for hashtag boobs in the Twitter app and was presented with, well, exactly what you would expect. Another time on the eve of a major feature release, a reviewer sent screenshots of several days old tweets containing an English language racial slur,

asking Twitter representatives whether they should be permitted to appear on the service. Reviewers hint that app approval could be delayed, perhaps even withheld, if issues are not resolved to their satisfaction, although the standards for resolution are often implied. Even as they appear to be driven largely by manual checks and anecdotes. These review procedures have the power to derail company plans and trigger all hands-on debt crises for weeks or months at a time. And he closes this entire op-ed by writing, as I departed the company, the calls from the app review teams had already begun. So even before the Musk era, you can see how they put them through the paces. Hey, this hashtag

boob search. I don't like what's coming up. Hey, I found this racial slur on here. What are you all going to do about it? And they also make it, he also makes it very clear that it's an incredibly opaque process. They're sort of hinting at what they want you to do in order to remedy the situation. It is ultimately driven by whatever the, you know, the team and the man at the top decides they want to do. And so it shouldn't be surprising to anyone that now under, you know, with Musk at the helm now, making a lot of chaotic decisions and sort of all over the place and with no real process of his own also, that they would be subject to this kind of scrutiny. This drives me crazy because it's like, who are you to decide what Twitter does on its platform with regard?

OK, the quote racial slur. We don't know what the racial slur was. And that could mean anything to especially a bunch of people in Silicon Valley for what they claim. I could say Latino and according to a certain subset of extremely online idiots, that would be a racial slur because I didn't say Latinx. So what does that mean? You don't get to decide what that is for the entire country, which effectively you are deciding for a vast majority of the population. As long as they have the monopoly, they do. And that's the issue, which is that they do.

And so even, you know, like on the boobs search, it's like, what? Twitter is not a pornography app. And it has all been. Also, if you were going to ban it at this point for that, it's outrageous. There has been pornography on Twitter since the very beginning as that policy. So now all of a sudden you're just changing. Look, once again, if you were literally going to allow Chinese spyware on your app store and you're going to try and ban Twitter because they brought Trump back, like that is a whole level. That is a level of hypocrisy and of outrage that I did not even think to appear possible. But like, I mean, zooming out from the dynamics of Twitter specifically or the Apple Store

specifically, I mean, you see here with one billionaire in control of Twitter and the total capricious decision making, you know, he says, oh, we're going to have a council, we're going to have this process. And then he's just like, nah, I'm going to just make whatever decisions I want. I'm going to put up Twitter polls and then decide based on that. It's just totally subject to his whims. And it's the same thing with Apple. It's totally subject to their whims. And so it really reveals what a problem concentrations of power in the hands of a few, you know, very capricious individuals, even if you like them, even if they are well-intentioned,

even if they have the best interest of humanity at stake or whatever you want to believe, having that much power in any one individual's hands is really a disaster. And especially when you are talking about something like a platform that has become very important for news gathering, for free speech, as Elon puts it, the village public square, when you have that sort of critical infrastructure for democracy subject to the whims of one individual, it is a bad situation. And it really doesn't have anything to do with Elon Musk or Tim Cook. These concentrations of power are the problem. Absolutely. And that's the complicated story here, right?

Apple has made some moves, which I applaud and which I love, whenever they refuse to cooperate with the FBI to crack the iPhone of the San Bernardino shooter. They were like, if we do that, you can crack every iPhone in America. We're not going to help you do that. And I was like, wow, that actually, you know, stood up to the Department of Justice on that. That takes some serious, some serious courage. And they've invented lockdown mode to try and stop, you know, the Saudi, the Pegasus system. So I'm like, these are all good things. But then on here, as you said, like completely capricious, they can do whatever they want and ban an app based upon arbitrary editorial standards. That's the other one, you know, like, are you a platform or are you an editorial publisher? You can't decide like individual tweets appearing on Twitter. That's like us scrutinizing individual reviews on the app store. It's ludicrous, especially at scale,

and it's obviously politically motivated. And so I think the core issue where I hope some people might be able to converge on is, this is a crazy system. We cannot have this. The Google and the Apple App Store have to be subject to some basic legal regulatory frameworks through which we all decide that these are the standards through which you are able to regulate. If you want to set individual policies on pornography or whatever, but then it has to be consistently applied. And the DOJ should be able to come in and say, you're not consistently applying the standards. Same with respect to free speech. I mean, this is why it also drives me crazy. All of this free speech and all that, we have a legal doctrine. It has been adjudicated now for 200 plus years in the U.S. Supreme Court. Pass a law that says that subject to editorial standards on all platforms

in the United States technology, that as long as it's within the bounds of the First Amendment. You know, even I was looking back on their statement with Parler. They said that Parler had violated its terms of service and had not taken adequate measures to address illegal activity on its platform. And Apple said that it preemptively wanted to address that because the DOJ and the FBI was not moving fast enough. Who appointed you? You are not the law enforcement agency of the United States of America.

Also, the DOJ and the FBI can't, quote, move fast enough because we have courts and laws which give people rights. Yeah. And actual ability to stand up if they want to. Monopolists are going to monopolize. You know, I mean, that's the bottom line, right? They have a monopoly. They're going to throw their weight around.

However, they want to throw it around. And it really is up to the government and to the Congress to deal and to the judicial branch branch too, by the way, to deal with these concentrations of power, because there is no way that Apple or Google or Twitter or any of these companies are going to rein in their own power. There's no way they're going to, you know, make what's happening here in this process transparent for the public good. Like, they're not going to do that on their own. That's why you have representatives of the people elected to a body called Congress in order to check the power of out of control entities. And I guess my hope is since Elon Musk has a lot of fans on the right and since you already have, which we've covered here, a lot more concern about corporate power among Republicans,

that perhaps this will be an aha moment of like, oh, these companies have to have their power checked because this is an untenable situation. Absolutely. Let's get to, though, you're not going to hear this perspective very much in the mainstream media. There has been now an ongoing real effort pushed by none other than Taylor Lorenz over at the Washington Post, but widespread in its want amongst the so-called internet censors and their hall monitors at major mainstream media institutions who have been trying and actively campaigning Apple to take, and Google, by the way, to take Twitter off of the App Store. Let's put this up there on the screen. And it really broke a couple of days ago with a quote from a so-called expert

in the Washington Post. Quote, they say, Apple and Google need to seriously explore booting Twitter off of the App Store. What Musk is doing is existentially dangerous for various marginalized communities. It is like opening the gates of hell. I also do love how he did not need to specify. He just said, quote, various marginalized communities. This is Alejandra Caraballo of Harvard Law's Cyber Claw Clinic, which is the fakest title that I have personally ever heard in academia. But look, you're reading through, and you and I were talking about this before the show. This news article written by Taylor Lorenz at The Post is titled, quote, Opening the Gates of Hell, Musk Says He Will Revive Banned Twitter Accounts.

It reads like an op-ed. It does. Asking Apple and Google to take the Twitter off of the App Store. This is none other than an activist op-ed masquerading as a news article. I, unlike these people, think you are free to say what you want. Write an op-ed.

But don't masquerade as news. This is appearing in the technology section of the website, Crystal. I shouldn't be surprised at this point, but I continue to be surprised. I mean, I read through this article and I thought surely, you know, okay, you lead with the expert who was allowed to think whatever they think. You lead with the expert opinion. Surely you're going to have someone, you know, maybe three paragraphs in who has the opposite take of like, oh, actually this could be good. And here's the arguments in favor of free speech. And yes, it gets messy. You know, like the old ACLU position. No, no, totally one-sided. It's just person after person after

person with quotes very similar to this. And like, yeah, that's fine if you're like writing a monologue for a show that's like your opinion or if you're writing an op-ed for this, you know, very important large newspaper that a lot of people read and get their views from. I find it astonishing not that she would write this piece, but I continue to find it shocking that The Washington Post allows this. Just blatant, one-sided opinion masquerading as neutral journalism is, I just, I will never stop being sort of like stunned by that. And that really is my issue with her. Like, again, you can have whatever opinions you want. You can say whatever you want. But to masquerade as this is like neutral journalism, just the facts, it's gross. Yeah, it is gross. And you know, I want to bring it back to, actually, it's funny. Anybody who's

ever tried to buy anything, you know, in store, like if you want to buy, I use a lot of Audible credits, right, to listen to audiobooks. You can't buy new credits in the Audible app. Why? Because they don't want to pay the tithe to the app store. They make you buy it elsewhere and then buy with credits. Why do you think that whole system exists? It's literally to get around the app store's tithing. Well, and the only reason they're able to do it is because Amazon, which owns Audible, is its own monopoly. So we have no choice. All right, well, we'll go through their process and deal with their thing. The only reason they're able to push back and do it their way is because they're also gigantic. So it's like to even see that Bezos's own paper is advocating for a system of which he actively

tasked to circumvent for his own business is just so particularly juicy. You referenced that op-ed, if we could put it back up there on the screen, because the Yoel Roth op-ed is important because Yoel previously was a Democratic operative before he was the head of trust and safety at Twitter. And really, the opening of the App Store conversation, while revealing to us from an analytical point of view, it is now being seen really as kind of an opening campaign. Like, this was a preview to the executives at Apple and to really the activists, which is why they're seizing on it, because they're like, oh, this is a major opening. We can actually pressure Apple to just kick them

off, which literally would be an existential threat. There's a book called Super Pumped, which I read. It was called The Battle for Uber. And one of the most interesting points within the book is the battle between Uber and Apple over the amount of information that Uber was able to collect about you on your phone. Oh, yeah. And there was all kinds of insane ways and code that went into people's apps and geofencing. I encourage people to go read it

because it's actually an interesting kind of corporate story. There were scandals in the beginning of them tracking journalists, and it was crazy. Yeah, that's what happened was is that they basically put a geofence around Cupertino, and it was like, it was crazy. Yeah, that's what happened was is that they basically put a geofence around Cupertino, and they were like, well, we'll have one app that exists over there, and then one app that exists in the rest of the world.

So it would pass review, but then wouldn't go into effect elsewhere. And they had an entire software system. It's a fascinating book. They also made a Showtime movie about it. Not as good, but it's all right. Super pumped. Everybody go and check it out. The point is that it just shows you again that Uber, which was a multi-billion dollar corporation,

itself was having to play crazy games and spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to circumvent the Apple App Store so that they could continue to do business. I also want to underscore what you said earlier about these advertisers. Let's put the Business Insider tear sheet up there on the screen, please. And it shows you that 50 of Twitter's top 100 advertisers so far have pulled out of the platform since Musk took over. And as you said, part of the problem is that these 50 companies have spent over $2 billion in the last two years. Musk is, of course, saying that they're against free speech and all that. I think it's certainly possible, but he did himself no favors on two fronts. Number one,

that initial Paul Pelosi tweet floating the conspiracy, that was a massive mistake because it just showed that since all editorial standards are up to him and he doesn't have particularly good editorial standards, well, that's just not going to be trustworthy on top of a major undeniable activist campaign against, you know, basically against Elon right now, getting these Twitter advertisers to stop with him. So it's a combination of he didn't even give them a plausible deniability about how he's trying. And at the same time, Twitter Blue was a disaster.

Allegedly, by the way, it's supposed to roll out tomorrow. I haven't seen a single announcement about that. So who knows when it's coming. He's changed things up and said we'll have different types of check marks and all that stuff that's coming. We'll see. But the business itself of Twitter, it's actually in danger right now. In bad shape. Because they were getting like 90% of their revenue from advertisers previously.

It was like their exclusive source of revenue. Obviously, the new efforts to have more like subscription style revenue, those have not come to fruition yet. So they're in a major hole. And I do want to point out like activists, part of their free speech is being able to call on these companies to, you know, to abandon the platform. And by the way, I don't think most of these companies needed much encouragement because there are a lot of places to advertise. And you look at the really chaotic decision making. You look at the fact that, you know, things that he said he was going to do, he then immediately reverses. I mentioned the content moderation council that gets thrown out the window. Then it's like rule by Twitter poll.

Then it's, you know, the Twitter checkmark thing is rolled down. It's pulled back. I mean, it's just a total, all the parody accounts that sprung up when they, we had a minute where you could pay $8 to get your checkmark and whatever. All these companies, I'm sure they're looking at this and like, we don't need this right now. Maybe we'll come back later, but we have a lot of places we could spend our advertising dollars. We read the analysis of one of the people who was like basically in charge of placing ads for a significant size company. And they said another thing that people are discounting is because you have such staff turnover. They had a whole bunch of different people in the course of like two weeks who were assigned to their account. So they're just like, no, we're out. That's not a war on free speech. That's just

business people making business decisions, which, you know, I don't always love either. And I do think it's bad that these platforms have their entire content moderation policy essentially dictated to them by what corporate America is comfortable with. That is a major problem. But this is 100% predictable, completely predictable. No, he made a mistake. And look, I support free speech on Twitter. I absolutely support even the revival of some banned accounts just because I don't think it should be within the power. I support President Trump being unbanned. I mean, I don't really enjoy having an obnoxious voice around, but I think it's the right decision. Yeah, exactly. And I think, look, you know, it's not always comfortable to live in free speech and open society, but having

lived in the alternative, I will take this any day of the week. And finally, let's get to this. Let's put this up there on the screen. Elon now saying that the Twitter files on free speech suppression will soon be published on Twitter itself. The public deserves to know what really happened. Kind of an ominous tweet there, Crystal. We have no idea what it actually means or what it will entail. Here are a couple of things I'm looking for, which is the actual released unredacted correspondence around banning the Hunter Biden laptop story. That would be very interesting. Number two, proof if shadow banning actually did exist. I think we can all confidently say it did, although I still would like to see

proof in the pudding. Well, Elon has said he wants to do shadow banning. So I'm like, well, do you have existing code? So does that exist or not? Because I would really like to see that. So shadow banning, the exact procedures through which maybe specific accounts that were done, and then all of the fake processes, because we know that there were published terms of service of which they did not abide by in terms of what accounts got banned and whatnot. So I want to know the back and forth around ones perhaps that they did protect, internal correspondence. My old friend Vijay Agade, I'd like to see a lot of her emails and the internal policies and things that they set. And then, you know, I think that that level of transparency is important. Secondary and perhaps most important is what Alex Berenson showed us, which is what he was able to obtain White House communications with Twitter over trying to get his account banned on platforms.

So anything government, FBI related, all the way going back to President Obama and that time. And then actually this is an under-noticed one. Remember with the Snowden revelations about backdoors that big tech companies had or not, any NSA-related activity with Twitter, backdoors, the extent and the cooperation that they have. Some things I'd be looking for. That's the part that I'm most interested in. I mean, the individual decisions

that were made under the previous regime, well, that regime is gone. So how interesting is that really at this point? By the way, Elon should be opening up his own books going forward. Like that is actually more important at this point since he is now in charge of how he's making those decisions, what algorithms are being deployed. He has talked about what he wants to do is basically shadow ban instead of outright ban accounts and language. So important to get that transparency going forward. We'll see if that happens. But yeah, the most interesting part would be what were the government contacts with Twitter like?

We had that reporting from Ken Klippenstein about government working directly with tech companies, opening up back doors for communications, all of those sorts of things. So that's the piece that would definitely be most interesting here. Yeah. So look, we'll see. We're waiting. There's a lot of things that could happen on that front. All right. Let's get to a fun story. Is it, Tucker? Involves me personally. Is it? Well, I get to say it here. So it's not totally a loss on my side. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. Cryptocurrency lender BlockFi has now filed for bankruptcy, the latest casualty in the crypto turmoil after FTX's collapse. Now, full disclosure, and I will get to the exact dollar amount I had a sizable sum on BlockFi, of which I had long been a customer of theirs. And so this actually personally hurts. Can you explain what BlockFi is? Like,

where did they fit in the ecosystem? What did they actually do? It was, okay, so at its core, it was a trading platform. But the core innovation that the major players, BlockFi, Gemini, and a few others had is us fell for, was that you could take an asset which is fully convertible to U.S. dollars, like GUSD, Gemini, U.S. dollar coin, pegged one-to-one. You could buy that. They would take your dollars and effectively loan it out as leverage for trading on its platform. Yeah. Meantime, you had a token which was fully convertible, and they were paying you interest on that. So you put your money in. Yeah, they go and make bets with it. They use your actual dollars to loan out. So if I wanted to make leveraged bets on their platform,

I could do so. And I could take loans based on the value of my assets. Me as a customer, why was I taking advantage of it? Well, the best way to think of it is essentially like a mega high interest banking account. As in, you show me a place in 2021, which is paying 9% interest on dollars. So that's what I was taking advantage of. Some of us didn't pull it out at the right moment. And it turns out that, well, FDIC exists for a reason, guys. Learn from my pain.

It's basically like having money in the bank in the 1920s, during the crash of 29, when they're like, your money's not in the bank anymore. You're like, wait, what do you mean? Where is it? Yeah, so anyway, we invented a lot of capital controls on banks and regulations after the fact. This is essentially one of the reasons they were able to pay such high interest rates is because they had such leverage and large bets being placed on the platform. It wasn't as egregious as FTX, but it was essentially financial instrumentation that was being developed at a more sophisticated level for crypto as the asset prices went up. Well, and partly, and we'll get to this, they got in trouble with the SEC for not sort of acknowledging that these accounts and this

money was basically securities. And so they had to pay, they had a massive settlement, $100 million, with the SEC over failing to fully disclose and register these accounts as securities, which was what they really were. Correct. And so let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen, the Wall Street Journal piece, which is what they point to. This shows you as well the $30 million that you referenced. They still owe to the SEC. To owe to the SEC. What they point to actually in the

journal Collapse is that this is all still linked to FTX. So there were two things existentially a problem for BlockFi. Number one was the overall downturn in crypto because, and this shows you really the fakery, which is they were using the asset price of the crypto highly volatile asset and then borrowing dollars based upon that. But then you essentially get margin called when you have assets that are going to diminish in price by 300% or whatever over a period of one year. That was already a major blow to the company. But really what put them over the edge was FTX because they had a huge stake actually in FTX and many of the tokens that, again,

there were things being borrowed against the value of those tokens, which go to zero overnight. So this is FTX Contagion. I mean, this was a multi-billion dollar company. It had a lot of assets. It now owes, it has 10 creditors, which it owes $1.2 billion to. So I'm very, very- Sagar's not one of those. Not in the top 10. I wish I was in the top 10. I would not be one of those folks. But I do want to point out,

and you found this article. Let's put this Mother Jones piece up on the screen, because this is important. There were a lot of people who were not filthy rich, who had money on these crypto exchanges. They wanted to invest and they lost everything on FTX. And now a lot of people also lost everything that they had on BlockFi. And what they point to are really majority younger men, much like me, 25 to 30 years old, who saw these not only enormous returns, but really, you know, sophistication. Sorry, they saw people getting rich. They saw, you know, opportunities there that don't exist in traditional banking or even in equities markets. And they're like, hey, this is an opportunity to like jump ahead in line

on the system. This is my opportunity to buy a house. And, you know, we could sit here and, you know, cry for the SEC to not get $30 million. but it's a lot of guys who were trying to save up for a town payment. A mortgage who looked at this as their life-saving shot. And I'm not going to say it's been a crippling blow, although it's still pretty bad for what I lost, but a lot of these guys, it was their actual life savings, which is gone, like six figures. Yeah, it's really sad. Yeah, I mean, you had people who really believed in the dream, who, you know, like six figures. Yeah, it's really sad. Yeah, I mean, you have people who really believed in the dream, who, you know, like a lot of young people are looking at the housing market are feeling like I am never going to be able to afford to buy a house. They interviewed

one guy who's trying to buy a home in his in his home city of Vancouver, which is one of the most expensive real estate markets in the entire world. You know, and they thought, okay, this is an escape from the situation that I'm in right now. And they went all in. And, you know, they particularly in this article, why I thought it was important and why I thought it was interesting and why I thought it was sad is because they tie it directly to people who are trying to buy homes. And they have some numbers here from Redfin finding that one in nine first-time home buyers

said that selling cryptocurrency helped them save for a down payment. 8.8% of buyers in the third quarter of 2020 claimed they'd use crypto gains to buy their houses. So the number of people who were using crypto gains when the market was hot, when it was going up and up and up, was steadily increasing. And it makes sense because, I mean, we cover here. You have to have a six-figure income now to afford the mortgage payment on your average American house. We've also covered how you need so much cash up front that basically if you aren't independently wealthy or you don't have parents who are going to give you a few hundred grand as your down payment, you're just screwed.

And so I can totally understand how people saw this as, OK, you know, I'm in this job. You know, maybe I'm doing OK in the job, but I can never imagine how I'm going to get off of this treadmill and actually be able to start to build some wealth and just have the basics of the American dream of the house. And so they, you know, they fall for the of the American dream of the house. And so they, you know, they fall for the rhetoric. They fall for the hype. They end up going all in. And it's really sad. It just is really sad. You know, they interviewed somebody here who, like, he hasn't told his wife yet.

She didn't really know how much he had in. And they talked to somebody who normally was really on top of, like, moving what he had in. And they talked to somebody who normally was really on top of moving what he had around and making sure that it wasn't going to get lost. But he went out of town for a weekend. And in that time, FTX goes bankrupt. And you're just like, you're done. So the level of just pain that this caused with FTX alone, you had over a million people who lost a huge amount of money, some of it really significant to them, some of that they thought was going to be what really changed their life. And they were ultimately completely defrauded. Yeah. I mean, look, on a personal level, this is a good lesson because, and let's put it up there

on the screen, this is the exact dollar amount. It's $5,590. So I'll live, but you know, it hurts. And the reason that I did this was greed. I mean, let's be honest, which is that the time there was no asset paying 9%. It was, you know, like you're looking at a company like this, you're like, hey, it can't go bankrupt. Like, how is that possible? It's a multi-billion dollar company. There's no way. What could go wrong?

You're like, they're paying 9% interest. Like, there's no bank account on earth that's paying 9% interest. You don't want to put money in the equities. This was my thinking. I was like, well, you don't want to put money in the S&P 500 because that's volatile. You're like, that could go up and down. It's got 20-something percent. It's down 14%. You're like, this is safe. You're just sitting there. It's your cash. You're just earning interest on that. I wasn't doing any crazy leverage but look it's a good lesson that these FDIC and other institutions they exist for a reason yeah very painful lessons that we all had to learn in the 1920s and yeah I mean I think you know I'm a micro car I didn't put my

life savings in there although you know at the time when I invested all that that was a lot of money for me and that was one of those important this is an important lesson to see. You're like, wow, like these, the trust in the institutions and like, you know, you buy into, oh, well, it's a regulated company, right? Like, even though they had their fine on the FCC, they had billions of dollars on platform, you know. Yeah. All this is all fake. It literally dried up overnight.

It's gone. Because it's ultimately built on nothing. Yeah. I mean, crypto is. It's not pegged to overnight. It's gone. Because it's ultimately built on nothing. Yeah. I mean, crypto is... It's not pegged to anything. It's not pegged to anything. I mean, it's literally just an invented currency. And I know people say, well, so is fiat currency.

Yeah. But the American dollar is backed by the American government. Like, it's a thing. We have an army. We have a Federal Reserve. We have a treasury. We have a whole lot of people, like, paying taxes. There's a lot of stuff there.

And you can use a dollar to buy goods and services, which never came to fruition in any real way with crypto. So the whole thing could sustain as long as you had people believing in the dream and getting more people in and more people in. And as long as the balloon kept inflating, it was fine. But then the minute that, and this was, you know, this was part of what exposed that some of the rhetoric around this wasn't true. You know, the crypto was the first thing to collapse on the market, start to turn south. And that's counter to some of the rhetoric in the community. And so the minute that the air starts to come out of that balloon, it's just domino after domino after domino

and this being, sadly, the latest one. Sorry, Sagar. Let's go, that's all right. Look, again, it's one of those things where it's a lesson. At least I get to share it with everybody here. So don't fall for the easy schemes. And I have seen- Some things are too good to be true.

I mean, it does come down to that, right? I cannot believe it's paying like 8% or 9% interest. Like, this is nuts. And I was like, wait, so it's like, you don't even have to risk it. You just put it in there and you get interest on your money. Look, I got lucky. 2017, I bought Bitcoin, even where it is right now. I was a long-awaited believer in this. It was one of those things where it's like, you literally couldn't exist outside of the, in the equities markets. So I fell for the hype, just like everybody else. And anyway, it's a painful reminder, but at least I get to share it with all you fine people. On a much bigger level, let's go to the next one. This was reporting from David Dayen,

which is very important. It's put up there on the screen. Congress members tried to stop the SEC's inquiry into FTX. There is a caucus known as the, quote, Blockchain 8, consisting, it's bipartisan, of Democrats and of Republicans, who wrote a letter in March attempting to stop the SEC's information requests to crypto firms, including FTX. They say, quote, my office has received numerous tips from crypto and blockchain firms that the SEC is reporting requests to the crypto community are overburdensome and don't feel particularly voluntary and are stifling innovation. That was listed in March 16th of 2022. They received personal donations from FTX and from other crypto-associated super PACs, but they were actively bullying the SEC to try and stop them for information requests

to these major crypto platforms. It's totally ridiculous. And by the way, it might have worked because the SEC did send letters, requests for information from FTX. They were looking into, okay, what's going on here? Concerned about some of the very issues that ended up being, you know, total fraud from FTX. And this group that is getting campaign contributions from FTX and from the crypto industry at large, they write this letter pressuring the SEC and lo and behold, the

investigation stops. So there is some evidence that possibly, I mean, it's correlation, it's not causation, but it may have worked. Dan goes on to, and by the way, what a phenomenal reporter this guy is, by the way. If you don't support the American prospect, they really do tremendous work that nobody else is doing. But he writes, the unorthodox letter is analogous to the 1987 Keating Five scandal. At that time, five senators, including a young Arizona Republican named John McCain, pressured the Federal Home Loan Bank Board into shutting down an investigation into Lincoln Savings and Loan. And his chair, Charles Keating Jr. Keating, was a donor to all five senators,

giving $1.3 million over the years. That turned into a gigantic scandal when that bank collapsed, ultimately. So some echoes there of the exact same type of congressional pressure put on regulators to stop their scrutiny into FTX. And, you know, I think it's a very important thread to follow because there were a lot of members of Congress. I mean, SBF was famously playing big time in Democratic primaries in particular, throwing a lot of money around, getting glowing profiles, getting, you know, palling around with all kinds of members of Congress and really sort of creating from scratch a gigantic influence operation. And I think that, you know, digging

into how that all unfolded and what he got for the money that he was giving and other crypto industry players is a really important piece of this. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the most important one is really just that it is they it shows you that there were major attempts made by government, by Congress members who took money from these crypto-associated platforms, as well as FTX that actively tried to stymie the SEC investigation. I've got my monologue today on really a media scandal of pretty crazy proportions where they effectively did not investigate SBF because they liked money and prestige and didn't want to lose access. I'll be going into that deeply.

But I think this reveals a lot about our economy right now and about really some of the promises that were made and just the corruption at the governmental level, which is outrageous. Yeah. I mean, the business press really lent a lot of these organizations credibility they did not deserve. They did not apply the scrutiny. They did not have the skepticism that they should have had in these instances. And so, you know, what you end up with is people like we were telling you about before who lost everything, who, you know, didn't have a lot to lose and lost it all, who thought this was going to be their ticket to like the middle class, like just basic stability, be able to build a little bit of wealth of their own. And now it

is all stolen from them. So ultimately, it's just a heartbreaking story. All right. Okay, let's get to Balenciaga. You guys, I don't know if you've been following this online, but this is really, really something. So of course, luxury fashion house, storied, renowned fashion house, Balenciaga. Let's go and put this up on the screen. Under fire over what they describe here in the New York Post as creepy ads, I would say disgusting, disturbing ads of kids with bondage outfits. We are not going to put these photos up on the screen, but I will describe them to you. Young children, I'm talking maybe four years old, standing and positioned in somewhat suggestive positions, holding these teddy bears that are wearing BDSM gear. In some of the pictures, there's also other like chain choker looking things in the pictures. And it is incredibly disturbing. And you're just looking at it, you're like, how in the hell did this get greenlit by anyone, let alone actually go forward and become a major ad campaign and get released to the public with no one going,

what the hell are you thinking about here? So there's been huge fallout from this, obviously, because Balenciaga is associated with all sorts of celebrities, including in particular Kim Kardashian. They'd already dropped Kanye, so I guess he doesn't have to say anything about it, but they were still associated with Kim Kardashian. She just put out a statement. She says, I've been quiet for the past few days, not because I haven't been disgusted and outraged by the recent Balenciaga campaigns, but because I wanted an opportunity to speak to their team to understand for myself how this could have happened. Question we all have. As a mother of four, I've been shaken by the disturbing images.

The safety of children must be held with the highest regard, and any attempts to normalize child abuse of any kind should have no place in our society, period. I appreciate Balenciaga's removal of the campaigns and their apology. And speaking with them, I believe they understand the seriousness of the issue and will take the necessary measures for this to never happen again. As for my future with Balenciaga, I'm currently re-evaluating my relationship with the brand, basing it off their willingness to accept accountability for something that should have never happened to begin with and the actions I am expecting to see them take to protect children. So she's taking a little bit of a wait and see attitude here. Ultimately, people after this disturbing, really terrible ad campaign

came to light with these kids and the bondage bears and whatever the hell was going on there. People also found another ad campaign where on a desk were strewn some papers that looked just sort of like casually laid out. And some of the papers, if you look closely, are to involve a landmark legal case, which is with regard to child pornography. So people looked at that too and are like, what the hell is going on at Balenciaga? Now, they've put out they apologized. They put out their own statement. They also, by the way, which I think is I don't know, they're suing one of the companies that put that produced the ad.

I think that in particular had the like child porn legal document situation. They say we'd like to address the controversy surrounding our ad campaigns. We strongly condemn child abuse abuse. It was never our intent to include it in our narrative. The two separate ad campaigns in question reflect a series of grievous errors for which Balenciaga takes responsibility. The first campaign, they say the one with the kids and the BDSM bears. They say it was a wrong choice by Balenciaga combined with our failure in assessing and validating images. The responsibility for this lies with Balenciaga alone. And then with the other one regarding the legal papers, they try to shift blame to the ad company and say, listen, we take full accountability for a lack of oversight and control.

They should have not had those documents in the background, but they didn't really know what was going on. And then they go through, we're conducting investigations, closely revising our organization, collective ways of working, reinforcing the structures around our creative processes and validation steps. And we're laying the groundwork with organizations who specialize in child protection and aims at ending child abuse and exploitation. Yeah. There you go. I don't even really know what to make of this.

I mean, clearly there's a sick person who was involved. And maybe multiple sick people who, I mean, here's something I believe. I don't believe for a second that those papers just ended up on the desk in the photo by accident. I just don't believe it. That's the one that is so weird. They claim that it came from a TV set. No, I'm like, you randomly grabbed this from a TV set. Some child porn legal documents.

Real court case involving child porn. Yeah, something tells me that there's a sick individual involved in this process. But, I mean, it does go to a really gross element on Balenciaga's part, which is, you know, they claim independence from this entire ad campaign. But I'm not so sure because there have been other allegations around like having baby dolls at fashion shows, some other really sick stuff. And, you know, for us, it's very hard for us to parse like what is a, like what is conspiracy and then what is actually true. But, you know, from what I have seen, the photos are correct in terms of their use of dolls that they had people wearing in fashion shows and really on this ad campaign. I mean, they're trying to blame this ad company, suing them for $25 million so far for extensive

damages. But does the campaign really, do the photo shoots just happen in a vacuum? Like, somebody somewhere had to have editorial direction to try and put these teddy bears and put these kids in like crazy sexualized positions. I mean, they don't even deny their acceptance of that campaign. Okay. They say this was a wrong choice by Balenciaga. So that's the thing I keep coming back to. Who comes up with this?

Think of all of the people that were involved in this. And no one was like, guys, this is gross. Maybe let's come up with a different concept that doesn't involve kids hanging out with, you know, teddy bears with BDSM gear and like choker collars on the table. I mean, I want to know what the parents were thinking. I want to know what the photographer was thinking. I want to know what the people who came up with the campaign was thinking. I want to know what Balenciaga was thinking, thinking that this was okay to go forward with. It's disturbing on every single level. It's not the first time the fashion industry has played with like, you know, indulging the fantasies of

pedophiles to appear like glamorous or artsy or whatever the hell they think they're doing here. I remember watching that documentary on Victoria's Secret and Les Wexner. They had a fashion show that the whole theme was like children's bedtime stories. And it was weird, but at least, I mean, they had grownups who were wearing like kids clothes and carrying around like lollipops. I'm just like, what, what were you thinking about with this? So I don't know what to say about this. I just can't understand how every single person who was involved in this, how no one raised their hand and said, you know what, guys, let's kill this. This is not right. This is not good. Yeah. I think what is really crazy too is that there are two separate ad campaigns. And one,

as you said, clearly was directed by Balenciaga. I also have no reason, I think, at this point to not think that they thought it was going to be good because apparently part of their whole ad campaign is about forcing consumers to grapple with the meaning of, quote, taste. So they're constantly trying to push the boundary. Be edgy, provocative, artsy, whatever. So you can see it in a pretentious fashion way, but I think involving children, that's sick and deranged. So look, I just think of the very basics who, I think there needs to be a very thorough investigation by possibly a law enforcement entity. I really think there's a sick person

who is involved with those papers. There is something going on. You don't just happen to place those papers there. That is some, it could be one, it could be some others who are clearly are getting their rocks off, like even thinking about it and trying to put it out in the public sphere, possibly trying to normalize it. And then at the executive level, I mean, look, I don't know exactly what's happening here, but at a basic child exploitation, like, you know, they very much could be, they could be, they could go after them for even putting kids in a situation like that, like they shouldn't, even the models themselves like should not be exposed to the sickness. So I don't have anything to say except for it's sick and I hope that somebody will listen

I think Kim's statement's kind of weak too. Oh, I think it's weak. I mean, she's clearly trying to sound the right notes here. I'm very concerned and this is disturbing. I don't understand how this could have happened. But at the end, she's like, yeah, I'm staying with them basically. And you know- We're evaluating our relationship. What is the point of being a billionaire if you can't say screw you to people who play footsie with pedophilia?

Yeah. What is the point? I mean, to go back to our previous segment about crypto, she was one of the ones who was like actually called out by the SEC for pushing one of these scam crypto schemes that ultimately ends up completely collapsing. Of course, she gets paid in cash, so it doesn't matter to her what happens to all the people who ultimately invested in this pile of dog poo that ends up instantly collapsing. So not a lot of scruples there. No, I really don't get it. She's a mom, so she has multiple small kids. It's like, you should know better than anybody about how sick this is. And, you know, I don't know. I really don't know what to say. Okay. Turning to domestic politics, the Georgia

runoff is actually going on now. Voters are already headed to the polls. Of course, this is Raphael Warnock versus Herschel Walker. Not really the rematch, but neither one of them was able to get past that 50% benchmark in the November vote. So that sent them to this runoff. Final day of which of in-person voting will be next week on Tuesday. So we're exactly one week out from knowing the results, maybe depending on how fast they count the ballots, of who will be the next senator from the state of Georgia. Of course, Democrats don't need this seat to have control of the Senate. But the stakes are still very significant because the next election cycle in 2024, Democrats have a very difficult map to defend, including Joe Manchin is up in West Virginia. That's going to be a tough one. John Tester is up as well. Both of those are going to be very hard

seats to defend. So it matters a lot whether they are able to win the seat and have a little bit of margin for error going into the next election cycle. Okay, so that's the backstory. We do have a little bit of polling. Let's put this up on the screen. This is from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. They have an interesting age breakdown here. Warnock apparently leads voters between the ages of 18 and 49, so under the age of 50, by a 24-point margin. So he's cleaning up there. However, Walker has a nine-point edge among older voters, older than 50, and 90% of those older voters are extremely motivated versus only 75% of the voters younger than 50 who share that intensity. This poll, the top-line numbers here, Sagar, commissioned by the AARP, has Warnock at 51, Walker at 47. That is, though, within the

margin of error of 4.4 percentage points. And it also shows that Warnock has a sizable lead, 54 to 39, over Walker among independent voters. So Walker has done a better job so far, according to this poll, in the runoff of consolidating Republicans completely behind him, which, you know, Georgia's still a pretty conservative state. So in the original voting, he had an issue with, you know, Republican voters who were actually voting for Brian Kemp and then splitting off and voting for Warnock. Here he seems to have consolidated the Republican vote, but he is behind in terms of independence, according to this poll. Yeah.

One of the things that's interesting here is the former president, Trump, has decided—let's put this up on the screen— he's decided he is going to stay away from Georgia. He says he's going to have a limited role in the Georgia runoff. You will recall that the last time we had a pair of Georgia runoffs, Trump did come to the state. I think he did two separate rallies. Didn't end up working out too well for them. Trump, of course, is basically the entire reason that Herschel Walker is the Republican nominee. But he and Walker have both decided that it is best if he stays away at this point. Yeah, lots to say about this, which I think is interesting. Namely with Trump and what they

point to is that exit data actually shows us that one in three Georgia Republicans says, quote, they are not supporters of the Make America Great Again movement, and that those people voted over 90% for Brian Kemp, but split pretty evenly for Herschel Walker. So clearly, MAGA and Trump, the imprimatur of the Stop the Steal and just general craziness, not sitting well with a lot of more traditional type Republicans who had no problem voting for Brian Kemp, no problem voting for Brad Raffensperger. But with Walker, they're like, no, this is just a bridge too far. And, you know, not just beyond the polls, on the actual money side, Crystal, Walker is getting outspent almost 10 to 1. I mean, Warnock has got some like 30 or 40 million dollars that he spent

on the race so far. And I'm almost getting the sense that the Republicans have effectively given up on this race. Like, you don't see major Republicans traveling down to Georgia in the same way. They went ahead and they held the Senate elections, even though some people said, oh, well, maybe we should wait to see if Herschel Walker wins. Like he's clearly, you know, like they have it. They clearly are not believing here in Washington from the NRSC, Rick Scott and others, that this is a winnable race in any way, which honestly, I mean, look, it's still a closenable race in any way, which honestly, I mean, look, it's still a close race. Like it came into a runoff, came within one point, you know, he didn't win more than 50% of the vote. Now you have that third party candidate who's no longer on the ballot and in an actual up and down. So it's not outside the realm of possibility,

but I think the Republicans see the national tides and after the midterms and are so deflated on top of Trump himself not wanting to attach himself to Walker that at this point, like they look at it almost as a lost cause, which is kind of crazy when you consider the Georgia runoff race. I mean, it could also be that they know that if Walker does win, like he has a there's a possibility you're going to have some problems there. And so they already lost the Senate, so they're like, well, why would he want this? Yeah, I mean, listen, I don't think they've totally given up on it. They would obviously rather win this race than lose this race. But to your point about the money spent, let's go to the fourth element here.

We've got Dems outspending Republicans on the air so far by the tune of 37.4 million to 20.2 million. This also, though, just tracks with the way spending went in the midterms overall, where Trump sucks up so much of the money and so much of the pie and is very stingy about it, does not spend on even the candidates like Hershel Walker that are there because of him. Then you add Rick Scott, head of the NRSC, spending wildly early on on races like Colorado and these places they didn't have a prayer at and a lot of questions. I mean, Republicans are calling for the NRSC to be audited because of the wild spending and waste of resources from there. Mitch McConnell has really become the big money player and, you know, apparently can't do it alone here. And I think Democrats also just have a stronger

grassroots fundraising base that they can go back to. And again, I really attribute that and blame Donald Trump for that in terms of the Republicans, because the grassroots base essentially gives to him over and over and over again, and he hits them up constantly rather than, you know, donating, for example, to Herschel Walker here. We covered how Trump was technically raising money for Walker, but if you read the fine print, 90% of the money was actually going into his coffers. There are a bunch of other Republicans who employ the same exact tactic. So anyway, that's how things are looking. We do have some early vote numbers that we can bring you. Gray and Assault, Gray and Assault, who knows what this means ultimately. But it's from our friend Daniel Chaney. And he says, at this early point,

6% of the people who have already voted in the Georgia runoff had not voted in November. So you have a sizable chunk of people who are voting now who actually didn't show up at the polls in November. Who are those people? Well, 69% of them are under the age of 29. A plurality is black, 42%, though he says that might be driven by which counties actually have early voting. So this would be a positive sign for Democrats, again, one you should take with a grain of salt. He also yesterday put out an update on that and more people had voted. Still, you had about 6 percent of the total who were did not vote in November, who were just showing up for this runoff. And it continues to be the fact that these new voters who did not vote in the midterms are

overwhelmingly young. And we gave you the numbers before from the poll of how well Raphael Warnock is doing with younger voters. So it would be a positive indication for him. Yeah, I just I do think it is really crazy that we are a week or so out from this. It doesn't feel like it for a lot of the people in the national press. But I do want to underscore something that we covered right after the midterms. You know, there's a huge difference between a 51-49 Senate and a 50-50. Oh, yeah. Committee power, your ability, you know, you don't need the vice president for tie-breaking votes.

There's all kinds, for a nomination perspective, it actually lowers the power of Joe Manchin. You could lose him on a single vote and still win big ones. 5149 is a very, very different environment for the entire Biden administration in its latter two years than a 50-50 Senate, one that we've really been living with right now. It sounds like it's on a lower level, but it could explode out on especially judicial nominees, right? Yeah, that's a good one. I'm thinking of three major ones, all that were impacted by a 50-50 Senate where somebody was not confirmed, where they almost certainly would have been in a 51-49 environment because of just one defection. Being able to lose Joe Manchin is really important because, yeah, I mean, oftentimes he does not go along with the rest of the caucus. It expands what you're able to do. And as I said before, it could really make the difference in

the next election cycle when Democrats have a very tough map to defend. We do have another piece of Trump-related Republican news that we wanted to bring you. Let's go and put this up on the screen. The MyPillow CEO, Mike Lindell, is apparently running to chair the RNC. He announced on Monday he is running to chair the RNC. He's running against Ronna McDaniel. He says, I am 100% running for chair against Ronna McDaniel. He says, I am 100% running for chair against

Ronna McDaniel. He said that to Steve Bannon. He says, I'm all in. And one of the things that one of the big donors said to me is, Mike, everybody wants you to be head of the RNC. Some of them just don't know it yet. Of course, I'm sure you guys know who this man is, but he was, you know, one of the craziest individuals with regards to Stop the Steal. He was one of the ones that was like sneaking into the Oval Office to plant all kinds of insane ideas and conspiracies in the head of the president, the now former president. Of course, the former president is himself responsible for who he allows into that circle and what conspiracies he decides to believe.

But anyway, Lindell, the running for RNC chair. Yeah, Lindell really is almost like a court jester, like an unbelievable figure. Yeah. Willing to say, I mean, and look, I've actually met Mike Lindell, and he's a shockingly nice guy, which is, honestly, it makes it sad

because he has a deep and slavish devotion to Trump. And it's clear, like, he basically lost his mind on the whole January 6th thing. He, not beyond that, like, he was one of those who was presenting, like, military takeover plans with the overstocked CEO to Trump, constantly calling him. You know, if you ask him about election fraud, like, he's the type to float the whole bamboo ballots in Arizona. There's no high IQ mail-in ballot stuff going on with Mike Lindell. He's like, no, like the Venezuelan dominions hacked the servers. And, you know, he himself is like open to legal scrutiny now based upon a lot of things. He's up there with Sidney Powell

in terms of like the most deranged fools to be made of during this entire process. And he's never backed down from the very beginning. Trump absolutely loves him for it. I wonder what Trump is going to do in this situation because he can't snub Mike Lindell. Lindell has stood there and was one of his most loyal backers throughout this entire process

and all that Trump really values in the first place. So now what? Because he also tacitly has supported Ronna McDaniel, who he forced to drop Ronna Romney McDaniel, because he didn't like that she had Romney in her name.

He literally asked her to start going by Ronna McDaniel. She also has been slavishly devoted to Trump and has basically done whatever he wanted from the beginning. So, I don't know. It's going to be interesting to see how Trump handles this in the first place. Yeah, I mean, if I had to guess, I'd say he just stays out.

I'll be silent. Right? Right. It is, it's sort of telling that Rodney McDaniel, who is, you know, she's really made the RNC in Trump's image. Like, they're very closely intertwined in particular, you know, on a fundraising front and has really carried water for Trump every step of the way, has been a defender of him, you know, very sort of, I mean, she's been very loyal to him as well. But she hasn't gone to the full level of stop the steal crazy that Trump would, you know, loves in the Mike Lindell.

Absolutely. So even just by not going the full way, she's sort of like suspect in the eyes of some. Lindell says he, at least as per yesterday, that he hadn't talked to Trump about it. So, yeah, I guess as Trump would just is just going to stay quiet. But you never know with that dude. You never know what he's going to do. Absolutely right. All right. good news, which is that the New York Times, along with a number of other European news outlets, is calling on the Biden administration to drop their prosecution of Julian Assange, specifically with regards to the espionage charges against him for the act of journalism, of publishing. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. This is a New York Times tweet.

They say the New York Times and four European news outlets called on the U.S. government to drop its charges against Julian Assange for obtaining and publishing classified diplomatic and military secrets. They warned his indictment, quote, sets a dangerous precedent. The open letter, which was signed by The Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and El Paisais said the prosecution of Mr. Assange under the Espionage Act threatens to undermine the First Amendment and the freedom of the press. Here's a direct quote. They say obtaining and disclosing sensitive information when necessary in the public interest is a core part of the daily work of journalists, something we've been saying here for a long time. If that work is criminalized, our public discourse and our democracies are made significantly weaker. Now, Julian Assange, as you guys probably know,

has been fighting extradition from the UK, looks very much now like he is going to be extradited to the US to face charges here that include both these Espionage Act charges and also the original charge. They kept it relatively narrow, alleging that he helped in the hacking of these documents, helped Chelsea Manning in the hacking of these documents, which also they, you know, Assange denies. And also, you know, one thing that Glenn always points out, the level of assistance that was given here is common in terms of what the jobs that journalists also perform. The New York Times does not go so far as to call on the Justice Department under the Biden administration to drop those charges as well. They're focused on the Espionage Act piece. And they close by saying there is no precedent in the United States for prosecuting a publisher of information as opposed to a spy or government official who leaks secrets under the Espionage Act. The Trump

administration's decision to bring such charges against Mr. Assange raised novel and profound questions about the meaning of the First Amendment. Right. The real question is, is Biden going to continue or not? So far, him and Merrick Garland, the DOJ, have continued that extradition. And John Kirby, spokesman for the National Security Council, was asked about it yesterday. Let's take a listen. What is your assessment or what is the National Security Council's assessment of the harm that was done by the WikiLeaks leak in 2012? That would inform any decision by the Justice Department. I think, you know, if you go back and look at how the administration responded in 2012, and of course, President Biden

was then vice president at the time, we would maintain that what we said at the time, what was said at the time, that those leaks, those revelations in the public sphere were damaging to U.S. national security. You can see they're still sticking to the line. No indication yet that they're going to listen. And you always have to square it with the Biden administration made a whole big show about being pro-First Amendment. They're like, we're going to stop doing subpoenas on the press and we're going to stop some of the worst things that the Trump administration did in some of its persecution of the media on a legal level that actually started with the Trump administration did in some of its persecution of the media on a legal level that actually started with the Obama administration. But guess what? Like, if you

continue this, you are effectively criminalizing publishing information. We do this, you know, any of us are in a position where we could be prosecuted under the same law. People, weird, sketchy people contact me all the time. And they're like, hey, we have this information, we vet it. But, you know, what if it's stolen? That's not my fault. They're the ones who stole it. Our job is to get information out there, as much information to the public as possible, regardless of the consequences. The consequences are other people's faults. It's not ours to grapple with. So what Kirby said there is also interesting because, I mean, he says, okay, we assess this was damaging to U.S. national security, which I think is bullshit because if it had been,

we would know about it. We would know the instance. We would know what happened. They would have screamed it from the rooftops. We would all be able to recite in, you know, chapter and verse exactly what the damage to U.S. national security is. But also, that's not really the question here, is it? So when he says, go back and look at what they said in 2012, well, guess what the position of the Obama administration was in 2012? It was, we cannot charge Julian Assange without criminalizing journalism. That was the Obama-Biden position. The Trump Justice Department ends up charging Assange initially with this bullshit hacking charge. Then they expand it to the espionage, which is the most dangerous part of this whole thing, which is why the New York Times and these other European outlets belatedly are making this call.

But I give them credit for doing it because other news outlets have been claiming, oh, democracy dies in darkness. But, you know, they have nothing to say about this. OK. But the real, you know, the real question is, is this espionage act? Is this a legitimate charge? And back in the Obama-Biden administration, they said no. Trump administration charges him with this. So all we are asking, all the New York Times is asking is for other European outlets, all they are asking is to go back to the Obama-Biden position of 2012. Do I have confidence they will do it? No, I do not. But it is heartening at least to see a news outlet standing up

partially to their own rhetoric about press freedom and protecting their own right to publish and do acts of journalism. Well, these papers in particular, because they're all the ones who worked with WikiLeaks back in 2011, so on many of the diplomatic cables, leaks, etc. So, look, we all know it killed the Times and many of these others do this. They hate Julian Assange because of the Hillary Clinton leaks. I don't care how they feel about it. As it has always been the point. That doesn't matter. They take pains, which I think is important,

in the piece that they published, too, to say this has nothing to do with Hillary Clinton and WikiLeaks. This is about the disclosure of the Bush administration of war crimes, effectively. All right. All right, one more piece for you here, guys, which broke yesterday. We have been covering, of course,

the possibility of a mass rail strike. To walk you back through this, because this is a complicated process, it's governed by special railway labor law, which is why this process is a little bit different. You had something like 12 unions that represent railroad workers. They were looking at striking because during the pandemic, even before the pandemic, they have just been getting completely screwed. These rail bosses cut a bunch of the workforce. They shifted all the workload onto these workers. They were getting no time off. They couldn't go to doctor's appointments. Some of them were dying on the job. I mean, just

horrific, horrific circumstance. So they draw a line and say, we have to do something about it. So the first thing that happens is Biden appoints a presidential board to review, you know, what the proposals are and come up with a deal. That initial deal, terrible. Gave nothing to the workers in terms of the legitimate standard of living concerns that they have about, you know, just the inability to take any time off whatsoever, even when they're sick. Okay. So they say no to that. Then we're coming down to the wire with a possibility of either these workers going on strike or the rail companies locking them out. Either one would obviously be crippling to the economy. So Biden administration convenes the rail bosses and the union leaders, and they come to a tentative agreement, which is marginally better for workers, which includes, like, one day off instead of the no days off that they were getting previously. Okay, so the next step in the process is, guess what? The rank-and-file workers, they get a vote on this through their unions. Some of the smaller unions said, okay, we guess this is better than nothing. We take it. And the largest worker union, their members,

majority of them said, no, this isn't sufficient. This is still ignoring the legitimate concerns and needs that we have. So this puts another ticking clock in place, which was set to expire in early December. So what is the Biden administration going to do? They have a couple of options. One is to let it play out. One is to let workers using their leverage, they were going to have, you know, all of the unions are standing in solidarity together, put leverage on the bosses, try to strike a deal. Two is they have the option to go to Congress and force a deal on the workers and on the bosses. Well, we now know that President Biden and Nancy Pelosi is backing him up, is calling for Congress to act and force down a deal on

these workers. So then there's a question, okay, well, what deal? Because you could call for anything. It doesn't have to be the tentative agreement that workers have already rejected, but they're going with the tentative agreement, completely silencing the voice of all of these workers who through democratic means said this is not good enough and siding completely here with the railroad bosses. And it is very disappointing and disturbing to see. Jonah Furman has been tracking all of this very closely. He has been compiling voices of the workers who are getting screwed here, and they are just absolutely apoplectic. Biden's statement he put out, I'm so sorry to have to do this. I'm a pro-labor president, blah, blah, blah.

But ultimately, again, you have another choice, which is even if you say, listen, shutting down the railroad is a disaster for the economy, we just can't let it happen. Okay, well then put a deal to Congress that includes the time off and the sick days that the workers are asking for. It really is not ultimately that hard. And as I said, Pelosi has already put out her own statement saying she's going along with all of this. Yeah, I really do think it bears looking at the basic facts, which is, look, I mean, I think that these guys are very much negotiating in good faith. Like, all they wanted was to get sick time and leave, right? Like, that's it. And their deal that was negotiated at the table with Biden was not done in good faith by the rail companies.

And based upon what I can see, Crystal, it's because the bosses, they feel no need to negotiate because they have the Railway Labor Act on their side. They know that they have a supermajority in Congress, which is willing to back them and force a deal down these guys' throats if they want to. They know that Congress is going to back Capitol at the end of the day. And Marty Walsh, by the way, the Labor Secretary, had already cut the legs out from under the workers by hinting that this was the direction that they were going to go in, which, of course, killed all of their leverage from the jump. You know, I have the statement here from Biden. He says, I'm calling on Congress to pass legislation immediately to adopt the tentative agreement, again, the one the workers explicitly rejected between railroad workers and operators. Let me True, but that doesn't mean you have to push the tentative agreement that was rejected. He goes on to say, President, I am reluctant to override the ratification procedures and views of those who voted against the agreement. But in this case, where the economic impact of a shutdown

would hurt millions, I believe Congress must use its powers to adopt this deal. So I don't really care how you feel about it, Joe Biden. I care about what you are doing. And he tries to act like his hands are completely tied here and there was no other decision he could have possibly made. And it's a lie. And he has said he would be the most pro-labor president in history. I mean, again, Jonah Furman, he's got one real worker who said words cannot express how effing livid I am at this administration. Biden prides himself on how he cared for his family after tragedy. I could never do that because the people in power like him would rather screw workers than stand up to effing robber barons. Another says, many of my coworkers were Democrats that went to Trump and have not

looked back. This just gives them more ammo. The Democrats don't care about us. Some other highlights from texts that Jonah was receiving. One said, he's a dickhead, effing loser, RIP Democrats. And then his commentary, the Dems wonder why they're losing the working class. So there you go. No, I mean, I'll just reiterate something I've read here before. Of the seven major railways based in the United States, combined net income of $27 billion is up from $15 billion a decade earlier. Over the past decade, six of the seven railways that are publicly traded have paid out $146 billion in stock buybacks and dividends, which is over $30 billion more cash than they invested in their

business, including their workforce, of which has shrunk at the same time that they're rewarding their shareholders on Wall Street. I think this is fundamentally insane. I believe in private negotiations between workers and the bosses. And if they don't want to work, the U.S. government should not force you to. That is as dystopian as it gets, especially when you have a court. I mean, can you imagine being forced to go back to work by the government? That's nuts. We really need the Railway Labor Act to be overturned because, I mean, that at bottom is the problem here, is giving them this out.

And then, yeah, if you're the rail bosses, you know. Whether it's a Democratic Congress or a Republican Congress, the Republicans were ready to go with the original presidential board agreement, which was even worse. Whether it's a Democratic or Republican Congress, when push comes to shove, they're going to side with Capitol, even if you are the president who claims to be the most pro-labor in history. Bullshit.

Yeah. Total bullshit. It's not. It's just not right. It really isn't. All right, Sagar, what are you looking at? Well, in retrospect, everyone can see something about to occur. It requires much more skill to see something before it happens.

And as we've all learned, myself included, a good track record in the past is actually really not that great of an indicator on how you will do so in the future. That said, listening and looking back at the Canaries ahead of major events who ran against the conventional wisdom in vitally important to see how they arrived at their conclusions before everyone else. That's why we love stories like the Big Short, because nothing really is better than vindication. In the latest FTX saga, I've been looking for that equivalent character. Surely someone should have seen how dirty this entire business was from the beginning, especially someone in the industry. But actually, it was more rare than it should have been. And we're going to look at one particular figure who did call them out, and who looks exactly why nobody even listened to him.

From what I've been able to tell, one of the only prominent people in finance to call out FTX was a short seller by the name of Mark Cohodes. Cohodes, in particular, has been vindicated by an interview that he granted on October 11th, nearly a month before the FTX collapse. Let's take a listen to what he said. No one can fucking explain FTX to me. No one can explain where SBF came from. No one can explain who mentored SBF. No one can explain, you know, he met his partner at a summer math camp in Canada. Well, if you meet your partner when you're 10 or 12. Is that true? Is that his like band camp?

What the hell? No, that's their story. That Wang and SBF met at math camp in Canada. And I know you're from Thunder Bay. They met at a math camp in Canada when they were younger. It's profane in the most vintage Wall Street sense. It's also obviously correct. Fundamentally, all he did is ask questions.

Who is this guy? Who is the partner? I've never heard of them. Where's the money coming from? How does this work exactly? The most sensational accusation is not just how Mark asked the question. It's about what he did with that information and who he brought it to. Let's continue.

I employed a major news organization who was doing a story on him to do the work and to dig in, and they just wouldn't because I don't know how much money FTX spends in financial PR to get the mainstream media off the path. Oh, now, well, that's interesting. Now, this is very interesting. As Mark notes on October 11th, he employed and brought major concerns about FTX to a big media organization to dig into SBF, but was rebuffed. He was further interviewed by CoffeeZilla on YouTube, and he elaborated further, noting that the news organization was actually the financial news organization Bloomberg, and that he was told explicitly they couldn't dig in.

Let's take a listen to what he said in that interview. I went to Bloomberg with my pal who I was working on this thing with and we laid it out to five crypto, five ladies on the crypto team and they passed and they said it would be too much work. We'd lose access. It's bad for business, right? They'd hang up on us if we asked these questions. Well, at least I had the questions. Wait, Bloomberg denied a story with you because

they thought it would lose them access and it was too much work? Yes, 100%. When? When did this happen? This happened in July. This happened in early July. They had everything. His space speaks for us all. And it brings me back to the true cover-up. It was obvious to a lot of players in the crypto world that this was all BS. But because SBF had conned his way to such fantastic wealth, it was the combination of brand, relationships he built with the mainstream media, and political donations coming from him were unfathomable to a major financial news organization whose job it literally is to investigate him. Consider what Bloomberg news

journalists told Mark, that it was too much work, that they would hang up on them, that it was bad for business. Imagine seriously saying it's bad for business when your entire news organization is literally funded by a multi-billionaire who sells Bloomberg terminals to trade on. So was it bad for the news business or was it bad for the Wall Street business? The other explanations are equally laughable. It's too much work? Seriously? What do you people get paid for? Oh, they might hang up on you? I got news for you. One of the most important skills that you need as a journalist is to do coverage where someone is going to scream at you on the phone.

It has happened many times. It's unpleasant, I can tell you firsthand. But sometimes it's comical, and sometimes the reaction is confirmation you're onto something. More important is Mark's allegation that he brought this story to Bloomberg in July. Bloomberg has not denied this, and it really ties back to a previous monologue I did with how much SPF gave the media everything it wanted. Not only did he donate to their preferred party heavily, he literally employed many of them. The totality of his funding of media is astonishing, including $5 million to ProPublica, $4 million to The Intercept, millions to Vox Media, the new startup Semaphore, and the Law and Justice Journalism Project. This was a good story. He was a young, multi-billionaire. He wants to give all of his money away. It's the same magazine covers he graced that featured Elizabeth Holmes in the same breathless excitement. SPF, as I said previously, he was actually much smarter than Elizabeth Holmes.

He not only gave him a good story, he actually cultivated and paid them in a much more direct way. All while the questions were obviously out there. Who are you? How are you making this money? The failure of journalism here is titanic. And at least with Theranos, it was John Carreyrou at the Wall Street Journal who took down Holmes. With Enron, there were fantastic journalists who were tipped off by short sellers who were raising tough questions for the corporation in the months ahead of the collapse. Enough so they could write and direct a great book and documentary about it pretty soon after it happened. Here, we have a failure of skepticism at the highest level of even basic investigation despite clear and obvious tips. It's a powerful lesson that if you have enough money, you can be a literal con man and get away with it. skepticism at the highest level of even basic investigation despite clear and obvious tips.

It's a powerful lesson that if you have enough money, you can be a literal con man and get away with it. Even today, SPF is still scheduled to speak live at a major conference for the New York Times, which was booked months earlier. Now look, I support journalists interviewing him after the fact and putting him on the record. What I don't support is the obvious notion he was booked before he was exposed to be some sort of so-called crypto fraud. In reality, what people should have taken notice of is that he was a fraud from the very beginning. And that's really my takeaway from this entire thing, Crystal. And if you want to hear my reaction to Sagar's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. What are you taking a look at, Crystal? Well, guys, is America suffering an epidemic of loneliness? That's the question raised by some new data showing that increasingly,

in ways that were accelerated by the pandemic, Americans are choosing to spend more and more of their time alone. So here is that data. It was laid out by economist Bryce Ward in a new Washington Post op-ed. Basically, if you're looking at this chart, up until 2014, the amount of time Americans 15 and older spent with friends was more or less stable. Then a dramatic shift happens that you can see here. The amount of time with friends and companions plummets, while the amount of time spent completely alone skyrockets. Now, it's important to emphasize this trend clearly predates the pandemic. In fact, the amount of time with friends fell further in the five years building up to the pandemic than it actually did during the pandemic. Now, this trend is also

pretty consistent across all demographic groups. Among the old, the young, the rich, the poor, the remote worker, and the in-person worker, increasingly Americans are choosing to spend more and more time alone. And as with so many things, the pandemic just poured gasoline on a trend that was already well underway. A raft of recent reporting provides texture to what all of this alone time looks like for different age cohorts and demographic groups. As reporters and researchers have tried to understand a new epidemic of teen mental health crises. They've taken a close look at how teenagers have shifted from in-person socializing to online socializing. And take a look at these two charts. This is from The Conversation. The one on top you see there, it shows what percent of teens say they meet up with their friends almost every day. This chart

starts in 1970 and goes through 2017. Now, at first, on the left side, the numbers slowly decline across the graph before falling off a cliff somewhere around 2010. The chart on the bottom shows why it matters, because at the same time that teens are seeing their friends less, they are also increasingly describing themselves as lonely. In 2017, almost 40% of high school seniors agreed with the statement, quote, a lot of times I feel lonely. So while teens are undoubtedly socializing in a different way than previous generations, it's also clear that the online social interactions are not filling the need that real-life social interactions once did. Let me show you one more graph that is really disturbing.

This is a chart showing a dramatic spike in emergency room visits for self-harm among kids and among adolescents. Now, this trend starts in 2009 and continues unbroken since then. I don't want to oversimplify. Loneliness is just one of a number of factors that might be contributing to a breakdown in teen mental health. But we know human beings are social creatures. We don't do well when we are completely isolated. We've also talked some here about a crisis facing men and boys. Part of that crisis appears to be a loneliness crisis. New York Times just wrote up some of the data here showing that men are in what they describe as a friend session. Since 1990, the number of men who say they have no friends at all have seen a five-fold increase, up to 15%.

Meanwhile, fewer than half of men say they are actually satisfied with the number of friendships that they do have. Could this be part of the reason for men dropping out of the workforce, suffering from addiction, dying deaths of despair? Are elders also increasingly writing out their golden years solo? More than a third of households headed by someone over the age of 50 has a single occupant. That means almost 26 million Americans 50 or older are living alone. That compares to 15 million back in 2000, a dramatic increase there. Now, the reasons for this, again, it's complex. Changing norms around marriage, childbearing, all of that contributes. But it also matches up with the overall trend of Americans of all walks of life spending more and

more time alone and reporting being lonelier and lonelier. Now listen, some people, they might be wired for solitude, might be perfectly happy living alone, being alone. But as we have spent more and more time alone, more and more of us are reporting those feelings of loneliness. And there is all kinds of research about how loneliness is bad for your health, causes you to age, can lead to mental health issues, can fuel societal ills. Loneliness is one of the core factors in the societal rot that we cover here regularly from things like addiction to despair to violence and to radicalization. So what is to blame for our drift towards loneliness? Now,

the smartphone, surely one part of it. In Ward's Washington Post op-ed that we started with, he points out that 2014 was actually the year smartphone penetration crossed 50%. It was also the year that we started detaching from our friends more and more and more. Now, there is nothing about this particular technology that should cause us to abandon other important parts of our lives in order to worship it. But as per usual, just follow the money. There are fortunes to be made in keeping us glued to the screen. After all, spending time with our friends or the proverbial touching grass, it's not really profitable for anyone. Endlessly scrolling is. It's profitable for the companies selling us crap through targeted

ads, and it's profitable for the companies selling the targeted ads to those companies selling the crap. And for the companies analyzing where we are, what we search for, what we click on, every other little bit of data that they can possibly scoop up to monetize. The end result is we are both the consumer to market to and the product to be sold. The longer they can keep our attention, the more profitable we ultimately are. On a deeper level too, we're better consumers when we are lonely and sad. Tempting to fill our emotional needs with consumer goods is the American way after all. So what is the answer here?

It requires nothing less than a government-regulated shift in the entire tech ecosystem to keep our attention from being plundered and sold off to the highest bidder, a national shift to reprioritize civic life, community, and fulfillment over profits. And while we wait this revolution, well, maybe just try to spend a little extra time

with your family and friends over the holidays. They might need it and you might need it too. It's interesting. I happen to note all of these different pieces. And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at breakingpoints.com. All right, we guys, we addressed the longstanding issue that I know many of you wanted, FIFA. We recorded a segment there yesterday just to explain everything that happened about why our full show was blocked, how they declared war on us and got some of our stuff pulled down, which we addressed. So let's get into it.

Well, we had a little bit of holiday unpleasantness, and it was all because of FIFA, Crystal. So while we were traveling, it turns out that our show, our last show that we had on Tuesday, was fully blocked by FIFA. And it was actually crazy because that show, as you guys might remember, included some video, not even audio, just some video of the Iranian soccer team refusing to play or refusing to sing its national anthem. It was less than 10 seconds. It was clearly within the guidelines of fair use. For people who don't know what that is, it basically means that news organizations are allowed to use copyrighted material as long as we're not just like, watch this. It's the full context of the clip.

As long as it has news value. Value, which of course it did. An overtly political moment. Yes. We played, it's called voiceover, so you can see it visually, but you don't actually hear it, and we're talking over it.

So it's not even the full audio and video. It was a tiny clip, and they blocked our entire full premium show because of this 10 seconds of overtly, politically, clearly justifiable fair use content that honestly we didn't even think twice about putting in the show because it's such a clear instance of fair use doctrine. Right. Of course. Right. And look, we have contested it. We'll see. It takes weeks in order to win. We had to previously win a fight with the UFC over that. So we have a well-established track record. But I think what's really crazy about this is they actually said, this was a notice from YouTube. Let's put this up there on the screen.

It says, hi, Breaking Points. After a manual review, copyright owner has claimed material in your video. As a result, your video has been blocked, can no longer be played on YouTube. This claim does not affect your account status. Wow, well, thank you for that. And for the context, we send our premium shows an unlisted YouTube link where they can watch it. So they claim this is based on a manual review. If it was just the public clip,

I think I would understand that. And also, it's not like we're making any money off of that premium video. We don't serve ads on that video intentionally because we send it out to our premium subscribers. So it was just outright blocked. Now, look, is this because of criticism from Qatar and all that? I'm not going to get that conspiratorial, although I do think it is possible. But I do think it just shows like a deep neuroses on their part to try and block out

any of this. And I mean, we can't, we cannot look past the fact that A, it was done manually. And B, this was about Iranian protesters. That's what it was about. So are they serving every news organization on the planet with a sort of notice? Oh yeah, because we were far from the only ones. You think we're the only people who cover this? Yeah, so could they like take it down on CNN's channel? Probably not. Yeah, let's see. Right. Probably not. Yeah. Let's see. I mean, I would love to see that. Listen, it shows the same thing that it always shows. Number one,

it is very hard to cover politics on YouTube, to cover news on YouTube and be able to do it without fear of having these sorts of issues arise, which is why we built the business model that we built, because we knew this from the beginning. Number two, like you just, you can't trust these people. You can't trust it to be applied fairly. You can't trust them to be applied consistently. You can't trust our channel being treated the same way as the CNN channel or larger, you know, official corporate media channels. And so, yeah, it's a terrible situation ultimately. You know, we figured out, like, we sent out the premium show on Vimeo instead as our workaround so that we could still provide the product that we promised to you all who are paying subscribers. But, you know, we are at their whims, like, every day, all the time. We're always thinking about when we're doing the show, we're having to ask ourselves constantly, like, are they going to fair you are is this going to be copyrighted what about that music all what was it we had a little

music playing in our uh midterm oh okay yeah this is fun so we had to play a video obviously of trump during his announcement and trump happened to have some music playing in the background we got the whole thing got hit by copyright because there was some audio in the background of this video. When we covered, that's right. When we covered Trump. Donald Trump announced it to the presidency. Okay. There's, what can we do about that? The man played some music. Obviously this is like a clear news gathering, like core function, journalistic value, and the whole thing gets hit because he played some music in the background.

So it shows you how hard it is to navigate by their rules, how inconsistently the rules are applied, and how much of a threat it really is ultimately to independent media. And it also shows why we appreciate you all who support us so much because if you have to be at their whims, at the whims,

at the whims of the YouTube gods, they can screw you at any point in time with very little recourse. Absolutely correct. So I know a lot of you guys had questions about that, so it was important to address it. That's the full context. We've contested it. We'll see if it works or not.

I'm not particularly hopeful. Again, the one with the UFC, that was when that, I forget the guy's name, the fighter said something about Ukraine. And again, we covered it, no question. Totally taken off, blocked. And here's the other thing. It's so ridiculous. Okay, let's say, so for that one, we're ultimately successful in the challenge.

But it took weeks, actually. Yeah, all the views are done. At that point, I mean, yeah, it's over. Like, okay, you can technically contest it. You can have it remedied after the fact. But, you know, I mean, that show was long in the past at this point. That's part of what we do here is being very timely with breaking news as it occurs. So if you're talking about weeks later getting a remedy, I mean, they've already screwed you. It's done. It's over.

Absolutely right. Thank you guys so much for watching. We really appreciate it. We appreciate your support shout out to the premiums who literally exist because of the situation with FIFA

we don't have to rely on YouTube ad revenue and all that we think about you guys every day and we appreciate you all so much

also live show don't forget December 6th December 7th we're coming next week tickets are all down in the description link of this video

and what we have full show programming back this week. It's awesome to be back at the desk with our beautiful holiday set. Shout out to our crew. Otherwise, we'll see you all on Thursday. This is an iHeart Podcast.