Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 12/16/22 - Weekly Roundup: Twitter Files, Fusion Energy Breakthrough, Coffeezilla On SBF's Fraud & The Yemen War Powers Resolution

Episode Date: December 16, 2022

Highlighting some of the best segments of the week including a huge fusion energy breakthrough, Matt Taibbi's take on the Twitter Files, Coffeezilla discussing SBF's fraud, And Ken Klippenstein breaking down the Yemen War Powers Resolution.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/id1570045623Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXlMerch: 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. Hey guys, ready or not, 2024 is here and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it means the absolute world to have your support. What are you waiting for? Become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Matt Taibbi, always a pleasure to see you, sir. Good to see you as well, Crystal. So I was wondering from you, now that we've had,

you know, your pieces come out, Schellenberger's pieces come out, Barry's pieces come out, what did you think was the sort of most significant, most troubling, most interesting revelations that came out of the quote-unquote Twitter files? I think there are two things that are the most significant. Probably the first one is what Barry did in her first thread, which basically just confirmed what everybody knew, but revealed concretely that there is such a thing as shadow banning. And not only does it exist, but they have an extraordinarily idiosyncratic system that basically allows these companies to have virtually unlimited control over the visibility of any account, person, hashtag, anything. They can dial it down all the way to zero, you can't be searched,

and all the way up to amplified to the max. And she showed that, specifically agencies like the FBI and the DHS, are not just generally making recommendations about content moderation. They are doing it at a micro level. Like we're seeing tons and tons and tons of these communications that say the FBI flagged this, the DHS flagged that. They are buying information in bulk, analyzing it FBI flagged this, the DHS flagged that, they are buying information in bulk, analyzing it, flagging it, sending it back to companies like Twitter for moderation. And there's no question they're doing that. They're not doing it

in pursuit of charging a crime. They're doing it because they are in the censorship business. See, I completely agree. We highlighted the Yoel Roth meetings with the FBI, the weekly meetings in many of these cases with these security agencies. That seemed to be one of the biggest takeaways there from the story. On top of that, Matt, you got a tremendous amount of color. What was it like wading through their communications of just how capricious the nature of all the decision-making inside the company was. Did it astonish you or did it just confirm what you thought?

I think it's astonishing. I think it speaks to probably some group thing sets in. You know, in any environment where a bunch of people are doing the same job and you get inured to kind of the morality of what you're doing, you see all these communications where somebody says, oh, we got a flag from the state of California by way of the Stanford Election Integrity Project. Let's see, why don't we bounce that for 12 days and then reduce visibility partway?

You know what I mean? They're making these decisions about, you know, how much people can see, you know, a certain piece of information and they're doing it in split seconds based on almost nothing. You know, sometimes we see Roth doing like a Google search where he sees an NPR article for, you know, a few minutes and then makes a decision. Like that's crazy to me. The arrogance of that is unbelievable, I think. where he sees an NPR article for a few minutes and then makes a decision. That's crazy to me. The arrogance of that is unbelievable, I think.

You know, one thing that Sagar actually brought up when we were talking about this piece of the government involvement is that it seems like a lot of these tools and this interaction was developed during the war on terror. And there was a lot of support and almost no pushback about them, you know, interfacing with Twitter and other social media outlets to say, hey, pull down this, like, ISIS propagandist or this al-Qaeda dude or whatever, like, let's get these people off the platform. But it's a real lesson in the way that once those tools and that power is made available to these agencies, they don't stop and limit themselves to that one area. So as, you know, administrations have moved forward, they have continued, it seems to me, and I wonder if this is your impression as well, to just continue to expand their intrusion and expand,

go from war on terror to, okay, now we don't like this type of actor, now we don't like that type of speech, and wade into more and more sort of controversial and fraught areas as they've moved forward. Yeah, absolutely. You can actually see the whole progression of what they began with in terms of what their mission was on the moderation front and then where it's ended up. Later today, you're going to be seeing some material talking about how they deliver certain information to one agency, but more serious information, for instance, to the Pentagon. Right.

And that's probably a holdover from the war on terror when, you know, the DOD was probably asking companies like Twitter for information about certain actors abroad. And they were just giving it to them, right? Like that's kind of how that system worked, whether it was through FISA, national security letters, whatever. They could get whatever they wanted. But you see that they've massively expanded the mission. And I think it was critical 2016 was critical here because after that they argued the foreign interference issue gave them uh the license to start doing it on a much grander scale than they had after 9-11. And you see that everywhere as well, even in something like as seemingly,

you know, partisan as the Hunter Biden decision. Lurking in the background of that is this fear that somehow the Russians are involved, so we have to do this or that. That's part of a lot of these discussions. And I think that's the justification for them getting down to, I mean, they're moderating tweets that have like almost no engagement to followers. You know what I'm saying? That was so crazy. That's incredibly comprehensive. Yeah, and when we look at that, I mean, especially when I saw the FBI flagging specific tweets and they were like, FBI flagged this as if that means that they're supposed to be called to action. That shows you the apparatus has long been built. I mean, do we have any insight into any further apparatuses that were built post

January 6th? Most of what you guys have focused on or released so far has been in the immediate aftermath, but the Biden administration collaboration post period has not yet been explored. Do you guys have any plans to release anything on that front? Yeah, we're looking at that right now. I mean, our methods of searching have kind of gone in different directions and our access has been kind of changed over time as we've refined this process. But they're back up and searching now. And yeah, what I think some of us, you know, myself in particular, maybe a couple of others, we're really trying to do is map out exactly where all that flagging comes out of the government and how it comes back to companies like Twitter.

And one of the things that's fascinating is that there's just so many entry points for these, you know, this like FBI flag material. It might go directly to Twitter. It might go via somebody they know at the company, like, you know, the former general counsel there. It might go it might go in bulk. You know, the FBI sends bulk requests for possible violative content. It might go through the Stanford project. It might go through the Atlantic Council.

There's a whole sort of geography of speech suppression that we're just learning a lot more about every day. Matt, can you talk a little bit more about the process? Because there have been a lot of questions about how this unfolded. You just made a reference to like our access has changed. So how how have you been working? What has that all been like? And what did you make of Jack Dorsey at one point, of course, former head of Twitter had suggested that, hey, they should just make all of these files public and then journalists can sort through them independent or otherwise make of them what they will. What do you think of that suggestion?

Well, we're caught between basically two different kinds of criticisms. One is saying you should release all of it. And I have some sympathy for that. I was a supporter of WikiLeaks and, you know, that approach is something that I understand. On the other hand, we're taking tons of flack for releasing people's personal information, even just names of people who were known to work at the company. And so you never know when you're going to release a gigantic data set, whether, you know, there's something in there that's going to trigger litigation or, you know, that's one of the reasons why you want to do it this way. I would argue that I think a good thing would be for journalists to at least take a first pass at identifying some of the key issues.

And then, you know, you know, I'm, I'm not opposed to that concept in general. I think it's an interesting criticism, but I do think you have to take into consideration the other thing as well. Yeah, I think that's totally fair. I mean, look, it's your scoop. You guys get, obviously, the first pass. That's really my final question is how much more do you guys anticipate on going through? And then even more so on the process, like, is it a searchable archive? From what I've seen, it's a lot of screenshots. So it must take a tremendous amount

of research and just like sifting through to even find the biggest stories. Many people are curious. That's the only reason I'm asking. Yeah, it's kind of hard to describe. I mean, I think I'd be talking out of school if I got into it too much. But people had this impression that we were sitting in front of a terminal and was flawed. I mean, as you know, there was somebody fired as a result of that because the former deputy general counsel of the company was reviewing the material without our knowledge. Then there was another period where we were looking basically at a period of time because we wanted to investigate one story, which was how was Donald Trump banned. I figured we would see a lot of evidence of kind of government discussion there. That was one of the reasons I was interested in that.

So we only had a chunk of time and certain Slack channels that we were looking at there. Then we had some technical problems, and now we're back up again, and I'm actually not in the room. I'm on the other side of the country at the moment. One other question for you, Matt, is, you know, almost every source in journalism has some sort of an agenda for why they're giving you that information. So the fact that Elon has an agenda here is not in any way disqualifying. But given that you're sort of dependent on him and his process for what documents you're ultimately able to review, how have you been able to ease your own concerns that what you're looking at isn't somehow cherry-picked or skewed or selective

versus a more complete picture? Well, I mean, the minute I get the indication that I'm being played or something like that, I'll, of course, you know, jump out of the airplane. I mean, but I haven't seen that at all. I've had no indication of that. Look, people keep bringing this question up. You're doing PR for the richest man in the world. What about his motives? Blah, blah. And, you know, like, it doesn't matter.

Like, journalists, we don't care where the information comes from. If it's true, we want to look at it. I know what my motives are. My motives are I'm looking at like I'm getting, you know, a unique look into the underbelly of how censorship works in this country and how the FBI, the DHS, you know, the Pentagon, like all of these institutions and how they operate in secret, that's an incredible opportunity. And I know what I'm looking for. So it doesn't, I guess there might be motives that he might have, but that doesn't matter. For the integrity of the project, all we have to do is make sure that the stuff that we're looking at is true and accurate and that we're drawing the correct conclusions from them. Absolutely. My final question to you, Matt, is about the media coverage. What have you made of the response to this? It used to be something like this would have been covered all six networks. From what I have seen so far, there's only been one segment

on any of the major television networks on this entire thing. To the extent that they covered in the mainstream press they've smeared you as a quote conservative journalist which is of course ridiculous if you know anything about your career has it been astonishing or i mean look we're all kind of in this game together at this point and it didn't really surprise me uh even though i'm repulsed by it but i guess it's just like a long-standing repulsion. What did you think? I mean, it's just funny, right? It's hard to take it any other way. Look, I think a clear subtext of this entire project is kind of a burn on traditional media. I mean, the whole idea of putting the material out on Twitter to begin with, it's kind of a double burn, right? Because you're flaying Twitter on Twitter. And then you're also doing it in what used to be the private playground, essentially, of the commercial media.

And, of course, this arouses lots of negative emotions. And, you know, they're hitting back and also pretending not to cover a story that everybody in the country and also in some parts of the world are talking about that just makes them look ridiculous. I mean, I get that they have opinions about it, but the whole thing is silly, I think. Yeah, agreed. I mean, I don't know how you can deny that the revelation of weekly meetings between the FBI and a major social media platform that they all acknowledge. I mean, there have been plenty of coverage of Elon's takeover of Twitter and what that means. So they're sort of tacitly acknowledging this platform is really important, but, you know, only covering the pieces of it that, you know, that they want to, that they pick and choose. So, Matt, thank you so much. I know you're tired.

I know you've been up late and all of those things. So we always really appreciate your time here. Thanks for your work, man. Thanks for having me. Take care. Always. Anytime. Yeah, our pleasure.

See you later. Big science breakthrough that Sagar and I are both, I think, a little bit nerding out on and excited about. There has been long, decades-long efforts to try to generate fusion energy, which right now we have nuclear fission, which is you break things apart. Fusion would be you bring atoms together that is sufficient enough to cause a net energy gain. Decades long efforts to achieve this. And I'll tell you why it matters a lot in a moment. Let's go ahead and put this Financial Times. They broke the news. Major breakthrough by U.S. scientists boost clean power hopes. Let me go ahead and read you the beginning of this. U.S. government scientists have made a breakthrough in the pursuit of limitless zero carbon power

by achieving a net energy gain in a fusion reaction for the first time, according to three people with knowledge of preliminary results. Physicists have since the 50s sought to harness the fusion reaction that powers the sun and other stars, of course, as well. But no group had been able to produce more energy from the reaction than it consumes. That's the milestone that's known as net energy gain or target gain, which would help prove the process could provide a reliable, abundant alternative to fossil fuels and conventional nuclear energy. Again, to reiterate, there are private companies and a lot of actually investor money

that has gone to trying to achieve this end. They have not accomplished this first. U.S. taxpayer dollars funded public research that led to this massive technological breakthrough that could, could in the future lead to a clean source of limitless energy? I mean, which would be an entire, entire revolution. Just a couple more things here. Fusion reactions emit no carbon. They produce no long-lived radioactive waste, which of course the problem with nuclear energy. And a small cup of the hydrogen fuel could theoretically power a house for hundreds of years. One of the stats that I saw was that a cup of seawater could provide the same amount of energy as an entire barrel of oil. So that is what we're talking about here. Ultimately, it's described as the holy grail of clean energy. And

if they can make this commercially viable, which we continue to be a long way from, this could be a whole energy revolution on the scale of like the Industrial Revolution. Yeah, I mean, look, I hope so. This is one of those where I also just want to put in a thread here for public research because this was something built called the National Ignition Facility. And it was designed actually to test nuclear weapons by simulating explosions to advance fusion energy research, or sorry, for advancing nuclear testing, but then was repurposed for the $3.5 billion facility for fusion energy research, where they're able to build, I think it's the world's largest laser,

which is kind of cool, which they use to bombard the plasma. I don't understand the science as much. I've been looking much more on the business end. And we should be careful, right? Which is, look, even the initial data, it's relatively unclear. Yes, they did get that net energy gain, but it's going to be very close. It does, unfortunately, take a hell of a lot of power to power the world's most powerful laser. That said, as you said, look, are we a decade away from this? Probably not. But are we $100 billion away from getting the first facility off the ground with some real testing? Yeah, I think we are.

I think we are at that point. And that's a very hopeful story. I mean, if you consider the Pentagon budget is like $800 billion. So this thing only costs $3.5 billion to build this facility. Let's say we throw $100 billion at this or something with new federal research, we could be living in a whole new world maybe, what, 40, 50 years from now. Economies of scale

take a long time to develop. But initial government research, and I hope what we can see is I don't want this thing to get culture warred the way that nuclear energy was, even though I still believe cost-effective-wise and all that. Oh, where we are today, we have to continue to lean into nuclear. Right. Nuclear in the interim, fusion in the future. That'd be my future that we could go for. The things that we should watch out and look for are we have got to encourage more public research dollars towards this because it is still, the breakthrough is there in terms of the experiment, but now we have to replicate the experiment multiple times, possibly in different facilities, build even more, throw possibly like contests and things at this to get different physics departments and all of that involved. So that's the frontier I think that we're moving into right now.

Yeah. You know, my dad is a physicist, long retired, but physicist nonetheless. I was talking to him about this last night. He was super excited. And let me try to explain the science as best as my feeble brain possibly can. So as I said before, the reaction that they're trying to achieve here and that they did achieve here is what ultimately powers the sun and other stars. And the reason they are able to pull it off, and we have not been able to up to this point, is because they have the benefit of having a large amount of mass. And it's that pressure that basically creates the heat that makes it possible for this reaction to form this plasma and have this net energy gain that just sort of continues. So there's two methods

that scientists have been using to try to achieve this net energy gain. One of them is, like Sagar said, using giant lasers to basically like, you know, superheat things up, which means move the particles faster. That's the one that's been successful here. The other method that's being tried in other places is basically using super powerful electromagnets. That's the one that's been successful here. The other method that's being tried in other places is basically using super powerful electromagnets. Right. That's the other method to try to achieve this gain. And so that's really the central challenge that they've been trying to figure out. Now, the hopeful indication here is that they're actually still crunching the data.

There is going to be an announcement from the government of the Department of Energy led by by Jennifer Granholm, sometime today. So we'll see the specifics of what they said. But they said, actually, one of the challenges with getting the measurements is that the net energy gain was more than they expected and actually broke some of the instruments. So that seems like a hopeful indication that they even went above and beyond. It appears there may have been a second experiment that also was able to replicate this net energy gain. However, put this next piece up on the screen. This is from Power Mag. They see U.S. officials set to announce this fusion energy breakthrough. As I mentioned, Jennifer Graham Holm, who is energy secretary, has said she's going to make an announcement of a major scientific breakthrough, and all expectations are

this is going to be it. But they go on to talk about the challenge of commercializing fusion. They said it includes developing machinery that could affordably turn the fusion reaction into power that could be deployed to the grid. Scientists have said that building equipment large enough to create fusion power at scale requires materials that are difficult to produce. In addition, the fusion reaction creates neutrons that significantly stress equipment and could potentially destroy that equipment. So there are a lot of challenges still ahead. One scientist I saw quoted said, "'Listen, is this going to be a significant part

"'of climate crisis abatement in the next 20 to 30 years? "'No, it is not.'" So keep in mind, this is more of a long-term hope for the future, Clean energy, completely transformational, hopefully in our lifetimes. And this is a major step forward. There was one other piece that I just wanted to bring you on the front of clean energy, which is, you know, we've talked here before about how the U.S. has really gotten majorly behind the game in terms of securing the mineral elements needed for EVs and electric vehicle batteries in particular. China has been very aggressive in securing these mining rights.

The Obama administration dropped the ball. The Trump administration dropped the ball. It looks like the Biden administration is trying to do a little bit of a better job. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. This is from Axios. They say that the headline here is exclusive behind Biden's overseas mining funding. They are trying to fund roughly a dozen different mineral projects overseas and a bid for more resources used in lower carbon technologies. Supporting more mining overseas could ease a raw material squeeze, hurting electric vehicles in particular. They also talk about the politics could have a side effect, giving Biden's foes fodder against him for rejecting mines at home. That to me is kind of the sideshow from the main key piece here, which is they're at least making some moves to secure

the type of minerals that we would need to have a larger scale up of electric vehicle technology. I don't know if this is sufficient. I sort of doubt that it is. But you can see the, you know, again, they like dabble in some good things, dabble in a little bit of industrial policy that we just haven't had in this country in a very long time. Yeah, mineral rights are very important and electric batteries and all that lithium ion deposits across South America, Mexico. There's some major titanic battles happening in Chile with respect to mining rights and government and all that. So there's some interesting stuff that's down the table. If that treaty does end up passing, which maybe we'll do a little bit of a segment on it if it becomes more newsworthy.

But there's a lot of really interesting things that are happening at the governmental level to try and secure the ground through which companies can then begin establishing a domestic or more of a less China-reliant electric battery supply chain. Because right now, at least for the next decade, we are locked in almost 100% with China, which is not a good place to be if you want to bet the future on electric vehicles. Great planning from our political leaders. Way to go, guys. Very excited about this. We've got a great guest to join us on the show today coffee zilla so if you might know him he's a journalist he's done a fantastic job over on his youtube channel which will have a link in the description exposing crypto scams

but really being at the forefront of the sbf scandal from day one and what a fortuitous day for you to join us coffee zilla thank you Thank you so much, man. We appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Yeah, we've got him getting arrested. It's an incredible day, for sure. Okay, so I think one of the things we wanted to start with so you could recap for the audience is when you did a video, I accidentally got SBF to admit to fraud. So why don't you dig into some of the details there and maybe even take it back to what set your BS radar off with SPF from the very beginning when you started covering it many months ago. Yeah, so months ago, he was on a podcast with Matt Levine where he was saying that basically everything's a Ponzi scheme. All of DeFi is a Ponzi scheme. It was kind of an incredible admission. And at the time I said, look, here's this crypto CEO that everyone loves, who's basically glorifying Ponzi schemes as if it's a

legitimate business. And Matt Levine famously said, sounds like you're in the Ponzi business and business is good. Now, later when all of this collapsed, I tried to get an interview with him. He didn't want to talk to me, although he talked to a lot of journalists. So instead, I snuck up on a Twitter space and managed to basically kind of trick him into talking to me. At first, he ran away the first couple of calls, but finally I nailed him down and I got him to admit that there was fungibility between accounts. This is a really important point. Basically, Sam Beckman Freed was never supposed to have control over customer funds. It was supposed to be separated per their terms of service. And what he admitted to me was that was never the case. There was what they called generalized

withdrawals the day of the bankruptcy, the days leading up to the bankruptcy, which meant fundamentally your funds were never safe. They were always being used by Sam and Alameda to make risky trading decisions. Absolutely scandalous. And today you saw the results of that. Obviously you have the DOJ announcing that they're about to release the charges on him. You're very strategic about the way

that you went about questioning him because you had seen him very successfully dodge other interviewers who were relatively skilled over at the New York Times and with George Stephanopoulos. Can you talk about some of the tactics that he would use to deflect scrutiny in these other interviews that he was doing? Absolutely. So what he was really good at was he was able to deflect by going to a bunch of complicated financial instruments that he knew very well. And by doing that, he could get the interviewer sort of off their game. So he would invoke Alameda Research, which was his trading firm, which he started, he owned, but ultimately had nothing to do with, he would say he knew nothing about,

right? He would say, I knew nothing about Alameda. I was not the CEO. So anything that happened there is not my fault. So an interviewer would say, what happened at FTX? It looks like there's a bunch of money stolen. And he said, well, that was with what was going on with Alameda. We had this banking issue. We had an accounting error, and each interviewer just kind of kept getting trapped in this mire of excuses. So what I decided to do was really focus on FTX itself, ignore Alameda completely, and say, look, even if you just take what happened on FTX, that's fraud because customers should have been backed one-to-one. Let's say your grandma put a Bitcoin on FTX. That money should still be there even if they didn't have money for everyone else who is on their riskier side of the trading. So they didn't

have the money. He eventually admitted they didn't have the money. And that by itself is definitively fraud. You cannot tell people in your terms of service that you're going to keep their money safe and then not do it. So by focusing in on that, I was able to get around a lot of his kind of excuses of going into Alameda, going into these complicated instruments. Basically, the SEC agrees with you because they nailed him for exactly what you said in the complaint that we read on our show this morning. I want to go a little level deeper. You've been exposing kind of crypto frauds, scammers, really just online in the broader universe for quite a long time. It's something that I think that the mainstream media really misses until it just explodes into

a multi-billion dollar catastrophe. Why do you think that is? Why is it that these obvious, you know, multi-billionaires in this case, multi-millionaires in many other cases, which you've exposed now for a long time. Why do they seem to fly under the radar when they're obviously so influential with younger people and on the internet writ large? I think a lot of mainstream journalists just haven't caught up with the crypto world. And I think they're struggling to catch up even now. In the case of Sam Bankman-Fried, it was a bit different because he was actually funding a lot of these institutions. You had him actually giving grants to journalists. You had him working sort of hand in hand with journalists. So it's no surprise they didn't

see it, right? A lot of these people are still struggling to see the fraud. You have some puff pieces going out there. Don't get me wrong. There's some great mainstream pieces about Sam Bankman Freed, but a lot of them miss this. And the question is, OK, it's some combination of maybe they don't understand crypto, but also how much of it is, well, he was the poster child. He was the guy from Jane Street who was so smart and he was helping all the journalists. He was a huge Democratic funder. How much did that play a role in it? It's hard to know. I mean, we see this across industries, not just in terms of finance or tech, but certainly in terms of politics. A lot of times,

the journalists get cozy with the subjects they're supposed to be holding to account, and their career depends more on access to that person than it does on potentially exposing them. And so it creates a bad incentive structure where it's like they want to be in the club rather than they really want to be covering and holding the club ultimately to account. I am curious though, I mean, your YouTube channel, though your description of it is, I uncover scams, fraudsters, and fake gurus that are preying on desperate people with deceptive advertising, which is an incredible space that you've carved out for yourself. Like, what are some of the tactics that you use to, like, when does your BS radar go off? What are some of the commonalities between these various crooks that you are ultimately exposing and revealing?

And what sort of characteristics does Sam Bankman-Fried share with some of those other individuals you've covered? Sure. Yeah, I'd love to talk about that. A lot of the tactics and methods people use to gain this status with people or grift on people, it's a lot on quick status. But I mean, a lot of these guys, my BS goes off whenever somebody comes out of nowhere, seemingly no pedigree, and all of a sudden is taking the world by storm. They seem to have wealth from nowhere. They're advertising some get-rich-quick scheme. And really, FTX was kind of doing that. I mean, they were offering people high interest rate loans. They said they were low risk. You have Sam Bankman Freed himself, who, although he came

from a great school, he came from MIT, he had some pedigree, he really didn't do much before FTX. And all of a sudden, he's the smartest guy on the block. He's telling people they have no risk. He's telling people he's making money without any kind of risk associated. It just didn't make sense. And then you just have his talk about Ponzi schemes favorably. That was a huge red flag.

So it's these types of things that kind of set it off. With his case, I think it's just a lot of people missed it because they were blindsided by all the other rubber stamping that goes on. I mean, this is something a bit different with Sam is so many people had checked him off. You had Sequoia Capital, you have BlackRock, you have a lot of people who are supposed to be doing due diligence who really didn't do it. But a lot of those same tactics that I see over and over with deceptive marketing, predatory marketing, you saw that with SBF. And he actually admitted in an interview that that's actually why he talked a lot about, or at least it was part of the reason he talked

so much about charity, about all this effective altruism, was it was part of brand building. And I think that's such an important point is what are our blind spots as institutions, as the fourth estate, as journalists to people like this? Who else should everybody be paying attention to? Because obviously you called SBF from the beginning. Are there any others that people should watch out for? I mean, certainly it's hard to say like one person without making a whole story about it. But for sure, anybody who pops up out of nowhere, who claims to have the whole crypto industry on a string, has it all figured out. And we've seen this time and time again. Usually there's undisclosed risk. So that was

a big thing this year. And in crypto in general, people have been saying, oh, it's different. You can get 8% a year, no risk with crypto, or it's 8% a year is easy to get with crypto. It's different from the fiat markets. Listen, anytime anyone's promising you huge amounts of money for no risk, run. If you don't understand it, if you don't understand why there's risk associated, there's something hidden there. And that's exactly what you've seen in the crypto industry is over and over and over again, these people who are promising high rates of return, they blow up because they had something that they were trying to hide eventually comes out.

Some things are too good to be true. Would have been useful advice for Saga a few months back. Lost $5,500 on a block buy. I'm right there with you. Oh, I'm sorry to hear it. It's all right. It's all right. I'm here to live another day. I'm here to talk to you.

I should have been watching your channel more often. That's one of the reasons we wanted to have you on. Such an amazing job that you've been doing over there. I encourage everybody to live another day. I'm here to talk to you. I should have been watching your channel more often. That's one of the reasons we wanted to have you on. Such an amazing job that you've been doing over there. I encourage everybody to go and to subscribe. You do a really good job of both breaking it down for anybody who's just coming into it, really entertaining, great interview style, breaking news journalism. And I consider you in the highest regard in this story. So congratulations. Yeah, thank you so much.

We're super grateful for your time. Thanks, guys. Appreciate you having me on. Absolutely. Link down in the description to go ahead and subscribe to his channel. Hey, everyone. This is Ken Klippenstein with The Intercept Breaking Points. I'm going to be talking to you today about the War Powers Resolution that was withdrawn in the Senate on Tuesday.

It's important to all Americans, broadly speaking, for two reasons. One is that the War Powers Resolution aimed to restore power in Congress, Congress's ability to determine when we go to war, place important checks and balances on the presidency to make it so they can't just do a troop buildup and force us into a situation where we're at war without authorization from Congress. So there's important constitutional dimensions to this that anyone who's concerned with the, I think, fact that the presidency has become an extraordinarily powerful tool over since at least World War II. And, you know, there's increasingly fewer and fewer checks on its ability to exercise its wartime powers.

And then for a second reason, just the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, which is what fomented the whole debate around this war powers resolution, being that, you know, we're supporting the Saudi-led coalition to fight a war in Yemen to try to remove the Houthi rebels from the government there. And the effect of this has been devastating. This is like the biggest humanitarian crisis on earth. You know, millions of people facing extreme food insecurity, huge numbers of people, the UN just said earlier this week, before the war powers resolution was withdrawn, huge numbers of children going hungry.

You can't overstate the just human crisis that's happening on the ground and of which, you know, we are a part by providing support to the Saudi coalition, which we've been doing for about seven years now. And so it's kind of like Saudi Arabia is Vietnam. The question is, okay, this has been going on for a very long time. You know, I was always against it. I think there were always great arguments not to be involved, but so long as we are, what does the end game look like? And nobody's really asking that question. And this War Powers Resolution sought to answer that, which is finally the president would have to get authorization from Congress. But what ended up happening was Senator Bernie Sanders, who, as we reported at The Intercept, had the votes, said that he had the votes for it, ended up withdrawing it on Thursday night. Now, over the course of our reporting, what we were able to find was that that withdrawal came

after the White House was privately circulating talking points telling the Democrats, back off of this. We do not want this. Would it surprise you that presidents don't like having checks on their power and they want to be able to exercise things without those? Well, that's exactly what happened here. And in the talking points that we obtained from the White House that they were circulating with Senate Democrats, who, by the way, Senator Chris Murphy, who is head of the subcommittee that has jurisdiction over this conflict, he even said that he supported the War Powers Resolution, which, you know, he himself, not necessarily, you know, a huge activist in his own activist type senator in his own right. So

that, you know, said a lot about where the caucus was at, where, you know, the Senate was at. And there was even some Republican support for this issue. The Yemen conflict is very interesting subject, because, you know, a lot of people that I know, in the military, a lot of people I know, in the national security world, who are themselves conservatives, I because, you know, a lot of people that I know in the military, a lot of people I know in the national security world who are themselves conservatives, I find, you know, pretty unusual agreement across both sides that this is a conflict that we don't have to be a part of. And, you know, how is this completely aside from the human costs that is not clear, especially in the context of a new regime in Riyadh under the young Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has been holding down oil production to the chagrin, you know, not just of Democrats, but of anybody who has to go to the gas pump and pay for things. And, you know, we have a fossil fuel based economy. aside from gasoline, holding the production down has had an effect on the global economy, drives up inflation, all sorts of negative things that President Biden himself has threatened, quote, consequences for. The White House has threatened the past. Where are those consequences? It looks like they don't exist because this War Powers Resolution that would have blocked or at least, you know, impeded U.S. support for the Yemen conflict. But to go back into the White

House, go back to the talking points that the White House was circulating. I'm going to read from them now. It says, quote, the administration strongly opposes the Yemen War Powers Resolution on a number of grounds. But the bottom line is that this resolution is unnecessary and would greatly complicate the intense and ongoing diplomacy to truly bring an end to the conflict. Now, when I read that, I thought, okay, well, let's talk to some of the diplomats and experts to see if that's true, that they're engaged in this wonderful diplomacy that we don't want to imperil with a war powers resolution. So I interviewed for this story that you can find on The Intercept, a former undersecretary general of the United Nations who himself was an envoy to Yemen until 2015. His name is Jamal Ben-Omar. And he was extremely critical of the notion that the

Biden administration was engaged in any sort of meaningful diplomacy. He told me, quote, there's been no diplomatic progress whatsoever. There's no political process, no negotiations, or even a prospect of them. And so he says, he concedes that there is a lull in the fighting that's taking place now. And that's kind of the argument that the Biden administration has circled around to say, hey, don't ruin a good thing that we have here. But what he's saying is that that's misleading because just because the fighting is in a lull period now, that doesn't mean that they aren't stocking up, arming, supplying themselves and preparing for more fighting in the future, which I think is exactly right. Just because the fighting is happening, that's not a meaningful piece because, as he says, there's been no serious negotiations to address the underlying problems that are causing this crisis. And so he says, quote, there's been a lull in the fighting, but since there was no concerted effort to move the

political process forward, the lull is a temporary one and all sides are preparing for the worst. He goes on to say the situation is extremely fragile because Yemen has fragmented now. You have different areas of Yemen under the control of different warlords. So he's absolutely right. When they go back to fighting, the situation could be worse than it's been in the past, as hard as that is to imagine. Because of the human toll that I was describing before, I was talking to a former State Department official once who said to me, no matter how bad things are, something I've learned from, I think he was an Africa specialist, something I've learned from my experience in being a diplomat is never assume that things can't get even worse. And so I'm afraid that's the situation with regard to Yemen now. And Biden's own Yemen envoy,

Tim Lenderking, he said, I'm quoting now, he said, quote, the end of the peace agreement, which they had a peace agreement that lapsed several months ago would precip said, quote, the end of the peace agreement, which they had a peace agreement that lapsed several months ago, would precipitate, quote, a return to war. So it feels like the administration is talking out of both sides of its mouth because you have people saying, you know, we've got this great diplomacy. You know, maybe there needs to be checks and balances in the presidency, but why do you want to imperil this great agreement that we have? But the agreement's already lapsed. You know, There's been no meaningful resolution to the problems that caused the war in the first place. So I see no reason why that wouldn't take place

again. And again, earlier this week, we have UNICEF, the UN Children's Organization, warning that 2.2 million Yemeni children are malnourished with over 11,000 having been killed or maimed in the war. So you can't overstate how awful, I mean, all war is awful, but this sadly is in a category of its own. And I wish that there was a sense of urgency on the part of the Senate, who my understanding is, as I said before, they had some Republican senators on board for this. So this was really something that I don't think had to become, or indeed was a partisan issue. And in fact, top Biden administration officials during the Trump administration passed a War Powers Resolution, which Trump subsequently

vetoed. But what was interesting about that is if you look at some of the names, I'm going to read them off to you now. These aren't like low to mid-level people in the Biden administration. These are people at the very top of the administration, like very prominent people wrote a public letter, which you can find, this isn't secret, expressing the importance of passing this War Powers Resolution during the Trump administration. So those figures were Jake Sullivan, who is currently the National Security Advisor to Biden, Samantha Power, Susan Rice, Wendy Sherman, Colin Kahl. These are heavy hitters in the administration, who during the Trump administration

thought, you know, this is important that we have checks on the presidency, that we draw down our support for this terrible war. Suddenly, what happened? They're in power now, and they don't have any of those concerns anymore. So unfortunately, I feel like in situations like this, I actually interviewed a congressional, Democratic congressional staffer who himself said no president wants to empower Congress and, you know, place curbs and limits on their own authority when they're in power. Now, they're happy to do that when they're out of power and raise all these sorts of concerns and, you know, talk about how we need to do something about it. But as soon as they have, as soon as they put on the ring, something about the allure of that, of the unbridled exercise of power, it just gets to them and they forget about what they cared about. So about because it's the Constitution and the intent of the Constitution was to limit the president's power with regard to wartime. I think that strengthening that can only be a good thing. But unfortunately, we have an administration that

doesn't seem interested in that. And the open question now is, as we report in the story, Bernie Sanders says that he, after withdrawing the resolution, is going to try to negotiate with the White House to come to some form of language for legislation that they can agree to. I'm pretty skeptical that the, again, that the White House is going to want to voluntarily put any limits on its own power. Senator Sanders says that if they don't agree to something, then he's going to come back. But, you know, they're in a lame duck session. They're going to lose the House. I think a big question at this point is how much can they're in a lame duck session, they're going to lose the House. I think a big question at this point is how much can they do after the lame duck session? I think probably

a lot less. And if you look at Republican leadership in the House, while many rank and file Republicans have, a surprising number have expressed support for this, I think just because of the constitutional dimension doesn't have to be a partisan thing. The Republican leadership, like McCarthy, have expressed opposition to it, and indeed still want to support the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen. So I think now is the time that if this is going to happen, it's going to happen. But unfortunately, people don't hold to the same ideals that they do when they're not in power, when suddenly they are. So thanks for joining me with this, guys. I think it's a really important issue. I encourage you to try to engage with this to the extent that you can, because it's such an important just separations of power question

that unfortunately is never in the interest of the person that happens to sit in the Oval Office. Once again, that's Ken Klippenstein. Thanks for joining me, guys. Take care. I think everything that might have dropped in 95 has been labeled the golden years of hip-hop. It's Black Music Month, and We Need to Talk is tapping in. I'm Nyla Simone, breaking down lyrics, amplifying voices, and digging into the culture

that shaped the soundtrack of our lives. Like, that's what's really important, and that's what stands out, is that our music changes people's lives for the better. Let's talk about the music that moves us. to hear this and more on how music and culture collide listen to we need to talk from the black effect podcast network on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast this is an iheart podcast