Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 2/3/22: Ukraine Crisis, Jeff Zucker, Corporate Greed, Bezos Superyacht, Whoopi Goldberg, Surveillance Capitalism, Obesity Epidemic & The Case Against College For All

Episode Date: February 3, 2022

Krystal and Saagar cover the placement of troops on Ukraine's border, Jeff Zucker's resignation as the boss of CNN, corporate profiteering off inflation, Jeff Bezos's destructive superyacht, Whoopi Goldberg's comments on the holocaust, billionaires selling suicide hotline data, America's silent obesity crisis, and the left & right case against college for all.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/Oren Cass: https://americancompass.org/a-guide-to-college-for-all/ https://www.encounterbooks.com/books/the-once-and-future-worker/ Freddie Deboer: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/ https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250224491 National Suicide Hotline: [phone] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

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

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

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

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

ad-free and uncut an hour early before everyone else. You get to hear our reactions to each other's monologues. You get to participate in weekly. Ask me anything. And you don't need to hear our annoying voices pitching you like I am right now. So what are you waiting for? Go to breakingpoints.com. Become a premium member today, which is available in the show notes.

Enjoy the show, guys. Good morning, everybody. Happy Thursday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Lots of big happenings this morning to get into. We've got new developments with Ukraine. We have a major shakeup at CNN and definitely more going on there than what we're being told at the moment. So Jeff Zucker out at CNN will tell you all about that. Starbucks is lying to you. They are telling you that they're lifting prices because of the supply chain crisis and inflation. In fact, they have record-breaking profits, so that doesn't really make sense. Jeff Bezos has a brand new yacht. Super yacht.

Super yacht. It is so large and extravagant that he has persuaded the city of Rotterdam to deconstruct a famous historic bridge. Historical bridge. So that his frickin' yacht can get delivered to him. So we'll tell you about that. Also, we obviously have to dive into all the things that have been happening with Whoopi, her comments, the fallout, the response,

all of those aspects we'll get into. We also have a very interesting, I'm excited about this, I don't know if it'll really be a debate, but a discussion between Oren Kass and Freddie DeBoer about college education and where our money as a public should be going and how we should be thinking about what our students, our young people should be doing post high school. So we will get into all of that. But we wanted to start with breaking news with regards to Ukraine. Yeah, this is unquestionably the biggest news in the world. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen, which is that the United States, President Biden greenlights an additional

3,000 U.S. troops to Eastern Europe in the coming days. So these are going to be countries specifically in the NATO alliance. The deployments will be to Poland and Romania. And there are already 8,500 troops that the Pentagon had put on alert. So this is 3,000 of that 8,500 troops that are going to go ahead and be deployed over there. So this is very, very important also, because many of these are people who are also within Germany, Crystal, who are being sent even farther east over to Romania. That's a mechanized infantry division. And the Pentagon also said that 1,700 of the service members will be deploying from the 82nd Airborne Division from Fort Bragg to Poland and an additional 300 people from Fort Bragg to Germany. So these are people who are already within Europe who are moving much, much further east. Obviously, this is a big escalation on the part of the United States.

And White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki talked a little bit about it yesterday at the briefing. Let's take a listen to her justification. It's still not clear, though, why we've been you've been addressing this here. But why now, then, given that you're saying there's there's no new evidence that's come to light necessarily, it's not that you have a sense that Putin is going to invade anymore so than you thought a few days ago. That's true. But, and I just noted that, that it wasn't an event

because I think the way Zeke asked the question in the last day or two or over the weekend or something like that. This has been under discussion for some time now with our NATO partners and of course within the administration. It is also true that there's no question that Russia and President Putin has continued to take escalatory, not de-escalatory steps. So it is not that it is one moment,

it is we are looking at events over the course of time. Yeah, very well articulated there. You know, it's just such, it's really terrible because the problem here is that the incoherence of our strategy, now obviously whenever it comes to Ukraine, we're like, oh, well, we're going to not do anything militarily if Putin invades Ukraine. We'll economically sanction. But now we're going to send 3,500 more troops to Poland and Romania, which is exactly why Putin is putting troops on the Ukrainian border in the first place and only bolsters that fear. But we're not going to use those troops. Don't worry. Also, the White House yesterday, go ahead and put this up there, has gone ahead and said that they are no longer going to be using the word

imminent to describe a potential Russian invasion of Ukraine based upon a, quote, unintended message. Obviously, they're listening to the people we told you all to listen to, the actual Ukrainians. So they're not going to say it's imminent, Crystal, but they're listening to the people we told you all to listen to, the actual Ukrainians. So they're not going to say it's imminent, Crystal, but they are going to send 3,500 more troops to the region, escalating the tensions there, obviously, and making it seem as if, well, what are they doing there? What exactly is the message that's being sent? Is it to bolster a diplomatic message? We have not yet heard about this diplomatic message. There is complete incoherence around what's happening here. And within incoherence, within chaos, this is why

I've been concerned so much, that is when something can happen which can spark a dramatic confrontation. Already this morning, I saw that U.S. fighters were going ahead and intercepting Russian fighters over the North Sea. This is exactly, you know, these chicken moves. And all it takes is one collision. These things come very, very close. One guy kills the other guy. Now what? Now what's going to happen? It can cause, you know, all sorts of different ramifications. And clearly, as we continue to move up the escalation ladder with this, we have no idea what is going on in Ukraine. And I mean, just listen to that White House justification. It's nonsense. It's basically like triple speak. I don't even know

what's happening. Good for her. Thank you. So why now, given that you aren't even making the case that Russia is escalating so effectively, why are we escalating right now? Especially as you point out, I mean, this is not going to serve as a deterrent force because they're very upfront about, listen, this is just to back up our NATO allies. They're not going into Ukraine. I mean, they're being very clear about that, which I appreciate, but it's not a deterrent force. All it does is exacerbate the exact insecurities and upset that Putin had to start with. So it's hard to see what it accomplishes. I mean, basically where we are right now

is pretty clear that none of the attempted diplomacy has panned out. The US and NATO have been unwilling to give an inch on any of Russia's core demands. And so you're still at this absolute stalemate. So this is an effort at this sort of like theatrical, chess-beating, saber-rattling show of force. Where does it

ultimately lead? I mean, that's really the big question that nobody ultimately knows. And I do feel really bad for the Ukrainians because their economy is getting destroyed and hammered through all of this tension and conflict as well. So, I mean, they're just in a horrendous situation, on edge, economy sinking, caught between, you know, very difficult circumstances. So I do really, really feel for them. The other piece that we should keep in mind is in terms of like, you know, people get into like, let's read Putin's mind or whatever. Part of why there's this sort of escalation from him at this point, too, is that domestically things have not been going all that well for him. I mean, their economy is trash. His COVID response was bad. So just as our country and our failed

leader and the failed leader of the UK have an interest in sort of having some sort of conflict to distract them, their domestic woes, Putin is responding to some similar domestic incentives, although I think he also has a genuinely, like, deeply held commitment to this revanchist, ultra-nationalist ideology of restoring the greatness of the Soviet Union. I mean, it would be very in character for a Soviet leader during a time of bad economic decline to spark a war in this, that time was Afghanistan. And before him, the czars did the exact same thing. So I've tried to put Putin in the context of Russian history. He really is just like the quintessential Russian leader whenever you read a little bit about it. It's kind of fascinating. The other part of all of this is

a big debate here in Washington over, once again, nobody tells you what exactly the Russians want. I'm not going to say they're the best good faith actors or whatever, but here is the gist of it. They want America and NATO to say Ukraine will never be a part of NATO. Now, we, the NATO Alliance and the United States have officially invited Ukraine into NATO many years ago. It never actually happened because of the geopolitical tensions that it would cause, but that kind of invitation remains the case. NATO, you know, official policy is that Ukraine, you know, when it wants to or, you know, when the time the stars align will become part of NATO. Well, Senator Hawley came out yesterday saying, well, why don't we just give the Russians what they want? Calls on Biden to drop support for Ukraine membership in NATO.

It would de-escalate the situation there. And frankly, it's not like we have a lot to lose anyway. It's not like we were ever actually going to let Ukraine into NATO at this point, given what the Russians have drawn their red line. None of what I said is all that controversial. And yet, when the White House was asked about it yesterday, they basically accused him and anybody saying what I just said as parroting Russian propaganda. Let's take a listen. Senator Hawley was at the statement today saying that the president should sort of take NATO membership off the table for Ukraine and that wasn't in U.S. interest to do that. Do you think that sort of rhetoric or sort of, you know, position by a U.S. senator right now is helpful in this showdown between the West and Russia?

Well, if you are just digesting Russian misinformation and parroting Russian talking points, you are not aligned with longstanding bipartisan American values. Thank you, Cold War and Russia. She's not wrong that it's bipartisan. It shouldn't be bipartisan. I mean, what is so crazy about this? American interests economically and militarily are not in Eastern Europe and have not been since, what, 1991? Why should we be wasting so much time, effort, money, 3,500 troops? It costs probably a million dollars per troop per year in order to keep those people forward deployed. Why is any of that worth it? Nobody can answer this question.

The bipartisan consensus around all of this is ludicrous. And yeah, just declaring Ukraine will not be a part of NATO is nothing off of us militarily, economically, strategically, from a foreign policy, gives them what they want. And then, okay, then we can all focus on what actually matters? This is the thing. I just don't understand how it can possibly say that it's Russian propaganda or misinformation. To be very clear about the timeline here, in 2008, we said Ukraine and Georgia will be a part of NATO. They take offense to that. We should have a debate. Should they be in NATO or not? I recommend people go out and actually read about what that would entail. Do you really want to go to war for the integrity of Ukraine's borders? Nuclear war, to be very specific. I don't. And frankly, I think there should have been a big debate around all the Baltic states that were let into NATO post of the Cold War. The entire part of NATO was to protect ourselves against the superpower at the time of the Soviet Union.

What the hell does all of this matter in these days, Crystal? Nobody can answer this question. Yeah. In power. Well, and the thing about Jen Psaki's framing there, basically, like, you're not a patriot, you don't support American values, et cetera, et cetera. Look at the polls of how the American public feels about this. That's a great point this because they are much more in line with i mean i don't love holly's framing because he's basically like let's not

be hawkish here so we can be hawkish towards china i'm paraphrasing defend against china anyway but listen if you pull the american people about how intertwined they want to get in this ukrainian conflict and whether they ultimately want to go to war for Ukraine's borders. You're going to find you've got a lot of, I guess, Russian misinformation and propaganda and anti-American values running through the American public. In reality, they just are much more, they have no financial interest in this, like the people in this town who are on the airwaves, who are, you know, at the podium, who are running the show here. And so they can look at this with

actually much more clear-headed and realistic view ultimately and say, listen, this is not a good situation. No, we don't want Russia, you know, invading countries and violating their territorial integrity. We don't want any of that. But are we willing to like fight and die to maintain the territorial integrity of Ukraine? No. So, you know, maybe you ought to have a conversation with the American people about what their American values ultimately are. To your point about the bipartisan consensus, Ken Klippenstein actually had this scoop, I think, just yesterday. Bob Menendez, Democrat in New Jersey, is also considering immediate sanctions on Russia, regardless of what they do in Ukraine. He would be joining Republicans in that call. So we've got a nice little bipartisan hot coalition there that gets so much praise and support from the media. Like, you can never go wrong in the media's eyes when you're calling for more military, more tensions, more lethal aid, quote unquote. That's always

praised when it comes to the media. In fact, I thought Michael Tracy had a funny tweet. He was like, you know, what Joe Rogan could do right now to take the heat off is he could just go really hard for Ukrainian territorial integrity and he'd be their golden boy. That's actually pretty funny. I will say this. The only piece of good news I saw out of all of this was that Ukraine, by its own what it actually wants, said that they were going to set up a tripartite alliance with Ukraine, Britain, and Poland. And you know what I thought? Great. Let the Europeans handle it. It's their continent. You guys decide. You shake it out amongst yourselves. The Germans and the French are on one side. The Polish and the Britain, the Brits are more hawkish. Convene your grand European council and figure it out. I don't think we should have to figure it out. It's your problem.

You decide what your red lines are, all of that. And okay, you know, we'll back you up a little bit. I don't think our troops should be the ones who are majorly there on the front lines. Ask yourself that question. Why are there more American troops out there forward deployed in Eastern Europe than almost any other NATO country, which is not Poland or Romania? How why don't the Germans handle this? Let the Brits handle it. They're huge economies. They have large militaries too. Why do we have to foot the bill? This is again the same problem, which is that we have no actual bipartisan debate here in D.C. because the consensus is almost exactly the same. Mitch McConnell is basically saying, yeah, I'm happy with what Biden has done, but I wish he would do a little bit more.

Basically what he means by that is maybe greenlight some CIA guys to go into Ukraine. This is the opposite of the debate that actually needs to happen in Washington. And look, it just tells you a lot. And the Biden administration is making us all a whole lot more unsafe. And this could make the situation spiral out of control. I'm not going to say, you know, it's going to go to a nuclear confrontation,

but, you know, it's not a good thing for the entire world's attention to be focused on here when geostrategically and more, we do not have a lot of stake about what's happening. Well, and the Europeans have a lot more direct interest in what's going on right now. And it would be respectful to the Europeans to actually let them take sort of the lead in this rather than us thinking that we have to run everything around the world.

And, you know, Russia has kind of acted in the same regard that our opinion and what we're doing is the only thing that matters here. So I think that's a decent direction to go in. All right, Jeff Zucker, CNN. So the head of CNN, in a pretty stunning move, suddenly stepped down. This broke yesterday. Let's go ahead and put this first tweet

up on the screen there from Brian Stelter. Jeff Zucker just announced his resignation to a stunned CNN. What he lays out here, leave this tweet up on the screen for a moment, is that while they were investigating Chris Cuomo's tenure at CNN, Zucker was asked about a consensual relationship. This is per his statement with his closest colleague, someone I've worked with for more than 20 years. I acknowledge the relationship evolved in recent years. I was required to disclose it when it began, but I didn't. I was wrong. As a result, I am resigning.

So effectively, he admits that he's been having this long-time, consensual, from all appearances, affair. And as we kind of get further through the day, it turns out that nobody was surprised by the affair. And as we kind of get further through the day, it turns out that this was, nobody was surprised by the affair. Apparently it was one of the biggest open secrets in all of New York. Everybody knew. I mean, and they both ultimately ended their marriages over the affair. And, and also I want to say like, I mean, I don't personally really care about the affair. This wasn't some junior level, like 23 year old producer like Matt Lauer was into. This was another sort of senior level person.

So, yes, he's the head of CNN. There's some power dynamic thing, whatever. But from what I can tell, this was relatively co-equal people having a consensual relationship. So then you start to go, well, I'm not surprised by the affair, but why are you resigning over it now? So put a pin in that for now. Had to laugh at Brian Stelter's reaction to this. Go ahead and throw this up on the screen. He describes Jeff Zucker as larger than life.

He's a pioneering figure at CNN for nearly a decade. Now his resignation is stunning this newsroom and the news industry. Of course, Stelter has been the most reliable CNN propagandist and lackey for Zucker. In fact, there's some calls this morning for Stelter to be fired over this as well. Because, I mean, his whole job, supposedly, is to be media watchdog. And when you're in that position, you're supposed to be not just watching other outlets and criticizing them, which she's very comfortable doing, but you're also supposed to be holding your own people to account.

I mean, that's a very difficult and uncomfortable job to be in, but that's the job you signed up for. And so if this was total open secret, and if there were, you know, if it helped her get promotions, and if there was some tie-in with what was going on with Cuomo, well, this is stuff that Brian Stelter, if you knew about it, you're supposed to be breaking as a media reporter.

So it's funny that even in this moment, he's feigning such surprise. There's no way he didn't know. He obviously knew. This was ultimately going on. Put the next piece up on the screen because this is interesting. This is where it's all about, folks. Yes. So here's, so when you start to go, okay, so consensual affair, everybody knew about it. Why is he getting, why is he leaving now? Why is he being pushed out now? Well, it turns out the woman that he was involved with, Alison Gollist, had been Governor Cuomo's communications director before becoming executive

vice president at CNN. So it starts to look like there's some direct tie-in with the treatment, the kid gloves treatment of Cuomo, how he was allowed to stay on the air for so long, how it took so long for there to be any accountability whatsoever. And of course, Chris Cuomo came out swinging and hired lawyers and said he was taking legal action to try to get the rest of the money on his contract because he thought he was fired. $18 million. Because he thought he was terminated unfairly

and even sort of alluded to like, there's going to be some other things that come out. So it looks like Cuomo, Chris Cuomo, former CNN anchor, may be having his revenge here and that there may be a lot more going on underneath the surface here than just a longtime open secret consensual affair. So as I understand it, I've been asking around to some people in the know and the phones are going hot right now, I can tell you. So this is basically what has been happening, which is that that open secret affair was being weaponized by Chris Cuomo's legal team. And legal team, apparently in a recent meeting with Warner

Media and Discovery, was like, hey, how can he say that it was an inappropriate relationship of Chris and his brother whenever the boss has been screwing one of his executive vice presidents who herself was a former communications director for Governor Andrew Cuomo. And that's a pretty good point. I'm sure there's all kinds of communications that look very bad for everybody involved. Right. And it's such a good point, Crystal, that actually there was a leak about a month ago. I'm frankly embarrassed. I didn't even know about it.

It's from a gossip website called Radar Online. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen, where they said CNN bosses Jeff Zucker and Alison Gallus left their marriages after alleged romantic affair and a cozy arrangement dragged into the Chris Cuomo scandal. So what they allege actually within this piece, and I think it's pretty obviously planted by Chris Cuomo's legal team in retrospect, is that what they point out is that the relationship between Zucker and Alison

Gollust, part of the issue is that part of the reason why Zucker may have been so soft on Chris in the first place is that she, given her previous relationship with Governor Cuomo, was like, hey, come on, it's his brother. You know Andrew, her former boss. And given that she's literally sleeping with her boss, this also seems important. And so all of this culminated ultimately in the kid gloves treatment, which led to the months and months of bad behavior by Cuomo

and ultimately for him to play that role of going ahead and getting involved in the defense and lying to CNN's bosses. And what actually makes this so significant beyond the actual story by itself is this morning, what we are learning is that there was a meeting last night between the head of Warner Media, Jason Kylar, and the CNN DC Bureau. Now, at this meeting, the CNN's journalists are freaking out and apparently asked him, did the punishment really fit the crime? Did you really not know? Well, and these people were Jake Tapper, Caitlin Collins, and Jim Acosta. Let me tell you why it was those three people. And this is from what I know, having asked around about how Zucker ran his network. He looked at his talent like his family, as in any criticism of them, including Chris Cuomo, was like an attack on him. He took it very personally. He protected them from network

higher-ups, from criticism, and all that. They're freaking out, and they want revenge for their boss, because now the battle axe could be coming. Because what have I told you guys previously? Discovery's CEO hates CNN. He thinks that they are a huge problem. And Discovery is the new owner of CNN, the new bosses of CNN. They do not like many of the talent there. They've actually been eyeing a shakeup for a long time. And Zucker was the chief proponent for, no, no, no, no, no.

We got to keep the Trump Russiagate madness. He was the buffer. So now that he's out, their, no, no, no. We got to keep the Trump-Russia gate madness. Zucker was the buffer. Exactly. He was the buffer. So now that he's out, their necks are on the line. This is a big problem for everybody involved. So look, sleazy media shenanigans going on. Look, yeah, their consensual relationship, like whatever. But there's some pretty creepy stuff that has been revealed.

We'll put this up there. Put the tweet. So these are memoirs. You actually read it, so you can describe it. And I forgot about this section. It's from Katie Couric's memoir. So Katie Couric wrote this very dishy memoir,

which actually was very interesting. I did a whole monologue on it. If you guys want to go on and check it out, which actually you all were very interested in, which I was a little bit surprised with. Anyway, when she was at ABC and she was working with Jeff again, he made a push to try to bring in this woman, who we now know he was having an affair with, Allison, as like a PR person. And Katie already had a PR person.

She's like, why are you forcing this person on me? Like, I'm good. And they had a meeting that was sort of uncomfortable. And Allison actually said to her, I don't want to force myself on you. And she's like, okay. And she also reveals in that piece that the two had moved their families in next to each other. She actually had bought the apartment above him and his family. And Katie sort of leaves it to readers to glean what's going on there.

And she just says, like, I was very uncomfortable with the relationship because she was close friends with Jeff Zucker's wife. Oh, man. Then the sort of kicker of this little anecdote she tells is that Zucker is up for the job at CNN. Yes. Big job. He asked Katie for a recommendation.

Can you put in a good word? Can you help me get the job? I promise there'll be a slot for you there. He gets the job. Number one, there never was a slot for Katie. That favor was never returned. Number two. He never called her again.

The very first hire was Allison. Allison. So, and it does speak to the point also of this being just like, everybody knew that this was going on and it wasn't a problem for him all these years. It's only now with whatever was happening behind the scenes with the Cuomo incident that this really became an issue for him. Now, listen, Zucker was planning to later on step down from this position at CNN once the merger was complete.

So that was a little ways into the future. But this is, you know, obviously extraordinarily abrupt and at a time of huge transition for CNN right now as well. I mean, they're trying to get this totally laughable, pathetic streaming thing up and running. Yes, CNN Plus, which was also his baby. Which is his baby. The latest news on that is that they're giving Don Lemon a show on there. A talk show. Which is just like, you know, how do you dilute yourself into thinking that this is going to work?

Because Don Lemon, not only is his show on CNN not do very well, but he had that podcast. Remember we found out he had that podcast with Chris Cuomo? Oh, that's right. They did that like handoff, which no one even knew about or listened to until it became relevant to the scandal. So, you know that already it's been proven in the alternative media ecosystem. This person has no cachet, no audience. No one cares what he has to say. And yet you put him into the streaming lineup.

So anyway, it's a time of great transition at CNN as it is at MSNBC and somewhat to a degree at Fox News as well. So for him to abruptly leave is really a big deal. And, you know, from the people I know that work at CNN as well, they say the same thing about he's very hands on with his talent. You know, he has very like sort of personal relationships with the hosts and the anchors who are there. So if you've spent, invested all this time sucking up to Jeff Zucker to ensure your place in the CNN hierarchy and now suddenly, without any warning, he's gone, yeah, I'm sure there are a lot of anchors

who are feeling very exposed right now, not knowing who's going to replace him and not knowing how they'll be judged in the just like cold, harsh light of, hey, what are your ratings like and how are you delivering for the bottom line? And not necessarily even the ratings there, Crystal, which is that the image of CNN is a black mark for a lot of people who are at Time Warner and with Warner Media. The people who are at higher ups in Hollywood, they don't want to deal with it because they know that it attacks regulatory scrutiny, that yes, with news comes power, but comes controversy. And they don't want to deal with it because they know that it attacks regulatory scrutiny, that yes, with news comes power, but comes controversy.

And they don't want controversy. Controversy is bad for business. This is part of the reason why Fox was spun off, Fox News was spun off from the rest of the Fox empire and was sold off to Disney was specifically because neither side wanted to deal with the other and they had to deal with boycotts and all this stuff. So, you know, if I was one of those people in the CNN Washington Bureau who's kissed Jeff Zucker's ass for the

last five years, yeah, I'd be freaking out a little bit right now. And look, for me, it's just a little bit of a karmic justice. I've watched some people flourish in this town, people like Jim Acosta become chief White House correspondent under the auspices of Jeff Zucker, who steered the country in that direction, rewarding his clownish, idiotic behavior, giving him his own show, turning him into a national celebrity at the detriment of the entire country with the shenanigans that they pulled under the Trump years. So this is just a small, small measure of justice. And I'm really looking forward to what the new discovery people are going to be doing. I just can't wait to go. And when this story initially broke, I was sort of planning on my commentary to be that of all the things that Zucker has done that have been evil and wrong, like consensual affair.

His sex scandal. But between someone who's more or less at your level, right, you know, where there's not a lot of, like, power or pressure, whatever. That's, like, the least of whatever his sins were at the network. But if what's really going on here is it's because of how he handled the Cuomo thing, that actually is a worthy reason for him to ultimately be fired, even though, I mean, all of these people are rotten to the core. I mean, think of what they've done to this country. And, you know, Donald Trump was a horror show for this country.

And Jeff Zucker openly admitted being part of helping to deliver him to the White House. So he's so culpable. He's as culpable as anyone in the just totally toxic, destroyed, divisive political atmosphere that's been created over the past number of years. So to see him get his comeuppance for, you know, especially if it is because really of what happened with Cuomo. I mean, that is actually just. And the other thing on that radar online, that sort of gossip brag that had this story a month or so back, the word is that, yeah, Cuomo's people were shopping this story to a lot of outlets, and they're the only one that would pick it up because they were afraid. Everybody's afraid. I mean, that's why these things don't come out long before when they're, quote unquote, open secrets.

It's because all of these outlets do the calculation of like, is it worth it to get this story and then face the ire of someone who's incredibly connected, incredibly powerful, not just in media but in politics too who has you know a streak for revenge and everybody calculated over many years that hey it's just not worth it so that's why you know didn't hear about it till now well the bell tolls for the jeff sucker uh i will say the only good thing he ever did in his life is he did green light fear factor with joe rogan he's the one who made joe rogan a household name yeah i know wild, actually. Within the span of two years, he greenlit two shows, Fear Factor with Joe Rogan and The Apprentice with Donald Trump. So what an impact on history this man has had. Wow. Incredible. All right, guys, this story really pissed me off. It's very revealing of what's actually going on in the economy right now. Go ahead and put this tweet up on the screen. So Starbucks sends out this missive, oh, we're going to have

to, we're forced to raise prices due to inflation and supply chain issues. Maybe. But also, by the way, their profit last quarter went up 31%. They just gave their CEO a 39% raise to $20.4 million. And if you dig into that New York Times article that Dan Price there is linking to, I mean, that's exactly what they say. They say the identical thing. For the last three months of last year, the company's profits soared 31% to $816 million. Revenue grew to $8.1 billion. That's a 19% jump compared with the same quarter a year ago. And also, by the way, this isn't the first time that they raised prices. They also raised prices back in October. So it just shows you it doesn't fit together that, oh, we're under

such pricing pressure. We have to raise price. We're really sorry, but what can we do? And also, oh, by the way, we're raking in record profits. So at least some portion of the price increase is just because they can. They raised prices in October 2021. And by the way, again, they copped to this. They admit to this. They say it openly. It's all on their earnings calls. They raised prices in October 2021. They found that it didn't affect demand. Their customers were still showing up. Demand for expensive, not that great coffee was still very, very high. And so they thought, hey, we got away with it once.

We were able to lift prices and get a record-breaking profit margin. We're going to do it again. And this, as we've been trying to demonstrate to you, and Matt Stoller had a great piece on it, this is a crucial piece of the story. It's not the whole story. It's a crucial piece of the story of why prices are going up in key sectors across the economy. The Prospect actually has a fantastic series. Let's go ahead and put this next tear sheet up on the screen. Fantastic series about what is really going on with inflation and proposing some novel solutions.

I mean, there won't be novel to you guys, but novel to the D.C. establishment about how to fight inflation other than just trying to destroy the lives of the working class so they have no money to spend. And antitrust is a big part of that fight. Why? Because when you have monopoly pricing power, it means that you can use an excuse, something like inflation, to lift your prices and to price gouge. And that is, in fact, what we have seen in sector after sector, especially when it comes to food, especially when it comes to gas, when it comes to housing, when it comes to a lot of things that really hit the bottom line. The last thing that I want to point out that I think is really interesting is, you know how Biden did that

sort of like tepid calling out of the meatpacking industry, which is one of the worst offenders in terms of massive consolidation, huge price spikes. They're the only ones that are benefiting. Consumers are paying very high prices. None of that is getting passed down to the ranchers who are actually raising the cattle that go into the system. Well, the mere threat, according to the prospect, the mere threat of antitrust investigation actually curbed price spikes in beef. Beef prices rose every month from December 2020 until December 2021, when they suddenly dropped by 2.3 percent, right as President Biden was putting on the heat and a similar phenomenon occurred back under President Kennedy. When he used the bully pulpit to admonish steel companies in April 1962, the price hikes were rescinded within days. So what have we been saying for a long time?

If Biden would just get out there and just say some stuff and call these people out and have a credible threat that, hey, we're going to do an antitrust investigation. We're going to look at breaking you all up if you don't get these prices under control and stop price gouging people. It actually, even the little tepid thing that he did, actually had a real impact here. So it's so important to understand what the full picture of why prices are going up really is. This is the power of the American presidency, Crystal. People really do not

understand just how powerful the bully pulpit is. You know, this story broke this morning, so I wanted to make sure I could highlight it for everybody, that Shell's profits have actually gone up to historic proportions. Wow. Even though they claim that the price of oil and natural gas is at an all-time high. So once again, the price is high for you. Your balance sheet, screwed. Shell balance sheet, high. Also, Crystal, where do you think that they're going to be

investing their hundreds of millions of dollars in extra profit that they made this year? Is it going to be in new drilling? Is it going to be in expanding infrastructure? Is it going to be in anything profitable for the rest of the country or for themselves? No. All of it is going to buying back their own shares in order to increase the price of their freaking stock dividend. Now, once again, that's within their rights. But here's the problem. It shouldn't be. It should not be. Here's the problem with the American economy.

You pay more. They claim that they're transferring the price to you. Their profit goes up. They buy back their own stock. Then they use that in order to juice the dividend for their stockholders, increasing the overall price of which they borrow assets against, of which they don't have to pay any taxes, and everybody gets rich except for you. That's how it's all rigged. And this is why it drives me crazy. Same with the stock example, which is, okay, let's say they have the profit. Fine. Then at least you have to use it in order to make the

price of oil go down in the future. Do you know the amount of subsidies that these people get? It's unbelievable. In the tax code, in Texas, drilling rights, tax benefits, write-offs, depreciation. Not to mention they bought the entire judiciary system, apparently. Everything, right? Like all stacked forward. And they still use it in order to buy back their own stock and increase the dividend price while everybody else gets screwed. The price of oil and gas continues to go up. Their profits continue to go up. And nobody is investing in making sure that any of it goes down. Sound familiar? Same thing whenever it comes to Starbucks. And the reason I'm focusing on the gas story is because, what, that's 50% of all inflation.

That's a huge part. That is the number one increase for average Americans. Man, the Costco gas lines these days are very long. And I get it. This is why. Because it's a huge line item increase for a vast majority of families. And how many people know this? Why is the president not decrying this every day?

You know what? I'm just a freaking guy on YouTube. Actually, a lot of people know this. Why is the president not decrying this every day? You know what? I'm just a freaking guy on YouTube. Actually, a lot of people know it. I mean, we saw that poll that a majority of Americans understand that corporate greed is a big part of inflation. But yeah, I mean, this is one of those examples where, you know, the Democrats, the one thing they're great at is coming up with excuses for why they can't do anything. Oh, Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema. Oh, the Republicans. Oh, the parliamentarians. Oh, it's just really hard.

This is something that you have a lot of control over. I mean, first of all, just the executive branch in terms of antitrust enforcement, you have a lot of levers you can pull there. But just in terms of the bully pulpit, we've seen now. It seems like it works somewhat with beef prices. Do that more. I mean, that's like 100% in your control. All they did is like put out one little press release and did like one little press conference. And that was it.

It stopped the rise every single month for a year. Beef prices had been rising. And then suddenly they do that and it drops 2.3%. And just so you know that we're not cherry picking here a couple of, oh, it's just Shell or it's just Starbucks. Food and Water Watch put together a bunch of statistics about some of the key sort of monopoly powers in different sectors, especially with regards to food and gas. They crunched the numbers on the oil companies and found exactly what you're laying out there. Their profit margins are through the roof. And yet they're telling you, oh, we have to charge you this much for gasoline. You look at Purdue in terms of food prices, meat prices.

Their profits are up 12.7 percent. You look at Cargill, 17.3 percent. Within the grocery industry, Walmart is up about 7 percent. Kroger is up 8 percent. Walmart is up about 7%. Kroger is up 8%. Costco is up 9%. So this idea that, oh, they're just under so much pressure that they have to pass on higher prices to you is largely just bullshit, especially when it comes to these large monopoly players who have so much control, almost an iron-fisted control over these markets, they're just lying. And they're telling their investors the truth, which is that

we've found we can raise prices and get away with it. So that's what we're going to keep doing. Let me point to another one. UPS yesterday posted a $3.1 billion fourth quarter profit, surpassing analysts' expectations. And they're going to be increasing their dividend by 50%. This is a supply chain company, right? They're supposed to deliver our stuff. They're always sending us an email. Oh, you're going to be delayed because of supply chain. 3.1 billion they're putting in the bank. And all of these UPS drivers, you know, the unionized one's doing okay, but we're hearing some rumblings about what might happen in 2023. I would tell you guys to go

ahead and take note of that. Same Exxon. Just once again, so you know I'm not cherry picking, Exxon is also up, going to be increasing. Their share price is up 6% on the news. And they're also going to be resuming a $10 billion stock buyback over the next two years, Crystal. Are you guys sensing a theme here? Price goes up for you. They use that in order to jack up the price. And it's not all of it. There's definitely supply chain concerns. Like, don't get us wrong. But what's going on behind the scenes is making sure that only they and the richest people in the country continue to get richer while they actually do it directly at your expense in this case.

That's the most disgusting part. The other reason the stock buyback thing is really important is because, I mean, part of what we saw leading into the pandemic is all of these big companies got a huge tax break under Trump. They were flush with cash and they used it rather than investment or saving it or any, you know, making sure that they weren't in a fragile position. A lot of them used it for stock buybacks. And then when the pandemic hit, you had a lot of industries that were in very vulnerable positions. The airlines are a perfect example of that, where then, you know, they're these too big to fail companies. They've got their lobbyist position to get their custom written bailouts. And I, you know, supported the airline bailout to make sure that the workers stay employed. But part of the story is that when they irresponsibly use this money just to juice their own wallets and the wallets of their investors, that puts them in a precarious position for if there is a market downturn, which, you know, a lot of analysts say that we may well have. So that's the other piece of the story.

Yeah, that's right. All right. So let's go. What does the logical conclusion of all of this lead to? To these very, very rich folks, what do they spend their money on? Well, this is just a symbol of everything wrong in the world. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. And I love, I specifically got the Washington Post write-up of this because I wanted to see what they included and what they didn't, given that Bezos owns it. Rotterdam will be

dismantling part of a historic bridge so that Jeff Bezos' massive yacht can pass through. Not a joke. Jeff Bezos' 417-foot-long three-mast yacht can now pass through the waterway sometime this summer. According to the spokesperson for the city, the Koningshaven Bridge, I think Koning means king, so something like that, will be had to be partially dismantled because the yacht, which has cost an estimated $500 million in the nearby city of Alblasserdam, sorry, Hollanders, which is, I guess you guys still build great ships, so that's why Bezos chose you, needs to be able to pass through the city of Rotterdam to eventually get through that,

but the city's historic steel bridge has a clearance of just over 130 feet. Now, just to give you an example of this bridge, it was built in 1927. It was a railway bridge, one of the very first kind in Europe. It was actually decommissioned in 94 after it was replaced by a tunnel, but it was declared a national monument. And the bridge actually underwent a major restoration in 2014 because they said it would not be dismantled again. At the time, that's what they said. And yet, they have now agreed that they will be dismantling the bridge in order for the yacht to be able to pass through. The only not insult injury is that, yes, Bezos will be paying for the dismantling.

I guess that's fine. But just the symbol of a historic bridge, which was once the pride of the Netherlands, to be partially dismantled and reassembled after they said they wouldn't do it anymore, after it was restored, just so the guy's yacht can get from the shipyard to the open sea. At the whims of a billionaire. At the whims. I mean, they really see the whole world. It's a $500 million yacht, one of the most expensive yachts in the history of mankind.

In fact, this yacht, let's put this next one up there, cost $500 million and is so big, it actually requires a little support yacht in order to track it and follow it around, which includes helipads and all sorts of other crazy stuff. The existence of the yacht was actually first reported by Brad Stone in his book about Amazon. Oh, really? Yeah. So it was all kept under wraps. A lot of this was never even supposed to hit the public. And thanks to Brad for uncovering it to the world,

just exactly this half a billion dollar yacht and what this thing looks like. This puts Bezos on par in gaudiness with Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia. At least this will be the largest sailing yacht in the entire world. Wow. So, yeah,

so he's bested them. He's bested them. He's a sultan. He's a king. He certainly sees himself that way. The sultan of Brunei is jealous.

He certainly sees himself that way. The whole world is his playground to be done with as he wishes. Just compare that with the treatment

of people like Daquan Smith, who we covered here, who was made homeless, lost everything, forced into a homeless shelter because he was fired by Amazon. What was his crime? Union organizing. any Amazon worker who is out there hustling either at a fulfillment center, in the warehouse, or driving, delivering packages, having to pee in a bottle in order to make it on time. And then this man, and oh, by the way, I mean, his tax rate way lower than what you or I or any of you people out there listening pay and, you know, making sure that that continues to be the case. It's just a perfect symbol of where we're at. I mean, this is the type of stuff that when we look back on this era and we think of it as a new, even more decadent, gilded age, these are the types of signs and symbols that we

will point to of the just disgusting largesse of the richest among us who really see themselves as masters of the universe who can you know use people's bridges historic bridges as playthings i also thought it was really interesting the justification of the city they said that they were they were doing this they weighed whether or not to do it they said on the one hand there's the economic importance and employment due to the construction of the ship on the one hand, there's the economic importance and employment due to the construction of the ship. On the other hand, our concern for the bridge itself. And of course, it came down on the side of quote unquote preserving employment, which I think is also very symbolic of the way that our economies are just like centered around catering to billionaires. I mean, can you blame them? They want to keep their historic shipbuilding industry alive, right?

It's not their fault. This isn't the city of Rotterdam's fault. No, and this is the bind that everybody ends up in is like, you know, because these people have so much power and control, and this is just on, you know, a small scale, like one little narrow example, but because they have so much power and control, you're just subject to their whims, right? So, you know, that's why when you had the Amazon headquarters competition, you had all these cities just like throwing themselves at Amazon, one of the richest companies in the entire world. And they're offering up hundreds of millions of dollars and said, please come and create some jobs.

You have to, honestly. That's right. I mean, so it really says it all. This is just a little microcosm of how our whole system is structured around the whims of these disgusting people who have rigged the system so that everything, good times are to their benefit, crises are even more to their benefit. They get further and further and further ahead and do everything they can to try to leave the rest of the population behind. I forgot to mention about the bridge. It was actually bombed by the Nazis in 1940. And, you know, I mean, that's the other, you know, this is the symbol of the bridge being dismantled for these purposes. That's where it was declared a national monument. I mean, and this is a huge bridge. Like, just to give people an idea, we showed the picture previously.

There's like a square part in the middle that goes up 130 feet. This thing is so big it can't even pass through it. And, you know, by the way, the Washington Post, they left that Nazi part out, just so you're aware. Yeah. Was it intentional? I don't know, you know. It's funny, right, because when he owns the paper

and he owns this, and I just found out actually this morning that the Martin Luther King Jr. Library has a new auditorium that they will be unveiling today. And that auditorium is the Jeff Bezos Auditorium at the Martin Luther King Library. And as some people have pointed out, in the later parts of his life, Dr. King, one of his furthest, one of his new causes on top of civil rights, after accomplishing the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, was actually wealth inequality and wealth disparity. It was the central thing that he was preaching in 1968. And what does it tell you? The Jeff Bezos Auditorium

at the Martin Luther King Jr. Library, because our city here in Washington is basically for sale. I mean, they're pointing to the fact that the Bezos Auditorium is a symbol of how Washington is basically letting corporations come in and basically run the game. I mean, we're talking about how the Bezos Auditorium and several other places, including TikTok and others, are naming historic areas here in D.C. It really is just disgusting, Crystal, because, you know, now we have the whole Washington Commanders thing. The whole city and the government is basically for sale to a lot of these people. Bezos, of course, owns the largest home here in the Washington, D.C. area. I've walked past it.

It's three homes joined into a single thing. It's a $100 million converted mansion. And the reason why, specifically to project power and inspire fear amongst lawmakers here in the city. And to whitewash your image. Which has been done. Yeah, exactly. Which is why you give Van Gogh some money too.

And Barack Obama or whatever. And Obama, $100 million. Yeah, it's nothing for him. There is some good news, though, which is that the Amazon Labor Union, new union that was formed specifically for the purpose of trying to organize Amazon workers that our friend Christian Smalls is involved with. They filed for a union election now at a second Amazon warehouse on Staten Island. That warehouse is known as LDJ5, is a sorting center with 1,500 workers, according to a roster that a reporter got last month. So this comes on top of the other Staten Island warehouse that Chris Smalls was originally fired from. They also just gathered enough signatures to trigger a union election, which of course

comes on top of the redo that they're having in Bessemer, Alabama. Listen, you wouldn't want to bet that any of these one organizing efforts are going to work out just because we know how long the ads are. We know the power and the weight that someone like Bezos and his company can throw around the threats, the bullying, the intimidation, the surveillance, all of that stuff. I mean, and the outright rigging, which is what they found in Bessemer, Alabama. But just like what we're seeing with Starbucks, once you have, when it's more than just one, once you start to have dominoes fall and more and more union efforts occurring, it becomes harder to focus all your resources

targeting one single election. It becomes a lot harder when you have more that you have to spread the amount over. So the more that we see in this direction, the more encouraging it is. And I do think that, like with Starbucks, if you had one that was able to unionize, was able to successfully organize, you could start to have that same domino effect where people take courage and say, hey, if they can do it there, maybe we can do it here. And we see the benefits it's conferring on them. We see the power they're gaining in their own workplace. So there is some positive pushback led by some extraordinarily courageous and selfless people who have really put their own livelihoods on the line in order to make this happen so something we will definitely continue to follow closely got it all

right let's get to the big one crystal you guys have been waiting on this one at least i've been waiting to talk about this because i actually do think it's a really interesting story whoopi goldberg okay over on the view they were having a conversation about this graphic graphic novel called mouse that I guess was pulled off of a reading list in a school, I think in Tennessee. It was in Tennessee, yeah. And it's about the Holocaust. So they're having this discussion about this.

When Whoopi drops some very questionable historic or ahistoric remarks about the Holocaust, let's take a listen to how that went. Well, also, if you're going to do this, then let's be truthful about it, because the Holocaust isn't about race. No. No. It's not about race. It's about a different race. It's not about race.

It's not about race. Because it's about man's inhumanity to man. That's what it's about. But it's about white supremacy. Well, but it's not about race. But these are two white groups of people. How do we have to see them as white people?

But you're missing the point. You're missing the point. The minute you turn it into race, it goes down this alley. Let's talk about it for what it is. It's how people treat each other. Oh, she was about to say between white people. That was the part that I actually found the worst is when she's like, this is between two groups of white people. So it's between y'all. So of course this goes over like a

lead balloon. Everyone reminds me, the Nazis definitely thought they were engaging in a racial program. They thought they were white people. They definitely thought it was a racial thing. They definitely, I mean, they're all master race. That was the whole deal. I mean, they even look to the U.S. Jim Crow regime for inspiration of how to execute their own racist regime. So, a historic. She's right that it's also about man's inhumanity.

Sure. As much as racism. That is definitely, yeah, that's what racism actually, ultimately really is. Okay, so this doesn't go well, obviously. There's a big outcry. People are freaking out.

And so she goes on Colbert that night. Yeah, so let's put that tweet on the screen. To try to clean this up. We would show you the clip, but we need a copyright. Yeah, it's a big Colbert. Stop being so annoying about copyright. Super irritating.

So she starts by trying to say the right things of like, I get it, I hear you. But then when it becomes very clear that she doesn't actually, her mind has not been changed. She really sort of sticks with her original point. She said Nazis, quote, had issues with ethnicity, not with race,

because most of the Nazis were white people and most of the people they were attacking were white people. So to me, I'm thinking, how can you say it's about race if you are fighting each other? So ultimately, after a pretty long discussion, it's very clear that she still really is sticking by her original point and the more she talks about the more you realize that she really sees race within you know what is kind of the typical American construct of black versus white yes and in fact I mean that is the the primary obviously we have all kinds of different people of all sorts of backgrounds here in this country but throughout history the primary binary has between been between black and white. And that's where, you know, the legal codification of discrimination is based on that effect,

that matrix. And so she is thinking and continuing to assert, if I can't see the skin color difference between two groups of people, then to me, it's not racism and it's not race so she doesn't do a very good job ultimately cleaning this up not to the satisfaction of people um and let's go ahead and put this next piece up on the screen from rolling stone so then they feel like all right we got a suspender um which is obnoxious abc news and they put out this very like patron statement about, well, Whoopi has apologized. I've asked her to take time to reflect and learn about the impact of her comments. Come on. I know.

And then the last piece, let's go ahead and put the Daily Beast tear sheet up on the screen, is that her co-hosts are really pissed off that they ultimately suspended her. Multiple sources tell the Daily Beast that her co-hosts, Sunny Hostin and Joy Behar and Anna Navarro are all furious with the network's decision here. So I think the easy part first, which is that, I mean, obviously the show, we don't believe in like canceling people and censoring people and all of this. Like a lot of this is I'm not saying her comments were correct. They were obviously ahistoric and ignorant. But this smearing of her as like a blanket anti-Semite is also ridiculous. It's not like she denied the Holocaust. It's not like she was like, actually, the Holocaust was a good thing or those Jews really deserved it. Or she's saying this was a really bad thing. She obviously had some ignorance around the sort of dynamics, the racial dynamics that were at play.

But to suspend her over this is ultimately, to me, a sort of theatrical show and really sad. Oh, I'm with you. This is just good old-fashioned boomer ignorance. And, you know, it's like one of those things where I'm like, okay, yeah, Whoopi's an idiot sometimes. I mean, if we were going to suspend people from The View, The View would never exist for saying dumb, ignorant things on their program.

Yes, cancel the show if this is part of the standard of what you're going to say. I thought it was ludicrous that she was suspended for it. I mean, look, she came out with her fake apology, all of this. It's clear to me her mind has been rotted by critical race theory and by a lot of this stuff. See, I actually, you know, in some ways I feel like this is kind of a silly and semantic debate. We're going to have Freddy DeBorah, and he had a good piece about this. He's like, you know, whatever you want to call it, like the point is the six million murders. And so what is race?

Race is a system that human beings constructed as a form of like putting this group above that group. It's pretty arbitrary. You mean racial hierarchy this group above that group it's pretty arbitrary you mean racial hierarchy yeah yeah it's in a hierarchical way and we had our version of it here which as i mentioned was primarily this black white uh dynamic which is what whoopi grew up with and what she sort of has in her mind when she thinks of this is what race is. Ultimately, though, I mean, all of these ideas are invented by human beings. So I do find it a kind of semantic debate over was it racism? Was it not racism? I mean, I think we can all agree. Yes, the Nazis obviously thought they were engaged in a racial project. But does someone deserve to be like kicked out of the public square and,

you know, shunned and suspended for two weeks because they in their mind were thinking well this was at its core about man's inhumanity to man well that is true it is about man's inhumanity to man but that's also the core of what white supremacy and racism is about and she missed that there are other racist dynamics that can be at play in other contexts than just black versus gay. That's how I saw it. I saw it as like privilege protection. It's like, yeah, yeah, but we, you know, this is about racism here.

That is about something else. So to try and compare the two, it's like, no, they're actually pretty similar. Privilege protection. That's a good way of putting it. Because there is like a sort of defensiveness. It's another thing that Freddie writes. She has this sort of like territorialness. She's like, no, our suffering was very specific in its own thing.

What real racism is is about skin color. This was something else. Something else. It's not. Which, yeah, I mean, I take issue with that. But again, I think suspending her over it is ultimately. Oh, look, I don't think she should be suspended. Like I said, if you're going to suspend Whoopi,

then you have to suspend all of them for saying ignorant, stupid stuff on The View at all times. It's just a ridiculous way in which we conduct ourselves in public. Also, this is fake. We all know it's fake. These people aren't really mad. They're suspending her for two weeks because they want it to go away.

It's not real. And so much of this, too, is just like, you know, people looking for a reason to pretend that they're outraged. Oh, yeah, a lot of people were gunning for her, trying to get her canceled just because they didn't like what she said about herself. Look, I can't stand Whitby Goldberg. I can't stand the view either.

But look, whatever, okay? Why do we have to go through this song and dance? You know, it was interesting, too, because after all of this happened, they did a segment on Rogan. And they actually sort of, half defended him. Yeah. And I was wondering if their position would have been different had they not been facing their own

sort of cancellation situation. They called him a transphobe and stuff in the past saying he shouldn't be allowed to moderate. So yeah, now their little eye is open.

I've also found it interesting that there are some mainstream figures who would be the type to trash Rogan, call for his censorship, and lots of other people too besides Rogan. But they're going to bat for Whoopi. They know her heart.

She's not an anti-Semite, et cetera, et cetera, which I agree. I mean, listen, I don't know Whoopi Goldberg. I don't know if she's an anti-Semite or not. But to just take these comments and smear her as some sort of deplorable, irredeemable racist is completely absurd. Do you see what Al Franken said? What did he say? He said she can't be an anti-Semite because she chose Goldberg for her last name. He would say something like that.

Okay, Al. Case closed. I'm not even saying she's anti-Semitic, but that's got to be the stupidest defense I've ever heard in my entire life. So anyway. If you're in the public. Free whoopee. With a little bit of like humility, let's just say that if you are on TV, if you're in the public eye for a long time, you're going to say some shit that is not good.

How long have we been doing this? A couple years? Three years? Yeah. So two hours a day, five days a week, roughly for three years. That's seven. oh God, you guys are so, almost a thousand days roughly, give or take. So like minus the weekends, that's like 800 days times two hours. I mean, that's thousands of hours.

And she's been doing the view for how long? And she's been doing this for 35 years. I mean, we've got to have some understanding of sometimes people are going to say some dumb shit. Yeah, it happens. You know, and the part I actually found the saddest about it is if you listen to the whole Colbert exchange, which is pretty interesting to listen to the whole thing and how she's clearly like, she's hanging on to that. No, no, the real racism is black versus white. But at the end, rather than saying, I get it and I understand why I was wrong. And so I'm going to take that into account in my commentary going forward.

She says, I'm just not going to talk about it anymore. So, I mean, it's very clear if you watch it. She has not changed her mind. She still sort of stands by her point. Instead, her response is just, I'm not going to say shit about it anymore. And I find that kind of sad. stands by her point. Instead, her response is just, I'm not going to say shit about it anymore. And I find that kind of sad because I actually think even though her view is, you know, ahistoric, I actually think if you did have a long discussion about this and it's an uncomfortable topic and you had people who were experts and who could talk from a historical perspective,

who could talk about the histories and origins of race and racial constructs and what that meant. If you had the space to do that, that would actually be a worthwhile and interesting conversation that I think people could get a lot out of. But instead, what the response is, first of all, you could never have that conversation in a show like The View because it's just too stupid and you don't have enough time to do it. But instead, what the response is from our culture is, you know what? I'm just not going to touch that topic anymore. My mind hasn't changed and I'm not delving into the complexities of it that are obviously uncomfortable for people. Instead, I'm just going to not say anything about it, which is kind of a sad response.

That's the wrong way to go about all this. Congratulations, cancel culture. You win again. Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, guys, this is truly one of the most ghastly and dystopian stories that I can imagine, which also perfectly sums up the times that we are living in right now. So imagine that you are going through

the worst life crisis that you can possibly contemplate. Maybe you're a teen in a repressive religious household who suspects that you might be gay and you're caught between living as you are and being cut off from your family and your entire community. Maybe you're a young woman who's caught in a violent relationship and no idea how to break free. Maybe you've lost your job, you're facing bankruptcy, you're struggling with addiction, you feel that your existence on this planet is nothing but pain and despair. So in desperation, you reach out to the network

of volunteers who are staffing something called the Crisis Text Line. You share your darkest thoughts about the gun that's sitting in front of you or the balcony that's outside of your apartment. What you don't know is that some of the most powerful billionaires in the world are backing Crisis Text Line, and they aren't just doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. Because all of those deeply private and painful moments, well, they're valuable to our tech overlords. Your words, your cries for help, your personal data, it can all be packaged up and resold,

a sort of financialization of your despair. Just listen to how Crisis Text Line's CEO in a 2015 TED Talk described the type of deeply personal and painful moments that are routinely shared with this service. Text is unbelievably private. No one hears you talking, so we spike every day at lunchtime. Kids are sitting at the lunch table and you think that she's texting the cute boy across the hall, but she's actually texting us about her bulimia. And we don't get the word like or um or hyperventilating or crying. We just get facts. We get things like, I want to die. I have a bottle of pills on the desk in front of me.

And so the crisis counselor says, how about you put those pills in the drawer while we text? And they go back and forth for a while, and the crisis counselor gets the girl to give her her address, because if you're texting a text line, you want help. So she gets the address, and the counselor triggers an active rescue while they're texting back and forth. And then it goes quiet. 23 minutes with no response from this girl. And the next message that comes in says, it's the mom. I had no idea and I was in the house. We're in an ambulance on our way to the hospital. As a mom, that one just, that's... The next message comes a month later. I just got out of the hospital. I was diagnosed as bipolar, and I think I'm going to be okay.

But for the CEO, those interactions, those personal exchanges, those aren't really what get her juices flowing. But the thing that really gets me hot and sweaty about this, the thing that really gets me hot and sweaty about this, the thing that really gets me psyched is the data. 6.5 million messages. That's the volume, velocity, and variety to provide a really juicy corpus. We can do things like predictive work.

We can do all kinds of conclusions and learnings from that data set. So we can be better, and the world can be better. Naturally, it went unmentioned at that TED Talk that this really juicy corpus of data would also be sold off for profit. According to Politico, the organization's for-profit spinoff uses a sliced and repackaged version of that information

to create and market customer service software. In other words, your pain is literally their gain. The more desperate people who find themselves at their wits' end, the more data they can sell off to their for-profit arm. All legal because you've technically signed off on their 50-paragraph disclosure. Somewhere buried in all that legalese, you've granted them permission to harvest and sell your pain. A who's who of Silicon Valley is involved in this effort. Reid Hoffman, Melinda Gates, Pierre Omidyar, and many more. And business, frankly, must be booming, cashing in on our nation's

skyrocketing rates of deaths of despair. The for-profit arm of Crisis Text Line is called Loris. They're an AI customer service company with customers like Lyft and Meal Subscription Service Freshly. Their website explains what they do with all of this financialized grief. Quote, we've baked all of our learning into enterprise software that helps companies boost empathy and the bottom line. If that's not late stage capitalism, I really don't know what is. Billionaires feasting on the pain of a nation to further enrich themselves. I truly have no words for how disgusting all of this is. I really shouldn't just pick on Crisis Text Line, though. Financialized despair is really one of America's top products. After all, you'd be hard-pressed to compete with the opioid merchants

of death at Purdue Pharma, who similarly capitalize on the despair of the blue-collar jobless folks out in Appalachia, to the tune of billions of dollars. I mean, Big Pharma, they really do consistently take the cake for sheer sociopathy, don't they? Right now, they are actively denying billions around the world access to a life-saving vaccine because letting go of their patent rights would leave their profits merely at historic levels

rather than astronomical levels. letting go of their patent rights would leave their profits merely at historic levels rather than astronomical levels. And of course, we can't leave out the war profiteers over at Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and more. Raytheon's CEO in particular recently delighted in the escalated tensions in Ukraine and the South China Sea and drone attacks in the UAE, telling his investors, quote, all of those things are putting pressure on some of the defense spending over there, so I fully expect we're going to see some benefit from it. Hooray for war. Go pandemic, go. To the moon, suicide rate. When there's a profit to be made off of pain, war, death, sickness, addiction, guess what you're going to see? More pain, war,

death, sickness, and addiction. And I confess, I've become more and more radicalized as I've really contemplated this state of affairs. The core rut that we track here will only recede once we have a system that actually values and incentivizes humanity, meaning, and flourishing, rather than profiteering and profiteering alone. But the good news is we don't have to overthrow the entire system to deal with this particular exploitative nastiness. We could start by just banning this particular shit. And by this shit, I mean surveillance capitalism,

whereby our tech oligarchs buy and sell you as a product rather than trying to serve you as their customer. Crisis Text Line is a particularly gruesome example of how corrosive this practice is. But it's the same business model as Facebook and Google and all the other social media giants. It's easy to have the illusion that you are the client being served by this product,

but you're not. As Johan Hari lays out in Stolen Focus, your every click, your rageful post, your thirst trap, your petty squabble, all of that is being mined and being sold. Your very being, in essence, as a person, is preyed on, surveilled, packaged, and shipped off to the highest bidder. And, of course, the more they're able to enrage and distract and incite you, the more time you spend on their sites, the more they're able to profit. Their very business model is to steal your time and warp your mind so that they can sell the fragmented

pieces of you to other oligarchs. And this makes it all so much worse because they aren't just selling you. They are actively warping and shaping you to be angry and distracted and addicted and to perform your duties as the good little consumer that they care about. If you want to understand how our country could have so much wealth and yet be wracked by so much misery, addiction, anger, despair, just ask yourself, who stands to profit off of that state of affairs? As long as there's money to be made off of your pain and your sickness, these ghouls will make sure that's exactly what we keep producing. Can you imagine anything more dark than taking... And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue,

become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. All right, Sagar, what are you looking at? This pandemic should have been a wake-up call for all of us. It's not a coincidence the United States has fared so badly whenever it comes to coronavirus deaths compared to the rest of the world. Now, the media is going to have you believe that it's all because of larger proportional unvaccinated population. And while, yeah, that's a factor, the truth is a lot more intuitive.

We are fat and deeply unhealthy as a country with major underlying health problems that make any illness, not just COVID, a ton more dangerous to our entire population. There's been almost no discussion of this, both before the availability of vaccines and even nearly one year afterwards. The New York Times analysis of the why the U.S. has more cumulative deaths per 100,000 does not mention obesity one time, underlying

health conditions, comorbidities, nothing. They just blame higher deaths on the lack of booster shots amongst the elderly. And once again, yeah, that would help for sure. But why are so many of these people so sick they're going to be hospitalized and die from COVID in the first place? If you actually look beneath the surface, the answer is staring all of us in the face. The official numbers for 2021 are in. And sadly, 100,000 Americans died of diabetes for a second year in a row. It is no coincidence that this occurred in the last two years during a pandemic, and that from 2019 to 2020, diabetes deaths went up by an astounding 17%. From that baseline, they grew another 15.

That's just deaths. The latest figures show that 11% of the entire U.S. population has diabetes. That's insane. Even worse, the new report finds that one-third of Americans will develop some form of chronic illness disease in their lifetime. And in fact, while everyone has been obsessed with COVID, a lot of people have been dying for all sorts of reasons, almost all of them related to bad health. In fact, J. Scott Davidson, he's the CEO of One America, an insurance company, finds that they have the highest death rates that they have ever seen in the history of the life insurance business,

up 40% with a massive number of these deaths not even COVID- related. So just to give you an idea of how bad this is, per the insurance company's own models, they believe a one in 200 year catastrophe would be associated only with a 10% increase in deaths. So this is four times worse than a one in 200 year event. This is once again, no real explanation. No way COVID can just explain that. The response to COVID can though. Our lockdowns and our misery induced environment has created a country in the last two years where some of the biggest threats to your life, chronic illness and bad underlying health has exploded.

Mental health obviously is one that barely needs an introduction. US overdose deaths are up 28% in a single year, topping 100K for the first time. Vast quantities of Americans are dying from illness, from drug overdose, bad health conditions, and the conditions of their daily lives are getting worse. In fact, while I was researching this, I found that when food is more expensive, that people eat a lot more unhealthy stuff. That's why some of the poorest people in the country are actually some of the fattest. Many coronavirus restrictions are still

in place, discouraging in-person gathering. That also feeds the mental health crises. It's even worse for kids. A recent study given by our idiots over at the CDC, even they found that between 2 and 19, the percentage of obese children and teens has increased to a whopping 22%. That means nearly 1 in 4 children in this country are not just fat, but clinically obese. The study specifically school closures, as with lack of nutrition and exercise, cites that as the major cause of a 3% increase in a single year. Who wants to bet that number went up even more, even though we don't have the data just yet? And as I have covered in previous monologues, the neurodevelopmental effects on children for two years of the pandemic restriction,

they're already well known. You add all this up and it's a catastrophe, not only because we know that COVID actually attacks fat cells themselves, making you way more vulnerable to the disease if you are overweight or obese, but because being overweight or obese exacerbates your chances of getting sick from almost everything. Almost all of this is ignored by the media, and even more importantly, by the CDC and health authorities in their real recommendations. Look, vaccination was a tremendous scientific achievement. It dramatically reduced the rates of hospitalization and death. It saved perhaps hundreds of thousands of elderly people from an almost certain death.

We cannot take that away, nor diminish it. But from this point forward, emphasis alone on vaccination, after 85% of the US adult population has already gotten a dose, is foolhardy, and in fact, it is downright dangerous. People are dropping dead daily from bad food, from bad lifestyle. None of this is even being addressed by the government. My impetus for writing this was not only the release of the diabetes death study, but of Biden's apparent plan to renew his cancer moonshot, a cure for cancer sometime in the next couple of decades. Now look, I of course want to find a cure for cancer as soon as possible. I think it's time we wake up though to a killer that's taking away so many people

right now in addition to that and is actually going up. We need to change government policy around food and lifestyle incentives to get people moving again. Exercise is a literal miracle drug that we have forgotten in favor of SSRIs and insulin medication when Mother Nature gave you all the tools that you need right now. Much of this can be accomplished on an individual basis, but that is still expecting too much for people who are in very dire straits. When I see the numbers of people dying from diabetes and from obesity, I see people who don't have to suffer and do so because of a system of incentives, a lack of knowledge, and the government.

And that's where they come in. They are focused right now on boosting the entire U.S. population in curing cancer. We need to update our priorities now and move with the times because we have a crisis right before our eyes. Now, we better do it now because soon enough we're going to be too fat to actually do anything about it. We won't even remember what the before times look like. And that's a really scary thought. I mean, those diabetes numbers, 100,000, 27%.

And if you want to hear my reaction to Sager's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. We know that the audience really likes right-left panels, and we decided to have a discussion here on Breaking Points about college for all. So we brought in the executive director of American Compass, Oren Kass, and Freddie DeBoer. He's the author of The Cult of Smart, and he's got the Freddie DeBoer sub stack. So we encourage everybody to go and check those out. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us.

We really appreciate it. Nice to see you guys. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. Oren, I mean, the impetus for this segment is you guys put out a statement over at American Compass about College for All. Kind of break that down both about what you put out and give us, you know, kind of the case against why that's a good idea. Yeah, sure. Thanks for mentioning that. You know, we've kind of been doing two things, I think, that have come together on the topic. One is a lot of work on just asking what is the purpose of public education?

It feels to us like in recent decades, we've come up with this mindset that the whole point of public education is to get everybody into college and, you know, then into some job that requires a college degree in ways that I think just harmed most students, most families, most communities. And so on the one hand, reminding people we really have to actually ask that question, what is this for? And then looking at the data on how our current system is working, you know, the reality is that a very small fraction of students are actually successfully going high school to college to career. Most fall out somewhere along that pipeline, and outcomes for them are just not very good. So I think the time is really right, and I think most people are really recognizing the time is right to rethink what is this all for? What are we trying to do here? Freddie, just react to that and lay out your viewpoint a bit, because I think part of the obsession, the neoliberal obsession with education, college education in particular, it kind of glosses over a whole host of other societal ills.

And it puts it back in the like personal responsibility. Well, if you just try hard enough, if you just get that college degree, if you just take on those tens of thousands of dollars of debt that are going to be with you for a lifetime, then everything will be good in society. So what is your view here? Well, yeah, I'm also opposed to college for a variety of reasons. The simplest is simply economic. In 2007, the National Bureau of Economic Research put out a paper, which I think is kind of under-discussed. It's by Claudia Golden and Lawrence Katz. And it looked at from 1890 to 2005, so a really nice, big, robust data set of what influences the college wage premium over time. So the amount that a college graduate makes relative to someone without a college degree, they find that it's a product of supply and demand. In other words, it's a question of a ratio between the number of jobs that require a college degree and the number of people who are actually getting college degrees.

And to quote a specific sentence, overall, simple supply and demand specifications do a remarkable job explaining the long-run evolution of the college wage premium. I mean, that just makes sense, right? I mean, you sell labor on a market, and within that market, you're always going to be constrained by supply and demand issues. So if we push more and more and more people into the pipeline, inevitably, you're going to find that there are gluts of people who have the degree and the premium that we're trying to get these people is going to be eroded further down. I don't think that it's only that the educational benefits are only a matter of scarcity, but

I do think that everybody is always going to be running against this firehose of people we're trying to shove into the system over time as that goes on. And as Oren said, of course, the other side of this is that not everybody has the same skills or abilities, and it's perverse to try to reward our system as if they do. So one of the consequences of this intense push from the policy level. So in my book, I point out that every president since at least Ronald Reagan has named college as being a key or the key to solving our economic problems. One of the consequences is that we have had a remarkable reduction in high school graduation rates over time to the point where, for example, in 25 years, for example, among Hispanic students, the high school dropout rate has been cut to a quarter of what it once was.

I mean, that probably sounds like good news, but the problem is there's no underlying educational data to justify that. In other words, if you're having all these people graduating from high school who didn't before, you would expect that that would come, you know, because of some sort of underlying growth in educational outcomes. But the SAT data doesn't show it. The NAEP data doesn't show it. None of the standardized tests data show it. So in other words, we're forcing people through the pipeline. All the policy pressure resulted in people getting graduated out who were not ready. What then happens? Well, one of the sort of quiet stories in higher education right now is that remediation costs in community colleges have

exploded because all these students who are graduating high school who should not have are showing up at community colleges without the skills they need. So it puts tremendous pressure on all elements of the system to try to force people into a pipeline that was never designed to be for everybody. That's really well said. You know, Oren, from a new right perspective, from your organization perspective, how are you guys thinking about this on a policy level? What should people do about this, so to speak? Yeah, I think that's exactly the right question. And what it comes down to is we have to move our resources. I mean, we spend literally hundreds of billions of dollars a year in public funding on this college pipeline. And yet, if you look

kind of across the street and ask, what are we doing for someone who's not college-bound or not going to succeed in college, the answer is essentially nothing. And so we need to change that in two respects. One part is we need to really invest in building alternative pathways. We need to say, yeah, look, some kids want to go to college, are gonna succeed in college. We should certainly have high school courses that help prepare them for that. But we have at least as much obligation

to have high school courses and ultimately entire pathways that prepare people for a different route, for getting them into the workforce sooner, connecting them with employers, getting them job skills, so that we say, look, if you want to head toward that bachelor's degree at age 22, okay, but also here's an option that gets you to age 20 with, you know, three years of job experience, a relevant credential, and by the way, earnings in the bank instead of what you might have spent. And we can do that, right? And most countries do. I think one thing that's so fascinating is to

understand what an outlier America is. If you look at the OECD data, you know, most developed countries have kind of 35 to 55 percent of their high school students on these kinds of other pathways. And then OECD, actually, they have a footnote. They say, sorry, we had to leave the U.S. out of our data set because the U.S. just has absolutely nothing comparable that we could even count. So building that is one half of it. But just to make one more quick point, taking some of that resourcing away from higher education also has to be part of it

because the reality is we've sort of set up what I call this amusement park entitlement that says from age 18 to 22, you know, you get to go to college and hang out on the quad and tailgate and whatever. And maybe there are these enrichment courses on the side. Try telling a 17-year-old, regardless of what's in their best academic or economic interest, no, you don't get to do that. We really need to make what being in college looks like a lot more like what not being in college looks like and just give all young people a more realistic and sort of equitable

experience that's going to help focus them on actually preparing for adulthood. What do you think of that, Freddie? Because, I mean, from a policy perspective, I actually don't know what your position is. I personally think we should have free public college. I think we should have free—I think we should have widely available apprenticeships. I think we should have free trade school. I think we should have free community college. So that people, obviously, coming out of high school are able to obtain the skills in whatever direction actually suits their personality and their skill set to be able to, you know, exist and function in the working world.

What is your view of that and what is you wanted to break it down to the one individual sort of thought that was most playing on my mind when I devised my book and when I decided to write it, was the sense that there's many more ways to be a loser in 21st century America than it means to be someone who is living a life that is enviable or that is sort of respectable. I often, when I talk about these things in the promo for my book, for example, there's a lot of people who sort of look back to NAFTA and they look back to globalization and say, well, this is the problem that we undercut the manufacturing center, we undercut the unions, et cetera. I think that's a complicated conversation. It is not true that we don't make things in the United States anymore. In fact, we make more stuff in the United States than we ever had before. But because of automation, because of technological growth, we just need to employ far fewer people. But anyway, it doesn't really matter. We're not

going back to a pre-NAFTA, pre-WTO, whatever world. That's just not realistic. And if we did, our economy would contract to the point where it would be self-defeating. But I do think that there does have to be a real effort to make people understand that, you know, the trades are a big capacious thing. I mean, I'm always hesitant to just say we need to push people into the trades because what the trades mean in terms of the lifestyle lived by someone within that is so big and so varied that it's it's not actually like oh the trades will save us right so the trades can mean being a unionized Mason in Manhattan and making 150 thousand dollars a year or the trades can be being an unionized Mason in Phoenix Arizona

making 40k a year right so we don't want to be too bold about saying, oh, the trades will solve everything. But the reality is, is that there has to be like multiple streams through which we can get people to that life that is considered not to be a loser, right? We have to have outs that are not academic outs in order to sort of push people along the pipeline. Other countries do this pretty well, right? So Germany famously has a multi-tiered educational system where, depending, somewhere around 13, you get put onto a track or another for an academic track or for to go into the trades. Now, tracking is profoundly controversial in the United States, in part because there are racial dimensions that are less salient in Germany.

But it's also Germany has powerful trade unions who can ensure that people who go into these trades, if you go and you work at BMW, you're going to have better material conditions than you will in the United States at this stage in many professions. But there's also not this sort of baked in like trade school is for the losers and we have to change that culture and unfortunately that has to start at the bottom and it's really hard to get people out of the sort of college for everyone mindset I mean I spent years and years and working in k through 12 schools and in various capacities and I was amazed that you know third grade teachers would be telling their kids, you know, you've got to go to college someday.

So you're you're you're you're create you have this entire pathway through the education system in which the relentless message is if you don't end up in college. Right. Then you have failed in some profound way. So there has to be structural changes. There has to be better funding for trade schools. There has to be a willingness to consider the possibility that not everyone needs to take Algebra II, et cetera. But also, there has to be a cultural dimension where, you know, we recognize the equivalent dignity of all different kinds of work. And there are opportunities, I think, in the trades out there. But even that, you know, again, the growing the fastest growing sector in the American economy is not the is not the trades broadly defined. It's also not STEM, which a lot of people think it's the service economy, service sector economy.

And that is, again, a set of jobs that many people consider low class or low status. And so to get people to take other options seriously, we have to be able to sort of confront the way in which we mark certain professions as being inherently lacking in dignity. Yeah, I think that's well said. I mean, Oren, let me just push you a bit because I've been, you know, I feel like everybody has always recognized, oh, we need job retraining. And I hear that it's almost become like a meme online about, oh, we'll just retrain and then the retraining never actually happens. What does that look like in practice? These actual retraining apprenticeship style programs, investments, is it government directed, state? I mean, what would I actually be looking at physically if this were to actually

materialize as a real thing? No, I think one thing to say is that retraining is very hard because you're talking about folks much later in life in a career as opposed to helping people when they are still in their earlier educational years and kind of getting off on the right track. I think what people have found in general, even with retraining, and this certainly goes for the kinds of performance we're talking about here, it all comes down to connection with the employer. If you can get somebody connected to an actual job that exists in the real world with an employer who wants an employee and have that employer be in the driver's seat in training the employee to do the job, that's when it tends to work. When it doesn't

work is when you have a government program that says, you know, we're going to turn this kind of worker into that kind of worker. Let's get everybody into a community college, teach them how to do this thing, and then trust that the jobs will be there. So really putting the employer at the center of the process, I think, is key. I want to take issue with just one thing that Freddie said, and in the context of kind of being very concrete about what this could look like, tracking isn't actually controversial in America. This is something I find fascinating. Tracking is controversial with a certain sort of narrow segment of the progressive elite that sees it as sort of constraining of opportunity. But this is one of

the key things we asked about in our failing on purpose survey at American Compass. We gave what I think is a very clear, fairly worded description, and it's all on the site exactly how we asked it. You know, which of these things do you prefer? A sort of essentially single track program that tries to get everybody in the same academically intensive courses versus tracking, acknowledging that people are gonna be on different pathways, headed toward different endpoints, and that we need to do that in high school. And tracking was more popular literally by 10 to 1. You know, in the middle class, it was 95% to 5% that people prefer tracking.

We even, for fun, we asked half the sample using the word tracking and half the sample we used the phrase diverse pathways, which is somehow supposed to be more fashionable. People couldn't care less. It is common sense, and it's because it's people's lived experience at this point, that there is no alternative to tracking unless you're going to get everybody an individual tutor. No matter what, we are going to have tracks. The problem with our current system is we only have one track. It is a track designed for the upper middle class. It is working for a very small segment of the population, and everybody else

is left behind. So there's no question we need to get get political leaders more comfortable understanding that they can say this because it's not only true it's popular there's no question we have to confront you know the like folks at the Atlantic who write endless articles calling tracking you know the new segregation when it's of course exactly lower income and often non-white families and kids who are most left behind by this system and have the most to gain by getting more options. And so what that looks like in practice is you say, look, you know, we have all this money we spend sending kids off to leafy college campuses. That's an institution that makes sense for some people as they transition to adulthood. For most

people, the institution that's best equipped to help people transition to a productive career is an employer. And so we should be willing to say, look, essentially call somebody a trainee, which is a definition just like a college student. It's somebody who's spending time on the job, spending time in formal training, and an employer who takes on a trainee should get the same $10,000 a year that we give to a college campus to take on a student. And if you did that, now the first thing a lot of employers would do is they would turn around and ask community colleges to set up the right formal training programs, but then the community college's customer wouldn't be the 18-year-old who doesn't know what he wants. It would be the employer who knows exactly what he wants. And I think that's, again, much more the sorts of systems that Freddie's describing in other countries, getting comfortable with the idea that employers have to play a role. And then last thing I'd say, because this is something I agree with Freddie very strongly on, is a cultural point, getting comfortable with the

idea that being on a non-college track and headed off to some career that's not in management consulting in New York City isn't losing, right? Like a huge part of the argument against tracking is what if there's some kid out there who could have gone to an Ivy League school and then become a management consultant who instead ends up being, you know, a very successful general contractor and leader in their own community. Like, oh my gosh, you know, our upward mobility and equal opportunity are broken. And that's just not true. And that is part of the mindset that we need to get out of and recognize that the whole point of public education is communities investing in their own young people, preparing them to take on the

burdens of carrying forward the prosperity of that community. And that's what we should be asking our schools to do. Well, and this is a deeper problem with a society that basically only values people according to their market value and what the market says that they're ultimately worth. Freddie, I'd love for you to respond to that point. But I also want to hear your thoughts on the student debt cancellation debate, because part of why I support some level of student debt cancellation is because a lot of these kids were sold a bill of goods. I mean, you have, Freddie's got, I mean, Oren's got numbers here that are really interesting about how fewer than one in five students actually go from high school to college to career. Half of those who even go to college never complete a degree. So you have a lot of people who had it forced on them, like, college is the only worthy avenue. If you don't go to college, you're a failure.

This is the only way you can succeed in the world. And it just ultimately wasn't the right path for them. And now they're saddled with all of this debt for their entire lifetimes. Yeah, I mean, I think to begin with, they're just the reason why I favor some form of college for a variety of reasons. But some sort of college debt loan forgiveness is because we have to acknowledge that a huge portion of that loan debt is never going to be paid back no matter what. People are going to die with a ton of this debt. If you look at the numbers, there's just a huge number of people who have a debt where

there's no realistic way in which they will ever pay it back. And so the government is going to eat that debt one way or the other. The question is when and how and how humanely can we make that happen? But I just think that if we're going to attack the college affordability crisis, again, like I think people underestimate the degree to which, you know, we think about colleges, kids who go to elite schools and they spend, you know, four years there and it's far from home and they are, you know, getting a liberal arts education, et cetera. Most college students go to colleges that accept essentially every student that applies. Okay. So it's quite rare for colleges to reject more students than they accept.

They are going to school. The primary number one reason far and away is for the school they choose is location. Okay, so something like, I haven't looked at the number in a little while, but something like 80% of college students go to school within 30 miles of where they grow up. So they're not shopping, they're just going to the local school that they can get into. And they spend a lot of their first couple years remediating the stuff they should have learned in high school. And that's a big part of the reason why many of them take five or six or plus years to graduate. And so what the upper middle class kids have, right, is college is like this broader thing, which is an opportunity to spend a few years figuring out who they are and what they want to do. Right. And they're able to do it because they're subsidized by their parents. They're able to figure out who am I,

what am I actually good at, where do I want to apply myself? They are often or almost always, those kind of kids, still on their parents' health insurance in that period. If you look at low-income students, they're paying everything out of their pocket or they're taking on loan debt. That loan aid will run out eventually. And what happens for a fair number of students is that they just literally run out of federal student relief, student aid, so that they can't continue their education. And they have to work at the same time, often in the hopes that the work will give them meaningful health insurance. I mean, in many colleges you can get some sort of health coverage, but it's not actually health coverage in any meaningful sense.

Well, you know, I want people of all income bands to have that period to find where they need to go in the economy, where they can be productive and contribute for the best of everyone, right? But in order to do that, you have to sort of give them the affordances of being able to figure things out, right? The employer-sponsored healthcare system that we have is a big part of the problem here because they don't feel that they have the latitude to move jobs or to figure themselves out because they're not going to have health insurance if they're not working for an employer who offers it. But then finally, and I think this is super important, is you just have to get off the credentialing treadmill.

OK, like so many people feel pressed to go to college because they feel like it's a requirement to get a good job now. And in many, many places it is. Right. But if you look at a graph of the amount of master's degrees that are held in this country, it is astonishing. The growth in the number of people with master's degrees is absolutely astonishing. The universities love them because they're big cash cows. And these are people who are working in jobs where there's no intrinsic reason for them to need that degree. But what they do need is a way to distinguish themselves against the rising hordes of people with BAs. into the college pipeline, the college diploma will become like the high school diploma, right? In which case, it's just a thing that you have to have, and it no longer confers a meaningful wage advantage. And so, at some point, employers have to ask and say, okay, does this sort of entry-level white-collar job working for nationwide insurance or to be a bank teller at Wells Fargo, whatever. All these jobs that are sort of these low-level white-collar jobs or pink-collar jobs, do

they really need the college degree? Because usually when they go looking for the college degree, they're just using it as a signaling mechanism to say, okay, this person could get out of bed and go to class and do their homework. And they have those kind of soft skills, And that's what's really valuable to us. But that is a hideously inefficient system. If you're actually thinking that what you're in college to do is to get that education. So until there is a willingness by employers to say, you know what, we don't need all the, you know, everyone who works for us to have a BA, you're going to have all this pressure on the system.

If we can sort of bring down, say, okay, you know what? Not all jobs need a BA. Some colleges will end up closing. I mean, I think that's inevitable in the next 50 years anyway. But there's got to be a sense that not everybody has to have that particular piece of paper. Yeah. I think this has been very, very, very good for the audience. I've personally learned a lot. We're going to have links in the description to books, the polls, the sub stacks, all of that where they can find you guys. Really appreciate your time. Thank you. Thanks, guys. Thanks.

Great, thanks. See you, gents. Man, that was awesome, Crystal. We should do that more often. Yeah, indeed. It's difficult, logistically difficult, but man, it is awesome. I always learn a lot. Thank you guys so much for watching. We

really appreciate it. I mean, we've been mentioning this this week. It's just such a reminder, Crystal, you know, literally while we were doing this show, multiple other artists are coming out on Spotify, the New York Times, Roxane Gay now is boycotting Spotify, all of these people, huge boycotts that are being led. And look, it's only a matter of time, in my opinion, until something gives way somewhere. We'll see. Already other artists are apparently recruiting Taylor Swift. It's just a reminder.

They could come at us any time. The only way we survive with full knowledge and we don't censor ourself is you guys through our premium subscription. So thank you so much for all of you who show up for us every day, who support us in the way that you do because watching these things cascade through popular culture, it is a warning. It's a warning shot across about at folks like us.

We will continue to say whatever the hell we want. Don't worry about that. But the only way we're able to is because of you. So thank you. Yeah. Thank you guys so much. We love you. We got some great content for you posting this weekend. So make sure you stay tuned and check that out when it drops. And we'll see you guys back here on Monday. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight-loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. But there were some dark truths behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children. Nothing about that camp was right.

It was really actually like a horror movie. Enter Camp Shame, an eight-part series examining the rise and fall of Camp Shane and the culture that fueled its decades-long success. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. DNA test proves he is not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John. Who is not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father? Well, Sam, luckily, it's your not the father week on the OK Storytime podcast.

So we'll find out soon. This author writes, my father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son, even though it was promised to us. He's trying to give it to his irresponsible son. But I have DNA proof that could get the money back. Hold up. They could lose their family and millions of dollars. Yep. Find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. I'm also the girl behind voiceber, the movement that exploded in 2024. You might hear that term and think it's about celibacy. But to me, Boy Sober is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's flexible, it's customizable, and it's a personal process. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it.

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