Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 1/27/22: SCOTUS, Ukraine, Good News, Amazon Propaganda, Neil Young, School Masking, Vaccine Distribution, Stolen Focus, & More!

Episode Date: January 27, 2022

Krystal and Saagar talk about the SCOTUS shakeup caused by Justice Breyer's retirement, bipartisan support for war in Ukraine, good news as companies invest billions into rust belt manufacturing, Amazon propaganda being taught in schools, Spotify choosing Joe Rogan over Neil Young, the need to free children from school masking, Biden's humiliation on global vaccine distribution, and how our attention has been stolen by corporate interests with Johann Hari.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/Johann Hari’s Book: https://stolenfocusbook.com/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. But there were some dark truths behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. Enter Camp Shame, an eight-part series examining the rise and fall of Camp Shane and the culture that fueled its decades-long success. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus.

So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. DNA test proves he is not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father? and subscribe today. his irresponsible son, but I have DNA proof that could get the money back. Hold up. They could lose their family and millions of dollars? Yep. Find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. I'm also the girl behind Boy Sober, the movement that exploded in 2024.

You might hear that term and think it's about celibacy, but to me, Boy Sober is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's flexible, it's customizable, and it's a personal process. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it.

Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, thanks for listening to Breaking Points with Crystal and Sagar. We're gonna be totally upfront with you. We took a big risk going independent. To make this work, we need your support to beat the corporate media.

CNN, Fox, MSNBC, they are ripping this country apart. They are making millions of dollars doing it. To help support our mission of making all of us hate each other less, hate the corrupt ruling class more, support the show. Become a Breaking Points premium member today where you get to watch and listen to the entire show,

ad-free and uncut an hour early before everyone else. You get to hear our reactions to each other's monologues. You get to participate in weekly Ask Me Anythings, and you don't need to hear our annoying voices pitching you like I am right now. So what are you waiting for? Go to breakingpoints.com, become a premium member today, which is available in the show notes. Enjoy the show, guys. Good morning, everybody. Happy Thursday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Lots of big breaking news this morning with regards to the Supreme Court, with regards to a potential conflict in Ukraine. Some actual good news, weird silver lining, possibly from the supply chain crisis. We will bring you those details. Also some details about Amazon sponsoring a high school curriculum.

It's not so stuffy. They went so far as to paint their logos in the classroom. It's very disturbing, but also not totally out of line with history of those sorts of things in this country. A little bit of a battle between Neil Young and Joe Rogan and Spotify. We'll give you all of the latest there. Also very excited to talk to Johan Hari. He has a new book out, previous books he's had, Chasing the Scream about drug war. He had another book about depression and what's causing it and the drugs that are

typically used to treat it. His new book that we're going to talk to him about today is about how your attention has been stolen by a variety of actors, not just tech, a variety of sort of modern cultural factors. So we'll dig into all of that. Really interesting book. I just finished it actually this morning. But we wanted to start with the big breaking news with regards to the Supreme Court. Yeah, that's right. Also, for our premium people, we're very sorry about the shortened show from the last time. We're having an extra long AMA. So stay tuned for that over the weekend. Let's start now with the Supreme Court. This is big stuff.

Leaked news. Let's put it up there on the screen. Justice Stephen Breyer, he is going to be retiring at the end of the term in June, Crystal. So June is going to be a pretty wild month here. We're going to have the end of the term. Justice Breyer is going to retire. Then we're going to have to deal with the confirmation. That also is the time when Roe versus Wade is very likely to be decided as well, on top of a bunch of other landmark cases.

So it's going to be a fun time, as they say. It's going to be interesting at least to watch how that all shakes out. Of course, though, there's been some interesting gossip being floated in Washington, which the White House is trying to tamp down. The idea being that Kamala Harris is so unpopular and Biden has now boxed himself in saying, I must nominate a black woman. Well, two birds, one stone, right? Take the vice president, shunt her off to the Supreme Court. She gets a fancy little robe for the rest of her life. Most of us never have to see your face anymore because the Supreme Court doesn't allow cameras. It's win, win, win, as Michael Scott once said. But the White House is shooting that down, at least for right now. Let's take a listen. Thank you. When you were asked about the vice president possibly being selected as a Supreme

Court nominee, you said you're not going to speak to any considerations. Does that mean she is being considered? Again, Peter, I'm not going to speak to the reports of a Supreme Court justice retirement that hasn't been announced. So theoretically, would someone who's- Theoretically. I do like that you preface it. I appreciate that. Just wondering, hypothetically, theoretically, would someone who was an attorney general of a large state and who served with many key Senate votes be an attractive candidate to the president for an open Supreme Court seat. I see what you did there, Peter. But the president has every intention, as he said before, of running for re-election and for running

for re-election with Vice President Harris on the ticket as his partner. But again, I will just reiterate that I have nothing more to offer in terms of specifics or information on the reports this morning. Okay there, Chris. So she's shooting it down for now. I mean, everything is always, you know, not happening until it's happening. Yeah. Look, it's probably just fan fiction on my part, watching too much West Wing or whatever. But, you know, I think, I think it actually would be a very smart move if you think about it, because also, as I believe, in terms of replacing a vice president can happen through Congress. They have majorities right now. They did this with replacing Spiro Agnew, and that's

how Gerald Ford eventually became president. So it's not outside completely of the realm of possibility. Yeah. I mean, I think that part of why it's not going to happen is because it would be so obvious what they were doing of just like, this lady's really unpopular and we cannot have her on the ticket, but we also can't take her off because of identity concerns. So what are we going to do? All right, let's just put her on the Supreme Court. Kind of undermines, you know, any argument about the importance of Supreme Court, etc, if you're just using it to solve your temporary political problem. But the fact that these rumors have been swirling, and this has been swirling around D.C. actually for months now, tells you everything about what a dire political circumstance they are in right now. You've got Joe Biden, who is extremely unpopular, but his VP, who would be the logical choice to succeed him, of course, is even more unpopular. And so the fact that they would even float this idea that this would even be circulating in the bloodstream of Washington as a potential solution to solve their political ailments is quite telling in and of itself.

But just, you know, let's not go crazy because I think it's very unlikely that ultimately they would go in that direction. There are other names that are being circulated. We can throw this tear sheet up on the screen. So Biden poised to announce first wave of nominations to reshape U.S. courts. District Court Judge Katonji Brown Jackson has just been appointed to a key appeals court. People are saying that could signal that she is next in line to possibly be moved up to the Supreme Court. She's got a number of things going for her. She's young. She's only 50 years old. She's a former public defender. And I haven't dug in deep on all of the, you know, rulings and where she stands on a variety of things.

But it seems like from what I have read so far, she's pretty good on the issues I care most about, which is labor unions. She's issued some labor-friendly rulings. She was actually a former clerk also to Stephen Breyer. So, you know, that may make some sense. And then the other thing she has going for her is the fact that she was just recently confirmed to the D.C. Circuit back in June by a vote of 53 to 44. All 50 Democrats plus three Republicans got on board with her confirmation. Those three Republicans were Susan Collins, Lindsey Graham and Lisa Murkowski. So Young seems to have, you know, a judicial philosophy that Democrats would broadly feel comfortable with and, you know, fits the identity criteria that's been laid out.

Yes. And, you know, they look at that, okay, who voted for them recently? Because that just makes it harder for those three Republicans and for the Democrats to say, oh, we were good with her in June, but now suddenly we have a major issue with her. That is still going to be a problem, though. Lindsey Graham already came out and said, hey, look, you guys made us do it, so you're going to have to do it with all these votes. Lindsey was one of the three Republicans who went ahead and voted for her. I do have a strike. I think Manchin and Sinema are going to go along with this.

I think you're right. I mean, Manchin in particular, he kicks up a fuss on these domestic economic issues to serve his corporate donors, but he's a pretty reliable vote when it comes to these sort of confirmations. Yeah. So I asked around and apparently Manchin has never been a real thorn in the side whenever it comes to judicial issues. So it's just not the same political situation. I do have one strike against her though, Crystal, which is that she's related by marriage to Paul Ryan. Her husband there. Her husband is the twin brother of Ryan's brother-in-law, so related by marriage.

But any sort of connection to Paul Ryan is just frankly a bridge too far for me. Apparently he respects her. That's another red flag, in my opinion. Look, it's Supreme Court fights in this particular one.

Obviously it is the biggest news and that's why we chose to lead the show and to cover it. But people need to understand that this is not going to be the same existential level fight that we saw here in D.C. around Gorsuch and around Justice Kavanaugh. And the reason is actually like pretty simple, which is that these this is not a swing seat like we have six three. We also have somebody liberal a liberal justice retiring, being replaced. It's actually much more of a box check for the Democratic coalition for Biden and specifically for Jim Clyburn, who forced him to say that he would nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court. I don't know why judicial stuff doesn't matter more, but whatever. Well, sorry to pause. I think what really happened here is Biden was not planning on picking a black woman to be his vice president.

I think he probably wanted to pick Amy Klobuchar. I didn't think of that. And then when she was sort of implicated in what happened with George Floyd, that put her off the table. But he'd already made his pledge of like, don't worry, we've got you. We're putting a black woman on the Supreme Court when Amy was taken off the table. So I think that's how, that's my, you know, this is an educated guess based on some reporting of what I think actually happened here. That actually seems to make sense. Breyer himself is an odd cat. I mean, he's like 81 years old. From Matt Stoller's writing, he's probably one of the single worst justices whenever it comes to corporate power. He never became an icon the way that RBG did,

or even really, if you talk to legal nerds, which unfortunately I'm friends with a lot of them, a lot of them actually really like Justice Kagan, for example. Breyer never held the same level of esteem amongst the liberal intelligentsia within the law world. And he has also been pretty pissed off that all these people on Twitter keep asking him to retire. And so from what I understand, he's not very happy about the way that this all went down. We have some reporting on that. Let's go ahead and put that on the screen. Multiple sources say that Justice Breyer was not planning to announce his retirement today. They describe him as upset with how this has played out. We will await any official notice from his office and or the SCOTUS public information office. Justice Breyer is actually scheduled to be at the White House today with President Biden. So we'll see whether an

announcement is forthcoming. My guess is that he probably wants to keep everybody on their toes. And also, like, he's still got a job to do, at least until June. And there's some obviously very significant decisions, huge decisions that are coming down the pipeline. So Supreme Court politics is one of those things where it really matters until it doesn't, and it's also hard in order to parse. I would say in this case, the confirmation fight, yes, people are going to kick up a dust, and people are going to try and dig up something,

like we'll see whether it happens, but the stakes are just not as high as a 5-4 decision or a 6-3 like it was with Amy Coney Barrett. In this particular case, like, yeah, you know, it was always going to be Biden was going to get one person to put on the Supreme Court, almost certainly a liberal briar doing what RBG refused to do and, you know, stepping down while there is a Democratic president. Yeah.

So, you know. Well, and I think that's an important point that there was a learning that occurred with RBG, you know, that she held on and wouldn't retire and then ends up, you know, passing away at a time that allows Trump to ultimately pick her replacement. The court, I mean, any illusion thatologies and with, in some cases, especially Justice John Roberts, preserving the institution of the court. So kind of trying to figure out how far can we go in service of our ideology. So ultimately, the fact that, you know, RBG didn't make a move under Obama when she could have left Democrats in a very in a bad position with regards to the balance of the court. Stephen Breyer clearly took that learning. And let's also throw this in the

mix, which is the fact that he's retiring now before the midterms is also an indication of how everybody here is feeling about Democratic prospects in the midterms, because, you know, you don't just need a Democratic president. You need to have a Senate that is ultimately going to back your confirmation, as we saw previously under Obama. So that's also why he's doing this right now, kind of like the last possible moment when a confirmation can occur while Democrats are still firmly, well, sort of tenuously in control of the Senate. So I think that is the other piece of this. You know, you mentioned Matt Stoller's piece, which I recommend to you guys that you go and read at his Substack Big. Subscribe there. He does a really great job breaking these things down. I

mean, the depth of knowledge that he has on antitrust is just astonishing. The history and the depth of specific knowledge. He's an incredible resource. But he goes back through Justice Breyer's orientation and ideology with regards to antitrust, tracks it from the beginning through to when he becomes a Supreme Court justice. social issues, on issues of corporate power and labor, that split has not been nearly so clear. And oftentimes, in fact, you've had a near unanimous or actual unanimous majority in favor of strengthening, furthering corporate power. He points in particular to a decision that Justice Breyer was part of with regards to Verizon that he actually helped to shape, which not only said, yes, Verizon, you can have monopoly power, but actually bizarrely made the case that their having monopoly power was a good thing for competition and strengthened anti-monopoly somehow. The fact that they were a monopoly actually was good for anti-monopoly.

That was the bizarre and convoluted logic of this decision that Breyer, again, helped to shape and sign on to and was part of, I think it was a nine to nothing unanimous decision on the Supreme Court, which shows you that, yes, the Republicans on the court are the most reliable sort of backstops for corporate power, but RBG had bad decisions. Breyer had a bad ideology with regards to antitrust and furthered that sort of bipartisan corporate power consensus. Yeah, there you go. Why don't we tell the people about more bipartisanship, Crystal? Yes. Great, great segue. A bipartisan pro-war caucus here in D.C. is making the world worse, part 1,323. Here's the very latest with regards to Ukraine, and then I'll get to the specific moves that Democrats and Republicans are making right now. Let's go ahead and throw this New York Times tear sheet that we have here up on the screen. So you'll recall Putin put out, here's my list

of demands I don't want, and the biggest one being I don't want NATO to expand to Ukraine, and I want a promise that that is not ultimately going to happen. And he was pushing, hey, I need you guys to actually like respond in writing to what my request was. So the U.S. did deliver their written response to Russia's demands with regard to Eastern Europe. And those, you know, that written response is not public, which frankly, I think it should be. I always think transparency is good in this regards. But what Tony Blinken, Secretary of State, is saying publicly is that effectively they didn't give really an inch that everything they put in there was, you know, things that they had already said with regards to Russia. Here's some of the reporting. They say the document suggests reciprocal transparency

measures regarding forced posture in Ukraine, as well as measures to increase confidence regarding military exercises and maneuvers in Europe. The Biden administration has already made such proposals, so unclear whether the U.S. response will have any effect on the growing crisis over Russia's massive troop buildup along Ukraine's borders. Blinken going further and saying it reiterates publicly what we've said for many weeks. This morning, the latest from Russia is they have not seen the answers yet, but they are very pessimistic that is going to address any of their concerns. So ultimately, none of this moves the ball forward in any way significantly at all. time, Democrats partnering with Republicans are helping to make everything worse and make the possibility for diplomacy much less likely. Let's put this next tear sheet up on the screen from

The Intercept. Sarah Sirota doing the reporting here saying Democrats are rushing through a massive Ukraine defense bill. The House of Representatives, spearheaded, of course, by Nancy Pelosi, is looking to skip markup and hold a floor vote on this package as soon as next week. Here's the details. This legislation would send $500 million from the foreign military financing program to Ukraine for 2022. That would make Ukraine the third largest recipient of such funding from this account, surpassed only by Israel and Egypt. So that's the level of military funding that they are pushing to send to Ukraine. Of course, Republicans have their own bad ideas with this regard. Theirs would only give Ukraine $450 million versus the $500 million, but it's worse in a significant respect, which is it would also impose sanctions related to that Nord Stream 2 pipeline project. So what this does is it just makes it much more difficult

for diplomacy to actually happen. It sort of binds the administration's hands. It sends this very aggressive, hawkish signal towards Russia and is one more piece inching us up towards having an actual conflict here. And the other thing I would say is that, you know, how many of these Democrats and Republicans have been running around, oh, we don't have enough money, how will we pay for it, oh, the inflation, et cetera, et cetera. When it comes to something like this, suddenly money's not a problem. I was going to say, but how will we pay for it? There's like

that meme of when you do capitals, but how will we pay for it? That's basically how I feel here. The Mitch McConnell element of this is also excellent. Go ahead and put that on the screen from Mitch. Mitch is praising the Biden move as encouraging after the Pentagon says it could put more than 8,500 troops on alert. So look, don't let anybody ever tell you that bipartisanship in Washington is dead. Every time you hear them complain about it, it's not true, especially whenever it comes to foreign policy. It's on bettering all of our lives where they all seem to disagree and disagree just enough that they're not able to ever actually do anything. I think that the important element to all of this is what do the actual Ukrainians say?

Put that on the West. Quote, the buildup of Russian troops isn't as rapid as some claim. You know, this is the part where I just feel like these, I feel terrible for them. They are being used as pawns in a great game. You know, people here in DC, Alexander Vindman and all these other neocons, they are not acting in a way that the Ukrainians want them to act. And same, I mean, the Russians obviously, you know, causing some of this crisis and then we with NATO and then our rhetoric ramping up, the U.S. Congress shipping aid over there. Do the Ukrainians even want it? Has anybody

asked them? They're like, hey, what's going on? It turns out it's a complicated situation. Turns out also they find the rhetoric, the alarmist rhetoric from Moscow and Washington to not match the actual situation, period. That is the part which actually drives me completely nuts, which is, you know, lack of regional understanding of the dynamics, both in our past, either promises, guarantees, whatever you want to call it, around NATO, the history also of Ukraine itself over the last 10 years.

It's been a complete mess, obviously, with the civil war and the Donbass and then our own efforts in order to arm the Ukrainian military or not. Big debates. Neither of that worked, by the way. Same in terms of Moscow. A lot of their gambles on how this was all going to play out didn't exactly work out as well. The lack of holistic perspective is creating a massive moral panic here in Washington, which the actual Ukrainians are telling us does not exist.

And they are telling us that it's not helpful, Crystal. I mean, why can't we listen to them? If this was another country, you know, let's take other examples that had been invaded and stuff in the past. They are almost always the ones who are warning the loudest, saying, hey, please come. We need aid. We need help. They're telling you explicitly, stop. What you're doing is actually making the situation much worse.

It's terrible because they really are being used like pawns and then you can tell how much propaganda you're being fed by the u.s news media by the fact that no one will show you that yeah that's from bbc ukraine you had to find it and translate it i found it on twitter yeah and i was like how could i mean you know this shows how naive i just continue to be like how this kind of can't be real because I'm not seeing it anywhere else yes but I look this is some real BBC journalists for Russia so no it's a real statement they really said this and it also tracks with the fact that when we pulled out our diplomats families along with you know pressuring like UK and Australia and I think one other Germany was it that did it they were like stop doing this this isn't helpful like this is alarmist you're freaking out and it's actually

making the situation worse and trying to emphasize that hey we've got all of these different diplomatic missions over 100 here in Ukraine and only these four are doing this so just keep in mind that what the overall picture looks like is different from what you're getting right now from the U.S. news media. And I think that is extraordinarily important. all kinds of issues with, guys, has been more right on this issue than almost anyone else in mainstream press. And listen, I haven't listened to all of his commentary, so I do not want to co-sign all of the things that he's been saying. But what I have seen, he has tried to lay out, hey, this is maybe the Russian perspective here,

and hey, this is probably why it's not worth us sending our men and women to potentially fight and die over Ukraine's borders. I saw a piece in Axios this morning where they were lamenting how many Republican candidates and in particular candidates in primaries were picking up on Tucker's rhetoric. And they're saying, oh, this is so terrible that they're now echoing the fact that we don't want to go to war. That's what they are lamenting.

That's what he's getting called like a traitor and all these insanity because he doesn't want us to go to war. That's what they are lamenting. That's what he's getting called like a traitor and all these insanity because he doesn't want us to go to war. Again, I have lots of issues with this man that I have laid out plenty in the past, but it is a sad state of affairs that on this particular issue, he's as close as it comes in the mainstream media to actually having a decent take. But because it's him, then there becomes this other sort of counterbalance. He's a traitor on the Democratic side of, oh, no, we've got to be hawkish with regards to Russia. It's Russiagate all over again with this stuff. And it just drives me completely insane. And that's how you end up with a bill like this one that The Intercept reported on potentially being sped through Congress with no markup, vote as soon as next week.

You know, Crystal, it also just tells you, outside of the Tucker element, how full of it some of these people are. They are always waxing on about the transatlantic alliance and the continental European and the connection with the United States. Ask the Europeans. Ask Berlin.

Berlin doesn't want to go to war. Berlin, for their own idiotic domestic reasons, decided to stop nuclear power and be reliant on Russia. You know what? I think you're idiots. You run your country the way you want, okay? I don't care. You decide. It's your territory. At the end of the day, you're 10 times closer to them than we are. You people decide. Why should we have to be more hawkish about Germany's borders than Germany itself. Why, if Brussels and the EU are telling us that we're freaking out and causing a panic on their continent, why don't we listen to them? I mean, since when has it that we have to make Europe in our own image? It's not 1945, okay?

I mean, we built them up specifically so that they could have determined and determine their own destiny. If they decide in order to live with this situation with Russia, so be it. That is not our problem. Yeah. In order to say that. I'd also point to this. People are trying to draw comparisons with Asia. It's completely different.

The South Koreans and the Japanese and the Singaporeans, the Vietnamese and many of our allies in Asia are way more hawkish than we are in terms of against China. They are way more concerned about what's actually happening in there. And if anything, the U.S. is very much following the mood of the people in the region, whereas here we are trying to some domestic political concerns that may be weighing into why we're seeing this play out right now. And, you know, I don't doubt. Look, I'm not one to be like, oh, Russia is a good actor in this and they're great. And Putin has nothing to play. Nobody's saying that. However, let's keep in mind that who's been most aggressive in pushing this stuff from the West point of view, the U.S. and the U.K.? You have two world leaders there who are tremendously unpopular domestically in big trouble right now. Guess what is very effective sometimes in helping to revive or distract from

other political problems, helping to create some sort of a foreign entanglement that is very, you know, very fraught and very stressful to keep the population focused on that. That's one thing. And then, of course, you also have the fact that right now we've withdrawn from Afghanistan. And I don't think it's any accident that now the military industrial complex is like, where do we get our next buck from? What's the next what's the next arms deal? What's the where's the next place, you know, that we can get involved with that's going to make sure that we get the cash that we've been accustomed to over the coming years? So those are the sorts of factors that Ukrainians are actually seeing pretty clearly

based on that statement where they're saying, hey, listen, I mean, this is not a good situation, but you all are going way further than what we're actually seeing happening on the ground here. So I would listen to them way before I listen to whatever our news media is trying to spin us on. Well said. Okay, let's move on. Some good news. You know, this is something we very rarely get to report here. So we compiled a bunch of stories where obviously we've talked a lot about the supply chain crisis, about semiconductors in particular, the chips, which are going to run everything.

They really do determine our future. It's why you can't buy a new car right now. It's why right now in the United States we have a face, a critical shortage, which I will get to. Well, that shortage, well, yes, it's been awful, and it has driven prices up for millions and millions of people, it has made life more miserable, is at least forcing some companies in order to reconsider globalization and start trying to build things in America again. Look at that, Crystal. It turns out it was that simple the entire time. So let's put this up there on the screen. This is a first really good piece of news from the Detroit Free Press. GM is going to invest $7 billion in four facilities across Michigan, creating 4,000 jobs. 4,000 is a paltry sum compared to the millions that were lost to China after the entry into the WTO,

but it's something. And even more important is that these $2.6 billion will be building a new battery factory actually in Lansing, Michigan, and $4 billion to convert an existing factory to make electric pickup. So making America the domestic future for electric vehicles, making it so that we can fulfill our destiny if we really do want to do something about our use of petroleum and try to transfer to an electric future, we are a decade or more behind China in terms of their domestic supply chain. This is what they were doing in 2008, 2009. So we have still a big catch-up to do. But look, this is a real thing that I want to point to. Give props to GM.

Props also to the people who, you know, the union, which was involved as well. They're very, very happy about this. I think that's awesome. Let's put this next one up there on the screen. Another really good piece of news. I'll tell you why also I'm so excited about this one is Intel is investing $20 billion in an Ohio chip making facility. And what I'm really happy about in these two cases is that the two things that we just announced, they're not in the Sunbelt in Arizona, in Texas, you know, in Georgia, which look nothing against those states, but they've been doing a little bit too well. I'm joking, but that's where the population growth is coming.

You know, some of the more downwardly mobile parts of the United States were being neglected. So to see Michigan and Ohio, the people there who suffered so much from globalization, to see these, what, $27 billion of capital being injected into their states, this is great stuff. Also because this is not only 3,000 permanent jobs in terms of the chip-making facility and the eventual fab which will come, but it actually is going to bring in $100 billion over the next decade. And what did we learn with GM and the plant closures all throughout the mid-2000s? It's not just about the plants. There's stuff around them.

There's the dry cleaner, which services the guys who work there. It's not just about the plants. There's stuff around them. There's the dry cleaner, which services the guys who work there. There's the restaurants. Then there are the people who sell the stuff to the GM plant, the raw inputs. The more of that that we onshore bring into the domestic supply chain, number one, we rule our future. It's not acceptable to be reliant upon a foreign rival power in order to power the technology that we need in order to, number one, be competitive, but two, to live. And then the third is, is that we need to at least forge a way that you don't have to be in the information economy. The information economy is not for everybody, and that's fine. And you shouldn't have to be relegated to serfdom in

serving the people in the information economy in order to survive. So this is exactly what's missing from the U.S. economy right now. It is, you know, look, it's not enough. We lost hundreds of billions. So this is 27 billion. But it's something. And it makes it so that other companies can follow suit. I also want to give props to the Biden administration. They did, you know, praise Intel, all of that. Thank you, by the way. This is exactly what the government should be doing. So two pieces of really good news that we have. Yeah. On the Michigan GM news, too, it's unclear in Ohio, but these will be union jobs. And that GM, exactly. That matters a lot as well. We got some numbers just recently that even though we've covered, of course, the great resignation and

the union drives and Starbucks and all of those things, union density continued to fall significantly last year, in part, I'm sure, because of the continued effects of the pandemic and in part because, listen, we've been in a 40-year trend of union density ultimately falling. That matters a lot in terms of just having some countervailing force to push back against the imperative of corporate America to just fixate on profits and to shrink and shrink and shrink the share of the pie that is going to the workforce. So little moves like this that help to bolster the labor movement. I mean, a big part of why you've had the labor movement crumble and fall apart is because you did have this massive outsourcing of jobs that had been

previously unionized. So helping to rebuild that even in a small way makes a big difference. To your point about the follow-on effects from, you know, the investments here with regards to Michigan, they say for each new full-time job created at a factory, typically two more jobs are created elsewhere in the state in relation to that plant. Small businesses thrive. I mean, you know, it's just creates a much healthier ecosystem. And if you've lived in this part of the country where you've seen those factory jobs go away, you see the way that it just strips the whole lifeblood out of a community. So for in a rare instance to see a little bit of that injected back in is heartening, even though, again, we shouldn't overstate the scale of this. It's sad that it took a global pandemic, catastrophic supply chain failure

for the capitalists involved to be like, you know, it might have been better if we weren't so dependent on everywhere else in the world. It might have been better for us. This is not charity. They're not doing this because they care about Michiganders or they care about unions got, you know, furthest from that, that it could possibly be. It's because they have calculated

that this supply chain issue has been a massive hit to their bottom line. And that maybe if they had invested a little bit more here and having native capacity, then they would be in a better position to profit right now. Of course, the trend over decades, and this is a big part of why we're having the price increases and all the issues that we're having right now, the trend over decades has been towards just-in-time. The trend over decades has been towards, hey, let's shave off whatever we can from labor costs, no matter where we're pushing it around the world. And that has made

these companies and our supply chains extremely fragile. If there's one thing we should have learned in the pandemic, it's that, listen, as a country, we have to have some of our own native capacity to build things and, in particular particular be able to create things like PPE, which we learned was, you know, sourced around the world. So with regards to the chips, you probably know more about this than I do, but there was a bill that passed through the Senate. Yeah, the Chips Act. That's still hanging out in the House. So I don't know what's going on with that, why they haven't pushed that forward. But, you know, you look at China and why they have such an advantage on these things. It's because they have a national strategy, because they have priorities, because they say, listen, this industry is important to us.

We want to be a global leader. We're going to invest it. We're going to make it happen. Now, that's a lot easier when you have an authoritarian government, effectively. But obviously, there are values other than just shareholders making a buck and corporate bottom line that our country should be investing in here as well. And we shouldn't be dependent on the global corporations to experience, you know, a once in a lifetime pandemic to realize that we need to go in a slightly different direction. I completely agree. And I want to also reiterate what you said. Let's go and put that next one up

there on the screen. This is from the Cleveland or the Columbus Dispatch, and they specifically tell the story of how Ohio got this. Some of it I'm not the biggest fan of, which is basically throwing massive tax incentives. I actually thought it was kind of gross. Yeah. Yeah, look, it is what it is. I personally don't like these, you know, reality style shows in order to lure companies, but I get it. But within that story, and something that's very important, is specifically the passage of the Chips, and something that's very important, is specifically the passage of the Chips for America Act that passed the Senate, which includes $52 billion for semiconductor research, design, and manufacturing, and the knowledge that Intel had

that some of that funding would eventually come towards them, specifically through the Chips Act, which has passage. So look, government can influence these decisions. Don't let anybody tell you it's just like some raucous free market. And this is the other thing about China. Give me a break. I interviewed this guy named Steven Levine who writes about electric cars. This was over on The Realignment. But we spent over an hour talking about this around the electric car domestic supply chain.

And he explained very, very, very in a scary way, really, about how China, as you said, identified 12 years ago. They were like, we're going electric. We're going all electric. Execute. And so they went all over the world. We did that New York Times story here that we covered about how they acquired the rights to these cobalt mines and the raw materials. Then they brought in Tesla, threw a bunch of money at them, and were like, hey, go ahead and build our domestic supply chain for us. Bring in the sourcing, which they did. And now China's electric cars are on par with Tesla.

These are real cars. They're really, really good electric cars. They are over a decade ahead of us, not only in the control of the supply, but also, frankly, soon, and you can already see this out in San Francisco, some people are buying the Chinese electric cars because they're more fun to drive. So this is something where our lack of action has left us a decade behind whenever it comes to this. Of course, the fact that CHIPS Act languishes in the House of Representatives under Nancy Pelosi is a perfect example of why. But still, it influenced the decision-making and is bringing real jobs to the state of Ohio, real jobs to the state of Michigan, jobs that they rightfully deserve and which were taken from them as a result of failures by our government. And just to give you an example of how vulnerable we are, put this next one up there,

which is that some manufacturers who rely on semiconductors are down to less than five days of inventory. Five days. You know, I've told you this before, Crystal, but there are stories coming out of people who are buying new cars with empty slots inside of them where the dealers are promising, yeah, in like a year we'll slot in that, you know, GPS. I'm not buying a car like that.

I mean, what kind of madness is this? No wonder the used car market is so hot. But that's the problem, which is we don't have the chips. GM factories, speaking of union jobs more, have had to go dark for like three weeks, four weeks. I mean, that's, can you imagine not working for a month? What would you do? I mean, this is- I've got a good friend in Louisville who's been in this situation, who works at the truck assembly plant there. And yeah, I mean, they've just had shutdown after shutdown because this part, that part, And the biggest thing is the chips.

Yeah. That, you know, and then that creates tremendous uncertainty for them and your life. I mean, it's just a total cascading effect. What are you going to do? Yeah, not pay rent for a month? This is madness. And so this has cascading effects, the jobs, the manufacturing. It's about being a real country.

This is what it looks like. All the new tech companies in the world cannot solve the fact that it's freaking hard to build cars. It's hard to build stuff. You know, even these cameras here. You know, we ordered our fancy computer thanks to our premium subscribers in order to export our show properly. That took like two months in order to get because we needed the highest end chips in order to process it. So, yes, even us lowly podcasters are suffering as a result of the supply chain crisis. Feel bad for us, guys. That's really the point of this segment. That's what's important.

We don't even matter close to these people who really deserve it. They need it. They've been screwed over for 20 years. We need 10 times more of this. So finally, some good news that we can actually report to you. Yeah, indeed. Indeed. So we try to not only bring you the outrage, but also the small slivers of hope that we do see. Bingo. All right, let's go ahead and move on. Amazon, Crystal. So this is some really, I don't even know what's going on with this.

Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. Amazon is paying for a high school course in which they are basically teaching anti-union propaganda where they provided $50,000 in necessary materials to start the program. Okay, fine. But they went ahead and plastered the weird Amazon slogans around the room, including customer obsession, bias for action, deliver results. Look, I think these are good things, but not when you're a little child. I don't really know why you need to be learning this. I just think it's, look, it's a state failure. It's like when we played that

video here of all those teachers who were scrambling for cash. It was so bad. It was horrible. You're so right. It is like that, isn't it? Where you're like, oh, yeah, hey, Amazon, thank you so much, Amazon. It's like when the Chan Zuckerberg initiative donated $100 million to, what was it, Newark schools, and it turned out they just flushed the cash down the drain and it didn't actually do anything. It's actually a really sad story, frankly.

But this is just an emblem of how, A, our public education or education system in general is totally broken. But, B, I mean, why you don't want private interests, Crystal, engaged in the education system. That's right. I mean, this is so incredibly blatant. Just to give you a sense, because Vice got their hands on the actual, like, the syllabus and the curriculum. And so some of the things that they want to teach in an exercise about worker motivation, one team activity prompts students to, quote, brainstorm ways you could motivate your employees

other than bonuses and high salaries. So how do we motivate these lazy workers without, you know, paying them a living wage? How do we get that accomplished? So there's lots of things like that. You know, they talked to, they reached out to the school for comment, and they said the pathway was named after Amazon, and thanks for the company's generous donation,

and Amazon was brought on as an industry expert, something that all linked learning pathways are expected to have. And the school principal in the, like, picture announcing it is wearing an Amazon-branded polo shirt. And I don't blame the school because they're probably screwed financially. I mean, that's the thing is Amazon's like, hey, we'll give you 50,000 bucks and you got to put our branding on the walls. And here's the curriculum we want you to use. And they don't have cash from, you know, traditional sources like government. So they have to they have to get it where they can. I mean, that's why this is such a systemic failure. And then the other situation is this town where this is happening in San Bernardino, California, Amazon

is the dominant player in terms of the jobs market locally. I mean, Amazon just, you know, is everywhere. So when a lot of these kids graduate high school, they probably are going to go and work for Amazon. And so you've turned the school into just a direct pipeline to indoctrinate these kids in the Amazon way. And I'm sure their section on unions is going to be extraordinarily enlightening in terms of Amazon's views towards the labor movement. I love the part in there where they go, here's how you negotiate with the labor union. I'm like, yeah, let's start indoctrinating them early in how to screw over people.

Yeah, I mean, they actually have them learning Amazon's corporate story and all this crap like that. And listen, Henry Ford would be proud of this. This is extraordinarily blatant, but it is not really out of step with the history of development of education curriculum. I've talked here about how in West Virginia for a long time, there was an

explicit law that you could not teach labor history. There was an organized actual conspiracy to keep the wins and the strength of the labor movement effectively hidden from students so that they wouldn't understand how important the labor movement has been to the development of this country and the development of basic worker rights. That was explicitly kept out of curriculums, both at the state and from the federal level. So again, this is like a little extra brazen, but it actually is pretty consistent with the way that a lot of curriculum has been developed in this country and why students don't learn some of the most vital history and some of the most vital sort of lessons they could learn with regards to empowering themselves in the workforce. Yeah. And our producer, James, found this story, an update to the one that we had

went ahead and shown you. Go ahead and put this up there on the screen. Amazon is now going to face a formal complaint from a labor board over a worker firing. The NLRB said Friday, an allegation that Amazon illegally fired a worker for organizing actually had merit. So this is one which is really important. You almost never see this actually happening. This is the first time the NLRB has kind of shown some teeth here, Crystal, because they also are ordering Amazon to redo that union election at the warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. So two different times here where they've been cited now for illegally firing somebody for organizing, allegedly, according to the NLRB. That being said, fines, probably what they make in like 0.01 seconds.

And in terms of the actual stuff that they have against them, it's not great, but it's still, they're getting called out. They're being shown for what they are and they're trying desperately, which is why I think they're doing this school initiative to try to bolster their image for the longterm because a lot of people see them for what they're doing. Yeah. And we had covered this story. This was Daquan Smith, who was an organizer with Amazon Labor Union, who was forced into homelessness after Amazon fired him by understanding he's got a new job now and he's, you know, he's doing better. But it's just outrageous the way that they go, whether it's Christian Smalls, whether it's Daquan Smith, the way that they go after any worker who tries to agitate for better conditions for themselves

and for their fellow workers. And so it's going to be interesting to see if there's a better result this time in Bessemer as they redo that election. Overall, the landscape is so difficult, though, because workers are not crazy to think, hey, this is a gigantic risk if I stick my neck out. And you're right. Listen, is Amazon going to be chastened by this National Labor Relations Board decision? No. I mean, they just consider it like a cost of doing business and a small one at that. So the threat of having their workers unionized so that they could actually have, you know, power and control in their own lives, in their own workplaces is far greater to them than, you know, the threat of the NLRB coming after them for firing this employee or that employee ultimately, which is sad and which is why

the landscape for labor, even though you have near record high numbers of people supporting labor unions, we've had strike waves that were, you know, ongoing before the pandemic and have now picked back up in spite of the fact that you have this surge of discontent among the broader public and an understanding that they're getting screwed and an understanding that the way to do something about it is by collectively coming together. And yet, because the landscape is so brutally rigged against them, you still end up with lower union density. You still end up with a labor movement that is ultimately hobbled. So listen, one of the big reasons that I ultimately did decide to pull

the lever for Joe Biden is because I knew we would put better people on the NLRB. But that sort of thing only ultimately gets you so far. Yeah, that's really, really well said. Okay, let's go ahead and move on. This is one of my favorite stories. Go ahead. Neil Young versus Joe Rogan. You may have already seen this story, but we couldn't resist covering this one. Neil Young, let's go ahead and put Rolling Stone here up on the screen, wrote a letter to his management team saying, I want you to let Spotify know immediately, today, that I want all my music off of their Spotify's platform. They can have Joe Rogan or they can have Young, not both.

Okay? And he's concerned about, quote, false information about vaccines. Okay. So that's stage one. Stage two is, I guess he actually pulled the letter down. So I don't know if he... This was very fishy. The letter disappears. Yeah guess he actually pulled the letter down. So I don't know if he. This was very fishy. The letter disappears.

Yeah. Nobody knows what's going on. So I don't know if he ultimately looked at this and was like, you know, I don't know if this is really going to work out for me. Because ultimately, I mean, Rogan's the biggest podcast in the world. He brings in lots of revenue and lots of new, you know, listeners to Spotify's platform. He's been, he's like their flagship thing over there that they're doing, especially with regards to podcasts. So the next phase, the next act here, Wall Street Journal, let's put this up on the screen, is that Spotify was like, all right.

They're like, okay, cool. So we choose Joe Rogan. And they take down Neil Young's music. I mean, here's, there's a lot here that just really bothers me. First of all, this idea that Joe Rogan is the big villain of our time is just so insanely absurd. And I often hear people on, see people on Twitter saying basically like, the people who are most upset about Joe

Rogan have probably never listened to an entire, you know, to a single podcast that he's done. Because if you did, you wouldn't know know that, yeah, sometimes he has on guests that I wish he wouldn't have on. Sometimes they go down rabbit holes that I wish they wouldn't go down. But this man is so open to talking to everyone. He's not some nefarious villain figure.

He's very actually one of the best, nicest, most well-intentioned people I've ever met personally. Which we can attest to personally, yeah. And by the way, think of all the other crap that's out there. You've got morons out there right now trying to get us into World War III, okay? You've got people who want kids to be kept out of school indefinitely.

I mean, that's anti-science. And yet, where's the outrage over that? No, I'm so glad that you said that, Crystal. And you know, this is the thing, too. Like, with the Neil Young situation, it just shows the absolute ludicrousness of the way that they conceive of activism, right? Which is that, oh, I'm going to try, weaponize, like, my brand, stop them, and pressure them in order to stop with Rogan. They did the same thing with Chappelle. I actually thought that the CEO of Spotify, Daniel Elk, put this really well whenever he was interviewed about this previously.

He was like, yeah, look, we have a lot of rappers. They make tens of millions of dollars on Spotify every single year. And, you know, we don't police what they have to say. And none of you idiots seem to care whenever they're talking about, you know, some really misogynistic, terrible stuff. I'm for that. I'm actually for lots of people to be able to make money, basically in whichever way that they want. It's really not up to us to tell Spotify or whomever, especially when it's a platform, that this or that is not acceptable. And, you know,

this is the same thing, which is that whenever it comes to discussions like the one I'm going to be talking about in my monologue about schools and mass and about children and absolute risk. Where is the, you know, boycott of CNN by other, by Neil Young or whomever who would be appear in some CNN original series, I'm sure for future CNN plus about the misinformation that they're spewing. It only targets one way. How about the people who want us to dance on the graves of people who died of COVID after not getting the vaccine? How about the people who want us to dance on the graves of people who died of COVID after not getting the vaccine? How about those people? I mean, I just I think it's so insane the way that people have fixated on this one thing that they're upset about. And look, I don't like it either.

The amount the anti-vax people that are out there, the people who are cherry picking data and who are snake oil salesmen. I've got a big issue with that as well. But guess what? There's a lot of cranks. There's a lot of bad information out there. There's a lot of dangerous information out there. Our friend Zed Jelani had a great post about how sad it is that Neil Young used to be, you know, counterculture figure, you know, wrote a song about Kent State, for example, something Zed points out. And actually during the Bush administration, went on this free speech tour,

because remember the lingo and the sort of like jingoism at the time was, oh, you can't criticize the president. And so he was aggressive in saying, no, it's patriotic to criticize. And good for him. That was the right stance to ultimately take. And Zed also points out, you know, after 9-11, there's a whole 9-11 truth of thing. Plenty of people. You can't have this conversation. There wasn't that instinct towards censorship that now there is. And again, it's so selective. And I think it's so convenient for people in power to pick Joe Rogan out like he's the problem, like he's

the villain. No, look at yourself. Look at your own failings. You all are the villains here. Don't try to pawn it off on Joe. Same. Remember, you know, the Surgeon General recently came out and said that the Surgeon General said Joe basically suggested that Joe Rogan should be censored for misinformation. And, you know, Ryan tweeted this. Why don't you go on the show, Dr. Morthy? I think that's how you refer to him. Go back, Morthy. Dr. Morthy.

Go ahead. You go, General Morthy, whatever. Go on the show. If you have such a big message, there's 11 million people who watch per episode. You are welcome to go and defend yourself there. You've seen Joe interview these people. The Surgeon General would make a claim. He'd be like, hey, Jamie, go ahead and look that up. The Surgeon General could prepare a slide deck. I'm sure that Joe and them would be welcome to do it, all of that. But these people

are so arrogant that they just reach for the censorship button every time. So as you point to, they never ask for the censorship of stuff, which is really, really dangerous. They also, it's very selective. And then B, it's just a lack of, the lack of the ability and the faith in order to engage somebody on their own terms. You and I were not happy with those Dr. Malone or Dr. Peter McCullough interviews. And so what happened? We had on Dr. Vinay Prasad on this show who wrote a 3,000-word piece, and we went by it, claim by claim by claim. And by the way, I sent that piece to Joe, even though it was critical of his podcast, and he tweeted it out, okay? He tweeted out that piece about what that Dr. Vinay Prasad, which wrote specific criticisms of his own podcast. So, you know, it's not hard.

This is a very simple thing that you're able to do. And, you know, watching this just terrible campaign against them, look, props to Spotify, but I got to be honest, I mean, you know, it only takes one for the dam to break. You can't give an inch of that stuff. I hope they don't. Because that's what ultimately emboldens people. But who's next, Taylor Swift or somebody?

When they get a win, you know, when they see that their tactic works, that's what emboldens them. You can't give an inch. And that's the other piece is like, again, we've talked about those episodes with Malone and we had on Dr. Prasad. But it's also very selective. I mean, this is the other thing. It's like something we've talked about here. The right loves to claim Joe because they see his cultural power. And so anytime he says something they agree with, they amplify it.

That's right. The left wants to like pick out those same things to distance themselves from him. And it just creates this very skewed impression of what who he actually is, the range of guests that he has on. I mean, if you were to watch the news media, you would only think, you would think every episode was basically like anti-vax cranks, just with false claim after false claim after false. And that's just not reality. I mean, the man will talk to like anyone across the political spectrum.

I listened to him on my drive in this morning. He was talking to some lady who was a lawyer and does spear phishing. And they were like both crying about the first time that they killed a white-tailed deer okay that's what the joe rogan experience actually is that crap needs to be censored yeah exactly he's like emotionally telling the story of the first time that he had to kill a deer or you know i mean obviously the comedians many of whom i've loved and who have been introduced to the fitness you know, I mean, obviously the comedians, many of whom I love and who have been introduced to the fitness, you know, podcasts or whatever. That guy recently had on knees over toes.

Yeah, this is real dangerous information. Teaching old people or young people like me who have knee problems to go and follow a guy on Instagram to learn how to do some exercises in order to heal your legs. Actually listen to the man before, you know, all of this stuff. But I got to say, I'm worried. Props to Spotify for standing up. But the next one could be a Taylor Swift. The next one could be, I don't know, the Chainsmokers or whatever.

Some brand that gets billions of views on Spotify. And then when it comes to that, I don't know how tough these people stand. Props to Daniel Elk on this one. I hope that the spine continues to be there. He's been trying to be strong with the whole, like, yeah, I mean, the initial backlash against Rogan on the

platform coming from within totally dismissed that as well. I mean, listen, here's what I'll say. Joe's not perfect, none of us are, but if the country was more, follow Joe Rogan's cues towards listening, engaging, debate, long, nuanced conversations versus the Twitter conversation or the CNN, MS, debate, long, nuanced conversations versus, you know,

the Twitter conversation or the CNN, MSNBC, Fox News conversation, we'd be in a lot better place. That's really well said. All right, Sagar, what are you looking at? Well, as Barry Weiss is apparently so controversial for saying, an entire generation of young people will remember the ridiculous COVID restrictions we've seen over the last two years as a catastrophic moral crime, from decreased development in young children to the robbing of college students and young entry-level professionals who have had some of the most important years of their lives taken away from them. And yet, I still get messages every day from parents.

But Sagar, we simply don't know. You can't understand because you're not a parent. You're a heartless child killer. Perhaps it's true that I cannot empathize fully because I don't have kids, but I can at least try to convince you that championing restrictive policies for children is bad and not based upon my personal experience, but based upon actual data. Sometimes it takes a more neutral party to take the emotion out and to deliver a level-headed case. So here we go. On the fourth point is mortality.

Every other day, you see some story like this that goes viral about a kid who died of COVID. This is terribly tragic. And as usual, though, it's almost certainly more to the story. Take this heart-wrenching one from the Salt Lake Tribune about the last words of a three-year-old who died on a ventilator. That is horrific, but the headline is that COVID isn't so mild for kids. And yet in the very same story, they tell you right there

that the child who died also had asthma, pneumonia, and quote, other illnesses. In other words, this child was very, very, very ill. And like almost everyone who dies from COVID, there were many, many other factors at play. Furthermore, a single story like that doesn't tell parents all of anything. What is the actual risk of dying from COVID for my child? The media doesn't tell you that. Luckily, Dr. Peter Attia actually crunched the numbers because the media is refusing to do so. And the results will literally shock you. Put this up there on the screen. This chart shows the U.S. death rate for age groups under 35 as a multiple of the COVID death rate.

Okay, so for children ages 0 to 5, they are 11 times more likely to die in a car accident, 9.5 times more likely to die of homicide, 12 times more likely to die from drowning. For ages 5 to 14 years, these children are 10.5 times more likely to die of a car accident, 6.5 times more likely to die of suicide, 5 times more likely to die of homicide. Do you guys get the idea? Childhood drowning is far more of a problem right now than children dying of COVID. We would actually be better off putting all of our current energy around school closures in mass into lifeguards and teaching kids how to swim. It would actually protect more children and save more lives. So that is on the absolute risk side.

But what else should we consider? Of course, the top responsibility of a society is to care and nurture its young for the future. How is nurturing going in the COVID era? As I have previously alluded to, it's a catastrophe. Infants born during the pandemic score lower on average on tests of gross motor, fine motor, and communication skills compared with those who were born before it. It didn't matter whether the parent was infected with COVID or not. In other words, it is a result of the pandemic environment and restrictions themselves. Furthermore, when looking at infants' neurodevelopmental scores, it actually gets way worse. Go ahead and look at this chart. Pandemic-born babies scored two standard deviations

lower than those who were born before the pandemic on a suite of tests that measure development in a similar way to IQ tests. Two standard deviations is a catastrophe in science when you are talking about something as vital as infant neurodevelopment. In fact, many schools of thought believe that some of the first years of life are the most critical for forming relationships, setting the foundation of human interaction for how you interact with the world and think about it for the rest of your life. The researcher who made that discovery believes that the number one cause of this level in developmental IQ and cognition is a drop in human-to-human interaction amongst children. On the motor skill side, the explanation is also obvious. A large portion of motor skill development for kids is developed through play in public, on the playground, finding out what hurts, what doesn't, chasing after one another.

And guess what is not happening during COVID restrictions? All of that. Furthermore, if I have not convinced you yet, let me make this case too. The number one thing I hear as a defense of all of this is it's okay. Kids are resilient. Well, Mary Catherine Hamm put this very well in The Atlantic, where she writes, quote, it's not a kid's job to be resilient. It's a parent's job to be resilient for them, to spare them from our fears and worries. The longer do we abdicate, the longer, the more damage we do. David Leonhardt also expanded on this in The New York Times. In effect, childhood masking and children restrictions are inflicting more harm to children in exchange for less harm to adults. That is the long and short of it all. Institutionalized insanity continues to be weaponized by adults against kids. Virginia, parents are sending their kids to school without masks, as is their right, per the governor's new executive order. And the school district is placing them in a form of detention for doing so. Take a listen. On Monday, these high school students went into school

maskless and they were sent to the auditorium with other maskless students. Several students and their parents told 7 News they were bored and weren't given enough lessons or homework to fill the school day. Placing children basically in isolation and detention because their parents don't want them to wear masks, that is the same thing happening in New York State, where chaos has engulfed children after a New York State judge struck down the governor's mask mandate for schools in public locations. That mask mandate was quickly put back in for effect after a judge granted a stay, but in the interim, parents who were very excited to send their kids to school without masks did so.

What did the schools do? They were being met, the children were met with cruelty. Despite no mask mandate legally not being the case for 24 hours, schools literally turned away kids whose parents sent them there with masks. Other schools reportedly placed kids in some sort of holding room like convicts. Look, if you still don't believe me, fine. Go ahead, strap an N95 to your kid's face for the rest of your life. But do not inflict this madness and cruelty upon others.

The moral crime of this new century will be reckoned with for years. Already, speech pathologists say they are seeing an increase in cases of kids who have not learned to speak properly throughout the pandemic because of masking. Childhood psychologists are going to reckon with these effects for years. Perhaps an entire generation will live their lives with psychological and physical scars, as many did from the Great Depression. And I would say, I hope they forgive us, but they should not. Because at this point, we know enough to stop and we simply won't. The misery and the cruelty at this point, they are all up to us to stand against it. I mean, look, Crystal, you look at that chart, it's clear as day.

And if you want to hear my reaction to Sagar's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. All right, Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, guys, we track a lot of COVID outrages here on this show, discussing posturing of pundits who fake like they oppose big pharma in order to get anti-vax clicks, but then are completely unwilling to do a single damn thing that would actually challenge pharma power. We've tracked liberals dancing on the graves of people who die from COVID because they wouldn't get vaccinated. We've tracked lying public health officials like Dr. Fauci who are more interested in manipulating the public and preserving their own careers than in actually telling the truth. But we must never lose sight of what is by far the greatest COVID crime that has been committed. This real world conspiracy implicates Joe Biden, big pharma billionaire Bill Gates. That is the decision to allow pharmaceutical giants to deny

life-saving vaccines to the poor world. If you watch the show, you pretty much know the story. The beginning of the pandemic, everyone was all, it's a World War II-style mobilization, we're all in it together. But after public funding helped produce life-saving vaccines, suddenly the message flipped. Now, Moderna and Pfizer are using their socially developed medicines to produce record-breaking private profits by reserving these vaccines for the rich world where governments can afford a premium charge. They have held tight to their patent protections, preventing drug factories around the world from churning out their own, less expensive doses. Bill Gates provided cover to do this.

He designed, spearheaded, and propped up the UN's COVAX program, which was supposed to purchase and distribute doses to the global south. This program has been a dramatic failure. Africa's vaccination rate today stands at around 7%. Joe Biden is the one person really in a position to try to bring these pharma giants to heel. Instead, his administration has actively blocked a World Trade Organization proposal to do exactly that. It is a crime and it is a disgrace all the way around. And now an unlikely country is exposing the shameful behavior of the U.S. government with regards to vaccinating the world. Cuba has been suffering under a U.S. embargo for decades that has crippled their economy, made life very difficult for

ordinary citizens, and sought to isolate that island nation from the rest of the world. In spite of this, Cuba has successfully developed multiple highly effective COVID vaccines of their own. This is pretty incredible. In fact, the Cuban biotech sector has produced five different COVID vaccines, and according to them, after three doses, their vaccines are better than 90% effective at preventing symptomatic COVID. So anti-vaxxers, listen, if you hate big pharma and you don't trust them, go get the Cuban jab. It is totally free of greedy corporate influence. But I digress. They have also basically succeeded in vaccinating their entire population.

More than 93% of the Cuban population, including kids, is fully or partially vaccinated. That's one of the highest rates in the entire world, and it's due to a variety of factors. First, they had the know-how to develop their own vaccines and not rely on anyone else, especially not us. Second, the public health system has outposts in virtually every community, making it accessible and making it trusted. In fact, Cuba has more doctors per

capita than any other country in the world. And finally, probably because of that trust and the lack of a profit motive to undermine that trust, Cuba does not have much vaccine hesitancy. But it's not just the Cuban people who stand to benefit here, because these vaccines do not rely on mRNA technology, but instead are what's called subunit protein vaccines. That means they're cheaper to produce, and they also don't require that super cold storage that makes the mRNA vaccines much more challenging to distribute in poor countries. Cuba's vaccines are right now being evaluated for World Health Organization approval, and the Global South is watching closely. They've given up on hoping that the U.S. or Bill Gates or COVAX or, God forbid, Pfizer are going to save them. According to one Cuba expert, a professor in Scotland, the developing world has pinned their hopes on the Cuban vaccine. She tells CNBC, I think it is clear that many countries and populations in the global south

see the Cuban vaccine as their best hope for getting vaccinated by 2025. And in fact, now Cuba is announcing a massive push to help get these life-saving vaccines to the people who need them in a move that should be thoroughly humiliating to the Biden regime if they in fact had any sense of shame whatsoever. Cuba is pledging 200 million vaccine doses to the global south. That is more than what the U.S. has delivered to all of the Middle East and to all of Africa, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. At a news conference announcing this pledge, Cuban officials also announced, number one, solidarity prices for COVID-19 vaccines for low-income countries. Number two, technology transfer

where possible for production in low-income countries. And number three, extending medical brigades to build medical capacity and training for vaccine distribution in those partner countries. All of these elements are totally crucial. They're planning to distribute inexpensive vaccines. They're planning to help build native capacity for production in low-income countries, and they're also committing their own trained health workers to train local workers and set up distribution so that those vaccines actually get into arms. How in the hell is it that Cuba, a country that's, let's be honest, is kind of falling apart, is doing this, and we're not? Think of how shameful that is. We could have been the leader of a World War II style

mobilization in support of curing the world. We could have used this moment to check the power of big pharma and shown that we care about a single thing other than corporate profits. We could have created huge amounts of goodwill and national pride by spearheading a mass global vaccination campaign. And from a purely selfish perspective, we would be protecting our own population by helping to vaccinate the world and getting ahead of new variants that could still emerge. Instead, we folded to the greed of the immoral capitalists of big pharma. Listen, Cuba's got a lot of problems. I'm not here to whitewash the repression of their government, but when it comes to these vaccines, there is zero doubt who occupies the moral high ground. What a humiliating moment for a fading superpower. And just that contrast

saga, when I saw it, made me lose my mind. And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Joining us now, we have-selling author Johan Hari. His latest book is Stolen Focus, Why You Cannot Pay Attention, which landed pretty close to home for me. Johan, great to have you. Welcome to the show. Good to see you, sir.

I love your show, so I'm so excited to be with you. That means a lot because I'm a longtime fan of your work as well. So I listened to your book on 2.5 times speed, which I felt a little bit guilty about because some of the themes were like, you should slow down and you need time for your brain to roam while you're listening. But anyway, I still got a lot out of it. Why don't you just tell our listeners and viewers to start with what brought you to this concern that our brains are actually changing and we're not able to focus in the ways that we perhaps were able to a generation ago? So I noticed that with every year that passed,

things that require deep focus, like things that are really deep to my sense of self, like reading a book, watching long movies, were getting more and more like running up and down escalator. You know what I mean? I could do it, but it was getting harder and harder. And I noticed it was happening to a huge number of people around me. I was particularly worried about the young people in my life, a lot of whom seem to be whirring at the speed of Snapchat. So I was wary of looking into this. At first, I thought, well, every generation struggles with its attention. Is anything new happening? And even very early on, when I started looking at the evidence, you know, for every one child who was identified as having serious attention problems when I was seven years old, there's now 100 children who've been identified

with that problem. The average American office worker now focuses on only one task for only three minutes. So I thought, okay, I'm going to try and understand this. So I used my training in the social sciences at Cambridge to travel all over the world. I interviewed over 200 of the leading experts on attention and focus from Miami to Moscow to Melbourne to Montreal, not just cities that begin with the letter M. And I delved really deeply into their science. And what I learned is there's scientific evidence for 12 factors that can make your attention better or can make it worse.

And loads of the factors that can make your attention worse have been significantly increasing in recent years. So your attention didn't collapse. Your attention has been stolen from you by these big forces. And we're going to have to respond in two ways. We have to have defense and offense. We have to defend ourselves individually as much as possible. But we're going to have to go on the offense against the forces that are doing this to us. You're looking at a guy who hasn't read a real book in five years, but has probably listened to

hundreds of books at three and a half speed. So I'm right there with you. I also find the same thing. I recently did Apocalypse Now, the Redux one. It took me three days to get through a three hour movie because you're constantly checking something. So what does going on offense look I recently did Apocalypse Now, the Redux one. It took me three days to get through a three-hour movie because you're constantly checking something. So what does going on offense look like? What should people like me and other people be doing? Essentially, because that thing that you just said is a really good illustration of why I think this is so important.

So just say to anyone watching, think about anything you've ever done that you're proud of, whether it's learning to play the guitar, writing a screenplay, being a good parent, whatever it might be, that thing that you're proud of is something that required deep focus and attention. And when attention and focus break down, our ability to achieve our goals and our ability to solve our problems also breaks down. That's happening at an individual level. We can also see this happening at a big collective level. So I think what we have to do first is understand what these 12 factors are. When I started doing the research, I thought this would be largely a book about big tech.

Big tech is a huge factor in this, a massive one. I actually don't think it's the biggest. The factors that are causing our attention to collapse range from the sleep we no longer get to the food we eat. The food industry has ruined our brains. There's a whole array of these factors. But in terms of going on the offence, I think what we've got to do is, I would argue, there's a historical analogy that can help us to think about it. So I think we're all about the same. I think you guys are a little bit younger than me, actually. So it used to be, I can just remember that it was normal that people put leaded gasoline in their cars. My mother used to do it.

People used to paint their homes with leaded paint. And it was known for years that this profoundly damaged children's brains, and in particularly their ability to focus and pay attention. But the lead industry funded a kind of pseudoscience to deny it all. They blamed individual mothers, said they didn't dust their homes enough. But by the 70s, the evidence was so overwhelming that there rose up a movement of ordinary people, mostly mothers, who just campaigned and said, why are we allowing our children's brains to be destroyed in this way?

Let's not allow it. And it's important to notice what they didn't say. They didn't say, let's ban all paint. They didn't say, let's ban all gasoline. They said, let's ban the lead in the paint and the gasoline. And in a similar way for all of the 12 factors that I write about in my book, Stolen Focus, there are lots of things we can do as isolated individuals to protect ourselves and our kids. I'm passionately in favor of individual action, but we've got to level with

people. At the moment, it's like somebody is pouring itching powder over us all day and then they're leaning forward and going, hey buddy, you might want to learn how to meditate, then you wouldn't scratch so much. To which the obvious response is, okay, I'll learn to meditate, but we need to stop you pouring itching powder on us. And we need to do that in targeted ways. So I can explain, for example, the specific aspect of the way our tech currently works that is invading our attention that we can change if we want to through collective action. Different factors, and certainly tech is one of them. And just, you know, my own personal experience, I actually sort of blamed

my lack of focus and ability to like hold one thought in my head for a sustained period of time. I sort of blame my kids on it because when I started having kids was about the same time that I think all of these tech platforms really started to invade my life and take over a lot of space. So I thought, oh, this is just mommy brain. Like I have too many slots in my brain

are filled with like where my kids' shoes are and when the next ballet lesson is. And that's why my focus has been lost. And I still think that's probably a part of it. But you've helped me to understand some of the other things that are going on and also to give myself a little bit less of a hard time about some of those brain failures that I experience all the time. But, you know, as I look at all these different factors, doesn't it just really come and their profit motives, when you talk about big food and their profit motives, when you talk about the companies that are polluting the environment that has tremendously negative effects on our children, for example, or focused on one screen instead of five, then that's also less ability to sort of bombard you with money-making, profit-making potential. So isn't the real problem here sort of that profit-making, you know, being central to our lives in all of these different spheres?

It's a big part of it. This is a big systemic problem. And there are key aspects of how capitalism is currently functioning that are profoundly damaging our attention. Just like everyone watching your show knows from your brilliant coverage that the way capitalism works is pushing us beyond our ecological limits. The way it currently works is also pushing us beyond our attentional limits. So that can sound a bit fancy and grand, so I'll give you a very clear example. I went to interview one of the leading experts in the world, sorry, one of the leading neuroscientists in the world, Professor Earl Miller. He's at MIT. And he said to me, look, there's one thing you've got to understand more than anything else about the human brain.

You can only think about one or two things consciously at a time. That's it. This is a fundamental limit of the human brain. It hasn't changed in 40,000 years. It's not going to change on any time scale we're going to see. But what's happened is partly as a result of the dynamics you're describing, we've fallen for a mass delusion. The average teenager now believes they can follow six or seven forms of media at the same time. So when scientists get people into labs and they get them to think they're multitasking, they study them. And what they discover is when you try and do lots of things at the same time, you're in fact not doing lots of things at the same time. You're very rapidly juggling between them. What was that on WhatsApp?

What did she just ask me? What was that on Facebook? Wait, what did the TV screen just say? And that comes with a really big cost. The technical term for it is the switch cost effect. When you try and do more than one thing at a time, you will do everything you're trying to do less competently. You'll make more mistakes, you'll remember less of what you do, you'll be less creative. This might sound like a small effect, it's really big. One study found just receiving eight text messages an hour lowers your mental performance by 30%. If you're interrupted by something as small as a text message, it takes you on average 23 minutes to get back to the level of focus that you had before you were interrupted. But many of us are never getting 23 minutes without being interrupted. Now, partly that's because someone's

got kids. I understand entirely why that's happening to you. But there's been an extra layer of interruption that's been layered onto all of us because, and it's important to understand, the way big tech want us to think about this is, are you pro-tech or anti-tech? And that just induces a kind of fatalism, because we're not going to all go and join the Amish. No disrespect to any Amish who are watching. I think it's unlikely, but if they are, we're not going to do that, nor should we. And we want our tech. So of course that induces a fatalism where you think, well, I'll just have to be pro-tech then. The question is not, are you pro-tech or anti-tech? The question is, what tech working for whose purposes with what goals? And we can get to a different kind of tech. And with all of the 11

other factors that are invading our attention that I write about in Stolen Focus, we can change these factors because you're absolutely right, Crystal, that at the moment, all of these apps are designed around one thing. It's very simple. The business model is the more frequently you pick up your phone and the longer you scroll, the more money they make. That's it. Just like the head of KFC wants you to eat fried chicken. All of these companies, all of their algorithms, all of their engineering power is built very simply. And they admit there's some of them around getting you to pick up your phone more often and scroll longer. And they have developed a genius array of techniques to make us do that.

So what we've got to do is go after that particular business model, what Professor Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism. We've got to just ban it, right? We ban lead in paint. We can ban that business model. We can force these companies to move to different business models that can begin to respect your attention. I go through this in much more detail in the book. And with all of these factors, think about the fact the way we eat is profoundly damaging

our ability to focus and attention because of the food industry. And I go through lots of ways this is happening, but give you just one example. Imagine you have the standard American British breakfast, what I grew up eating, I'm pretty sure you guys did, you know, sugary cereal and white bread. What that does is it releases, not together, that would be weird. What that does is it releases a huge amount of glucose very quickly into your brain, huge energy surge, you feel like you've woken up, it's great. And then a couple of hours later, you're sitting at your desk or your kid is sitting at their desk and you get a huge energy slump and you get brain fog where you just can't think very clearly until you have another sugary, carby snack. The diet we eat puts us on a roller coaster of energy spikes and energy

crashes, which causes patches of brain fog throughout the day. The way one leading nutritionist, Dale Pinnock, put it to me, it's like we're putting rocket fuel into a mini. It'll go really fast for five minutes, then it will just stop. This is one of many ways the way we eat is damaging our attention. And again, this is highly unusual. No humans have ever eaten the way we eat. If you eat food that releases energy steadily throughout the day, as almost all humans before us did, you'll be able to pay attention in a better way. But you're right, and so much of your show is about exposing these corporate forces. One of the things that worries me is when people hear that about food,

often they think, oh, I'm doing something wrong. No, the entire food supply industry has changed in a way that harms our attention. The more 18-month-old children know what the McDonald's M means than know their own last name. We've got to take on these big forces. And I argue in the book that just like we needed, and of course still need, a feminist movement to reclaim women's bodies and lives, we need an attention movement to reclaim our minds. And we need to shift our consciousness. We need to stop doing what I did and what you did, which is when we can't focus primarily blaming ourselves. It's to say to myself,

oh, you don't have enough willpower. You're not strong enough. You're not good enough. No, this is being done to all of us. Professor Joel Nigg, one of the leading experts on children's attention problems, said to me, we need to ask if we're living in what he called an attentional pathogenic environment, when we're all of us are struggling with this. And to deal with that, we've got to change our psychology. We are not medieval peasants begging at the court of King Zuckerberg for a few little crumbs of attention from his table. We are the free citizens of democracies, and we own our own minds, and we can take them back from the forces that are corrupting our minds and our kids' minds. But we're going to have to fight for it because we're in a race, right? On the one hand, you've

got all these forces that are on the current trajectory only going to become more powerful. Paul Graham, one of the biggest investors in Silicon Valley, said the world will become more addictive in the next 40 years than it was in the last 40. Think about how much more addictive TikTok is to a child than Facebook was, right? That's one trajectory. That's one side of the race. On the other side, there's got to be all of us who liken the historical precedent we've led, say, no, no, you don't get to do this to us. You don't get to do this to our children. We don't want to live this way. We don't want to have lives where the average office worker only focuses for three minutes. We don't want to have a life deprived

of depth, deprived of the ability to achieve our goals, to minutes. We don't want to have a life deprived of depth, deprived of the ability to achieve our goals, to think. No, we choose a different life, but we're only going to get that if we fight for it. Wow. I feel inspired. I hope everybody else can too. Look, we're going to have a link down there in the description, Johan. Thank you so much for joining us.

You've just laid out the case so well. Thank you so much. Johan, thank you for your time. And I understand you've graciously agreed to also join me again with my other co-host Kyle Klinz. You are. You can get into this as well. You're a strong man. You're a strong man. Thank you.

I can never have too much of you, so don't worry. I'm so excited. Thank you so much for having me on the show. And anyone who wants to know where to get the book, they can just go to StolenFocusBook.com as well. Thank you guys so much for having me. Absolutely. We'll have a link in the description. Thank you guys so much for watching. We really appreciate it. All the support. It means a lot. We got some messages being like, don't worry so much about the technical difficulties. No,

listen, it's going to drive me crazy until because you guys pay for our product and you support us and we have made a commitment to you. So like we said, we will deliver you that longer AMA over the weekend. We're going to do 10 questions instead of five to make up for not having the reactions. To the rest of you, we appreciate you guys so much and your support. You know, Chris, I don't know if you saw this. I did that whole monologue on the Great Reset narrative or whatever, and they put some fact check underneath. And you're like, this is what the thing really is.

So I'm like, Why are you looking to Wikipedia under my article? You don't need to do that. It's well researched. I have all my sources there. So look, this is what we're dealing with. I was telling you in one of the breaks, somebody was just banned from YouTube, Dan Bongino. I'm not a big Dan Bongino fan, but

the guy was banned for saying, or got a strike, whatever, for saying that cloth masks don't work against COVID. This is something the CDC had come out and said. Stupid technicality of like, he was banned and he posted on another channel that he has. And that was part of it as well. I mean, it just shows you like. You can be gone in an instant.

This is the whole reason why we set things up the way that we did. So we wouldn't have to worry about the whims of these people and who decides they have it out for you or not no 100 true thank you to those who support us we take it very very very seriously um those of you do and uh we'll see you guys next week all right guys enjoy the weekend we'll see you next week DNA test proves he is not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father? Well, Sam, luckily, it's your not the father week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon.

This author writes, my father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son, even though it was promised to us. He's trying to give it to his irresponsible son. But I have DNA proof that could get the money back. Hold up. They could lose their family and millions of dollars. Yep. Find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Camp Shane, one of America's longest runningrunning weight-loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results.

But there were some dark truths behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. Enter Camp Shame, an eight-part series examining the rise and fall of Camp Shane and the culture that fueled its decades-long success. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. I'm also the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. You might hear that term and think it's about celibacy, but to me, voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's flexible, it's customizable, and it's a personal process. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now.

Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast.