Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 11/4/25: Consumers Slash Grocery Spending, Elon Warns Rogan On AI, Trump Denies Binance Pardon Corruption

Episode Date: November 4, 2025

Krystal and Saagar discuss consumers cut staple grocery spending, Elon tell Rogan AI will take all jobs, Trump denies knowing Binance CEO he pardoned.   Logan Phillips: https://www.racetothewh.com/  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.

This is an I-Heart podcast. The murder of an 18-year-old girl in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved for years, until a local housewife, a journalist, and a handful of girls, came forward with a story. America, y'all better work the hell up. Bad things happens to good people in small towns. Listen to Graves County on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season ad-free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Michael Lewis here.

My best-selling book, The Big Short, tells the story of the build-up and burst of the U.S. housing market back in 2008. A decade ago, the Big Short was made into an Academy Award, winning movie. And now I'm bringing it to you for the first time as an audiobook narrated by yours truly. The big short story, what it means to bet against the market, and who really pays for an unchecked financial system, is as relevant today as it's ever been. Get the big short now at Pushkin.fm. slash audiobook, or wherever audiobooks are sold. I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and on the new season of heavyweight. And so I pointed the gun at him and said this isn't a joke.

A man who robbed a bank when he was 14 years old. And a centenarian rediscovers a love lost 80 years ago. How can a 101-year-old woman fall in love again? Listen to heavyweight on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, Saga and Crystal here. Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election, and we are so excited about what that means for the future of this show. This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else.

So if that is something that's important to you, please go to breakingpoints.com, become a member today, and you'll get access to our full shows, unedited, ad-free, and all put together for you every morning in your inbox. We need your help to build the future of independent news media, and we hope to see you at breakingpoints.com. Turning now to the economy, a lot of relevant news, just going to put this up here on the screen. The CEO of Kraft Heinz has now said they have the worst consumer sentiment in decades, pointing out the drop in the number of consumers who are buying staples. They lowered their sales outlook and that the feeling of U.S. shoppers has fallen, quote, to a historic low. The company now expects full organic net sales to be down 3 to 3.5% with slower growth also in

emerging markets and pressure in the U.S. retail. They said that higher prices from inflation and expected headwinds from contailed food stamp funding were creating a tough environment for U.S. shoppers that the drop in their overall sales has led to some 17 percent drop in their overall stock price compared with the 17 percent rise in the S&P 500. Higher prices from inflation, food stamps, funding are all creating, quote, tough environment, they say, for shoppers. And I think that that, I mean, that's really grim. We talked previously about the McDonald's CEO. Now, I'm not saying Heinz products and McDonald's and any of that is healthy.

But it's indicative of consumer sentiment of behavior, and what he was showing is, like, people were skipping breakfast. And I think a lot of comments were, oh, well, if they're skipping McDonald's breakfast and eating breakfast at home, then maybe that's a good thing. But there's not actually a ton of data that even necessarily shows that because of the, you know, grocery price increase. And so the fact that staples themselves have become not only more expensive, but people are deciding not to buy them, I think is one of those, like, edge indicators in the grocery store to say, oh, man, like, things are really buying. Yeah. People are cutting back on, like, ketchup and mustard. I mean, by the way, how much ketchup are people eating? How many times do people buy ketchup?

How about it every six months? So I don't even like ketchup. Oh, really? You're going to see how much ketchup your household can go through. If you never give them ketchup, then they'll never know. because of what my son would, like, dip his apple slices in it and everything. I was like, oh, oh, that killed any sort of appetite I ever had for ketchup. So our family has long cut back on ketchup because I refuse to use this.

It's disgusting. Anyway, let's go ahead and put C2 up on the screen because it's not just Kraft Heinz. You also have Chipotle. I actually didn't even realize this. They have this very young customer base. They've really catered to them. They've been, like, you know, like there's like a whole Jimbrough type. in here's a good way to get lots of protein for relatively inexpensive price, easy, you know,

relatively affordable, tastes good. I personally, I like Chipoli. I know you're a big Chipoli fan, Saugher. I used to be, not anymore. At the current price, I'm no longer a consumer. It's too much. So anyway, they say millennials and Gen Ziers have helped power Chipotle sales despite rising menu prices and slowdowns at rival chains. In recent months, though, a harsher economic reality is set in rising student loan payments stagnant wage growth and rising health insurance costs have bumped burritos down younger consumers' priority list. They're just eating with us less frequently. And they're eating at home more often.

The Chipotle CEO, Scott Boatwright, said in an interview. And their stock is getting trashed right now. And guess what? They're not the only ones. I mean, you have the top line of the stock market, you know, just keeps going up, up, up. That's all because of these tech stocks. Invidia leading the charge. But other tech stocks that are AI-enabled, these sort of like consumer staple type of companies,

they are actually really suffering and underperforming because you see this consumer pullback. And we can put C3 up on the screen, which is going to have a major impact as well. So we covered yesterday, you know, the Trump administration was saying we're not going to pay any SNAP benefits. A judge came in and said, you actually have to. You have to tap these emergency funds. So now they're saying they're going to pay half of the SNAP benefits for November. However, there continues to be, I mean, those funds haven't hit for people yet. here we are November 4th, and there's no real telling when they will hit. So an Agriculture

Department official who oversees the SNAP program said in a court filing that, quote, there are procedural difficulties that states will likely experience, which would affect November SNAP benefits reaching households in a timely manner and in the correctly reduced amounts for some states required system changes that have to be implemented could take weeks or several months and could lead to payment errors and significant delays. So for the 43 million people who are on SNAP benefits, I mean, this is just an absolute, you know, it's an absolute catastrophe. And of course, it's going to have a ripple effect throughout the economy.

And, you know, some of the places that are going to be hit the hardest are actually stores in rural America where you have more impoverished populations and a lot of the revenue from the store comes from EBT, comes from the SNAP program. So, you know, even though you've got this ruling in the Trump administration now saying, okay, we'll give you half, which is already, you know, a 50% reduction is a massive, massive hit. No telling when they'll even get access to those funds either. Yeah, I mean, one of the things, well, this is where it comes down to cost, let's say with Chipotle and generally. Like, I remember when it was $6 a bowl. This actually was not that long ago.

And I used to you at Chipotle five days a week, literally, back in my early 20s. There was one right next to where I used to live. I was on a name basis. Now, though, like they had this recent advertisement. I'm not sure if you've seen. It's Karnay Asada and Red Chimmy Chiri. I was like, all right, got to try it. Okay?

It's like Catniff. So if you look at the overall price when I was done, keep in mind, we live in a high cost of living area. It was $22 with tax. I mean, look, again, maybe. The Red Chimmy Chirry, though, is good. Listen, it's good. I loved it.

I'm not going to say I didn't like it. Was it $22 good? I don't know. Again, maybe boomer brain, but that's one of those where. you know, I don't drink alcohol, that's kind of what I expect to pay if I go to like a mid-tier restaurant, right? Like, I want to be sitting and getting some service, not some, literally something in a paper bag that's wrapped in foil. They're eating on your couch when you're watching TV. That's just in my head, that should cost around eight to ten bucks. So $22, not happening anymore.

And you just have to think about how, again, for young people, especially if you eat out a lot, of course, it's about convenience. And one of it is it used to be so that it was a lot. little bit more expensive to eat out, but not all that much more. Maybe you could justify the value in your time. Like I said, at 13 to 18 bucks for a bowl, depending on like what you're getting in there, how is that possibly even worth it anymore? I mean, you have to cook at home. But there's no choice. But then you're like, okay, so I'm going to eat at home. It's like, oh, oh, no. Yeah, exactly. You're paying for Carnace out of there, or you can pay for it at Costco. You're paying a shit ton for it, basically no matter what. That is the part where when you see

how it pervades, you know, even influencer culture, I think I've talked about this, about those YouTube channels where it's like cook like your grandma from the Great Depression, those channels saw a huge explosion over the last couple of years. That's part of why. It's so exorbitantly expensive. Stuff that was once not even, I mean, would you call Chipotle luxury? Like, I wouldn't. It was six bucks. I even remember in New York, you would pay $7 or something like. It just was not that expensive. It was a, you know, even in Midtown. It was like $750. I'm pretty sure if I recall now. I mean, what, $15 probably for what it? That's just, that's a lot of money. And you have that for everything because it's not just a defense of Chipotle. It's all fast food. And consider what the

minimum wage is, right? It's still 725 an hour or something like that? Yeah. And I mean, even in states that have increased it, maybe they've upped it maybe to $15. So you're working an hour to get one Chipotle bowl. I don't even know if it buy, it wouldn't buy a drink. It definitely wouldn't. to where I live, it would be about $15. I think. And this is really the story of our economy. Put C4 up on the screen. This is the story and the reality of our economy today. So now the top 10% of income earners account for 50%. So half of all spending is being done by the top 10% of earners.

And so you have this incredibly lopsided economy. And then, of course, what happens is all the incentive, like if you are a business wanting to make money is to cater to the people who have the money, who have money to spend. And so increasingly, you know, the economy becomes more and more tilted and lopsided towards catering to the affluent. There's a bunch of, let's go ahead and put, Kobay-C letter did a long thread with a bunch of other indicators about the reality of the economy today. Let's go ahead and start these. They write, the elephant in the room, AI stocks are outperforming consumer stocks by 20% plus over the last 60 days. And as AI investment exceeds a trillion dollars per year, car repossessions are at 2009 levels.

There are two U.S. economies, rich versus poor, and AI is the lifeline of it all. And really think about that because overwhelmingly the people who hold stocks are the wealthy. And so they're benefiting from this massive, you know, continue growth in the stock market. But if you're just a regular wage earner trying to make it, you are getting sort of. screwed. Let's put the next element up on the screen. So here are the sort of consumer-focused brands whose stock prices are suffering. They say on the other side of the table is a more bleak picture as opposed to the AI stocks. Consumer-facing stocks are getting crushed. Latest earnings season only underscored that. Take a look at the year-to-date performance of these consumer stocks. General

Mills and Kraft Hines, which we mentioned before, are in a bare market. Put the next one up on the screen. The economy is particularly bad for Americans who are seeking entry-level jobs. the U.S. unemployment rate for youth graduates, age 20 to 24, so people are, you know, just coming into the job market, has averaged 8.1% over the last three months. That's the highest in four years. This is up sharply from under 4% just two years ago when the AI boom began. So it certainly looks like AI adoption is starting to take a hit on the job market, especially with new college grads in particular or new associate degree holders. And let's put this last one up on the screen as well. this is a look at auto repossessions. We are now at, have seen a huge increase in just the past year and vehicle seizures are at the highest level that we have seen since 2009. So you have a huge spike in 2009, Great Recession. Then it declines. Then it climbs back up and reaches a peak during the COVID era, which makes sense again when people are losing their jobs and out of work and struggling through COVID. Then it declines. And now we are back on the march up. On the one hand, you have these, you know, record earnings for invidia and all of this, you know, excitement about AI and these tech stocks that are just going up and up and up.

And then the rest of the economy tells a very different story about what the reality is for people. And that's why I mentioned in our A block, our election coverage, you know, in Trump's first term at this point, people were happy with where the economy was. You know, some 60 plus percent said the economy is good versus those saying it was poor. Now it's flipped and it's 70 plus percent who say that the economy is actually poor and only maybe 25 percent that say it is doing well. So you, you know, for people's own experience in their life, they are really feeling the pinch and feeling the pain in spite of what the, you know, top line on the stock market is doing. All I know is what I've been told and that's a half truth is a whole lie. For almost a decade, the murder of an 18-year-old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved, until a local homemaker, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story.

I'm telling you, we know Quincy Kilder, we know. A story that law enforcement used to convict six people and that got the citizen investigator on national TV. Through sheer persistence and nerve, This Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran. My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, producer, and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find. I did not know her and I did not kill her,

or rape or burn or any of that other stuff that y'all said. They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her. They made me say that I poured gas on her. From Lava for Good, This is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame. America, y'all better work the hell up. Bad things happens to good people in small towns. Listen to Graves County in the Bone Valley feed on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season ad free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus.

on Apple Podcasts. Michael Lewis here. My book The Big Short tells the story of the build-up and burst of the U.S. housing market back in 2008. It follows a few unlikely, but lucky people

who saw the real estate market for the black hole it would become and eventually made billions of dollars from that perception. It was like feeding the monster, said Isman. We fed the market. monster until it blew up.

The monster was exploding. Yet on the streets of Manhattan, there was no sign anything important had just happened. Now, 15 years after the Big Short's original release, and a decade after it became an Academy award-winning movie, I've recorded an audiobook edition for the very first time. The Big Short Story, what it means when people start betting against the market, and who really pays for an unchecked financial system, is as relevant today as it's ever been. offering invaluable insight into the current economy and also today's politics. Get the big short now at Pushkin.fm. slash audiobooks, or wherever audiobooks are sold.

In early 1988, federal agents raced to track down the gang they suspect of importing millions of dollars worth of heroin into New York from Asia. We had 30 agents ready to go with shotguns and rifles and you name it. But what they find is not what they expected. Basically, your stay-at-home moms were picking up these large amounts of heroin. They go, is this your daughter? I said yes. They go, oh, you may not see her for like 25 years. Caught between a federal investigation and the violent gang who recruited them, the women must decide who they're willing to protect

and who they dare to betray. Once I saw the gun, I try to take his hand and I saw the flash of light. Listen to the Chinatown Sting on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you get your podcasts. Why don't we transition to AI then? So just to show everybody what's happening with that?

Yeah, of course. So Elon Musk went back on with Joe Rogan I made some comments about how nobody's going to work anymore in the future. Let's go ahead and take a listen to that. Cars are going to be autonomous. But there's just so many desk jobs where really what people are doing is they're processing email or they're answering the phone. And just anything that isn't moving atoms, like anything that is not doing physical work, that will obviously be the first thing.

Those jobs will be and are being eliminated by AI at a very rapid pace. And ultimately, working will be optional because you'll have robots plus AI and will have, in a benign scenario, universal high income, not just universal basic income, universal high income, meaning anyone can have any products or services that they want. but there will be a lot of trauma and disruption along the way so you anticipate a basic income from that that the economy will boost to such an extent that a high income would be available to almost everybody so we'd essentially eliminate poverty um in the benign scenario yes so like there's multiple scenarios there are multiple scenarios there's a lot of ways this movie can end um Like, the reason I'm so concerned about AI safety is that, like, one of the possibilities is the Terminator scenario.

It's not, it's not 0%. So, that's why it's like, I'm, like, really banging the drum on AI needs to be maximally truth-seeking. Like, don't make, don't force AI to believe a lie, like that, for example, the founding fathers were actually a group of diverse woman or that misgendering is worth a nuclear war. Because if that's the case and then you get the robots and the AI becomes omnipotent, it can enforce that outcome. And then, unless you're a diverse woman, you're out of the picture. So we're toast. So the benign scenario is that all the jobs are gone. Yes.

Then what did he call it the, what scenario do you call it? Basically where everyone's dead is the other scenario, which he says there's not. a 0% chance. Okay, well, what percent are we talking here? Not that he knows, right? But if you talk to anyone who has been deeply involved in this technology, none of them will tell you that the like absolutely apocalyptic scenario is 0%. So we're just rolling the dice. I mean, even if it's a one percent, one in a hundred chance of complete human extinction, I don't, for me, that's too high of a risk. I don't want to take that chance, right? That seems insane. And yet, you know, The Terminator scenario.

Right. And there's a bunch of, I mean, there's a bunch of assumptions here, too. He's like, oh, well, you know, there won't be jobs anymore. But we're going to have a really high basic income. What indication do you have that there's any, like, likelihood of that politically occurring? Because right now you have just like a bunch of oligarchs who are consolidating all of the money in power. You know, and they are going to find us to be if they've made it so that labor is useless. They're going to find us useless.

They're going to want to keep us around for what? For what reason? So even that is like very optimistic and very hopeful. And that's, but that's the benign scenario that they're contemplating here. And then Sager, Elon is interesting in all of this as I would say a bit of a cautionary tale because he's right that he came into AI development very concerned about safety. That's why with Sam Altman, he sets up open AI, the ideas we're going to keep this as a nonprofit. We're not going to make it profit driven. It's going to be open, right?

That's the open and open AI so people can see the development and open source models and whatever. And then when he realizes that, you know, other companies and Sam is taking this in this other direction and other companies are joining the AI race as well. And it's basically off to it. It's just an arms race both between the companies and between the U.S. and China. He's like, okay, well, I guess I'm just joining the arms race here. And I think it's utterly delusional to think that you're going to keep AI, quote unquote, safe because it doesn't think the founding farmers are diverse women. I mean, that's his view that he's articulated multiple times as he believes that if it's like an anti-woke AI, then somehow that's going to like save us all and mitigate us from those consequential catastrophes. And I think that is so incredibly delusional as to defy like any kind of logic. I think that both are actually very dangerous, both woke AI and so-called anti-woke AI because the whole point around it is actually about society and having feedback into both and that neither should be controlled at a central.

I mean, I think it's sort of irrelevant, whether it's, like, that just completely misses the question of what the problems are. I don't know if it's irrelevant because, I mean, part of the thing is with oligarchal capture, as you can all see with the Trump people, is that they're incredibly fickle and they believe nothing. So they could also, you know, it wasn't that long ago that pronouns were in bio. Right. But think about like when, when Elon intervened and tried to make Grock less woke, it ended up within a matter of days calling itself Mecha Hitler. No, that's what I'm talking about. That's the thing is that we have this, I think, illusion that they understand what this technology is. They don't. They don't. This is not something

they programmed. It's something they grew. It's an alien intelligence that they grew. That's the best way to think of it. And so they try to do all these tests to figure out, like, is it deceiving us? Is it doing nefarious things? Is it going to like, you know, is it going to break out of the lab and copy itself? And is it going to conform when we tell it to change how it operates? Is it going actually conform. And they don't actually know. They do these tests and these experiments. And in many instances, they find that it will lie to them. It will deceive them. It will try to blackmail them. It will copy itself onto another server to try to serve its original objectives. And they'll do some clues to try to fix that one, to plug that one hole. They have no idea whether they've fixed the

problem. They have no idea what's going on under the surface. No clue. And that's where we are today with the limited, you know, level of AI development that we have today. That's to say nothing of where they want these things ultimately to go. Well, let's pick up on that. Ross Dowell that just did a great interview with an AI safety advocate. D4, guys, let's go ahead and play it. Artificial intelligence is able to start navigating the real world, right? So because advances in robotics, like right now,

I just watched a video showing cutting-edge robots struggling to open a robot. refrigerator door and stock a refrigerator, right? So would you expect that those advances would be supercharged as well? So it isn't just, you know, podcasters and AGI researchers who are replaced, but plumbers and electricians are replaced by robots? Yes, exactly. And that's going to be a huge shock. I think that most people are not really expecting something like that. They're expecting that we sort of have AI progress that looks kind of like it does today, where companies run by humans are gradually like tinkering with new robot designs and gradually like figuring out how to make the AI good at X or Y. Whereas in fact, it will be more like you already have

this army of super intelligences that are better than humans at every intellectual task and also that are better at learning new tasks fast and better at figuring out how to design stuff. And then that army of super intelligences is the thing that's figuring out how to automate the plumbing job, which means that they're going to be able to figure out how to automate it much faster than an ordinary tech company full of humans who'd be able to figure out. So this guy is the author, co-author of a sort of forecast of where I is heading, AI is heading called AI 2027, which I read through. And, you know, the near-term predictions are much more reasonable. And the longer they go out, obviously, it becomes more difficult to make

predictions of what it's going to look like. But what he's pointing to here is, you know, Myself, including you, and I think there's a lot of reasons to be skeptical about the idea and the promise of AGI and what this is if it's actually going to be as transformative people are saying. And what he's explaining there is the reason you're going to hit this point of exponential growth in terms of the capability is because it's increasingly going to be taken out of the hands of humans. And you're going to have AI training AI where it's constant improvement where you have effectively like an army of AI that is research. researching and improving itself. And the humans are just like the high-level supervisors who aren't even really capable of completely supervised because they don't actually know they do have to sleep. They do get sick.

They do have limited ability to like really understand what's happening under the hood here. And then it's in that scenario once you hit that point where the AI is effectively training the new AI that you hit this kind of like exponential growth curve and where things really start to get potentially very weird. And obviously it's not the only one that's saying there are a lot of people. I mean, I think most people who actually are deeply in touch with this industry and whether or not they support it or not, that's the direction they all see this ultimately going in, which is why you see this race now for whoever can develop that ability, you know, whatever

level of an AGI or whatever you want to call that, whoever can develop that ability, they're going to be the ones who were able to hit that exponential growth curve and win the AI arms race that is unfolding right now without any of our like desire or consent. That's, there's two scenarios and they're both so bad. One is that they're right and that this will all progress. And, you know, I actually, I still don't really believe that they're right. But hard to. The way that they seriously take it and keep saying it out loud over and over again, at the very least, if the richest and most powerful people in the world believe something to be true, I have to take it seriously, right? Because they're the people who could at the, at the, they have the best ability.

to enact that. Now, I think a lot of the times they are talking their own book to inflate their massive stock prices. I mean, even X. You know, the reason Elon is obsessed with AI right now is because XAI acquired X and the entire valuation of his private $40 billion boondoggle is built upon the promise of AI and using Twitter data to use it as some sort of training bot for GROC. There's no profitability in Twitter, okay? It's a dead business. It's horrible. But the point also, though, is if it fails, is that we're basically left with some sort of dot-com style, you know, scenario, which blows out the economy. I was looking at a stat. If you bought the S&P in March of 2000, you did not return the baseline for like 11 years.

That's how long it took for you to actually return for what it was. Now, obviously, you should have bought in between, you know, if you were dollar cost averaging and all that. But that's, I mean, that's a lot of value that was wiped out. 11 years of a dead zone in the U.S. economy. And the dot-com thing is instructive as well, though, because, like, yes, a bunch of these internet companies failed, but the internet was transformational. That's correct. So you can have a bubble pop and still have the technological revolution for good or for ill that we are, you know, facing down right now. And bubble watch. Let's put C6 up on the screen, please. Michael Burry of the

big short fame apparently now has some massive put options against the value of Palantir and of Nvidia, two of the high-flying AI stocks now currently. I mean, you can do the math for yourself in terms of the value of the amount that he's betting on those companies. And he's poised to profit massively if those stocks do go down. Look, he and himself, in terms of the release for everything, part of it could be publicity. But I mean, those are real positions held by obviously a legendary investor. I will say he has been wrong a lot recently. But you only had to be right once, as he famously was in the movie. And you should always take what the guy says seriously. I a little bit more seriously that I take is put D5 on the screen. This, John Cassidy, he's from

the New Yorker. This was, he wrote, you know, a little while back, but it was about that efficiency story that I talked about, the ad profits draught and the lessons of history. He is the author of that book, I can't recommend enough. Dotcon, specifically on the dot com crash back in 2000, and he links the same stuff that we were talking about, about how the inability to find efficiency for some 95% of users, is that even though we can cover AI job loss, that the big promises of productivity and all that are not manifesting themselves yet, which is the only thing propping up, the NVIDIA stock price, open AI evaluation, $13 billion revenue, trillions of dollars in deals, AMD, all of these other things,

data center construction, like, that's the only thing that's propping up everything right now. And so if there's a crash, it will not only impact overall stock valuations, it will also suck huge amounts of money out of the economy, investment, capital expenditure, construction. It's just like housing. Like the housing crash didn't just crash housing. It crashed everything for a long time. That's my big fear right now. And by the way, I think this one is more likely than the AI bots take over and kill us all. I think the crash is the most likely scenario. Could be both. I really do. Could be both. Well, yeah, you could have both. I don't know. Let's take the crash scenario. Let's take for granted

that that's the direction we're hiding. I mean, think about where we are right now. We just listen to Elon Musk. Obviously, Elon has a very large personal financial incentive to push the narrative that AI is going to be this incredibly transformational force. Now imagine you are a large institutional investor. And all these guys who are smart and rich and powerful are telling you basically like, listen, I'm going to be the one to make it an AGI. And I'm going to be effectively like God King of the universe when that happens. That is a very powerful incentive for you to invest with them, isn't it? So they do have huge personal incentives to portray AI as it's going to be this completely revolutionary thing,

the likes of which we've literally never experienced before in human history on this accelerated timeline. And so you better be on the team of the, you know, oligarch God King that achieves AGII first or you're going to be left in the cold like all the rest of us suckers asking for our UBI from the federal governor or whatever handouts and scraps they feel like giving us. So it is a pretty compelling, you know, pretty powerful story and pretty powerful self-incentive, like huge incentive that people have in their own selfish interest to push that narrative. So I think it is worth keeping that in mind when you're considering the problems. Now, like the guy that we just showed you from Ross dealt that, he does not have it. And he left open AI because he was concerned that they were no longer, you know, worried about the morals and ethics. And he did not see a way that they could have achieved what's called AI alignment where the AI. where the AI basically stays in the box that you want it to stay in.

And so that's why he left and is now doing this work on AI safety. But yeah, there is definitely a very possible scenario where investors come to realize, you know, I don't think that this thing is living up to the hype. And you've got all of these trillions of dollars in this sort of like, you know, self-licking ice cream cone economic system going on here with Nvidia at the core of it. And you could easily see how that. could all come crashing down very quickly in an instant. Or, you know, China's deep seek or another competitor gains a significant edge and looks like it's going to be what gets adopted

globally. They have some advantages in that regard. Number one, the fact that it is open source. So any anybody in the world can, you know, download their weights and mess with it and adopt it and whatever. That could be another thing that could cause the bubble to completely crash. So, you know, there's there's a number of scenarios. One is it's just, completely fake and it's a bubble and it crashes and we never get beyond like, you know, making videos of Tupac fighting Biggie in WWF or whatever. The productivity gains never really materialized. It's like moderately disruptive, but nothing really super crazy.

That's probably the best case scenario. There's a scenario where the bubble crashes, but it's still, you know, the AI development actually is still that level of transformational. And then you have the like, you know, tail end truly apocalyptic. which you can't put off the table when you consider that the people who work with this stuff the most say this is a real possibility we have to keep in mind we are trying to develop they are trying to develop an intelligence greater than human beings we've never coexisted on the planet with an intelligence that's greater than ours what does that mean you know i mean i think you have to take seriously the upending of the you know the order where that we currently dominate and that we're trying to we are ourselves trying to upend that order How are we going to be able to predict what are going to be the actions and the outcomes of what this super intelligence does? You know, are they going to treat us the way we treat ants where it's basically like, yeah, well, they're kind of in the way. Let's like, you know, I don't want them in my house.

Let me just get them out of here. I mean, we genuinely don't know. And definitionally do not have the mental capacity to really try to figure it out. Yeah. All I know is what I've been told, and that's a half-truth is a whole lie. For almost a decade, the murder of an 18-year-old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved, until a local homemaker, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story. I'm telling you, we know Quincy killed her. We know.

A story that law enforcement used to convict six people, and that got the citizen. Investigator on national TV. Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran. My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, producer, and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find. I did not know her and I did not kill her,

or rape or burn, or any of that other stuff that y'all said. They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her. They made me say that I pour gas on her. From Lava for Good, this is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame. America, y'all better work the hell up. Bad things happens to good people in small towns.

Listen to Graves County in the Bone Valley feed on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season at free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Michael Lewis here.

My book, The Big Short, tells the story of the buildup and burst of the U.S. housing market back in 2008. It follows a few unlikely, but lucky people who saw the real estate market for the black hole it would become and eventually made buildup. billions of dollars from that perception.

It was like feeding the monster, said Eisman. We fed the monster until it blew up. The monster was exploding. Yet on the streets of Manhattan, there was no sign anything important had just happened. Now, 15 years after the Big Short's original release, and a decade after it became an Academy Award-winning movie, I've recorded an audiobook edition for the very first time.

The Big Short's story, what it means when people start betting against the market. And who really pays for an unchecked financial system? It is as relevant today as it's ever been, offering invaluable insight into the current economy and also today's politics. Get the big short now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. In early 1988, federal agents raced to track down the gang they suspect of importing millions of dollars worth of heroin into New York from Asia. We had 30 agents ready to go with shotguns and rifles and you name it. But what they find is not what they expected.

Basically, your stay-at-home moms were picking up these large amounts of heroin. They go, is this your daughter? I said yes. They go, oh, you may not see her for like 25 years. Caught between a federal investigation and the violent gang who recruited them, the women must decide who they're willing to protect and who they dare to betray. Once I saw the gun, I tried to take his hand and I saw the flash of light. Listen to the Chinatown Stang on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you get your podcasts. Moving now to CZ, the notorious crypto billionaire who previously had been indicted by the U.S. Department of He pled guilty. It seemed to be done and dusted in terms of a deal until very recently when Donald Trump

pardoned him. This obviously caused a lot of consternation online, potential corruption. There were a lot of questions. And then it exploded even more after a CBS News interview on 60 minutes, whenever they asked Trump who CZ even was, and he did not even know. This is after criticizing Joe Biden around the auto pen scandal of pardons and proclaiming the president to even know who he was pardoning. So first, take a listen to Trump's answer. He pled guilty in 2023 to violating anti-money laundering laws. Right. The government at the time said that CZ had caused significant harm to U.S. national security,

essentially by allowing terrorist groups like Hamas to move millions of dollars around. Why did you pardon him? Okay, are you ready? I don't know who he is. I know he got a four-month sentence or something like that, and I heard it was a Biden witch hunt. In 2025, his crypto exchange finance helped facilitate a $2 billion purchase of World Liberty Financial's stable coin. And then you pardoned CZ. How do you address the appearance of pay for play?

Well, here's the thing. I know nothing about it because I'm too busy doing the other. But he got a pardon? No, I can only tell you this. My sons are into it. I'm glad they are because it's probably a great industry crypto. I think it's good. You know, they're running a business.

They're not in government. So he said, I knew nothing about it, and I'm very busy. And he didn't even know who the guy was who he parted, which, I mean, look. Remember all the auto pen discourse? By the way, you know, I think the auto pen stuff is legitimate in terms of Biden's dementia and, like, who was actually running the pardon scheme. But, I mean, this is also equally bad if you're like, because notice, what does he talk about? He's like, well, my sons are very into it. It's like, so your son's asked you to pardon him?

Is that what you're saying? Because it sounds what it's like, right? Let's put that up on the screen, please, the actual report about the, like, the actual, like, the actual. like the actual, the pardon. He was sentenced to four months in prison in April of 2024, pled guilty to violating U.S. money laundering. Binance also pled guilty and was ordered to pay $4.3 billion after a U.S. investigation said it helped users bypass sanctions.

The pardon was a big debate about White House embrace of crypto given Trump's own family investments in the industry and concern over whether, you know, the Trump family or somebody like that got paid. Part of the whole scandal, I think, around it. is the, you know, we talked about Trump coin and all that behind the scenes. And you can give a legitimate theory like case as to why like it was quote unfair, you know, around crypto for money laundering, et cetera, kind of the spirit of crypto itself and like what that all means. Because there's a lot of crypto people who I know who said that it was a bullshit investigation, kind of

in the first place. I personally, like my thing with CZ is, Crystal, if you will recall, he was the person who was also kind of at the heart of the whole SBF scandal and the crash. That I'm like, yeah, I would like to see a little bit more about that, okay, in terms of defrauding people of billions of dollars. I don't really care about sanctions evasion. Yeah, let me just elaborate on that a little bit because it does seem to me like, you know, okay, you know, people say, oh, this was a bullshit investigation and these money laundering laws, whatever, okay. But, you know, he took a deal from the government and there were a lot more things that were being investigated with regard to CZ and with regard to finance. The whole structure of the thing is incredibly shady and sketchy. Internally, a bunch of reports to come out about how they had like no accounting controls whatsoever.

I mean, you know, similar to like the very rogue way that SBF ran his company as well. And then there have been not just allegations, but actually Binance has taken action against people internally who were internally trading based on knowledge of what coins were going to be listed on the exchange because that would give them, you know, huge advantage. So there were all sorts. There was a really consequential interview that he did on CNBC that we covered here where there was a real question whether they were lying about the funds that they were holding in reserve and whether they had enough cash to actually cover the things that they could potentially need to cover. They had to freeze deposits for a while. So there was a lot more questions and investigations going on into this company beyond what he ultimately pled to. I think is important context to know. That's very well said.

A friend of the show, Coffee Zilla, broke some of it down. He's an expert on this stuff. Let's take a listen. Whether or not you're a stand of the Trump family, it doesn't matter. I mean, this is just straight up corruption, which we should be all against, right? This should not be a political issue. Unfortunately, increasingly, politicians are involved in these huge crypto self-dealing deals. But I am not injecting politics into this, okay?

it just so happens that they happen to be in positions of power. But don't worry about that, right? Just look at the facts, please, for a moment. It all starts November 21st, 2023, okay? Binance and Chengpeng's out. Both plead guilty in a historic $4 billion plea deal where basically they admitted they didn't really have anti-money laundering controls and they kind of willfully look the other way.

Specifically, in regards to people they probably should have not allowed them to use their platform, such as, according to the charges, terrorists, cybercriminals, and child abusers, which, you know, yeah, you probably should block those people from using your platform. Now, on April 30th, 2024, Zsao is officially sentenced to four months of prison. And of course, a few months later, Donald Trump takes office, wins the presidency, okay? And while he's winning the presidency, he also announces the launch of something called World Liberty Financial, which is kind of their big crypto project entry. Yep. And he, broke it down even more, put the next one up there, which you can show the actual timeline.

So as he explicitly says that Trump launches World Liberty Financial Stablecoin in March 2025, $2 billion investment into Binance by MGX, $2 billion investment was paid for in USD1. CZ admits he applied for a pardon in May of 2025, October 2025 he gets his pardon. And then the net result is that USD1 is now backed by treasuries. This yields some $60 million a year for this World Liberty Financial, as long as finance does not redeem the $2 billion in U.S.D.1. Okay. So he literally in the same month does this $2 billion investment that's going to pay the Trump $60 to $80 million per year and ask for his pardon. Yeah, it's good business if you can get it. Just so we know, and this is the guy,

Trump, oh, I don't know anything about him, but my sons like him. Oh, yeah, your sons who are running this crypto scam. Yeah, of course they like him. So it makes a lot of sense. Last thing was flagged here about the transcript of the 60 Minutes interview. Let's put that up on the screen, a missing portion had this final question on crypto, quote, so you're not concerned about the appearance of corruption. Trump's edited out reply began with hesitation. He says, quote, I can't say, because I can't say, I'm not concerned. I don't. I'd rather not have you asked the question. He went on, but I let you ask it. You just came to me and you said, can I ask you a question? I said, yeah, this is the question. O'Donnell replied, and you answered to which Trump respond,

I don't mind. Did I let you do it? I could have walked away. I didn't have an answer to this question. I'm proud to answer the question. He concluded, we are number one in crypto, and that's the only thing I care about. I don't want China or anybody else to take it away. It's a massive industry. And you will recall that Trump sued CBS and 60 Minutes specifically. And won. Oh, over, well, you got his payout.

He didn't win. He got his payout. If you get paid, you win. Specifically over an edit of a Kamala Harris interview. And now you have CBS, you know. know, controlled by Trump allies, including Barry Weiss, who he spoke of very favorably in this interview. And they cut out this answer, which is unflattering to him, right? They cut that out. And, you know, Democrats are actually looking now at turning the tables and suing 60 minutes

over the editing of this interview. But, I mean, this is the, these are the sorts of, like, you know, this is the way that they're catering to power now. And now that they are controlled by Trump allies, you know, overt Trump allies. These are the sort of things to be on the watch for here. Yes, indeed. And not just there in terms of foreign policy and a lot of other. Oh, yeah. And not to mention entertainment, which they are currently eyeing and trying to buy. There's a whole lot of sketchy stuff going on behind the scenes. Okay. Thank you guys so much for watching. I know it went a little bit late today. The live stream starts when? 7.30. 7.30-ish. Check your inbox.

There. Polls close in Virginia at 7, and probably we're going to know those results pretty quickly. Almost certainly. If things go, you know, if it's a Spanburg or a pretty clear victory, you're going to get that one pretty quickly. So probably when we come on the air, we'll be able to bring you those results. We'll be watching New Jersey. You know, another one that I just thought of when we're on the show. Graham Platner in Maine is using his volunteer army to organize around this ballot proposition. Yeah, what is it about Maine?

It's about voting. Yeah, I think absentee ballots. I got to check the details. But that'll be an interesting test, you know, of his organizing strength as well. So there's that one. And, of course, there's the New York City mayoral race. And Ryan and Griffin will be on the ground covering that. Hopefully we get another like tipsy, Jamal Bowman to stop by another other fun guest like we did last time.

That was a good one. Yeah. All right. New York City results, we may not know tonight, correct? Oh, I think we'll know them tonight. Well, they may call it, but we won't know the exact, like the exact number. Just because if they take a long time to come in. But I'm, you know, even on the primary when we thought.

it would be we didn't think there was any chance with ranked choice voting that we would know it that night and we did so i think you're very likely to know who the next mayor of new york city no no no we'll we'll definitely know the mayor i was for me the big question is about the 50% like can he crack 50 or not i i wonder whether we'll have a sense of whether we've had such issues with new york elections i think we'll have a sense of whether he's on track for that or not too we won't have all the results in but i think we'll have a sense of whether he's headed for that kind of a victory so there we go okay see guys later The murder of an 18-year-old girl in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved for years,

until a local housewife, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story. America, y'all better work the hell up. Bad things happens to good people in small towns. Listen to Graves County on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season, ad free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Michael Lewis here. My best-selling book, The Big Shoe, short, tells the story of the build-up and burst of the U.S. housing market back in 2008.

A decade ago, the Big Short was made into an Academy Award-winning movie. Now I'm bringing it to you for the first time as an audiobook narrated by yours truly. The Big Short story, what it means to bet against the market, and who really pays for an unchecked financial system, is as relevant today as it's ever been. Get the Big Short now at Pushkin.fm. slash audiobook. or wherever audio books are sold. Welcome to Decoding Women's Health. I'm Dr. Elizabeth Pointer, chair of Women's Health and Gynecology

at the Atria Health Institute in New York City. I'll be talking to top researchers and clinicians and bringing vital information about midlife women's health directly to you. A hundred percent of women go through menopause. Even if it's natural, why should we suffer through it? Listen to Decoding Women's Health with Dr. Elizabeth Pointer on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.