Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 1/4/23 Counter Points: Kevin McCarthy's Historic Loss, Twitter Pressured By Intelligence Community, SBF In Court, Idaho Killers, Bipartisan Stock Corruption, Tech Layoffs, Exclusive Matt Taibbi Interview

Episode Date: January 4, 2023

Ryan and Emily discuss the historic loss of Kevin McCarthy's bid for speaker, the new chapter of the Twitter Files revealing pressure Twitter experienced from the intelligence community, SBF in court, how DNA technology was used to catch the Idaho killer, Unusual Whales revealing information on dem/republican stock corruption, tech company layoffs rising, and an exclusive interview with Matt Taibbi on the new chapters of the Twitter Files.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Others dismiss as niche, we embrace as core. There are so many stories out there. And if you can find a way to curate and help the right person discover the right content, the term that we always hear from our audience is that they feel seen. Listen to Good Company on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The murderer is still out there. Each week, I investigate a new case. If there is a case we should hear about, call 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sometimes as dads, I think we're too hard on ourselves. We get down on ourselves on not being able to, you know, we're the providers. But we also have to learn to take

care of ourselves. A wrap-away, you got to pray for yourself as well as for everybody else, but never forget yourself. Self-love made me a better dad because I realized my worth. Never stop being a dad. That's dedication. Find out more at fatherhood.gov. Brought to you by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Ad Council. Hey, guys. Ready or not, 2024 is here, and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it means the absolute world to have your support. What are you waiting for? Become a premium subscriber today

at BreakingPoints.com. Well, welcome to the first edition of CounterPoints in 2023. We're happy to see everybody today. Ryan, how you doing? Good. Happy New Year. Happy New Year to everybody out there. So Ryan is rocking the Andrew Ross Sorkin look today. He's totally, if you're watching this, you'll see it's tropical. I think what happened is Sager went to Tulum and we decided to set the temperature here to Tulum levels. So that's what we're doing.

It's also climate change. It's like 65 degrees or so in Washington, D.C. And so the buildings just don't know how to deal with it. They have four seasons that they're prepared for. When winter comes and the climate wants to give you spring or fall, they just blast the heat anyway. And the funny thing is Ryan called ahead and said, I'm wearing a wool jacket today. Please set the studio to my preferred temperature. Set it super high.

No, actually it was really hot in here. It still is really hot in here. That said, Ryan actually has been, Ryan has reason whether or not it's hot in the studio. It still is really hot in here. That said, Ryan actually has been, Ryan has reason whether or not it's hot in the studio. You have reason to be a sort of gruff and like an ink-stained wretch today because you were all over Capitol Hill yesterday. Well, it was a lot of fun. And so later in the show, we're going to talk to Matt Taibbi. We've got a lot to get into, but the drama, of course, was on Capitol Hill. Yes. And, yeah, so I was in the House press gallery for that, watching it unfold,

which there was almost more drama in the kind of buildup than in the actual unfolding of it because nothing changed except for one vote. So to back it up, Kevin McCarthy has been eyeing the speakership probably since he was four or five years old. Didn't want to be president, just wanted to be Speaker of the House. And so the man gets in position and there's this rump group of right-wing Republicans who are running a kind of never Kevin type of campaign. His campaign is called Only Kevin. He has given up- It's middle school, basically. Basically, yes. Because he's given up so many... No offense to middle school.

He's given up so many different concessions to them that it seems like the only thing left that he could give would be himself. Like, they just don't want him at this point. Yeah. They don't trust him. The problem... So, they had three votes yesterday.

He won 203 votes the first time, which is 15 short of the 218 he needed. Second time, he won 203 again. The third time, he won 202. So now he has 20 opponents. So at this point, it's very hard to see what his path is to the speakership. Yet at the same time, the opponents don't have a path to victory either. So they're just kind of staring at each other. They adjourned. They didn't have to adjour to victory either. So they're just kind of staring at each other. They adjourned. They didn't have to adjourn, but Democrats agreed to adjourn last night.

And all the parties agreed to adjourn. So now they're going to do it again today, still with no path forward. You were talking about how Tucker Carlson, who, if anybody's going to mediate this, maybe Tucker Carlson, threw out some ideas. What was his take on what McCarthy's path is? Right. So Tucker obviously comes on at night after all of these negotiations had failed, basically, and said, all right, how about this? Kevin McCarthy agrees to release all files related to January 6th and agrees to put Thomas Massey in charge of this church-like committee into the intelligence community that Kevin McCarthy has promised to convene. Personally, I'm fine with both of those points. There's a question, though, as to whether, and you probably had a chance to chat with some folks on the Hill yesterday,

that's enough to say, to your point, they're already saying we don't trust Kevin McCarthy. The problem is not, you know, so it's like, how much more stuff can we get from him? Because he made a concession on one of the biggest possible things that he could concede on, which is called the motion to vacate. It sounds like a dumb procedural beltway thing. And it is, but it's hugely consequential because it's what ousted John Boehner. It's what Mark Meadows used to force John Boehner out of leadership years ago. Nancy Pelosi, the shrewd tactician that she is, immediately was like, hell no to this, got rid of it. They wanted to bring it back.

Kevin McCarthy agreed to bring it back, meaning five members of his caucus could basically at any time be like, bye, and stage a coup, which is really a huge concession from him. They've also, from the perspective of the establishment Republicans, that was just a massive concession. He's agreed to impeaching, having an impeachment hearing for Alejandro Mayorkas. One thing he told me he wouldn't do in September, he then, by the time December rolled

around, was like, yeah, let's do it. He's given them a lot and they have a lot to be happy with. They should really be taking the W, but because it's more about personality than policy in this case, they think personality is policy. Because it's more about that, nothing is going to satisfy it. So does the Tucker point satisfy it? I don't know. Right now, with Tucker saying it rather than McCarthy saying it, maybe that makes it a little bit easier for them. Can we put up A5, actually? Because this has Kevin McCarthy basically saying that, he's talking about Matt Gaetz here, and Matt Gaetz and others, that they basically made the same, attempted to make the same deal that Tucker is suggesting. So let's roll A5 here.

Last night I was presented the only way to have 218 votes. If I provided certain members with certain positions, certain gavels, to take over the church committee, to have certain budgets. And they even came to the position where one, Matt Gates, said, I don't care if we go to plurality and we elect Hakeem Jeffries and it hurts the new frontline members not to get reelected. So first of all, he's talking about the church committee there, which is this subcommittee that would have investigatory powers, basically a deep state committee. The church committee is a reference to Senator Frank Church back in the 70s who exposed all sorts of malfeasance on the part of the deep state, if you want to call them that at the time. I don't know if that term was much in circulation at the time, but he exposed all sorts of different crimes that the CIA, FBI, other elements of the gun and government apparatus had been committing post-World War II up through then. And so there's been this, and it's in the rules. If you read the rules package, there is a committee in there for that type of oversight. Look, it sounds like they were making a demand for who would run it.

Tucker wants Thomas Massey to run it, right? Yeah, he wants Thomas Massey. And Thomas Massey is a super interesting maverick libertarian. He'd be great for journalism. It would be fantastic for journalism. If he was running that, yeah. I'm all for it. And you know what?

They need somebody who's going to basically take no prisoners. And that would be the person that you would think of would be a Thomas Bassey, somebody who doesn't care whether he's voting with the party line or not. So I think Tucker's suggestion is not a bad one. when with a Matt Gaetz, for instance, like here is your sense that what they're doing right now is trying to take this as far as they possibly can to the point where they have squeezed every last concession out of Kevin McCarthy that they possibly can. And then they'll say, okay, or is it just, we don't care, blow it all up.

If Hakeem Jeffries gets in, Hakeem Jeffries gets in, or here's the third option. It's a combination of everything and nobody really knows what the plan is. I think it's the latter. Yeah. Because I don't think that they have thought, like, I don't think they have a one, two, three, four, five. Here's how we get to exactly where we are. I think it's more of a kind of Trump-style approach to it,

that we're just going to live to fight another day. We're not going to give in to something we don't want, and then we're going to keep pushing. And if it gets blown up, who cares? And then if it gets blown up, who cares? What did you think? Do you believe that Gates did tell him that he's okay with Hakeem Jeffries taking over? First of all, that's not going to happen.

It's basically impossible for that to happen. It would be hilarious if this clip is being played in a couple of weeks when Nicky Jeffries is the speaker. It's virtually impossible for it to happen. I could see Gates saying it as a bluff, to demonstrate to him how little he cares about whether or not McCarthy survives or not. A hundred percent. And I've said a couple of times on our podcast, Federalist Radio Hour, and maybe he was listening, that all Republicans should just like cast, if you really want to do a protest vote, you should just get as many Republicans as possible to vote for Ilhan Omar and just stick it to Dem leadership, Republican leadership at the same time in such a narrowly

divided house of representatives and just say, screw it. Speaker Omar? Yes. If you're really trying to blow it all up, then do it. Then do it. But at this point, it's such a muddled strategy. They've gotten so much. They really have gotten so much out of Kevin McCarthy. Kevin McCarthy sort of sees himself as someone who stuck his neck out for Jim Jordan, put him on oversight when a lot of establishment Republicans didn't. He's friendly with Marjorie Taylor Greene, which is in D.C., Republican circles, unheard of that you would have an establishment, a denizen of the sort of Washington establishment, also be on personally friendly terms with a person of the sort of positioning in the party that Marjorie Taylor

Greene holds. And I think he was really more confident because of that. I don't think he was ever perfectly confident. But because it was always like this, it was, what are they going to do? They're going to throw bombs. And that's exactly what they ended up doing. But they really have a, they have a W to take. The W is on the table. It's there. And if we can put up, if we can put up A2, I'm curious for your take on Trump's role in this entire thing. So somebody called up Donald Trump yesterday and asked him, hey, are you sticking by your endorsement of your Kevin? That's one of his best nicknames, my Kevin. And Trump, who is anything if not the least loyal person on the planet, said, you know what, let's see. What do you say? Let's see how it goes.

We'll see what happens. We'll see how it all works out. Yeah. So does Trump have a role in all of this? It sounds like, according to him, he's got some of these renegades calling him, maybe some of the others calling him, maybe Mike Kevin is calling him. Or does he just not have enough juice left to move the needle inside the Republican conference. I don't think he's moving the needle inside the Republican conference, which is very interesting, actually, to watch, because that was the expectation is that Donald Trump would be sort of the kingmaker. But he's really been on the sideline of this particular battle. If he had, again, positioned himself differently, if he weren't, for instance, attacking pro-life voters on True Social this week, it may be easier for him to actually have a say right now. But I think they're doing most of

this of their own accord. And that's what's particularly interesting. Now, Kevin McCarthy, something interesting about him is if you contrast his relationship with Trump with Paul Ryan's relationship with Trump, it's totally a study in contrast. And like he learned from Paul Ryan, that's something I talked to him about. He learned from those kinds of mistakes. He let Paul Ryan go before him, take the arrows and then sort of realized that maybe there was a different way to do this. And that's one of the big differences between the two of them. It's one of the things that helped him build relationships with people like say Marjorie Taylor Greene. And so he's been trued about it. But after January 6th, their split seemed to be not great.

And I want to get to the intrigue with Matt Gaetz and AOC on the floor in a second. But I'm curious for your take on this split between Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene, because Greene has been kind of pro-McCarthy for a while. In December, she was tweeting, like, look, McCarthy has promised to impeach Biden if there's evidence to impeach him. And she listed all her reasons why they should work with the Kevin that they have rather than try to get a new Kevin. Whereas Boebert, to this day, is still resisting him. Are they anything of a squad? Have they ever been? What's their situation? How did they get to a place where they're kind of publicly attacking each other over this strategy?

Yeah, I think this says way more about the Freedom Caucus than it does about Kevin McCarthy. Because again, the Freedom Caucus has in the past been extremely successful because they have been tightly knit. They've been able to sort of rally around the cause of opposition to leadership, opposition to the establishment, which is a really strong unifier. That's something that the squad has kind of grappled with as well. There are always interesting parallels between the Freedom Caucus and the squad. But the fact that they're on a different page about something like this, I think it's not it shows that this is not a clean litmus test. You know, if you vote for Kevin McCarthy here, it doesn't mean you are, as Republicans might say, a squish or not. It's not that clean litmus test, even though some people are trying to make it into one.

Because for people like Lauren Boebert, I think she sees her cost benefit analysis. I can get, first of all, a lot of attention, a lot of publicity, and sort of be seen as a star in the same way that Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan became stars in the fight against John Boehner. I think she sees this moment as that. And Marjorie Taylor Greene sees this moment as saying, well, I can consolidate support. I can really build on my support with McCarthy, my relationship with McCarthy. I can win a lot of points right here for future negotiations and policymaking down the line and maybe get more W's out of it from that sense. So those are, I think it's just two sides of that coin. And you've seen members taking swipes at Lauren Boebert saying, you know, when you can win a deep red district by more than like 50 votes, then you can come here and dictate to us, you know, how we ought to run things. But until then,

no thanks. And so the intrigue that did break through, that we did learn about, was between Matt Gaetz and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, if we can play that video here. So basically, Matt Gaetz literally crossed the aisle, goes over, talks to AOC, because apparently he believes, actually, that AOC runs a Democratic party. That's not just something like he hears on Fox and that he says. He maybe actually believes it to be true. And I love that in him. I guess there's some hope there. That's actually true. But so he walks over. There's a lot of speculation about what they said. I reported in The Intercept, we could put that up here, that basically what Matt Gaetz was saying was that, hey, Kevin McCarthy has been, he's been

making a bunch of threats against us. And he has been telling us that he believes he's going to be able to get a deal with Democrats, that a lot, that enough Democrats are going to vote present, that it's going to allow him to win with his 202 or 203 or 205 or even 210 votes. And so therefore, all of you people who are fighting me are out on a limb here and you're going to get annihilated once Democrats start to fold and kind of bail me out of this jam. Then AOC tells him, I don't think that that's the case. Then she goes back to party leadership. And I think you can see it at the end saying, I'll get back to you or something like that. So she goes back to party leadership. She's like, look, there's no bailing out of Kevin

McCarthy here. Is there? Because McCarthy's telling his members that Democrats are going to bail him out. And the party leadership tells AOC, no, absolutely not. He's on his own. Nobody here is voting present. Nobody here is leaving. Like that was another wishful thinking thing that started circulating kind of from the McCarthy camp that Democrats were just going to get bored and leave. Right. Which lowers the threshold. Which then would lower the threshold, which to me suggests that they're out of plays. Like if they're just hoping that Democrats are going to get bored, like that's not how legislating tends to work. But although we're in uncharted territory, who knows?

So what did you make of Gates kind of using AOC to get intel from Democrats? Well, it was a great report because everybody on Twitter, I mean, this was so many people on Twitter were speculating what happened, wondering what happened, and Ryan's like, oh, I got this. I asked Gates, I asked her, she's the only one that responded. Yeah, no, it was really interesting. And so I think that's also to the point about them being out of plays. There's reporting suggesting right now that's the play for today. That's one of the plays that Kevin McCarthy is perhaps banking on today.

Just run out the clock. Getting Democrats to vote present, which lowers the threshold so that he doesn't need the 218. You can bring it down. And there's precedent for that. I mean, didn't Nancy Pelosi win with 216? So it's not as though that's a crazy idea. And maybe if you're a certain type of Democrat, there's logic to be had in manipulating and maybe taking some- He'd have to give. What would he give? Debt ceiling? There's a lot he could give, but it hasn't really been on the table so far,

so I don't know exactly what it is. But debt ceiling is a great example. There could be something like that. There could be committee stuff. There's all kinds of stuff potentially out there. But then it screws up his calculus because he can't give away something that he gave to a Republican

in order to win their vote. Yeah, exactly. So good luck. Good luck. We'll be watching this all day. Yeah, it's a pickle. I mean, it is actually a pickle. You've got a runner between second and third and the ball is going back and forth.

So we'll be paying attention. Ryan, you heading back to the Hill today? Yes. Wouldn't miss it. Jacket. Oh, yeah. You can't Hill today? Yes. Wouldn't miss it. Jacket. Oh, yeah. You can't be there without a jacket. That's right.

All right. Well, there was also big news yesterday on the Twitter front because we had another Twitter Files dump. Matt Taibbi, as Ryan said, will be with us later in the show. He had sort of a two-part Twitter Files dump yesterday. We're going to start with the first part here, which I think personally, I think contained one of the more interesting revelations of the entire, one of the more important too, not just interesting, but one of the more important revelations of the entire

Twitter Files disclosure process. Let's start with B1 and put the tear sheet up on the screen. There you see the headline from Taibbi Subst substack, Why Twitter Let the Intelligence Community In. We can then go over here to B3 because Taibbi posted this Twitter thread in addition to his substack, an incredible long thread basically showing the push and pull between our government, between the FBI and all of them going back and forth and the media trying to figure out where the pressure points are inside of Twitter. Basically, you have reporters, you have the government pushing Twitter to find Russian bots where there aren't Russian bots. And so Taibbi has these Twitter threads where people are, has this thread where you have emails from inside Twitter showing, hey, you know, the government has just sent us all of these accounts that they're saying are bots. And Mark Warner is telling us we have to go find

the Russian infiltration of Twitter. And inside Twitter, they're telling, you know, constantly keep pushing reporters to Facebook. This is really Facebook's problem. But they're also saying, listen, we can't find this. This is not what we have on our end. And why I thought that was so important, if we could put B4 again on the screen, personally, I thought it was so important. Because there's this line from an email where it says, reporters now know this is a model that works. That's an email from inside Twitter. What do they mean by that? So they're saying, given we've now suspended all accounts, we will take a hit in the press that moves from BuzzFeed to more establishment

publications. We'll work to contain it. So BuzzFeed's working on a story. This is an email from someone inside Twitter. Relatedly, we can expect more investigation of accounts that are tangentially associated with the IRA handover to the U.S. committees buoyed by academic brand names. Reporters now know this is a model that works. A model as in like for reporting a story, a format, like we found a bot. They didn't take it down. We told Twitter about it. They took it down and boom, we have a story. Or basically, we can either take, we can fabricate a problem inside Twitter based on maybe one bot account or based on allegations that are fuzzy from the intelligence community. We can sort of fabricate a story and then force it to become a story by making Twitter respond.

And that's a model. I've seen that happen all the time. I see that as a broader model of cancel culture. It happened a lot. Right, you get some results. In different spaces. Right, yeah, because- You cancel this bot. Right, powerful people realized

that it could be exploited and they were happy to exploit it. So Twitter, terrified of the PR backlash, has to respond to this because they see BuzzFeed working on the story. And this actually happened over at The Federalist. And a reporter at NBC News said that our comments were in some way like beyond the pale, even though there are plenty of websites that have comments beyond the pale, and went to, I think it was Google Ad Services.

At the time, Google Ad Services was basically a monopoly and said, you know, what are you going to do about this? And Google was like, oh, maybe we'll have to kick Federalist off of our ad platform because a reporter went to them and fabricated this entire news cycle. And it's just a waste of everyone's time. But it also shows how I think powerful people have exploited the media and how journalists have allowed themselves to be exploited in the service of really powerful government and business interests. And so we do know that there is this little sub-covert agency, whatever you want to call it, the Internet Research Agency. The IR. Basically, you know, a Kremlin-type operation. The same, you know, very similar to what a lot of other governments do. I think Russia's probably, you know, on the, Russia and the United States, China probably on the leading

edge of this type of thing. But for all of the investigations that have been done, they seem to have uncovered a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of spending on, we know, on Facebook, which when you compare it to a multi-billion dollar presidential campaign is really hard to see as anything significant. If somebody pitches you or me on a story and we say, well, how much are you spending on this campaign? And they were like, well, $150,000. But like, yeah, no, like, sorry, like we're covering much more important things than that. So it wouldn't even be worth a single article, probably, unless it was Russia that pitched it. We're like, actually, that's illegal.

So we'll do a little story about how you can't legally do that. But what's interesting, and if we could put up B2 here, this is the one I found really fascinating, where you have a Twitter employee saying that the TLDR is that, quote, we have found suspicious accounts which demonstrate our investigation strategy is working. However, we see no evidence of a coordinated approach. All of the accounts found seem to be lone wolf type activity, different timing, spend, targeting less than $10,000 in ad spending. And so what they're saying there is that they actually are finding plenty of bots. There's no necessarily a shortage of bots, but they're not able to find that this is coordinated state activity.

Which you can find, and they have found with others. Right. If it was, it would be clear that it was. So these particular bots that were getting flagged were not. And it just seems like both the senators and the House members and the intelligence community, some of them, I think, were operating in bad faith and wanted to impute these campaigns to Russia. I think others probably just see Russia everywhere. Yeah.

And so believed it. And then others, I think, watch their mentions fill up with trash and criticism. And everybody just assumes it's a bot. Like everyone who gets criticized. Because it's a cope. Yeah, it's a cope. Everyone who gets criticized online is like, clearly that's a bot. Like, everyone who gets criticized. Because it's a cope. Yeah, it's a cope. Everyone who gets criticized online is like, clearly that's a bot.

There's no real human. Shut up, bot. Who could read my take and find it objectionable. Sometimes I think Ryan is a bot. Right, yeah. If I'm objecting to something you're saying, then, yes, totally. People always think that their opponents are bots.

Now, but they think they're state-coordinated bots. What they forget is that there is money to be made by producing what we called in 2015 fake news, which was literally fake news, getting written in Romania or somewhere, Moldova. You won't believe which 70s child star has cancer. Or like four bodies found in Hillary Clinton's trunk. And it would be abcnewsgogo.com or something like that. And it would look like an ABC News site, but it wasn't. And then you would then buy ads. Those Moldovans would then buy ads on Facebook and Twitter

because the money that they could make by going viral was more than it would cost them to make ads. So it was just a business proposition. And so that's probably what they're finding here. Less than $10,000, lone wolf type stuff. What they realize is that they can just set up a fake website, write outlandish things that the American news consumer will gobble up, and the way that they get over the hump of not having a legitimate news operation is they would spend money on Facebook or Twitter, just a small amount of money, just to get it moving and then hope that it would go viral. And so that is a problem. That's something that I think all of us would prefer is not part of our discourse. But it doesn't mean that this is Vladimir Putin doing this. No. And it was Democrats conflating a serious problem with something that was, I mean, questionable at best to push reports in media, to push reports all over the place. And it's just a great look back into how I think paralyzing for Democrats, the specter of Russian collusion was for such a long time. Yeah. And it's the macro version of what we were talking about. You always think that any critic of

yours must be a bot. Well, they lost an election. Yes. We couldn't have been rejected. Like it must be all bots. It was exactly that. And Hillary Clinton, to this day, uses the Russia collusion cope. And I think that's completely true. And it's a good glimpse. The documents they released were, it was sort of like a time machine, like I'd been transported back to 2017. And you were in the midst, in the throes of this obsession. And it's another great reminder of how the fevered freakout over Russian collusion really, really deserved a whole lot more skepticism from reporters like the ones at BuzzFeed who carried water for Mark Warner in this case and for Democrats in Congress, rather than taking both sides of the story here, Twitter side, the Mark Warner side, and maybe adding a little skepticism of both sides.

Former FTX founder, the disgraced Sam Bankman, freed, arrived in court yesterday. Let's roll some video of that. Sam, how are you going to play this morning? Come on, guys, today. Take the hole. Take the hole. You're going to have to fall. Thank you, guys. I courtesy of wearing a jacket. He did. He did wear a jacket and a backpack.

I'm doing Sager's work today. I love the news cliche of disgraced, though. It just goes into every piece of copy. It just becomes part of your name. Disgraced Intercept DC Bureau Chief. One day, one day, I will get there. If you live long enough in this business, you wind up the disgraced. Someone will call you disgraced. Absolutely. Can't wait for that. So what stands out to you from the video and from SBF's decision here to plead not guilty? Backpack is classic. He's keeping it real. So he kept it real by going- Two strapping. Yeah. Two straps. Right. Unafraid. So he goes in there. He pleads not guilty. Two of his

underlings, including his former girlfriend, have turned state's evidence and are now going to testify against Bankman-Fried. She may, Caroline Ellison, she may face up to, what, five years or so, which suggests that if she was willing to plead guilty and plea for five years, that they have enough evidence that her lawyers were able to persuade her that she was looking at decades if she didn't do that. And so therefore, is Bankman-Fried looking at decades, you think? I would think so. Absolutely. And there's a big question mark here. When he's pleading not guilty, I'm curious what you think of this. What does he think? How does he think if Caroline Ellison has flipped and all indications point to that's absolutely what's happening, which means, by the way, other people probably will be very eager to cooperate as well. What on earth does he think he can argue against all of that. Well, I mean, maybe he can get some charges knocked down. Maybe there's some type of guilty plea that he can enter,

but you can't just enter a guilty plea right off the bat without any deal being offered. Because what do you have to lose at that point? Yeah. You might as well take it to trial and see if you can... So you don't think he's going to do this to the bitter end? You think this is part of a give and take, possibly? You know, it's hard to tell because this guy,

there was this reporting that Michael Lewis was at his house while he was out on bail, talking about what they're going to do with the film and probably doing some more interviews about, what was it like getting indicted, filing for bankruptcy. Because Michael Lewis, author of The Great Short, The Big Short. It was great. And a ton of incredible books.

He started out with Liar's Poker. He was a trader back in the 1980s and then ends up writing about Lehman, which then ends up fueling the financial crisis in 2007, 2008, with the very mortgage-backed securities that he wrote about in Liar's Poker, which is an incredible book. And that's before you get the money ball blindside. He's just had this run of just incredible both luck and talent. And the luck lands again where he spent the last six months or year or whatever with FTX.

He was able to see a good story. Before it was crumbling. I don't think he knew it was going to be this good. But he knew it was going to be good. And so for Sam Bankman-Fried to basically have carried on as if nothing has really changed, DMing with reporters, doing Twitter spaces, doing interviews, just hanging out and being a dude. Incriminating himself. Incriminating himself. Incriminating himself constantly.

And that's what I don't understand about this. So the two possibilities here, give and take possibility, this is part of a way to sort of negotiate with law enforcement, or he rides this out to the bitter end. I'm curious as to whether he's actually going to ride this out to the bitter end precisely because of what you just said, the hubris that he has in sort of chatting with reporters, incriminating himself, doing interviews, looking so casual and relaxed about the whole thing. I don't know. I mean, I think maybe he thinks he can muddy the waters, hire really good lawyers,

and I believe he has one of Ghislaine Maxwell's defense attorneys. And just work his way through the situation because the law has been too loose around crypto period. Is the law actually there to say this is a slam dunk for decades in prison? I don't know. Right. I have heard some experts who will say that, look, there are so few rules around crypto that they're going to have

to get him on ticky-tack stuff, like Al Capone-style tax evasion stuff. Like, in other words, there's going to be a ton of wire fraud, which is just...

There's always... It's a crime that everybody's committing all the time. Your favorite real housewife, Teresa Giudice. That's right. That was it's the crime that everybody's committing all the time your favorite real housewife Teresa Giudice that's right that that was one of the charges that they that they hit her with and they they they hit her with the the kind of the the pencil whipping your mortgage thing where you're like oh yeah my house like which Trump does all the time which is like

you're going to a bank for a loan what's your place worth and that that house worth eight hundred thousand dollars but you know it's worth like $600,000. Yeah. And actually it was her husband doing it. She got railroaded. He also got railroaded. They deported the guy. It's so ridiculous. He lives in the Bahamas now, not with FTX, but. Is he in the Bahamas? I thought he was in Italy for a while. He was. And then he went to the Bahamas. You have not been keeping up. I have not. The Joe Giudice Chronicles. Well, can we put C2 up on the screen? Because this adds a wrinkle to the conversation from a sort of 30,000 foot perspective that I found really interesting. This is a column from John Tamney over in RealClearMarkets who wrote, the Sam Bankman freed collapse is a paradoxical sign

of progress. Now, Tamney is super libertarian and he writing, and he references one of his own columns from June 2021 that said in the headline, we'll know crypto is for real when its coins start collapsing. John is a writer that I respect because he's totally consistent on his libertarianism. You know, it's not like you're not sort of like just trying to piece together an ideology from what's happening in the news. As you can see from the fact he wrote that in June of 2021, it's been consistent. What do you think about that take that I've heard it increasingly from crypto quarters as well over the last couple of weeks and since the FTX stuff started to come into full bloom is that basically these are the growing pains that suggest crypto is here to stay. What is here to stay is what I would ask. Like, what is crypto?

What is... Like, what is it? Post gold standard, what is money? Right. Right. If crypto is money, then it's done. Then it's done for because it's not money. And it's not circulating in the way that money is.

If crypto are securities, which they're now being regulated, or they're now being hinted at being regulated as securities, that means a security as in basically a stock certificate that represents a company. Okay, what does the company make? For a while, you can say, oh, it's this blockchain technology that's going to revolutionize everything. And then it reveals actually the blockchain technology isn't actually that great and nothing that super innovative about it. And it doesn't scale. And so

it's very hard to see how that is a product that this stock certificate is related to. So then what is it? And as Bankman-Fried described it, it is somebody's belief that it is worth something. And as long as that belief maintains, then it continues to be worth something. And as long as you can continue to attract people in with advertising and with offers of 9% interest rate, then people's belief can stay in that. But what Bankman-Fried was doing was describing a pyramid scheme. That as long as money keeps coming in, then you can keep putting some money out without actually producing any product. And so I haven't seen anybody in the crypto space argue for what the kind of use case is for it that would justify the valuation of it if it's not money. And so far, it is not money. And I don't see any evidence that it's going to tip over into money. And I don't see any evidence that it's going to tip over into money. And so I think that

it's a little bit too convenient to say that, well, the collapse and the failure of this project shows that some of it is going to work. That's not enough. You have to show, okay, fine, you're getting rid of the scoundrels. But what is it about the ones that are still there? What fundamentally is it about them that is going to survive a tight money situation and that is producing value to society, which then translates into wealth because you have to have some value. Otherwise, it's just a pyramid scheme. And John's argument hinges on that because he compares this specifically. He says history is repeating itself. He compares it to cars. He says in the early parts of the 20th century, thousands

of car makers or would-be car makers were matched with capital. Just about every single company created failed. Fast forward to the end of the 20th century, something similar happened with the internet. And to your point, both of those are predicated on a tangible service, especially cars. I mean, that's even more obvious, but the internet in ways that were maybe a hazy, I just combined fuzzy and hazy, one word, at the time, but are now very clear to us the tangibility of the internet as a product. So yes, if you're trying to add crypto into that mix, it's easier to see what the difference is. One of these things is not quite like the other. Right. Pets.com might have been a ridiculous company that wasn't worth $100 billion,

but you can imagine a website that sold pet-related products as being a company that made money. Yeah. It's a service that people will buy. Yeah. I mean, that exists now. I don't know if... Is it pets.com? What happened to pets.com? But what did you... Did you find anything in that argument to cling to? No, I mean... Crypto folks. It just forwards to PetSmart.

Pets.com forwards to PetSmart. That's really funny. No, I mean, I think I always enjoy the sort of sincerely argued devil's advocate point to media frenzies, because it's not a point anybody's making in the media. But I think in other sectors of the economy, perhaps like social media, for instance, where the bubble might be popping, it's an argument that's sort of well worth considering that maybe this is growing pains that, you know, it's hard to see the forest for the trees when you're in the middle of something.

So, but no, when it comes to crypto, again, it's very, very hard to say where all of this goes. Maybe there's a remote possibility that this turns out to be correct. I agree more with you. I think they kind of tried to make a forest without trees. And it turns out you need both. And you can't have one without the other. That would be my take. We're moving on now to the tragedy out of Idaho

that continues to develop as we learn more about the 28-year-old suspect, Brian Koberger, who was arrested at his parents' home in Pennsylvania after he drove miles and miles, thousands of miles, with his father across the country from where he committed the crime, allegedly, to then Pennsylvania. In that Cartwright country, Stroudsburg. Oh, yeah, that's right. It's a district that Ryan has paid very close attention to. The white Hyundai Elantra that police had told everybody to be out on the lookout for, this is an interesting part of the puzzle.

We've learned now that he was pulled over twice by Indiana police while he was driving from Washington, where he lived very close to Moscow, Idaho, on his way to Pennsylvania with his father. His dad flew out to Washington. We're sort of piecing these puzzles together, piecing this puzzle together. But that white Hyundai Elantra that police said, yeah, let's roll D2. Police said to be on the lookout for this white Hyundai Elantra. They said they didn't know the license plate from it because they had footage of the car going sideways in the vicinity of the house where the murders happened. They didn't know the license plate number.

It turns out that Indiana police pulled that car over with Coburger and his father in it twice for traffic questions. On their trip back from Pennsylvania, that car was in the driveway of his parents' house in a gated community in Pennsylvania when he was arrested just several days ago. Indiana police again say they did not have the information about the license plate and about that car.

Obviously, there are many, many Ande Elantras from that time period. I think it was 2013 through 2016 out on the market. It's too generic, but they say that license plate wasn't available in mid-December when they made these traffic stops. So again, you have a situation, incredibly frustrating, I can imagine for the families where this guy was driving across country with his father. We know he was a criminology student. He has a master's degree in criminal studies or criminology from DeSales University. We're learning more details about his life.

Ryan, these new developments are just peeling back predictable layers of an onion. And there's obviously a lot of intrigue surrounding this. He appears to be a pretty textbook case of a suspect in a tragedy like this. What do you make of it? He says he looks forward to, or his lawyer that government authorities are able to access that DNA database. And so it turns out that it wasn't that he himself had done an Ancestry or 23andMe or whichever the ones that are more willing to give up. We can put D1 up. Yeah, we can put D1 there. But there was some relative of his great-grandfather or something. Basically, like you were saying, all you need is a close relative. So if you're out there saying,

like, wow, this isn't a problem for me because, A, I don't commit murder, and B, I've never submitted my DNA test anywhere. Well, hopefully you don't ever commit murder. But also, it doesn't matter if you have submitted your own DNA to 23andMe or any of these sites. It's out of your hands now. It's out of your hands because if somebody in your family, and we're talking distant, distant family, somebody that you've never met would qualify for this. They were able to then track the DNA that way. And so the article that you were mentioning raises all of the privacy implications of this. And I wonder if this is something where the horse is out of the barn. It is. And what kind of rules at this point could you put in place? Because you also have

government authorities, including Chinese government authorities, who get around court orders, subpoenas, and other restrictions on civil liberties by just straight up buying it. So they'll say, hey, look, this is for sale. Like this evidence is for sale to the public. So this is just like us reading your tweets. If you put your tweets out on a public timeline, then we're going to read those. Now, there are actually restrictions on whether the FBI is able to collect and analyze them. They're not supposed to do that. They can read them, but they can't collect and analyze. Whatever.

The point is that once all of this stuff is in the public domain, governments are just going to exploit access no matter what the laws are. Yeah. And then the further problem becomes every victim of this, so to speak, is the least sympathetic person you could possibly imagine. Of course. Like, assuming that the allegations are true, this is somebody who killed four innocent people for absolutely no, just deranged, no reason.

So to then say, well, it's a shame that the way he was caught, it's a shame that it doesn't make you sound like a very sympathetic actor in the argument. And it doesn't move the chains and policy world at all, period. And that's how you get to 1984. What member of Congress are you going to get to stand up at this point? Yeah. Well, and this is sort of famously used in the case of the Golden State Killer. But my colleague Evita Duffy, who wrote that article that was up on the screen, she actually reminded me of another case.

She writes, in 2019, GED match helped solve the assault case of a 71-year-old woman who was strangled while practicing the organ alone in a church. Per GED match's terms of service, the site would only share users' DNA with law enforcement in the case of sexual assault or homicide. Since the Utah victim was not sexually assaulted and survived the attack, GED Match was not supposed to share users' data to solve the case. However, the company's founder decided to hand over DNA data anyway. The offender was subsequently caught, and GED Match users' privacy was breached. And again, what do you do to put the genie back in the bottle? Absolutely nothing. There's nothing to be done in that case, period.

And how do you argue against it? It's the same difficulty. It's similar to the difficulty people have in defending free speech, especially in the sort of social media climate, where there's so much finger-pointing and there's so much bad faith argumentation. If your champion of free speech is, let's say, you know, the ACLU, for instance, used to put out press releases about

defending the rights of awful Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois. They don't want to come anywhere near that stuff of the 10-foot pole anymore because we exist in the social media world. Right. Yeah. Who wants to make the case that, well, hey, look, this woman was only nearly murdered and not murdered according to your terms of service. You should not have allowed access to this DNA. Yeah, you look like a ghoul making that argument. And if there isn't a kind of cultural respect for the value of privacy and for civil liberties,

then you don't have anything to stand on. You don't have anything to embed yourself in when you're making that argument. And you just look like a freak. Yeah. Yeah. And tragically, this story looks like it's headed straight to the sort of true crime books, like the stacks of true crime books that have been written, but in a way that is, I think, sensationalist and overly sort of drenched in an intrigue that distracts from the victims and is more focused on the suspect who may eventually be convicted as the killer himself, because it's such a crazy story. If you have a criminal justice student or criminology student who's studying serial killers,

studying murder, is on Reddit, we now know, asking survey questions to people who have actually been in prison about sort of topics like these. So it's headed straight in that direction, being one of the sort of infamous serial killers that deserves really no part of the infamy, no part of the fame in the infamy question at all. Although the person seems, the twist being the denial.

Yeah, well, that'll be quite interesting. Which maybe, maybe just a weird case of mistaken DNA identity. Who knows? But like, it certainly doesn't seem that way. It doesn't seem that way. They've pinpointed, according to police, this is according to police, they have pinpointed location data and they've pieced together, they say they've pieced together a pretty plausible explanation of how it all happened. You can't do four murders anymore with iPhones and with your E-ZPass and everything else they've got on you.

And then to get nailed with a DNA on top of that. Yeah. So if you were thinking of doing four murders, I would suggest you don't do them because you're not going to get away with those anymore. Well, that's one of the interesting parts of this is they say again that, and I have no problem whatsoever with true crime intrigue at all. I mean, I love it myself, but there are obviously. I thought you were going to say, I have no problem with true crime. I love committing crime, yeah.

No, no, no. I love all the true crime series. I have zero problem with that, but obviously I have a problem with the times that it's so sensationalist. And we've seen a lot of that in the coverage from the New York Post and the Daily Mail and others who have some really good reporting,

but the way they frame it, I think, is unfortunate sometimes. But that is one of the interesting cases here. Cops say they have location data of him pinging really close to the victims through a long period of time. So he was perhaps following them. They also say though, that there's perhaps he was wearing gloves

in a grocery store. That should protect you. When your phone is trying to like get onto the wifi of your victims. Right. As long as you've got gloves, gloves. That should protect you. When your phone is trying to get onto the Wi-Fi of your victims. Right. As long as you've got gloves, you're going to be fine. There was some, perhaps there was some effort made while he was following them to conceal his identity. We, again, all of this stuff is preliminary,

but certainly a case that will follow, especially the DNA angle. But prayers go out to the victims' families and the entire community, small community that has just been totally uprooted for weeks. Not only are four lives ended, four families changed forever, the entire community will reel from this for decades. The school, yeah, absolutely. All right, Brian, what are you looking at today?

What is, I love asking this, what is your point? I don't have any point today. No, my point today, I'm looking at the unusual whales who runs a great Twitter account that has been exposing kind of in real time, along with a lot of other great reporting that's been done. Business Insider made it, I think, didn't they do like a year-long investigation into this? And

finally, pressure has been building on Congress to do something about it. And then Nancy Pelosi kind of just sabotaged the talks at the very end and step down as Speaker. Now, Kevin McCarthy has sworn that he is going to ban this. He said this to kind of embarrass Pelosi. So we'll see. If Kevin McCarthy does become Speaker, we'll see if he does this as one of his first acts or not. So I wanted to run through Unusual Whales, put out its annual report on 2022 spending. We can put up that first element there, 2022 stock trading report. And so I think he runs through a lot of the numbers and has a bunch of kind of helpful little bars that we can talk about here. So first of all, it does appear that I think two things combined to reduce the amount of trading that was done in Congress.

I think one is the public condemnation of it, that it just became kind of the juice not worth the squeeze anymore. But also, when the market is receding, you're making less money, you're less inclined to play around in it. Everybody thinks they're a genius when the market is rising because their trades are all paying off. And then people quickly realize that they're not geniuses at all when the market is retreating. And we're going to get to how Pelosi's family lost 20%, which actually lost to the market, which is fascinating, in a minute. But we put up this second one. So what that shows you right there is that the number of, the amount of trading went down. And so for the next one, it goes to, here, that one right there. This compares the total value traded by members of Congress. One of the few people that increased significantly the amount of trading, Ro Khanna, who I think his spouse is super wealthy

and the spouse trading gets thrown into this as well. That's the case with Pelosi. Her husband, Paul, is a literal trader. Like that's his job. And then you have Josh Gottheimer down here after Michael McCaul, Josh Gottheimer down here after Michael McCaul. Josh Gottheimer, who we're going to get to later, traded $64 million in options, buying and selling call options. But here he's down from $133 million in trading down to $52 million in stock trading this year.

Rick Scott, not surprising, right, That he's one of the biggest traders out there. Bill Haggerty, that one surprise you? No, no, no. Now, Tommy Tuberville got himself caught up in some really sketchy trades. I guess nobody has kind of confused him for a stock market genius either. He's like, wait a minute, Tommy, where did you get these ideas? And then Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut, which is like the land of the traders. And so it wouldn't be surprising

that Richard Blumenthal also, like Richard, where'd you hear that? Yeah. On the flight back to Hartford? On the train, yeah. The train, like, he has also done a bunch of good reporting on the relationship between the amount of lobbying that's done and then the amount of trading that's done. So if you're lobbied by a particular industry, you're more likely to trade stocks of that industry.

And you can imagine how that's happening. So somebody's coming in. They're telling you what they want to do on this, what they want on this particular bill. And then they're also saying, hey, by the way, it would be really great for us because, you know, one of our drugs is about to be approved for stage three, you know, phase three FDA. And this is why that's important for us to have this particular type of regulatory relief. And the member of Congress is like, what did you say again about that phase three? When's that news hitting? Oh, October 15th, sir.

Just happy to share this information with you. And then, boom, October 13th, you see this member of Congress buys a bunch of stock. And you know that they were lobbying. You don't know what happened, but you can put two and two together. But you can't prove it. Well, you can only prove it when you get – whose phone did they bug? Like they actually caught some people like actually. Chris.

Chris Cox? No, no, no. New York. Yeah, New York congressman who actually got them like on the phone. Although, yeah, anyway. And they also always say it's in a blind trust. Oh, it's in a blind trust. I couldn't see it.

I was just talking about it. And so let's put the one that says top 10 stocks bought by House reps in 2022. I thought this one was interesting too. Look at Tesla. Democrats, of the $6 million worth of Tesla's stock purchased, almost all of it was by Democrats. First of all, they took a bath on that, right? I mean, that $6 million is now worth about a million dollars or $2 million, depending on when they bought it. We'll see what happens next year. Yes. So it looks like Republicans were smart not to be buying Tesla in 2022. You also see the same partisan divide here with Apple and Disney and Google and NVDA. I don't even know what that one is.

So what do you think of that Tesla breakdown? How funny is that? Also, it could just be, and the problem, and he makes this point, it could just be Pelosi or like Ro Khanna. In a bunch of his stats, he just pulled Pelosi out because she ruins all the data because she trades so much or her husband trades so much. So what is the breakdown? You mentioned the Gottheimer breakdown. What is interesting about his trading? Because Tesla, to me, is a good reminder that Elon Musk, especially with Tesla, has been trying to do this sort of public-private partnership thing for years where he has been very heavily subsidized and Teslas are very heavily subsidized.

They're only at the price point they are because of like very heavy subsidies from Democrats that have been so interested in this transition to renewables and green energy. And that's why they've always been generally very supportive of Tesla. And it wasn't a toxic stock. It wasn't a toxic company to be in the mix with at all until Elon Musk started flirting with buying Twitter, basically. Which, again, then Tesla stock has gone down over the course of the year. But what's the deal with Gottheimer? So yeah, so put the next one up. This is options contracts traded in Congress. And you see Pelosi, as expected, like, so this is like her husband's a trader. He's going to be trading options. But Josh Gottheimer, so $64 million in call options in 2021, $23 million in call options in 2022.

Just an extraordinary amount of options trading. Now, Gottheimer represents a lot of the bankers because the bankers, a lot of them live in northern New Jersey, which he represents. The report points out that a lot of his options trading was done in Microsoft, and he used to work for Microsoft under Mark Penn. If you remember, they did that. Mark Penn was leading their kind of anti-Google and also like this very kind of cutthroat DC operation that they were running for a while and Gottheimer was a part of that. So to be trading tens of millions of dollars worth of options, a lot of them related to a company that you used to work for, be an executive in, while serving in Congress representing probably as many stockbrokers

and other bankers as Richard Blumenthal represents in Connecticut, is just a real kind of thumb in the face of the American public, it feels like. Yeah, and this is all happening post. Thumb in the eye. Yeah, maybe thumb in the eye. This is all happening post-STOCK ACT, all caps, STOCK ACT, which was something- Which is why we know about the trading. And yeah, that's true.

And it was something that Pelosi sort of championed, but it's a good example of- Reluctantly championed. Reluctantly. But then eventually, she's talked about it since it's passed and says, we've got it on the books. But this is the point is that there's no shame. And one of the interesting things from the recent Pelosi documentary that her daughter Alexandra did is how frequently Paul Pelosi is in the room during those phone calls. There's no

connection made at all to this, of course, in Alexandra's documentary. But from if you put two and two together with this topic that we're discussing right now, and you just see how often he's in the office, how often there's business in their condo, there's business in the car, he's always around. And there's no possible way. You can have, what, the Stock Act, sure. But unless you totally ban trading, which Kevin McCarthy can say he'll do. I don't believe anyone is going to ban trading sure but unless you totally ban trading which kevin mccarthy can say he'll do i don't believe anyone is going to ban trading um but unless you ban trading if spouse trading too i don't see how you can truly truly make this fair um because i mean you just look at that he's he's there everywhere he's hearing everything and if you're a smart trader

you can you can figure it out. And we know. Although they lost this year. Although they lost. So yeah, actually put up this next one. This is average stock returns in 2022. And can you break down why that doesn't just sort of negate the question of corruption? Well, right.

Just because you failed at getting rich in one particular year. And also, it's the appearance of it. And I think that's all you need right there. I think the public sees members of Congress trading stocks while also having power over the economy and over these companies as wrong. Like, whether they're beating the market or losing to the market isn't really the point. The point is that it just looks wrong and it erodes faith in Congress. Now, it turns out that they also do beat the market. And so as this one shows here, and this is matched to basically like a standard and poor's index, which was down 18% over the year.

So everybody was losing money here. But Republicans beat the market by 4.64%, and Democrats beat the market by 3.7%. Pelosi, and actually, if you take Pelosi out of that, then Democrats did much better because Pelosi lost 20 percent. The Pelosi's lost 20 percent over the year while the market lost 18 percent. So, you know, they underperformed the market by by two percent. But the fact that year over year, on average, members of Congress are outperforming the market, I think is all the proof you need that they have inside information. You've met these people. These are not geniuses by any stretch of the imagination. Very stable geniuses. Very stable geniuses. And if they can beat the market,

then they have some information. Obviously. Yeah, there's no, like, yeah. And unusual wills is often good as well as pointing out what committees they're on. And Peter Schweitzer's done really good reporting on that, too. It's just like the most obvious thing in the world. Run through the last two really quick. This is worth exploring. If anybody watching feels like digging more into this, these are some breadcrumbs. These are the best best traders. Mike Kelly, a Republican, 239% gain matched to or beat against the SPY. And then David Trone, who's one of the richest Democrats. He's the guy that owns Total Wine, which is, I don't know how national that chain is, but it's at least in the mid-Atlantic. It's this like Walmart-sized liquor store.

Yeah, I've been in one once and it just blew my mind. It's incredible. It's total wine. Well, it's not totally wine. Right, there's also beer and if the state allows it, liquor. And then if you go down, you see other people who did pretty well. Aren't they lucky? And David Trone, I guess, feels like he deserves this because he also has spent something like $10 million every election cycle. His was the, I think his was the most expensive primary ever up until Sam Bankman Freed dumped an insane amount of money into a losing district. And so he has spent an enormous amount of money to be a member of Congress. Maybe this is just his way of getting a return on his investment there. Get some of it back, yeah. That's why it was a good investment. And then finally, another, some more breadcrumbs for

people if they want. These are the top stocks purchased by Congress with the largest gains since Russia's invasion. And these are a lot of weapons makers. Of course. Unsurprisingly. Of course. So you don't think McCarthy is going to follow through on his promise to do this? No, I think the Stock Act is the best template of how Congress takes care of these things. It's a sort of symbolic gesture that takes a tiny, tiny step in the right direction while also shielding people's ability to continue corruption. Because that's all they're corruption, because that's all they're capable of. That's all they have the will to do.

So if you can package something that doesn't really, I mean, because this is so existential for so many members of Congress, like you said, return on investment. This is considered, you know, they make compared to all the donors they spend all day talking to and the community business leaders they spend all day talking to, they're making south of $200,000 a year from their congressional salary. And they feel like they're entitled to more. They've got to feed their family. Why am I in this room with all these rich people who are sucking up to me? Exactly. Yet I have less money than them. Just feels wrong. Yeah. Or they, in general, have a lot of money to play with. And they're sort of the entrepreneurial type people that say, I've got this money. I'm going to play

with it. I've got the information. I'm going to play with it. But it's always just been considered, you know, that 200K a year isn't enough for me. So obviously I'm going to make money somewhere else. It's really an existential part of their lives. So no, I don't, you would take like a Thomas Massey as speaker of the House to get rid of that. Yeah, and I wonder if they feel like they deserve it in the sense that, let's say a member of Congress is having dinner with somebody that they've known for a very long time, but the person that they've known for a very long time is the head of an oil company or the head of a construction company or head of a pharmaceutical company and they're just so comfortable in their power that they forget that the reason that that person is friends with you and the reason the person is buying you dinner and the reason the person is telling you these things about their company is that they're trying to corrupt you yeah and it's and maybe it just becomes very difficult to see you all they also might just not care it's

a little like you know i'm just going for the Yeah. I think some come up with justifications for it and others just shameless. Don't care. Yeah. Yeah. I think, yes. I think if you're a total narcissist, you might just think, oh, it's because they love me. I'm just such an interesting person. Yes. I'm so good at my job. What's your point today? Well, Crystal actually talked yesterday about a Wall Street Journal article in which corporate bosses vented their frustrations about workers. You can see that up on the screen. Now, The New Yorker, they published a much better take on so-called quiet quitting. That was courtesy of Cal Newport, who wrote that the trend is, quote, the first step of a younger generation taking their turn

in developing a more nuanced understanding of the role of work in their lives. These two positions from the Journal and the New Yorker are actually entirely related. And I actually don't doubt, let's say some fraction of the workforce is actually getting lazier. Can you blame people, though? American work culture has absolutely created immense prosperity. That doesn't mean it's perfect. Plus, when the labor market benefits workers and inflation is high, obviously people are going to demand more, especially when they know they can get a job that perhaps involves working from home with a flexible schedule and, hey, technology is making some folks very rich. Technology that is making

some folks very rich is sapping others of their will to live, let alone to work. One 26-year-old British man told Common Sense last year, quote, the lowest possible quality of life you can have with the internet is still kind of tolerable. It's not absolutely awful. You can sort of exist in that and there's nothing to give you a kick up the butt because it's not the worst thing. All right, so the labor force participation rate among working-age men has dropped a lot. It's gone from about 94% in 1948 to 84% in 2015, with most of the drop actually happening since that period in the mid-60s. Women's labor force participation rate, meanwhile, has actually doubled over that same time period. As Nicholas Eberstadt told the Fifth Column this fall, quote,

For every 25 to 55-year-old guy who is out of work and looking for a job in 2022, there are four guys who are neither working nor looking for work. But we needn't go too far down that particular rabbit hole. Are people really getting lazier? And if so, is that even morally wrong or logically irrational? As Helen Mirren said on this week's great episode of 1923, what could humans possibly do with all of the leisure time new inventions like the washing machine and refrigerator have given us in the last century? Well, let's check back in with Cal Newport over at The New Yorker.

It's hard to find references to the phrase follow your passion in the context of career advice until the 1990s, at which point the adage explodes into common usage, Newport wrote. This passion-centric perspective attempted to thread the needle between the extremes that the boomers had experienced. Get a job, they told their kids, but make it one you love. Seek self-actualization, but also care about making your mortgage payments. Newport added, quote, before we heap disdain on Gen Z's travails, we should remember that we were all once in this same position. For me and my fellow millennials, Newport wrote, it wasn't that long ago that our own parents shook their heads at our confident plans to run an automated business from a laptop in Tulum. Now, I didn't plan that while Sagar was in Tulum, but I kind of think it's funny that parents shook their heads at our confident plans to run an automated business from a laptop in

Tulum. Now, I didn't plan that while Sagar was in Tulum, but I kind of think it's funny that that's where he is right now. There's a lot of debate over the relationship between wages and productivity over time. Jason Furman and the folks over at AEI say it's not a big deal and that, quote, greater productivity growth holds the potential of being the most powerful source of sustained wage growth across the income spectrum. Productivity inputs, though, are getting harder to measure as the common eight-hour workday with that hour lunch break fades away. Hourly workers are not immune from this. If a boss sends a text message or an email at any time, pretty much everyone is expected to respond. You could be at a pool party, you could

be at the gym, but your phone is always there. And that means there's always a possibility of a dramatic request or a minor request, but it's work-related nonetheless. And that is no small thing. It's not a matter of checking your phone for three seconds and just shooting off a quick reply. It is the psychic toll of never, ever disconnecting. And that's not whining. It's a very real thing. For people with Zoom jobs, the luxury of flexible schedules means monitoring email and doing little bits of work here and there when you're with your family or just trying to decompress at the end of the day. Screen time is bad for our health. We know that. And jobs require more and more screen time in formal work hours, nine to five, and outside of

them. It's almost impossible to add up all the little seconds here and there people spend working when they're not technically working. So yeah, some people might throw in the towel and others might get a little mad. Plus, Americans are working more hours, more weeks, and even small things like lunch breaks are declining. We have the data on all of that. To my conservative friends, it's worth saying we don't necessarily need new regulations so much as we need fair interpretations of labor laws, defensible labor laws that are already on the books. Not many people paid attention to it, but in the fall,

the NLRB issued a memo that announced an investigation into, quote, unlawful electronic surveillance and automated management practices. As the NLR investigation into, quote, unlawful electronic surveillance and automated management practices. As the NLRB said, quote, under settled board law, numerous practices employers may engage in using new surveillance and management technologies are already unlawful, already unlawful. The board pointed to several provisions in the FDR-era NLRA, National Labor Relations Act, that are potentially being violated. And crucially, they wrote, electronic monitoring and automated management are not always limited to working time. After the workday ends, some employers continue to track employees' whereabouts and communications using employer-issued phones or wearable devices or apps installed on workers'

own devices, read the memo. And even before they continue, the employment relationship begins, some employers prying to job applicants' private lives by conducting personality tests and scrutinizing applicants' social media accounts. This means work is now absolutely everywhere in a way that it never has been before. It's an incredible blending of the private and personal, just as Newport suggested Gen Z is experiencing. Of course, that's going to change employees. Of course, it's going to change everything. And it renders employees' problems reasonable in a way that many employers are not yet willing to accept. We're excited to be back now with none other than Matt Taibbi. You should check out taibbi.substack.com, TK News over there. Matt, welcome back to CounterPoints.

Thanks for having me on. Of course, we're really excited. We talked earlier in the show about sort of the first dump of the two-part dump yesterday. There was so much information we want to talk to you about the belly button. And maybe we have a picture of the lovely illustration of the belly button. Twitter and the FBI belly button. And maybe we have a picture of the lovely illustration of the belly button, Twitter and the FBI belly button. Now, Matt, you had a thread on this on Twitter. You had a post on it up on TK, which was excellent. Can you start just by telling us, while people are looking at the lovely graphic, what the hell the FBI belly button is. It's actually really interesting. I know that picture is gross and

kind of off-putting, but in a way it kind of should be because one of the things that we're focused on with these documents is trying to figure out the architecture of how information flowed to and from the government with Twitter. And what this thread is really about is how Twitter didn't really want to work with certain agencies for a variety of reasons. They had political disagreements. They thought the State Department, for instance, was too Trumpy. And so they were putting up a front about how many different agencies they wanted to give away their chief moderator's phone number to, and ultimately they settled on a system where everything went through the DHS and the FBI,

and there's a passage where the FBI agent says, "'Think of us as the belly button for the USG.'" So information essentially, and there's another passage where the agent says, the FBI will take care, we'll handle the federal and the USIC, and DHS will know what's going on in all the states. So that's how they did up the information.

The moderation request came in on the federal and international side through FBI and domestically through the Homeland Security. And you also talked about this one back and forth around people who were retweeting or Zero Hedge articles or something. Zero Hedge had been banned, but then people are still sharing some of the information and they said it led to, quote, another flurry of disinformation narratives around the time Zero Hedge had been speculating on the origins of COVID, whether or not it was a lab leak or natural origin. So what's going on with, like, are they zeroing in on Zero Hedge at this point and then trying to make sure that there's nothing emanating remotely

from them? And what else did you find around this area? So I think this came from a report by the Global Engagement Center, which is like the fledgling intel arm of the State Department that nobody's ever heard of. It was founded in the Obama years under Hillary Clinton. I think they wanted to make basically like the State Department version of the NSA. And so it's kind of the weak sister of the intelligence community. And they issued a report in February of 2020 that basically identified a whole bunch of actors as potential cyber threats. And one of their criteria was sort of arguing that COVID might have come from a lab or retweeting news about Zero Hedge being banned from Twitter.

And what this really offers you a window into is how government agencies decide that this or that account is suspicious. Like they have all these crazy criteria. Everybody thinks it's super sophisticated. It's not. It's really stupid. Like in another area of these reports, they're talking about anybody who retweets two or more Chinese diplomats is now suspect for being, for spreading Chinese disinformation. And that included like the Canadian military, like a CNN account. So this

just gives you a window into how they're, how they're making those decisions. I think it also gives us a window into how, and this was another thing your earlier thread yesterday reported on, how reporters promulgate and fuel so much of this cycle. Your earlier thread, something like reporters now know this model works. That was an email from a Twitter reporter or a Twitter staffer. What did you find as it relates to this question in terms of reporters fueling and working with the government agencies basically in service of censorship. Yeah, so I find this part fascinating. Maybe only other reporters find it interesting. But, you know, you might remember back in the WMD episode, there was this famous thing involving Dick Cheney and this thing called stove piping, where Cheney would reach into one of

the intelligence agencies and grab raw intel that hadn't been vetted, would feed it to a news agency or a newspaper like the New York Times, and then would go on a show like Meet the Press and say, hey, did you hear about that New York Times article? And exactly the same process goes on here. Basically, you have either a government department like the Senate Intel Committee or some private researcher that's connected to the government that goes through a reporter and says, here are a bunch of suspect accounts we think are Russia-linked. And then they will go to Twitter and say, we think these are Russia-linked. Will you take action on them? Do you have any comment?

And Facebook, not wanting to take the political hit, might suspend a few accounts. And then instantly they have a headline like, you know, Facebook uncovers, with our help, you know, Russian influence. And that's what the Twitter staffer was talking about, that this is a model that works. As soon as you get somebody to sign off on the idea that this or that account is Russia-linked, you already have an automatic news story. And they did that over and over again. And what's really interesting, I thought, in these documents is you see the Twitter staff are saying, this is going to happen to us over and over again. And it did. I also want to ask you about this Yul Roth email that's number 17 in your thread,

which I think actually kind of exposes the divide in such a profound way. And it's Roth referring to the DHS and FBI as apolitical. And he puts generally in parentheses to acknowledge that, okay, maybe there's a tiny bit of politics going on with DHS and FBI. But it's an internal email. I feel like when he's writing this, I think he means it. And the problem with this GEC, and you can talk a little about what GEC is, to them that was political. So what do you draw from the fact that, and let's assume that he means it, that when he thinks of the FBI and DHS that he sees them as apolitical. What does that tell you about how Twitter was relating to those organizations, those government agencies? Well, clearly I think they brought themselves into a place psychologically where they were able to comply with really this unbelievably incessant stream of demands from agencies like the FBI and the DHS to eliminate certain accounts.

They justified that on the grounds that all of these things were legitimate threats. They were legitimately dangerous. We legitimately had to worry about what he called major risks, which included, I guess, Donald Trump getting reelected. So when they were presented with an agency that was politically not in the same place as they were, and it happened twice that year. Actually, I didn't mention this, but also that summer they refused to go along with a Pentagon, quote, political, and the FBI, DHS, NSA, CIA, all those other agencies were not political. So that's how they justified dealing with all those moderation requests. But I think it's pretty transparent what they were doing, and I think people will see it that way, too. Follow up on that real quick. Yeah, go for it.

How does that relate to what you found? How does that relate to Lee Fong's story? Oh, yeah. Once Trump was in, or, yeah, can you, like, what's the connection? a couple of weeks ago talking about what he had found in which Twitter was kind of whitelisting a bunch of Pentagon bots and Pentagon accounts that were doing propaganda around the globe and around drone strikes. Did they at some point then you found pushback against some of this? Were they going too far? Yeah. And Lee even wrote about that. The pushback came in June of 2020.

It started with Facebook, actually. Facebook was the first company to say no, and then Twitter kind of followed their lead. But essentially, the Pentagon, and we can put Pentagon in parentheses because this really, we're talking about the NSA in some cases. They had been creating local foreign language accounts so that if, for instance, you did a drone strike in a foreign country where they speak Arabic and there were lots of local news reports saying, oh, they blew up a hospital, all these kids died. Suddenly you would see a flurry of fake accounts that would say, oh no, actually it wasn't that bad. There were no serious casualties. And guess who that was? That was us doing that, right? So those were what we call information operations. And they had been doing, they've been going along with that for years, but the Pentagon had not had a good relationship with Twitter dating back to 2017. I was told this explicitly by somebody in the defense community that they had been basically ghosted by Twitter dating back to like the middle of 2017.

Finally, in 2020, the company's banded together and decided not to do this anymore. And that story didn't come out until 2022. You might remember it from earlier last fall when it came out in the Washington Post that they had uncovered a U.S. information operation that was actually a Pentagon operation. It's really interesting. One thing from all of these, all of the reporting that's happened during the Twitter file is to see how much business is conducted over email and Slack. I mean, one thing that's always plagued journalists like to time, like forever, basically, is that nobody puts things in writing. You know, this is all phone calls or in writing. They say we need to move this to a phone call. But so much of this was happening in writing and was etched in so-called like digital stone, maybe. But Matt, is that have you seen any effort? I'm sure there are a couple of emails where it's like,? Not that I'm in favor of less transparency,

but did they really just think that this was kind of in a vault and was not a liability for them to be talking like this? They clearly thought that. They were extremely cavalier in what they were doing. There are moments where they say maybe this is more of a phone conversation. They also, and this is one of the things that came out in the second thread yesterday, the quote unquote industry call, which is involved Twitter, Facebook, some other companies,

and a whole bunch of other companies. And then the DHS, FBI, Director of National Intelligence. And then there were a bunch of other agencies that were sort of auditing. They were in listen mode only. All that was going on in Signal, which is an interesting question because some lawyers have raised to me the issue of, you know, can you really send things in encrypted fashion or can you send documents that are timed to disappear which is what happens through the fbi's teleporter program uh if you're a government agency you're

supposed to be recording everything right um so that's interesting like they had i would say on the whole really terrible opsec on all this stuff. But in some cases, they're using methods that I'm not sure were legal if they're government agency endeavors. So it's interesting on both fronts. Yeah, that happened here in D.C. Government officials were communicating over signal, and they had to stop that because it's not appropriate. Right, well, that raises a lot of questions. I'm sorry to interrupt, but you had thousands and

thousands of moderation requests coming in via signal and teleporter. And, you know, I'm not sure how much of that is ever going to be retrieved. And, you know, is that okay? I'm not sure. Yeah. And so you and the other, other reporters working on the Twitter files have been accused of quote unquote cherry picking. And I saw you responded to that in one of your recent, recent newsletters. Can you, can you elaborate on, on, on your kind of response to, to that particular line of attack? First of all, I don't even know what that means. As opposed to what? You know, the absolutely perfect,

even representative sample of humanity that you see on other news channels? What are they talking about? And if you see an email, in a sea of emails where it says, hey, we're the FBIbi all the reports that come in from the u.s intelligence community uh and from us we'll go through our channels and and the homeland security is going to handle all the states you're not going to pick that cherry like you know as a reporter i don't i don't really understand what they're arguing here. Yes, of course, we're taking the interesting stuff. But if you want to argue that

there's some other email somewhere that says, oh, we're not doing this, I would feel ethically obligated to put that in there. I haven't seen that. So that's why I'm feeling confident in publishing this stuff. But there isn't really like a contra argument that is not appearing in these emails. One thing that people have said, because I reported this initially, there were requests that came from the Trump administration and were honored. I was told that pretty solidly by former executives, and I felt obligated to report it, but I haven't seen it in the email record. So that's why people aren't seeing it. It's just that I don't have it in writing. That is really interesting. And I really recommend folks follow your subsects

to TK News because it's been helpful in sort of fleshing this out even more. Just great reads over there and hope you're able to get some sleep, Matt. Thank you both. Of course. All right. Well, that does it for us on CounterPoints today. Ryan, fascinating reporting from Matt. Yeah. I wish every company would just open up its archives. I know. And let people in. One of the interesting things I've seen is that Elon should have just dumped all of this WikiLeaks style. And, you know, that, I mean, yes, we would all love that from every major corporation, especially publicly traded ones. But it's been, I mean, it gives me a lot of confidence when you have Taibbi and Lee Fong going through all of this. And really, even though you can have these accusations of cherry picking flying back and forth, you can tell based based on what's included, that it's a good faith effort

to really pull this back, pull back the curtain on what's happened at Twitter. Yeah. And like I said, if, and we had, people should check out our interview with Lee, because he talked about the process that they go through in order to do the reporting. Basically, there's a Twitter lawyer who is designated to work with the reporters, and the reporters then, Lee or Matt, would send a request like, I would like everything that matches the keyword of this. And then it comes back from the attorney, which... It's not the ideal process. There's no, you can imagine why a lawyer at a company would say, we're not just going to allow a keyword search.

Yeah. And because there are privacy laws around different personnel stuff. And also, that's not what they're necessarily looking for anyway you're not trying to get like into like people's like performance reviews or other like you know super personal stuff they want the they want the exchanges that are of public importance right so yeah it wouldn't it's not it's not perfect you'd rather have journalists have complete and unfettered access, but that just doesn't exist absent a kind of a hack or a leak like Edward Snowden style type of dump. And even with those, news organizations didn't dump everything that Edward Snowden obtained. Yeah, and it's fascinating to watch the Washington Post call people like Matt conservative.

I mean, it's just like dismiss everybody. They changed that. Did you see that? They did. Yeah, they corrected that. It was like a little insult. Yeah. How do you like that that's an insult? Yeah, I mean, hey, it's been an insult in the corporate press for a long time, are doing this reporting because they want to somehow excuse it as being biased or cherry picked. When, in fact, again, Matt and Lee have absolutely no incentive to carry water for Republicans or for the right, period.

But it's easy to just sort of offhand do the sort of, yeah, they're just carrying water for the right thing it's not reality but that's the good news here is that lots of people now can see pretty clearly what was happening on the inside. Also I just noticed speaking of seeing things pretty clearly that CounterPoints is now CounterPoints, look at that nice clean

logo we'll probably be with you not just on on Fridays in the future stay tuned for more information on that we're excited to

keep going yep and so that does it for CounterPoints Wednesday now everybody can head on over to C-SPAN where you can binge that for the next day

they're about to start the fourth vote for speaker which will probably go about as well as the last did but we'll see.

Stay tuned. It's going to get interesting. See you soon. I'm Michael Kassin, founder and CEO of 3C Ventures and your guide on good company, the podcast where I sit down with the boldest innovators shaping what's next. In this episode, I'm joined by Anjali Sood, CEO of Tubi. We dive into the competitive world of streaming. What others dismiss as niche, we embrace as core. There are so many stories out there, and if you can find a way to curate and help the right person discover the right content, the term that we always hear from our audience is that they feel seen.

Listen to Good Company on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Over the years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned no town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've heard from hundreds of people across the country with an unsolved murder in their community. I was calling about the murder of my husband. The murderer is still out there. Each week, I investigate a new case. If there is a case we should hear about, call 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sometimes as dads, I think we're too hard on ourselves.

We get down on ourselves on not being able to, you know, we're the providers, but we also have to learn to take care of ourselves. A wrap-away, you got to pray for yourself as well as for everybody else, but never forget yourself. Self-love made me a better dad because I realized my worth. Never stop being a dad. That's dedication. Find out more at fatherhood.gov. Brought to you by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Ad Council. This is an iHeart Podcast.