Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 1/13/26: Yanis Varoufakis On Trump, Venezuela, The Fed & MORE!

Episode Date: January 13, 2026

Krystal and Saagar are joined by Yanis Varoufakis on Trump's master plan for the fed, Venezuela, and more.  Yanis: https://x.com/yanisvaroufakis?s=20    To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.comMerch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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breaking points.com. All right, guys, we are very lucky to be joined this morning by Janus Verifakis. He is an economist. He is a best-selling author. He is a podcast host of the Econa class, and he is the former finance minister of Greece. Great to see you, sir. Good to see you. Thank you for having me. Yeah, of course. So let's start with this. First Element, put this up on the screen. This is the president of the United States claiming to be the president,

the acting president of Venezuela. I'm curious just off the top here, how significant you think the kidnapping of Maduro and now Trump's claims that we run Venezuela and we're going to take their oil, how significant do you think this mode of U.S. operation and foreign policy is to the world and to our own politics?

Well, that is significant. There's no doubt. The question is what kind of sense? significance are we detecting in this very confusing stage that we found ourselves in? Just seeing the picture that you put on your screen, reminded me that this is not the first time he does it. Remember, only a few months ago, he declared himself to be the owner, the person who has actually annexed personally that has never happened in history before, Gaza.

He declared himself to be the head of a company that is taking over Gaza. and then of course, you know, before we had a chance to scratch our heads and see what that means for the people of Gaza whose lives are devastated and, you know, whose genocide is continuing, he abducted Maduro and he declares himself to be the acting ruler or owner of Venezuela. And then on the same day, he talks about Greenland. I wouldn't be surprised if this confusion is strategic. And the whole point is to continue to build up a reputation for accumulating territories, accumulating companies, accumulating stable coins, accumulating different kinds of resources for himself and his clique, in order to make it far more alluring for, you know, alluring for,

powerful people around the world in the United States as well, to do deals with him, hoping to get some crumbs of his overladen table. One of the things that we've seen, you know, backing up your point, we can put the next one up here on the screen, for example, ExxonMobil, one of the largest oil companies here in the United States apparently told the president at a recent meeting on Friday that actually they weren't all that interested in investing in Venezuela, President Trump saying they're playing too cute, saying he may block them from some eventual deal.

You know, I do think that this bolsters your point, but I'm wondering if you see this as any bigger strategic play that may not just have Trump and his own personal interest or those around him, but a bigger kind of driving motivation for the United States. Well, there's no such thing as the United States. We should never talk in terms of national interest. There is no such thing.

There are different cliques. There are different ruling classes, and they have different interests. the interest of some of the majority of the people in the United States never had anything to do with the agenda and the strategy of democratic presidents of republican presidents. I'm just stating this so that you know where I'm coming from. But there is a strategic plan.

And, you know, one of the great mistakes of the Democrats in the United States and of the centrists in Europe is they have dismissed Trump as a buffoon who has absolutely no strategic vision, you know, he's haphazard, he moves from one disaster to another, he's a fool who somehow has managed to defeat them so handsomely. I don't take that view. I consider him to be a political adversary, a political, if you want, even aesthetically speaking, enemy of mine. But I take very seriously his strategic plan. And you know what? He's put it on paper, not so much himself. But, you know, before his inauguration,

second inauguration, I studied very, very carefully the texts that have come out of his team, like, you know, things that Scott Bessent had said and written. You know, the Mar-a-Lago, famous Mar-a-Lago paper, it's clear what the strategy is.

Trump looks at the last 60 years, and what he sees is a period that some people, refer to it as the period of globalization, others refer to it as the neoliberal period, or the globalist period. It's a period that started in 1971 with Richard Nixon, when Richard Nixon and his team, not himself personally, blew up the Bretton Wood system. So why did that happen? It happened because the United States ceased to be a surplus country. It slipped into a deficit position. And, you know, Henry Kissinger, who's part of Nixon's team

then, even before he became foreign minister, before his move to the State Department, when he was still at the National Security Council, he put a very simple question to his team and said, well, now we're a deficit country. How can we maintain

our hegemony? And the answer is, blow up the Bretton Wood system, use the dollar as a weapon, devalue the dollar while enhancing its reserve currency stages, it's hegemonic stages. So, you know,

Trump looks at that. I want to do this again because the Nixon shock is pettering out. After 2008, American hegemony is being seriously contested. I want to give it another 12th. And I'm going to do it in a way that will make me and my mates lots of money as well. So, you know,

the devaluation of the dollars is not a failure. It is a aim. The issue of stable coins and the legitimation of cryptocurrencies, the Genius Act that was passed recently by Congress or in Congress through Congress, is an attempt to privatize fiat money, the dollar. The attack on the Federal Reserve is part of this plan. There is a clash between old money and new money. There is Wall Street on the one hand that is very coy about this whole thing, but then there is the tech brolic arcs.

There's stever that are issuing stable coins at the expense of Wall Street and the Federal Reserve. So there is a strategy. There is a huge conflict within different oligarchic interests. And Trump is playing a very smart game in keeping all these people hating each other and, you know, competing for his graces. So I listened to a lot of your appearances and your parents and your. speeches that you give. And I think it's really important to assume that your adversary is not just an idiot, that there is some sort of a strategy there. But sometimes I do have trouble holding that in my head with Trump. For example, when I think of his tariff policy, which, you know, from the jump,

the percentages that were chosen were seemingly random or AI generated, you know, he'll go into these negotiations and come out of them basically rolling the tariffs back or going back to where we started. We now have an announcement yesterday that now anyone who does any sort of trade with Iran is going to have a 25% tariff. You've also had situations where his own personal emotions and grievances seem to be driving the tariff policy. Brazil being a key example here where initially he was mad at Lula over their prosecution of Bolsonaro. Then, according to journalist Glenn Greenwald, Lula came in and charmed him and said, that Bolsonaro guy, you wouldn't like him, he's weak, he's always in the hospital, he's kind of a loser. Trump decides he likes Lula,

rolls back the tariffs. So when I look at those sorts of things, I'm like, how can this be a grand strategy when it's so all over the place and so driven by his own emotions and personal grievances day to day? Look, I can't resist the temptation to agree with much of what you said. But at the same time, let me continue along the lines of my earlier position. I mentioned Richard Nixon before. Now, we all know what a flawed character he was, what a psychopath he was, really. I mean, he was moody, he was a very poor excuse for human nature. And yet, it was under his administration that the world changed. They blew up the post-war miracle system, the Bretton War system, and they replaced it with chaos.

It was designer chaos. John Connolly, the Treasury Secretary of Richard Nixon, traveled to Europe and effectively did the Trump on them. He said, you know, guys, you're on your own. The dollar is our currency, but from today, it's going to be your huge problem. I don't give a damn. You can go and jump. This is all about maintaining and enhancing American hegemony

while at the same time increasing our deficits. And I'm going to divide the dollar. Now, you mentioned the use of tariffs by Donald Trump. Well, he's not the first one to have used tariffs as a ramming road as a weapon. Ronald Reagan in 1985. Remember the so-called Plaza Accords, the Plaza debates, what did you do? He got the Japanese in one room and said, okay, you have grown your trade. surplus with the United States

immeasurably and I'm going to smack you over the head with a blunt instrument and the blunt instrument is 150% tariffs if you don't agree to revalue to increase the value of the yen effectively to deval the American dollar vis-a-vis the Japanese currency

and you know they are rolled over and the result is that Japan is finished kaput ever since the Plaza Accords so it you know all this I mean, in a sense, you're quite right. He's bringing a new intensity of chaotic behavior, and a lot of it is personal. But, you know, you said that there were AI or randomly chosen tariff rates.

Look, by the way, they were not. There was a very simple deterministic formula. He simply computed his tariffs, the Liberation Day tariff. in proportion to the trade deficit the United States had with particular countries. It was really very, there was nothing reciprocal about them. It was, you know, the greater your trade surplus towards the United States, the greater the tariff I'm going to slap on you.

But he never meant to keep these. These were simply, you know, these blunt instruments that he used to butter people around to hit them about the head and then to say, okay, now come and negotiate me, each one of you did separately. Now, he has gone into a test. of personal self-celebration that we've never seen from any American president in the past. That's quite correct.

I mean, I was astonished the way he has behaved vis-à-vis Prime Minister Modi of India. One would have thought that the United States would be very eager to see India move away from China, move away from the bricks, you know, going to bed with... the Trump administration. He hasn't done that. And instead, he has chosen to make the issue of whether he was

the one that stopped the recent skirmish war between India and Pakistan the determinant of whether he's going to increase the tariffs or not. So he does that. But you know that? I mean, the madman strategy we have to remember was devised by

Rand Corporation in the 1950s as a rational game theoretical way of behaving, because if you convince people that you are mad, then they will think twice before they confront you. Yeah. I am fairly convinced, so it has been effective enough. Yeah, there you are you. No, you're absolutely right.

Actually, you mentioned the Federal Reserve, given your expertise. I'm curious for what your view is here about Trump's current attack on the Federal Reserve. You're saying it's in a privatized manner. There's also some complaint about interest rates domestically here. in the United States. I do also just curious for your take for kind of the global outcry of support that Powell now has, I mean, you know, multiple central bank leaders from around the world this

morning signing a letter saying that they are supportive of Jerome Powell. How do you see that? You know, you were talking about oligarchic interests, the Federal Reserve, obviously a keynote in that. By the way, you know, these central bankers will never learn. By signing that letter in support of Jerome Powell, they're handing a huge, huge gift over to Donald Trump because Donald Trump's base hates all these people. So when they see that they are coalescing together in support of the Fed's chairman, you know, Trump is applauding all this.

You know, it's amazing, you know, those centrists, the liberal establishment, how in name they are. I remember, do you remember during the Brexit referendum in Britain when, you know, Mario Draghi from the Central Bank of Europe and, you know, various finance ministers and bankers and central bankers generally were warning the British people, don't you dare vote for Brexit because Armageddon is going to befall.

And I knew at that moment that Brexit would win because, you know, these kinds of letters of support for the liberal establishment, don't help the liberal establishment at all. No, look, what's happening here is this? There are different discussions you could have. One is, is the interstate policy of the Fed appropriate? I hate to say that. I really love to say that.

But I think that Trump is right. The rate of interest is not going, if it's going to stay at such high levels. It's not going to do anything in order to reduce the cost of living, to reduce inflation. Inflation is not controlled by interest rates anymore. Yeah, we have to understand that now we have what I call in a recent book of mine entitled Technofieldism, sorry for plugging it, but it's important in order to make the point that if you go to groceries around the United States, not just Walmart or Amazon, but, you know, bricks and mortar groceries, many of them, thousands of them, are being

controlled in terms of their pricing by Instacart, which is a, a, a technical. techno-futable company that effectively uses very sophisticated algorithmic systems for ensuring that you cannot compare prices between different stores. You cannot even compare prices, the prices you pay with the prices that others pay. It's intense first-degree price discrimination, which is algorithmic. And we know that Instacart, on its own, along with Amazon.com, have contributed to an increase in the value of groceries by 30%. Now, there's nothing that the Federal Reserve can do that, even if they put up interest rates to 10%,

that kind of technological inflation, inflation created by what I call that individual is not going to go away. So I fear, I hate saying that, that on the question of interest rates, I think that Trump is right. But there's a bigger question, the question about the so-called hypothesis or aspiration for central bank independence.

the idea that the elected government shouldn't run monetary policy. Monetary policy should be handed over to experts who on behalf of the whole of society make dispassionate apolitical decisions. Well, you know, that's rubbish. There's no such things than a political decision. Who sets interest rates is a political decision. And, you know, you have a class conflict.

You have debtors and you have... lenders. When you increase the interstate, you favor one at the expense of the other. So it's a political decision. Now, the gist of however of it is, remember, the Federal Reserve Bank is not, it's not even a state bank. It belongs to Wall Street, formally. And not just formally, but in terms of, you know, when they speak of the independence of the central bank, independence from whom? Independence from Congress. Independence supposedly from the president,

but not independence from J.P. Morgan or the Bank of America. So dependence on the bankers whom they're bailing out when the bankers' bets go ory. So personally, I don't have much time for independence, the independence of the central bank. Once upon a time, there wasn't even this discussion. I'm old enough to remember a time when no central bank was independent. The Bank of England was bound by its relationship with the British government and so on. What we now have, however, is not that Donald Trump agreed with people like me and wants to democratize the Federal Reserve and take it away from the bankers. No.

He is representing big tech. He's representing the stable coin industry. He's representing, you know, Facebook, Zuckerberg, and several upstarts that want to privatize the American dollar and they want to make use of the genius act in order to do this. And, you know, Wall Street is represented through the Fed. So there's a clash between old banking money and new techno-fuel money. And Trump is taking the side of the latter. A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers.

but it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught. The answers were there, hidden in plain sight. So why did it take so long to catch him? I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, hunting the Long Island serial killer, the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York since the son of Sam, available now. Listen for free on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Dr. Priyanko Wali. And I'm Hurricane de Bolo. It's a new year, and on the podcast, Podcasts health stuff for resetting the way we talk about our health. Which means being honest about what we know, what we don't know, and how messy it can all be. I like to sleep in late and sleep early. Is there a chronotype for that or am I just depressed?

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Listen on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Every January, we're encouraged to start over. But what if this year is about slowing down and learning how to understand ourselves more deeply? What if this year is about giving ourselves permission to feel what we've been holding and knowing that it's okay to ask for help? I'm Mike De La Rocha, host of Sacred Lessons. This is a podcast for men navigating stress, emotional health, fatherhood, identity, and the unspoken pressures were taught to carry alone. We talk honestly about mental health, about healing generational wounds, and about learning how to show up with more presence and care.

If you want a healthier relationship with yourself and the people you love, then Sacred Lessons is the podcast for you. Listen to Sacred Lessons with Mike Dolorotcha on America's number one podcast network, IHeart. Follow Sacred Lessons with Mike Delocha and start listening on the free IHeart Radio app today. I want to talk to you some about the ideas in your book. But first, if you could tell our audience a little bit about you were one of the most deep faked men on the internet, which is, I mean, it sounds sort of impressive, but I don't think it's really a positive thing. There are so many videos that really, I mean, really look like you, really sound like you, really appear to be things that, you know, content that you would say or along the lines of things that you would say.

Can you talk about how you discovered this and how difficult it is? to parse through whether this is real Janus Verifakis or AI Janus Verifakis and also how the tech companies involved responded when you reached out to them and flagged for them that this was happening in a widespread manner? It's such a dubious honor to be one, probably the most deep faked person on the Internet. You know, I have no idea why this has happened. Absolutely none. Usually have theories about everything. But on this, I'm stumped. I have to confess that. The way I discovered this, I received a very flattering text message on WhatsApp

from an American scholar whose name I'm going to mention of high regard and somebody I really admire. And he was congratulating me on a video I had done on some economic matter. I can't remember exactly what it was. And he had included the link to the YouTube video and I clicked on it. to admire myself, to say, okay, well, this guy, whom I highly appreciate, like that video, man, let me remind myself of which this video was. And I started looking at it. And it took almost two minutes before I realized it wasn't me.

And what's even worse is why I realized it wasn't me. Because I was wearing a blue shirt with this background here, but that blue shirt had never left my island home in Egina. And I thought, how come I'm wearing it? that blue shirt against this backer. That's when I started thinking, hang on a second. I don't remember saying these things. But the even easier aspect of it was that there were things I could have said.

But then, you know, interjected within that flow of arguments that I could have made, which I hadn't made, there were statements that I would never have made. And that's where the dangerous start. Bart comes, especially for people who are politically exposed as I am. I have lots of enemies that would love to, you know, pretend, present me as somebody that said something, let's say, anti-Semitic in order to take the wind out of my criticism of Israel. Similarly with Russia, you know, I have made enemies everywhere because I am, I believe that Putin is a war criminal. At the same time, I think NATO are war criminals too in the way they've been expanding and giving Putin the opportunity to do. do that which he's doing. But, you know, if you're standing against both NATO and Putin,

it's very easy for somebody to use deep fake in order to insert the sentence in what you're saying that completely destroys your credibility. So I wrote to Google because it was, the videos I I saw were mostly on YouTube, they were on Instagram and on TikTok. So I wrote to Google and I didn't get an answer for days and then they asked me to fill forms in and I filled them in and then and they asked me to fill some more forms in, and I did that as well. And then it took, you know, seven, eight days before they brought down that particular channel.

And then it reappeared 20 seconds later, again in YouTube, under a different name of a different channel. And it's very clear that, you know, this is not incompetence on the part of Big Tech. It's their business model. I mean, you know, my fake versions have a lot more views than I have.

So they make a lot of money out of that. And Google is simply not interested. And, you know, I talk to other people who are similarly deep fake like John Meishheimer from Chicago University and my great friend Jeff Sachs from Columbia University. And we are in the same boat, you know. Do I spend the rest of my life litigating against big tech? I mean, I don't have the resources. I certainly don't have the time, you know, I'm getting on in life.

I'm not going to waste five years of my life doing that. Would I win? Would I remain solvent? before the court case finished. So it's one of the situations where you realize that supposedly here in the liberal West, we have rights, we have no rights. We do not even own our own audiovisual image. That is terrifying.

Absolutely terrifying. I mean, the context of your book, which you mentioned earlier, techno-feudalism and your own experience, kind of bringing the thread of these together, How do you view the future that we're heading into where we see the rise of AI? We've recently had Jensen Wong, the CEO of Nvidia, on a podcast talking about this. We wanted to get your reaction. Guys, let's go ahead and play the clip. This is a technology that has the potential to automate many aspects of human labor very soon.

And I'm curious the degree to which you feel a responsibility for making that transition go well. What AI will do is to make tasks that we do in our job more efficient. Our job is not to wrangle a spreadsheet. Our job is not to type into a keyboard. Our job is generally more meaningful than that. I'm fairly confident that AI will drive productivity, revenue growth, and therefore more hiring. There's a belief that the world's GDP is somehow limited at $100 trillion. dollars. Well, what's likely to happen is AI is going to cause that $100 trillion to become $200 trillion, $300

trillion, $500 trillion. There's no fundamental limit to the size of a GDP. And so, and the number of people in the world that is participating in this GDP and the $100 trillion GDP is actually quite small. And so what if we brought the rest of the world, the rest of society, the rest of the world's population, empower them with AI, give them the opportunity to participate in the GDP, and causes GDP to quintuple. So you're seeing the pitch that is made there, your reaction, sir? Well, I'm aghast at how such a very smart, clearly competent businessman has such a low level of understanding of what capitalism or what I call technofidelism is like. Now, of course, look, AI technology is brilliant.

I mean, think about it. You know, you ask Chad GBT to take some rubbish you've written and put it in Shakespearean language and does it fantastically, you know, having translations. I love technology. The question is not, is it useful? Of course it's useful. The question is who owns it?

And who is excluded from using it? And those who own it, what do they do with it? because you see there is a profound difference between, you know, a tool that helps me, as he said, do things more efficiently, take the chore out of my work and leave me with my creative, the creative aspects of my work which give me purpose in life. That's great. But when you have machines that are owned by 0.001% of the population,

that have the capacity to engage with you personally on a dialogue and pretend to be your servants like Alexa, Amazon's Alexa or Apple's Siri or the Google Assistant or whatever, one of these assistants, or the Instacart assistant for that matter. And they give you the feeling that you can say, you know, switch off the lights, buy me some milk, order me an electric bicycle for my daughter or my son. And they do it. And it's great. Great. Who doesn't like that? But what is really happening is you're interfacing with what I call the cloud capital object basis of this 0.0001%.

And essentially, that machine trains you to train it, to train you better so that you train it even better, to know you so well that it wins your trust. And once it was it has won your trust, then it can direct your choice. then you know you say my coffee maker has broken what should I buy and says this and you click on it and then the coffee maker comes to you outside any market you don't go to a shop to get it it comes and jeff bazers whose Alexa has helped you let's say in the rise of the commerce get that coffee maker gets 40%. 40% that 40% is a rent that is taken away from the laborers that have actually worked to produce the coffee maker but even from the surplus value of the capitalist that owns the coffee-making company.

So, you know, when we have AI that is empowering further and enhancing the control that this 0.001% have over our minds, overall behavior, you see, these are machines that don't produce anything. They are not productive machines. They're not like industrial robots building cars. These are machines that determine what we think. And, you know, in other words, these are machines that the owners can use in order to extract rents, which are a loss of GDP, to go back to what you were saying. It is a break on growth. It is a break on societal enhancement.

But these tech guys either don't know any of this because all they want is more of whatever it is that they're after, which is money, shares, whatever. And they have no idea how their tech. technology is being utilized. In a sense, you know, this is not new because you go back to three centuries ago, you know, James Watt, the inventor of the steam engine, was neither responsible nor understood the effect that it would have on transforming society from feudalism for capitalism. And this is core to your argument that we have actually exited the capitalist system and

moved into a new system, which you call techno-feudalism, which is why people need to read the book to fully understand the arguments that you're making here. I wanted to put F-4 up on the screen which is President Trump, the acting president of Venezuela, President Trump here, making a similar case in his way, as we heard that NVIDIA CEO making. You have this as New York Times reporters saying people are concerned AI is going to take their jobs and they will not, they will be out of work. Trump says, I think just the opposite. I think AI is going to be a tremendous job producer. I think we have so many jobs. My biggest problem isn't taking the jobs. It's that we don't have enough people to fill the jobs. And that's where robots come in.

Now, you do hear other tech CEOs who will say outright that their goal in AI development is to make all human labor irrelevant. So some of them are saying that outright. And I get the sense that their goal is to win some sort of final battle against workers who they find to be pesky and annoying and difficult and diminishing their, you know, profit margins and power in all sorts of ways. What these people are lacking is the theory of change, of terms. transition because, you know, ideally, ideally, I would agree. You know, I'm a tricky, right? I mean, I have misspent my youth and my older age, watching a lot of Star Trek. I love Star Trek because it is the best example of libertarian communism.

Think about it. Nobody works because you have replicators doing all the work. So, you know, you order food, clothes, even spaceships of replicators. And machines convert energy in mass into. whatever it is that you order. So there's no point in having an economy. Everything is produced for you. And, you know, what they do is they spend time in a spaceship exploring the universe, having

philosophical conversations. That's why I'm a trekkie. I love that. The question is, okay, now let's say that we buy the hypothesis that at some point, we will have the technology to replace all labor, all work, all, you know, all chores, let's say it, because, you know, nobody wants to replace

the labor of love that is writing poetry or composing music. But, you know, all the chores that people would rather not do, but somebody needs to do them. Let's say that robots do all that. Okay? Yes, then we can have libertarian communities, Star Trek. The question is, how do we get there?

Because, you know, you saw Elon Musk's, what's, I forgot what he called his Android. We've seen the Android that are coming from different companies, from China and so on. You know, these things are going to cost money to buy. And you and not everybody will be able to buy one of these machines. Some small businesses will not have them. Bigger businesses will have them.

But even large businesses may find that it is cheaper to have precariously employed labor, human labor, than machines. So then you're going to have bifurcation, yet another division of the economy, between those who use the machines to produce a lot of stuff with huge profit rates and all the rest who are either making huge profits by continuing to exploit precariously employed human labor

and others who are struggling and just can't make ends meet. If in the meantime, the 0.001% continue to have the ownership of the machines that completely and totally poison our minds and control our minds, that is not Star Trek.

It is not libertarian liberal communism. It is a version of the matrix where the vast majority of the population have succumbed to the powers of the machines. We feed them with our own power. Remember the movie? And that's a dystopia. And I'm very much afraid that Mr. Trump

and his many men and women are working towards it that particular dystopia. Janice Farrakas, thank you so much for your time and your insights this morning. Thank you, sir. Well, thank you.

Hi, everyone. We talk too much. So gambling, we're going to kick that to Thursday just to make sure we can try and get the show out on time. And we will see you all then. We're counterpoints for his show, counterpoints for all of you tomorrow. A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers,

but it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught. The answers were there, hidden in plain sight. So why did it take so long to catch him? I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, hunting the Long Island serial killer, the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York, since the son of Sam, available now. Listen for free on the IHeart Radio Apple. Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Dr. Priyankawali. And I'm Hurricane Dabolu. It's a new year. And on the podcast's Health Stuff, we're resetting the way we talk about our health. Which means being honest about what we know, what we don't know, and how messy it can all be. I like to sleep in late and sleep early.

Is there a chronotype for that or am I just depressed? Health stuff is about learning, laughing, and feeling a little less alone. Listen on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Dr. Jesse Mills, host of the Mailroom podcast. Each January, men promise to get stronger, work harder, and fix what's broken? But what if the real work isn't physical at all? I sat down with psychologist Dr. Steve Poulter to unpack shame, anxiety, and the emotional pain men were never taught how to name.

Part of the way through the Valley of Despair is realizing this has happened, and you have to make a choice whether you're going to stay in it or move forward. Our two-part conversation is available now. Listen to the mailroom on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.