Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 3/15/23: Russian Jet Shoots Down American Drone, Desantis Speaks On Ukraine, Tucker Scoffs Trump Foreign Policy, Is SVB Like 2008, Biden Approves Fossil Fuel Drilling, ChatGPT4.0, Women in Workforce, Ebola Outbreak to Covid Lab Leak

Episode Date: March 15, 2023

Ryan and Emily discuss a Russian jet shooting down an American drone, Desantis gives statements on Ukraine similar to Trump but receives more backlash, Tucker ridicules what Trump got done during his term and calls him "autistic", Is SVB the sign of another 2008 like collapse?, Biden approves a controversial fossil fuel drilling, ChatGPT 4.0 is unveiled, Emily looks at Women in the workforce, and Ryan looks into the origins of Ebola and how that outbreak's response may have effected our response to the possible Covid lab leak.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, welcome back to CounterPoints. I'm Ryan Grim of The Intercept here with Emily Jashinsky of The Federalist. A quick programming note. At some point during this show, I'm going to force Emily to define woke. Bring it on. Not now because you're sort of—

I'm too ready. I've had too much coffee. Anyway, you guys should Google that one if you haven't seen this viral clip going around. But yeah, I will get her on this. I don't think she knows what it is. Yeah, I've never heard of it, actually. How would you define woke if you were put on the spot? If someone was like, define wokeness.

Yeah, I would say that it's unfortunately a nebulous definition because we have no consensus on what it means. It meant something very specific to the left at a point in time. It was then co-opted by the right and has basically become a catch-all for political correctness. I mean, it's essentially... I think the correct definition is it's a stand-in for all the things that annoy me. It's a stand-in for everything that people find annoying about the left. Now, we need a version of woke to describe the excesses of the American right. We need a parallel broke. I think they go with woke. Like a bunch of right-wing organizations are calling each other woke now.

I know. If they do anything that isn't just like completely supportive of like a patriarchy, you'll have people in these right-wing organizations who are like, I see wokeness. Wokeness is creeping in. Right. I mean, essentially though, it's just a, it's a one syllable word for political correctness. Political correctness has always been clunky and people mean ESG, they mean DEI when they say wokeness, but essentially it's coming from this place that like, we do need to reevaluate Language we and people even use it to mean cancel culture what you can say is also rooted in that question of political correctness But I think that's part of the problem with the word is that it's just

It's it means what it needs to mean to the person at the time they use it Right and it's actually supposed to mean basically like awake to injustice. Right. And that's what it was originally coined to describe. It's a very, very annoying term. It can be sometimes a helpful stand in when you are, at least I use it sometimes for political correctness because political correctness is often just very clunky. It doesn't roll right off the tongue. That's clunky too. But we do have an actual programming note that people noticed last week. We only posted a few episodes of this show directly to YouTube. The clips. On Wednesday, a couple of clips. If you want to watch the entire thing, you can go to breakingpoints.com, sign up, $10 a month, get the whole show. Part with that money once a month. You can also, though, get it through Spotify now.

Yes. And so in order to do that, so you go into your Supercast account online, which you'll get if you part with your $10. This is to connect your premium subscription to your Spotify account. Yes. So then you click on your Breaking Point subscription in Supercast. Then you click on the Spotify icon that links up your account. Spotify opens, asks you to log in. Once you're logged in, you'll get all the premium videos. So, you don't, so that way,

you'll still get the Vimeo link, you still get the YouTube private link, but now you can also watch it on Spotify. Right. And I love the Spotify video feature. Have you used it? No, I don't have premium Spotify. Oh my gosh. I just have the ad one. Oh, it is the best.

Yes, I love premium Spotify, but the video function is fantastic. I actually pay for breaking points, so I should, I just have the ad one. Oh, it is the best. Yes, I love Bermuda Spotify, but the video function is fantastic. I actually pay for breaking points, so I should. I know. I'm going to do this. Why do I do that? I mean, I do support it, generally. I didn't want to, like, feel like I was mooching off of it.

I like the idea of something that is funded by a lot of different people who have different viewpoints. Right. It's awesome. So that you can tick people off. And then if some people unsubscribe, it's like, okay, fine. Sagar and Crystal, if you're listening, Ryan and I would like 10 extra dollars a month. Well, we have a really big show. Obviously, we're going to start with more news out of Ukraine.

We're going to talk about Tucker's Q&A with all the Republican candidates for president in 2024, some of whom are announced, some of whom are not on their positions of Ukraine. We're talking about developments in Silicon Valley Bank. We have Ken Klippenstein, Ryan's colleague from The Intercept, here to break down some truly, truly interesting reporting about Gavin Newsom's relationship with Silicon Valley Bank. We're going to be talking about potential lab leak. We're going to be talking about artificial intelligence, generative AI. So it is a huge show today. We hope that you take that step and link your premium subscription to your Spotify account. All right.

So let's get into the show. Ryan, talk to us about this Russian fighter jet down a United States drone operating over the Black Sea on Tuesday, according to U.S. European Command. It was an MQ-9 aircraft. Ryan, you had a pretty funny reaction to the U.S. statement. Right, because we're not in World War III yet, so we can laugh about it. But yes, so basically two Russian jets, you know, basically intercepted a drone over the Black Sea. This happens fairly frequently around the world over the decades, and also while we're at war or well technically we are not at war we are supporting a party with weapons that is at war how dare you

with russia right we're hoping we don't actually get into a hot war with russia and so apparently these two russian jets had a lot of fun with this drone uh the military called it deeply unprofessional behavior. And so I'm just picturing Top Gun style stuff. Like they were watching Maverick and maybe they flipped off this drone. Right. Which is funny. I guess you'd have to find the camera because you can't flip off the pilot. Right. So you can flip off everybody back in Tampa who's like running the drone. And then my favorite part was they dropped a little jet, the Russian jets dropped a little jet fuel on the drone, and the military complained that it was, quote, environmentally unsound. Right. This is the military who we know for a fact produces, you know, more climate emissions, carbon emissions, I think, than what, 10, you know, the 10 biggest countries after it combined.

Dumps its own jet fuel in the Honolulu water supply. It also may have had something to do with the greatest environmental catastrophe of the last year, which was the Nord Stream pipeline. But yeah, you shouldn't dump jet fuel on a drone. That's rude. It's environmentally unsound. And it's environmentally unsound. It's an HR matter. It's definitely, yeah. And it's going to hit Russia's, the Russian military ESG score significantly. Well, my favorite part of the statement is that it, I really think they're devious enough to know this might work with like the slice of, you know, people with Ukraine flags on the back of their Priuses. There they dump jet fuel on the drone. Like now I really hate Putin. The drone did end up

crashing, which is also environmentally unsound because now you've got a big drone pile of junk at the bottom of the Black Sea. And the Russian, one of the Russian fighter jets, which apparently collided with the drone, had to basically make an emergency landing. Yeah. And this is, so according to general, U.S. Air Force General James Hecker, he's the command of U.S. Air Forces in Europe and Air Forces in Africa, he said that before the collision, the Russian aircraft, two Russian aircraft, including the one that was involved in the collision, had been harassing the U.S. drone. collision. And that's a good example, which we've had several from the first year of this awful war of how fragile the balance is and how quickly things can escalate. You know, this is another sort of catastrophe that we have to really worry about these kinds of things where something starts as harassment ends in an accident. And before people realize what's happened, things can escalate.

And so the United States is summoning the Russian ambassador to have a conversation about this. Hopefully, it's just a little talking to, you know, be more professional and environmentally sound in your harassment of our drones. Yeah. We need to de-conflict better so we don't have World War III. And hopefully, you know, none of us ends up dying as a result of this. Right. But that's the problem with prolonging this war, that you'd never know what type of incident is going to trigger some type of escalation that nobody saw coming. People feel like they have control of events in a way that history shows that they just don't. Right.

If you look back at almost any war, you see that events kind of get out of the control of the men and women who think that they're the ones who are actually directing it. Yeah. No, absolutely. And you're right in your point about the longer this goes on, the higher the chances become. The more time it's possible for something to just go extremely wrong. You remember the, what was the situation a couple of months back with the missile, right? And immediately- Right, where the AKP reported Russian missile strikes Poland, was it? Yeah. Right. And you have all kinds of completely reckless reactions. And, you know, by the time it was pretty immediately clear that people were jumping to conclusions and having reckless reactions. And now there's more transparency,

oddly enough, on Twitter. You can sort of see how, you know, the people in the Polish government are reacting. You can see how people in the United States government are reacting or in the media are reacting. And maybe that's to all of our benefit. I'm generally pretty skeptical of that, but maybe when you have the public watching you really closely and saying, poking holes in your theory of the case before you can do something extremely stupid because you're trigger happy, maybe that's a good thing. But at the same time, it's extremely hard to believe because to your point, Ryan, the longer that we're in this conflict, the longer there is or the more chance there is that something goes very, very wrong for whatever reason. We can't know what it is yet. And the rhetoric out of the Pentagon has actually been comforting in this sense on this occasion.

They're calling the Russian pilots amateurs, just the idea that they would make their criticism that it's environmentally unsound, at least that's so trivial that it makes it less likely. World War III over ESG. How dare you? Yeah. Like, how dare you? And then we're like, uh-oh, how dare you?

Okay, we're going to have a duel now. Right. And we're going to be, you know, missiles are going to be pointing at each other. Right. So this kind of stuff, calling each other amateurs and saying that they behaved unprofessionally is actually paradoxically a little bit comforting. Yeah, a new way to duel, though, actually might be dumping fuel on each other. Who dumps the most fuel the fastest?

Somebody was saying that that's kind of a common way to harass each other up in the sky. I'm sure it is. That you can dump a little bit of fuel on somebody. If anyone wants to take Ryan and me for a ride-along. I don't know. Not anywhere near the Black Sea. Yeah, well, we'd know. Thank you very much.

I'll go to Tampa and watch it happen. Yeah, Tampa. Tampa's nice. Right before happy hour. So speaking of Ukraine, let's move on to Tucker Carlson's Q&A with every Republican, every possible Republican presidential candidate. Some did not respond, of course. Over in Ukraine, it was almost like a litmus test.

He sent the same set of questions to every presidential candidate. And again, some folks who have not announced, people like Kristi Noem, people like Mike Pompeo, who did not respond, and got, I think, some really interesting responses that ended up roiling definitely conservative Twitter yesterday. But the Internet in general had a lot of reactions to what people were saying to Tucker. The neoconservative branch of the Republican Party, which is under more scrutiny and more threats than ever before, even if they still have a lot of power. They're even getting backlash from establishment folks like Kevin McCarthy. They were really upset about what Ron DeSantis had to say. And Tucker himself said Ron DeSantis' response to his questions was really the most newsy. So we're going to start, Ryan and I are going to do kind of a rapid fire going through a bunch of these different responses.

What do you want to start with? Well, let's start with, I think we have Donald Trump first. The man himself? to start with? Well, let's start with, I think we have Donald Trump first. Yeah, let's see that one. All right. So if you look at your screen, you can see this here on the screen, but we'll read it for everyone else. Trump goes in and gives a very Trumpy answer, most of which I would say is accurate on Ukraine. There's not a ton to pick at here. He's very clear that this is, okay, so he says, the sad fact is that due to a new lack of respect for the U.S. cause, at least partially by our incompetently handled pullout from Afghanistan and a very poor choice of words by Biden in

explaining U.S. requests and intentions, Biden's first statement was that Russia could have some of Ukraine, no problem. I can't really channel Trump very well here. I don't remember Biden saying exactly that. I don't either. So maybe that is one of the things to pick at. But overall, he says... Go ahead and take some of Ukraine. He's saying at a staggering $125 billion, we're paying four to five times more. And this fight is far more important for Europe than it is for the U.S. Next, tell Ukraine that there will be little money coming from us. We've heard him say something to that extent before. Yeah, we did. That's right. In a little phone call. But he ends it by saying this can be easily done if conducted by the right president. Both sides are weary and ready to make a deal. The meeting should start immediately.

There's no time to spare. The death and destruction must end now. Properly executed, this terrible and tragic war, a war that never should have started in the first place, will come to a speedy end. That's the part I think more Republican candidates, more Republicans in general, should zero in on. This part where he says the meeting should start immediately. There's no time to spare. The death and destruction must end now. That's perfectly put. And to me, the rationale behind Trump here is kind of populism at its worst. If you think of Bernie as defined by his kind of not me, us, Trump's like, no, there are no problems structurally and materially with the world that I just can't fix on my own. The problem is just that you don't have me.

So the problem is not that this war is going on. It's that it's being waged poorly and it would be waged better by me. And it would be paid for by Europe if I were in there. He even said he's going to charge them kind of back rent for all of the money that we've spent up until now. So basically he's just saying, trust me, I got this. And he says he's going to meet with Putin. Then he's going to meet with Zelensky. Then he's going to get him in the room because he's such a good dealmaker.

I don't know if anybody still believes this about Trump, that he's this incredible dealmaker. But that's basically his shtick, which is not saying that I would force an end to this war. Yeah, I think that's a good point. We have talked in the past about the theory of the madman with Donald Trump, and there's actually some good reason to believe that other world leaders bought into that. That he's so unpredictable that maybe let's, yeah. When he's tweeting about the size of Kim Jong-un's button on a Saturday night at 8 p.m., who knows what the hell this guy is going to do. So I think there is something to that. I don't think that's what he's necessarily doing

intentionally, but I do think there's something to that. When Tucker asked him what specifically is our objective in Ukraine and how will we know when we've achieved it? He says, our objective in Ukraine is to help and secure Europe, but Europe isn't helping himself. Basically, there's like five more questions here. Do you believe the U.S. faces the risk of nuclear war with Russia? And to your point, Ryan, he says, it depends on who the president of the United States is. And then Tucker asked, given that Russia's economy and currency are stronger than before the war, do you believe the U.S. sanctions have been effective? No, they have not been effective. Just the opposite. Should the U.S. support regime change in Russia? No. Again, you can definitely quibble with the language,

and I think your point is a very good one. At the same time, there's also some really good stuff in this response that probably sets the tone for the rest of the Republican Party going forward. The neoconservatives don't get upset about Trump anymore because they sort of expect some of this from him. Their friend John Bolton has told them about all of the meetings in the White House. But DeSantis seemed to really get under people's skin. So why don't we go ahead and pop that one? Before we do, let me just quibble briefly with Tucker's question here, where he says, given that Russia's economy and currency are stronger than before the war, do you believe that U.S. sanctions have been effective? The problem with that question is that's not a given.

Russia's economy is significantly worse off today than it was a year ago. The currency happens to be actually roughly where it was one year ago after wild fluctuations. The currency has stabilized, but that's in the face of inflation that makes ours look mild. And it doesn't mean that the sanctions are a good thing. It doesn't mean that driving Iran, Russia, and China into a closer trading block is a good thing. But the premise of his question is just factually off. Russia's economy actually is not stronger than before the war. Now, maybe you could argue it's more resilient in the sense that it's building tighter networks with our adversaries, but it's not stronger. So let's actually, that's one of the answers that Kristi Noem,

Kristi Noem had a surprisingly good and substantive answer on these questions, but she writes, it's counterfactual to say that Russia's economy is stronger in the wake of the war. Team Noem right here. There you go, team Noem. Ryan Grim is all aboard the Noem train. Let's go to the DeSantis element. That's the next one. So this is what really, I think, had a lot of people upset because, you know, they just, they expected better of Ron DeSantis and the neoconservative camp. Well, what did they expect of him? I was surprised they were upset by this because this, to me, doesn't feel much different than what Biden might say, except for some of the rhetoric. But why did this bother the right so

much? There's one phrase. The Ocon right. Yeah, the neocon right. I think a lot of other people were very happy with this answer. Tucker seemed to be very happy with this answer. But there's one phrase in here that set off the kind of national review crowd, and that is territorial dispute. So DeSantis said, well, the U.S. has many vital national interests securing our borders, addressing the crisis of readiness within our military, achieving energy security and independence, and checking the economic, cultural, military power of the CCP. Becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them. So this was, that phrase, territorial dispute, felt to the neoconservatives as though Ron DeSantis was minimizing the conflict and minimizing its sort of global implications, its historic implications, and minimizing Putin's ultimate goal. My response to that, and I think you'd probably have a similar one, which is that we

actually have plenty of evidence at this point that Putin would be willing to have conversations about territory, right? He may have wanted to take Kiev. And I think at some point he probably thought he could. Yeah, he thought he had it. It's perfectly clear now that he didn't. It's perfectly clear that now that he's not going to. And he knows that. And that's why he has, in the past, we've heard about scuttled negotiations, been willing to talk precisely about territory at this point. I think it's perfectly accurate to call it a territorial dispute. And I think, again, gets to the delusions of the neoconsult that this set them off. Yeah. What I found most interesting about this is that, to me, it actually, you hear the, you've been hearing the phrase uniparty a bunch lately. To me, it actually revealed how much there

is a uniparty when it comes to foreign policy, because I see why that could trigger a kind of internecine battle on the right, you know, because it's a question of whether or not you're giving enough, you know, you're giving enough kind of weight to the struggle. But if you look closely at what he's saying, it is very hard to distinguish from the current Biden policy. Well, he says no regime change. Which, so Biden, now, okay, I shouldn't say Biden policy. I should say American policy. Because Biden has said all sorts of things. And then they go back to his advisors and they're like, well, no, no, no, we don't mean regime change.

So I don't think that the current American policy is actually regime change. I think Biden might say that because he just says whatever pops into his mind, it slips right out. Although I think you do hear that from other members of the Uniparty in media, you know, your Ann Apple bombs. Certainly the Ann Apple bomb world, for sure. But beyond that, so while the U.S. has many vital national interests, and he names them, becoming further entangled in this dispute is not one of them. This territorial dispute is not one of them. This territorial dispute is not one of them. That actually mirrors the way that the Biden administration says that this is not a critical national interest, which requires U.S. troops or direct U.S. engagement.

That is specifically how Biden has rejected the calls from the more hawkish elements of both parties to get more aggressively involved, to give offensive weapons to Ukraine. Because he says it's not a national interest to that degree, which goes to exactly what DeSantis talks about, which is he says we don't want to give kind of long-range offensive weapons to Ukraine. Elsewhere, he's critical without saying what he would do differently. Like he says he's against a blank check. It's like, okay, well, what kind of check are you for? Because a President DeSantis with a leader McConnell and a Speaker McCarthy would probably be showering just as much money on the war effort as Biden. Maybe there would be some more efforts to actually monitor where the money's going. But that's trivial compared to the size and scope of the effort.

Yeah, I don't know about that because Kevin McCarthy signaling was a good example that Republicans in Washington, D.C. with future interests, with electoral interests, are pretty terrified of the base and understand where the base is. If you look at public polling and where the Republican Party and Republican voters are on the money to Ukraine, I think you see a trend in almost all of these answers except for some of the predictable ones, you know, Chris Christie's, where you're getting to something here. Lindsey Graham, we have this next element. He actually compared what DeSantis said, what Ron DeSantis said to Neville Chamberlain. He said the Neville Chamberlain approach to aggression never ends well. I mean, it just, there's no winning if you stop short of regime change to them.

And I saw somebody make the point in response to that. It said, actually, unpopular response here, but the Neville Chamberlain project actually does often work. It didn't work against Hitler. That's true. But like negotiation to end a conflict does actually have a not that bad track record over the last, you know, 300 years when it comes to wars. Like that's how aggression and wars end is through negotiation. Sometimes you're going to have the most evil megalomaniac who's ever like walked the face the earth, and that's not going to work against him. But the idea that negotiations don't work. Now, one man's negotiations is another man's appeasement, but that's what makes a negotiation.

You're never going to come out of it with a complete victory. Complete victory, that's total war. Right, right, exactly. And when people in the neoconservative camp use the word appeasement, it is absolutely infuriating because then you're just talking about, like you said, Ryan, total war. And that's ultimately- That's your other choice. So just say that. We'll do rapid fire here through some of the rest of them. There are some more interesting ones. His Tim Scott line was hilarious. I don't know if we have that. I think we do. So Mike Pence gives a very, what I would argue is a fairly neoconservative answer.

Oh yeah, Pence. He's carrying the standard. He invokes the Reagan doctrine and says, we support those who fight our enemies on their shores so we will not have to fight them ourselves. And then goes on offense and says, there is no room for Putin apologists in the Republican Party. Tucker interpreted that as a barb at him in his reading of the Pence tweet. There's some other ones. Vivek Ramaswamy basically answered with an essay. Like a really, really long post. You can read all of this on Tucker's Twitter, by the way. I don't know. What do you make of Pence's entire kamikaze kind of campaign that he's running?

I mean, I enjoy watching it. It doesn't mean I'm a neocon all of a sudden. But it is kind of fun to watch him just, yeah, kamikaze seems the best word because it feels like this is not a path to victory for him. Yeah. But he's going to do some damage along the way. It almost feels like when Bernie decided to run in 2015, he didn't think he was going to win. But somebody needs to get the message out there and have a debate over these issues.

It almost feels like he feels like somebody has to like stand up for the ghost of Reagan. I think he really sees a path for himself, which is that when you have a very splintered, potentially a very splintered primary, we don't know. One of the interesting things about this Q&A is we don't know how many people are actually running. These are people who are seriously exploring a bit, but we don't know how many of them actually end up on the debate stage, actually end up mounting campaigns and traveling and making a real effort. But it does look like a lot of people are flirting with the run. And if that's the case, you have the Trump vote, some 30% of the Republican base, roughly, and then everybody

else is split into these different camps, which is essentially how Donald Trump won the Republican primary in 2016, because you were either voting for Donald Trump or for one of the other against him. So he's trying to be that guy who's going to stay in it long enough with that integrity and he's going to carry Reagan's mantle. You could see the sort of suburban Republican voter who's uncomfortable with DeSantis, maybe, because he thinks that the Ukraine conflict is, quote, a territorial dispute. And you have Mike Pence arguing sort of against that. Then, yeah, I think they think there's enough room. If everyone's voting against Trump and just needs to pick another flavor,

then maybe now that Trump's support is down to something around 25, 30 percent, if another person can just beat that, that's their lane. So that's what I would make of Mike Pence's. Is he competing for that lane with Chris Christie? And should we finish with him? I honestly, yeah. Let's throw Chris Christie's answer up on here. He's the last element.

He's the last element. We'll just go straight to that one. I have no idea. I didn't even think there was a chance that Chris Christie would mount a bid at all. I guess Tucker has reason to think Chris Christie is on, I guess Chris Christie is on Tucker's radar for some reason. And he answered the question. The full-throated kind of George W. Bush throwback kind of rhetoric. Completely, as though the Trump administration never happened. Yeah, Russia's aggression against Ukraine is a national security issue that threatens our alliances and our standing in the world. Our objective is to assist Ukraine sufficiently

to enable them to defeat Russian forces and restore their sovereignty. If we do not, this aggression will spread and the void we leave will be filled by authoritarian regimes like China, Iran, North Korea, and an empowered Russia if they triumph over Ukraine, which Tucker kind of paraphrased on his show as if we don't beat Russia in Ukraine, North Korea and Iran will take over the world. And the other thing, the other point to make is Tim Scott, Kristi Noem in particular, and Vivek Ramaswamy in particular, all invoked China and made this argument that our focus on Ukraine financially and just militarily is distracting us and weakening us with the potential urgent threat of a fight in the South China Sea mounting. That was one of the lines that they brought into the conversations

with Tucker. Speaking of Tucker. Indeed, speaking of Tucker. We have more Tucker to talk about because actually this whole exercise where Tucker peppered the potential Republican candidates with questions was a really interesting one. Some of them gave short responses. Some of them gave long responses to every individual question. They came in all kinds of different formats, but he also went on a full send to talk. I saw him talk about nicotine. He's always, you know, got a dip in a long time smoker. That was a fairly enjoyable part of the conversation because he talked about how nicotine has health benefits. It's not a carcinogen. I tend to agree with him on that point. But he also called- But he's got dip in his mouth? It's a nicotine dip. Like, oh man, you're about to learn about a whole new world.

But it's not like old school dip? No. Yeah. It's like what vaping is, but for. Oh, okay. Wow. I didn't know that there was like vaping, but for dip. Well, it's, it's, it's an artificial type. It's, it's not packed with tobacco. Yeah. So he also, now that we've cleared up, Ryan's going to do the next show. Yeah. So, but he also called former president Donald Trump quote, a little bit autistic and dismissed, this is media writing, dismissed Trump's claim he would end the war in Ukraine in a lengthy and candid interview on the Full Send podcast. At one point during the discussion, the topic of Russia's invasion came up, quote, I saw

Trump said he could close that in 24 hours if he wanted to. Kyle asked, quote, do you think he could? Carlson responds, I have no idea. I mean, he couldn't build a border wall in four years. So, you know, there's a gap between promises and delivery with all politicians, very much including him, I will say in Trump's defense, and maybe because he's a little bit autistic. He saw the stakes of this like at the very beginning. And this is what I do love about Trump, particularly in foreign policy. I think we have a clip of Tucker's response here as well. Trump said he could close that in 24 hours if he wanted to.

Do you think he could? I have no idea. I mean, he couldn't build a border wall in four years. So, you know, there is a gap between promises and delivery with all politicians, very much including him. But I will say in Trump's defense, and maybe because he's a little bit autistic, he saw the stakes of this like at the very beginning. He's like, you don't want, and this is what I do love about Trump,

particularly in foreign policy. He sees the big stuff. He's like, wait, you've got Russia and China. They don't trust each other. We can't let them get together. They'll kick our ass. And we'll be, we're not going to fight a war against them, one hopes, but we'll definitely be taking orders from them. Definitely. No. And he said that five years ago when everyone's like, shut up, racist. Okay. He's a racist.

But is he wrong? how Trump sees the big picture that from his perspective, that Donald Trump comes in, has this sort of business mentality, looks at these conflicts from an almost like cartoonish perspective and says, well, because I'm not mired in the theory and the details and all of that, I can say, what's wrong with all of you very smart people? Can't you see the bigger problem going on? You're not seeing the forest for the trees. That's an interesting point. What did you make of it? Well, I think that American foreign policymakers also have a cartoonish view of American foreign policy and that it clouds their judgment, whereas it might actually make Trump see things a little bit more clearly, at least in that particular sense. In other words, if you're an American, you're guiding foreign policy, and you are constantly drinking your own Kool-Aid about how we are spreading democracy

and how we are a force for good, that we're the only country out there that doesn't engage in great power politics. What we're out here doing is just policing the world and making it a better place. That's all we're doing. Everybody wants to be a Madisonian democracy if we can just kind of nudge them in that direction with our M-16s and maybe potential security guarantees, and if not, then coups of their bad governments. So if you're driven by this belief in your own worthiness,

your own morality, then you might be blinded to the way that your actions are going to be perceived and counteracted by other countries. You might not see, oh, wait, if we do this, not only are we going to have Russia and China who do hate each other, but now all of a sudden, you know, find out of necessity a reason to work together. You have Iran working with them closely. You might even get countries like Brazil, El Salvador, Venezuela, like all of these other countries that we could have, you know, very good relations with, all of a sudden start to feel threatened and don't see from their perspective this kind of warm-hearted sharing of democratic values. What they see is a global hegemon just trying to enforce its will. And so for Trump, who is, you know, has, you know, is completely amoral, only sees kind of transactions and power plays. And that's the kind of morality, the transactional morality.

Right. He's able to see from their perspective much more easily how they're going to respond to what the United States is doing because he doesn't really have any buy-in into the kind of the mythos around the U.S. spreading democracy around the world. Yeah, he's completely changed the tone, at least in the Republican Party. And that's with this question here. We talked about it in the last block. I mean, one of the big, obviously, it's an open question as to whether you believe that Ron DeSantis sees this as, quote, a territorial dispute in the way that absolutely angered so many of the old, you know, conservatives who are trying to cling to power but are

keeping it much less, they're much less powerful than they wish that they could be, precisely because you're getting answers like Ron DeSantis, Kristi Noem, things that, you know, would not have had Republicans talking about pre-Trump. And we know that, by the way, because they were talking about Ukraine a little bit differently during the Obama administration, both for political reasons and because Trump hadn't disrupted the party yet. I think there's an argument for that sort of Reaganite peace through strength not being fully contradictory with where they are now. But at the same time, there was a lot more, I think, eagerness to criticize the Obama administration's, what they perceived as weakness for not equipping Ukraine, in some cases with offensive weapons, to do what

it needed to do around the annexation of Crimea. So all of that is to say, he completely and fundamentally at least changed the way Republican politicians talk about it, but we have not yet tested how a post-Trump Republican party deals with, in in office these questions. We obviously have Kevin McCarthy saying he doesn't want the blank check, but he's only been Speaker of the House for a little bit, and Republicans have only had the House for just a couple of months now at this point. So we don't really know what the Republican Party post-Trump looks like on foreign policy. We do, however, know what they want to talk about, and we do know what they believe the rhetoric should look like, and that is a change.

What do they think the rhetoric should be? More isolationist-leaning? Realist, I would say. Less neoconservative and more realist. The whole going to Iraq to build a democracy. Like that's gone kind of thing. Yeah. And Tucker's talked about himself, how his perspective on this has changed. And it would be hard to be, and I think this is where the Republican base has shifted to, it would be hard to be an American who looks at what our foreign policy establishment over the last 20 years, over the last 50 years, and says, you know, great job, great work. I trust you to continue doing this. You clearly know exactly what you're doing. You need no disruption whatsoever.

Was it, what finally brought the right back around? Was it the disastrous occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan? Like the combination of those two after Vietnam and basically like 60 years of having nothing to show for these adventures? Yeah, I think it's that. And I think it's the class element, too. And, you know, disproportionately people who vote Republican were affected by sending their kids to war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And especially, you know, now feel as though that was a sacrifice they made while people in Washington were sort of using their children as pawns in this great global chess game and doing it really poorly. So I definitely think the class element is there. But yeah, it's hard to look at this and not see failure after failure after failure. And so I think at least the candidates, and Trump picked up on that. People forget how central that was to his campaign in the Republican primary back in 2015 and 2016. What he was talking about in terms of Iraq and Afghanistan was completely different than basically any other Republican candidate before him. And now we're almost 10 years from the escalator that he descended down to announce his candidacy. And the Republican Party at least is talking about these things in a totally different way because I think they saw the response. And that totally changed.

I do remember that incredible moment in the Republican debate where Trump told Jeb Bush, like, you know, your brother, you know, was there for 9-11 and then he botched the Iraq war. And we never should have done that. Now, Trump, if I remember, was supportive of the Iraq War at the time, but that's fine. He's a politician. He can swing all over the place if he wants. He was probably all over the place on the Iraq War. Yeah, I was going to say.

He was probably like, as long as we can get the oil, then we should do it. He probably wasn't for building democracy since he's not necessarily even for democracy here. But to see him eviscerating the kind of pro-war mentality that was dominant in 2015, still by 2015 in the Republican Party, and to see it land on Jeb and just crush him was delightful to watch. The front runner at the time. I mean, again, it's ridiculous to think about that, but Jeb Bush was crush him. Was delightful to watch. The frontrunner at the time. I mean, again, it's ridiculous to think about that, but Jeb Bush was the frontrunner. It was Jeb Bush and Hillary

Clinton, but it was on the Republican side, it was Jeb's year. Trump's told Howard Stern, this was in 2002, about six months before the war. Yeah, I guess so. When he was asked if he supported going to war, but then he did by 2004. He was completely in opposition to the war. So he turned around quicker than other people. He was definitely ahead of the Republican Party on that question. 2004, by then,

Abu Ghraib's 2004, but it's still faster than a lot of the Republican Party for sure. It took the 2006 midterm wipeout for a lot of them to be like, all right, we'll eventually end this war 15 years from now. Right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, let's go to Silicon Valley bank developments because there's more to talk about every single day. By the hour, it feels like there's more to talk about every single day. Let's start, though, actually, Ryan, with yourself. You were on Russell Brand's show yesterday. I'll tee this up very briefly. We talked about the Department of Justice announcing that it's going to be probing Silicon Valley Bank. The New York Times reported that experts were saying that they're going to be looking at the bonuses that executives in the stock sale, the bonuses that paid out to the executives in the stock sales done by executives. That's great. They should definitely look at that. What I hope and also suspect a

little bit that they would also look at would be this text chain. We'll talk about it a little bit later. A bunch of text chains and Slack groups among these VCs, founders, the Silicon Valley tech world that very early started saying, hey guys, why don't we all get our money out? And so then the question becomes, why were you making these suggestions to this group rather than if you really had concerns, just pull your money out. Like you wouldn't like yell, like if the theater is really on fire,

just get out rather than start a stampede. So anyway, so we talked briefly about some of that. It's a sort of a dialogue being played potentially. I know you're not Nostradamus or whatever or some sort of soothsayer, but potentially this is part of a kind of dialogue taking place between the state treasury and the banking system that's letting them know that there are ways of precipitating financial disaster unless there's compliance and favorable legislation and regulation.

Yeah, nice little economy you've got going here. Shame if there was a bank run and a bunch of contagion that just wiped it out. So yeah, so now the New York times reporting just now that the FBI department of justice are going to look into the, you know, the causes of this meltdown and the 2018 rollback, the executives who cashed out a bunch of bonuses, like those, that's all going to get looked at. You know, they, they, to me, they ought to actually look at that text chain. You got 200 people, you got 200 phone numbers, call those folks in. Maybe it was completely innocent. Ask them, you know, why, you know, why did Ask them, why did you tell your closest 200 friends to take the money out of here?

Why didn't you just take your own money out? At the same time, Peter Thiel's, what's it called, his founder's firm, they did a call on that day where they called money in. On that very day, that required then a bunch of their partners or urged a bunch of their partners to pull money out as well. You say, why'd you do this? Just a total coincidence? What did this have anything to do with this? I think these are reasonable questions that investigators ought to be asking because the

other explanations just don't make a lot of sense. It's extraordinary that you say that. So it's unlikely that the investigation will look into these aspects of the case. What about Biden's public claim, overt, obvious, and plain, that the consequences of a failed capitalist venture are bankruptcy. Like you said, the bankers involved are unlikely to face bankruptcy. You said that should be the first step and that the consequences of those actions should be felt. So the question then would be, well, why? Like, why would a bunch of tech bros blow up their own bank? And the speculation that is out there is that it is a shot across the bow at the Fed. That the entire tech industry that these guys have made so much money off of

requires quantitative easing at a global scale to get the free money flowing out to Silicon Valley that runs through Silicon Valley Bank and then runs to all of these different startups. Some of them hit and some of them don't. But if you're at 4%, 5%, 6% interest rates, you can't make all of the different bets that you can make. At basically 0% interest rates, the bubble can just go on forever. So the idea would be, how do you make it clear to the Federal Reserve that they need to stop ratcheting to the Federal Reserve that they need to stop

ratcheting up interest rates, that they need to stop tightening monetary policy. You tank Silicon Valley Bank. You tank Silicon Valley Bank. So that would be the, that's the speculation, which, speculation. Ryan literally just did many people are saying. Many people are saying. He just created a conspiracy theory. It's out there, it's out there.

Many people are saying. It created a conspiracy theory. It's out there. It's out there. Many people are saying. It also makes more sense than the alternative because here's the thing. If you really do feel like because of the news that came out Wednesday night that your money is at risk, you have two things you can do. You can either go to your bank calmly while there's not a bank run and pull your money out of that bank. Like that would be the rational thing to do if you're trying to protect your wealth. Or you can text 200 of the richest people in the world who all have money at Silicon Valley Bank and encourage them to take their money out. And then you can do a call to other investors to have them pull their money out. Those are your two options. Which one of those is going to have you more likely to be made whole by the end of the day? And which one of those is more likely to cause a bank run,

which then risks your ability to get your money out? And if your real goal is just to get your money out, you know, spreading, sowing fear and panic doesn't do that. I've heard anecdotes about smaller businesses, startups that had, you know, their assets in SVB. I also though think there is an alternative possibly, which is that a lot of these other people basically have been playing with monopoly money for the last 20 years. They have so much money that they're investing in different places and playing around with that their fear of being made whole is not necessarily understandable or comprehensible from the perspective of people who haven't just been playing with millions and billions for a really long time. I don't know. I mean, I think that's it to the question about why they would be chatting in their signal groups instead of yanking immediately and taking action. Maybe it's simply, well, first of all, incompetence. But secondly, it seems plausible to me that they just have been playing with this glut of all, incompetence. But secondly, it seems plausible to me that they just have been

playing with this glut of money, like it's monopoly, like it's those fake gold chocolate coins that you just toss around at a birthday, a kid's birthday party for so long. It's not as pressing as it would be otherwise. It could be. And the nice thing about this conspiracy theory is that it can be tested. Investigators can literally call these people in and they, all of their communication is done by text, by Slack. Let's hope they don't have disappearing messages on signal and just say, look, we want to see what you guys talked about Wednesday night and what you guys talked about Thursday morning. Did any of you say like, hey, you know what? The Fed is out of control. You know what they need?

They need to be scared. Like if you find some messages like that, all right, then you got them. If you don't, then maybe this is just organic idiocy. Well, we have the New York Times is reporting that the United States is reportedly opening an investigation into the collapse of SVB. There's actually also, I believe, a class action lawsuit that has been filed on Tuesday night. The shareholders. Right. So there's a lot of opportunity for discovery here. There's a lot of opportunity for evidence to emerge, whether they want it to, whether the investors want it to or not. Is there anything particular you expect from the early days of these investigations? Not necessarily from the early days, but what's nice is that when you have

powerful entities in a legal fight, then you are more likely to get to the bottom of at least messages. The reason we have all those Fox News messages is because Dominion was able to get them. So the executives at Silicon Valley Bank are very much motivated to point fingers in other directions. It wasn't us, wasn't our risky business model, wasn't our lobbying Congress in 2018 to roll back rules so that we could operate in a riskier fashion, which we then exploited to blow ourselves up. Like, wasn't us.

Wasn't us, like, extracting our bonuses and selling stock at the end. It was actually these tech bros who prompted a run on our bank. Like, they're motivated to make that claim. So their attorneys are then going to be motivated to try through the discovery process to get access to some of these messages. Right. To see if there actually is anything that points to. And, you know, some of these bros might be dumb enough to have, like, typed that up.

We'll see. You wouldn't think that you'd have, you know, Fox anchors saying, like, none of this was true. All right. More at 11. But there you go. Well, for more on this, Ken Klippenstein is actually here. So we're going to pause and bring Ken in right now. One of the most vocal cheerleaders of the Silicon Valley Bank bailout was none other than California Governor Gavin Newsom.

Ken Klippenstein from The Intercept joins us to talk about some of his new reporting about some potential conflicts that Governor Newsom may have had that he neglected to mention. Ken, thanks for joining us. Good to be with you guys. I have to say when you queued up this segment, I thought you were going to say one of the most vocal cheerleaders of SVB was Ken Klippenstein. Yeah, that's me. Who happened to have some of

his startup capital lodged in that bank. Ken, a lot of people don't know this, has a winery like Gavin Newsom and he was banking with SVB. Well, congratulations. I'm glad that everything worked out for you. You know me, I like to support the innovators. That's right. Yes. So Gavin Newsom loves to support the innovators as well. Tell us a little bit about his entanglements with Silicon Valley Bank, what we know of them. Yeah. So it turns out he has three wineries. He was a businessman before becoming governor, owns a bunch of companies in the hospitality industry. And three of those wineries appeared in the bank's winery division.

That's a thing for the bank. And it's listed on the website. And so it turns out he uses Silicon Valley Bank for those three companies. In addition to that, a longtime former employee of Newsom's told me that he also uses it for his personal – he has multiple personal accounts with the bank as well. And then a third angle to all of this is that his wife runs a nonprofit and on the board of directors is a president of Silicon Valley Bank. And that nonprofit received $100,000 from SVB over the last several years. So a number of different points of connection and ties between Governor Newsom and that bank. And I want to get your thoughts, Ken, on the response from Newsom's camp to your reporting.

They claim, right, that he has his holdings, all of his financial holdings are in a blind trust. What do we know about the potential conflicts there and how much that would matter if, for instance, his wife has this connection on the board with SVB? Right. So the problem with this blind trust is that it's not meaningfully blind if you look at what some of the ethics experts have said. And what this case is really reminiscent of was President Trump and his attempt to put his companies into a blind trust, which he then allowed his son to run. And then in this case, sort of in parallel to that, Governor Newsom's sister runs his blind trust. And so the critique of that is that it's not meaningfully blind because A, he already knows all the companies

that's in it because he's run them for a number of years. And B, you know, it's his blood relative that's running this thing. So what kind of wall is that to put between him and these firms? It occurred to me another good one is Joe Manchin, who he and his wife have a coal company and they put it in the name, they put it in a blind trust, but his son runs it. But he still knows it's a coal company. Right. He knows what it does.

Right. And now Newsom might only be able to assume at this point that the winery still has accounts with Silicon Valley Bank, but you don't typically move your major banking operations for no reason unless you're a tech pro kind of trying to spark a panic or you're panicked. I was actually just looking up his wine. Plump Jack is one of his wineries. Apparently it specializes, it's a boutique, like Northern California Cabernet. It's $100 a bottle for their 2018 Plump Jack.

You ever had Plump Jack Cabernet? I've not. Never heard of it. Have you ever heard of it? No. But, you know, I'm not a big Cabernet person. And so did you get any reaction from either the California press or the governor's office in this story? What did you hear?

Yeah, the California press is actually following up on it. And I'm glad that it hasn't just become a partisan football because this is really, as I said, with the Trump case, this is an ethics question that is a serious one and has been a serious one in the local press. They had looked at these problems, not specifically the wine companies and the bank, but all of his holdings. And this is something that comes up any time you have one of these business moguls that has a high net worth, as Governor Newsom does. There are all these questions of conflicts of interest. And so there's been some very good reporting in the local press around what's called behested giving. So there are strict limits on what California politicians can take in terms of gifts generally, but there's one exception, and that is what's called behested giving, where the politician directs giving to something. And in this case, Newsom is known to have directed giving to his wife's

non-profit. And so it's not regulated in the same fashion that other gifts are. And that's something that the local press has been focusing on for a number of years now. And Ken, you just said something important, which is that you didn't want it to become sort of a partisan football. The report you had just before this one was about entanglements in the office of Kevin McCarthy with Silicon Valley Bank. Tell us about what you found there. Yeah, what was interesting about that is that two of the House Speaker McCarthy's senior staffers for a number of years ended up becoming registered

lobbyists for Silicon Valley Bank. And not just that, when I looked at what specifically they lobbied on, it's directly related to all the stuff that's happening now, which is the 2018 Dodd-Frank partial rollback specifically pushed on that, lobbied the FDIC, which is what's insuring the depositors at this point and guaranteeing making whole the people that had money in that bank. So it's directly connected to all this. And what's sort of funny about that is when I have this nuisance piece come on, some Democrats are very angry about it saying, you know, oh, you're a Republican in disguise. It's like, oh, that's funny. You missed my last story. It's literally about the other. I'm not looking for any specific. I'm just looking at the bank

and trying to see where the nexus is with politicians and whatever pops up is what I'm going to write about. So I don't know what to tell people. Yeah, and it's really in that rule writing and in the regulatory side where the public is at the most disadvantage. So in Congress, at least it's happening somewhat in public view so people can weigh in when it's an obscure kind of rollback unless you're reading the Intercept, the American Prospect. You're not going to follow like those, you know, those those repeal efforts through Congress. But you can if you want to. By the time it gets into the FDIC, it's really like former McCarthy aides, former Manchin aides, you know, former House Financial Services Committee aides who are going directly to the FDIC saying, all right, so here is what was written into law. Now here's how we can weaken it even further. Because the FDIC, aside from insuring deposits, also wrote a lot of the rules around Dodd-Frank

about how are we going to implement the law? What does it mean when we're going to stress test you? How often are we going to look at your books? What do we feel like is a reasonable amount of exposure? What is not a reasonable amount of exposure? Because what I think a lot of people might not understand is the direct link between the 2018 rollback and this blow up. The link would be if there were tighter inspections and stress tests of the bank, you might have had regulators come in and say, all of these bond holdings, mortgage-backed securities, I've been hearing a lot on the news about potential coming interest rate hikes. I'm not sure that if that stressor hits you, that you're going to be able to survive that. So one

of two things happens. They make them unwind those, or knowing that they're going to get that pressure from regulators, the risk managers don't do it. They say, you know what? We need shorter-term bonds here, or we just need to stay in treasuries, or we need to make sure we're tightly hedged in the case of some type of shock from interest rates. And this idea that nobody could see these interest rates coming, Are you kidding me? I'm not a risk manager at a bank. I knew they were going to raise interest rates. I talked to an employee of SBB Bank who himself was frustrated about exactly what you're saying, which is that, of course, they were going to raise rates.

They were saying it. And so what's amazing, I interviewed an economist recently about all this and said, why are these banks so adamant about rolling back regulations? Because doesn't that end up hurting them in the mid to long term? And he's like, well, you're assuming that they're looking at the mid to long term. Because again, talking to this employee, he would have been happy to have the stress test happen because he wouldn't have to worry about all this stuff now that he's having to brief investors and things on and hope for his job to still exist in a year. And so it's kind of interesting how much it ends up hurting basically everyone except people at the very top C-suite of all these kind of deregulations.

Well, and you quote at the very end, you really stick the landing in this piece. Can you say perhaps no one embodied this contradiction more than Larry Summers who said, this is not the time for moral hazard lectures or for lessons administering or for alarm about the political consequences of bailouts from a tweet on Sunday. And when you have, to your point about the people in the C-suites never ending up getting hurt, well, maybe that's partially why. Yeah. Coming from the guy that for the last two years has been endlessly talking about how we can't have student loan debt because

the moral hazard and now oh we don't have to worry about moral hazard this is a very serious issue right now all those people and that we need more unemployed people that's the other thing he said we we need he said we need more unemployment for 10 years what happened to that yeah well here's your chance right right not not like the wrong the wrong people would be unemployed we don't want them to be unemployed. Come on now. That's a little bit, those guys? No, I know them. Yeah, they're my friends.

They need us. They're good people. They have wineries. That's how you know somebody has lost an argument, when they just say, now is not the time. Yeah, now is not the time. A memoir by Ted Klipp. You might be right. I just don't want to hear it right now. Ted, great reporting. Thanks so much.

Thanks, guys. an extraordinary amount of wilderness in Alaska, going after one of the huge untapped stores of fossil fuel resources in Alaska. The left quite fairly lost its mind in reaction to this with a, what are you doing? What could you possibly be thinking at a time when we're, you know, in the midst of a climate apocalypse and you're saying that you're going to be some type of apocalypse, maybe overstating it slightly, climate crisis. You say that you're going to be, you know, the best climate president in history and you're going to improve one of the biggest oil drilling projects ever. And the idea to me that you're going to get any credit from Republicans or from the right for this, that all of a sudden you're going to start seeing Republicans say, well,

you know what? The Biden administration, you know, they really are quite reasonable when it comes to their energy policy. So we're not going to continue to call them kind of Marxists who are trying to shut down every gas station and drilling project in the country, right? I mean, is anybody, am I wrong? Or is there some amount of drilling that Biden can do where Republicans will say, you know what? Nice drilling, baby. He did it. He drilled, baby, drilled. No, yeah, no, that's not going to happen. And he coupled it, interestingly enough, with his announcement that the Interior Department has new regulations that will

cut off 2.8 million acres of the Arctic's Beaufort Sea and then 13 million acres within the National Petroleum Reserve from new leases. So I think that was described by an administration official in the New York Times as, quote, a firewall against new drilling. So I think he's coupling it in a way where he is trying, to your point, maybe not to make amends with the right or to impress the right or to neutralize any of their criticism so much as he's trying to say, this is 2,500 new jobs, potentially. 300 of those would be permanent positions. It's an $8 billion project. 300 whole jobs? Right. Wow, okay.

180- And then we should burn the world down, yeah. 180,000 barrels of oil down the Trans-Alaska pipeline daily. So I think it might not be amends with Republican voters so much as it is anything, steps to do anything about gas prices and reliance right now with a very tenuous situation in the Middle East. Yeah. And the Biden administration's defense of itself was there were five drill sites that ConocoPhillips wanted. Yeah. They only gave them three. Right. And I mean, again, like for the Biden administration with gas prices where they are, depending on where you are in the country, by the way, your gas prices are very different. In some places, they're extremely high still, like California, for various reasons. But if you're the Biden administration and Conoco

Phillips is coming at you hard trying to get five new, it does feel like if you're in the White House right now, three is quite a compromise. I see why they're happy with it, but I also see why they coupled it with that quote firewall they described to the New York Times, cutting off all of those, cutting off that part of the National Petroleum Reserve, 13 million acres, and then 2.8 million in the Arctic Sea. Yeah, but none of it's going to come online in time to, you know, practically while Biden's alive. And it's certainly not in time for his, certainly not in time for his election. Like you're not going to see it affect gas prices,

which was the absurd thing about, oh, they slowed down and stopped the Keystone XL pipeline, which by the way, XL means export. It was going to export gas. But Republicans kept using the fact that they had stopped the Keystone XL pipeline to say, well, that's why you're paying high gas prices right now, which just was completely untrue and just made no sense.

It gives them, it definitely gives them a talking point in re-election to be able to say, it's not true what Republicans have mentioned. Right, yeah, look, they're destroying all this wilderness up in Alaska. Right, and to say it's not true, that these claims are false. We started this project, an $8 billion project up in Alaska. I'm not anti-drilling, et cetera, et cetera. And then he can say to the left, well, I cut off all of these acres. It's just for a president like Joe Biden, he's straddling the fence between, I think, one generation of Democratic voters and another, it is a very difficult political question for him, to be sure. Lisa Murkowski, Republican from Alaska, who's been pushing for this for her entire life,

basically, put out a statement in which she said she could, quote, feel Alaska's future brightening. No, that's the greenhouse effect that you're feeling. It's getting warmer in Alaska. The climate that has existed in Alaska for hundreds and hundreds of years is radically changing in ways that are fundamentally undermining the way of life up there. But they'll get the drill. So congratulations to Senator Lisa Murkowski. You feel that future brightening. Congrats all around. Brightening is an interesting choice of words. You need a little more SPF up there. Yeah.

Maybe she used that intentionally to upset the Ryan Grims. It worked. She got me. Well, let's move on in more terrifying news to rapid advancements in generative AI technology. Yesterday, OpenAI released GPT-4. This is generative AI that's really quickly getting really, really powerful. This is happening essentially at an exponential rate. If you talk to experts on AI, they say it feeds on itself and grows exponentially because of that, especially in this open source context. So according to Axios, the new version can accept and generate longer entries up to 25,000 words.

It can generate captions and other information using an image as a starting point. Now, ChatGPT as people have noted and Axios notes here, can score in the 10th percentile on a bar exam. OpenAI says that GPT-4 can score in the 10th percentile on a bar exam. OpenAI says that GPT-4 can score in the 90th percentile. It can pass most AP exams. And then on the safety side, according to OpenAI, GPT-4 is, quote, 82% less likely than GPT-3.5 to respond when asked for content its rules don't allow. This is a rule-abiding AI.

And, yeah, it's... But who makes the rules? What happens when it starts making the rules? Well, yeah, exactly. No, I mean, this is what's really terrifying. Like, rules can be changed. When we're referring to these things as... And, by the way, GPT-4, you have to pay to access it.

You have to have GPT+, I think, to access it. And then if you don't, you get on a wait list. Developers can sign up on a wait list. But I think it's really, really important to note that we're talking GPT-4. This is very new technology. And already, we're up to 25,000 words. Already, we're making these rapid leaps in a matter of months. Every single week, AI is taking a new step forward that is dramatically further than it was just the week before. really nice, but I think is actually absolutely terrifying, not because it's democratized, but because we're putting really powerful weapons in the hands of people who could potentially be bad actors. Now, there are all kinds of benevolent hackers in the world. There are all kinds of

doing really interesting, like democratized, benevolent hacking. But there are a lot of really bad people in the world. And we are giving these tools more tools just from our own use of them every single week. And we cannot fathom, truly we cannot fathom where this goes in three months, let alone a year, let alone three years. I also wonder if we're sort of the last generation of writers that can kind of trace their lineage in us, I mean everyone, who can trace their kind of lineage back to like the poets in Babylon. Writing has been basically the same since then. Poetry, fiction, nonfiction,

people have written in different forms and obviously written different content and substance, but it's been the same thing. You go from a quill pen to a regular pen to a typewriter to a laptop, but fundamentally, it's just putting words from a human mind down onto paper that are then read by other people and that produces some type of experience. With AI being able to produce poetry and fiction and nonfiction, I would suspect that people

that are growing up today are going to kind of write along with that crutch the entire time because you already see, if you write in Google Docs, you'll see it start to make suggestions about your grammar or your spelling. And that crutch alone is new. Like that is a break from the way that Voltaire would have written. Right. But if you have another artificially intelligent being who's throwing up sentences in front of you, you're not engaged in the same art that humans have been engaged in for thousands of years. Well, and it also then destroys trust for people in public spaces in ways that, again, we haven't really thought about.

We had, what, a very short period of time to acclimate to Facebook and Twitter, but that's about 10 years, right? We've had those for more than 10 years now, but by the time we sort of got used to the technology and to the platforms, that happened roughly over the course of a decade. ChatGPT has outpaced those platforms

in terms of gaining users really, really quickly. If you look at the chart, it's like ChatGPT is straight up here. And then you see really rapid sort of snowballing with Twitter and Facebook, but it was over a much longer period of time, whereas GPT is just going straight up. And so think about, to your point about writing and art, well, think also about law. Think about contracts. Think about wills. I mean, there are just really all of these things. It seeps into all of the cracks of human life.

And we can't possibly conceive of them and think of them right now. Think of how it can exploit code. I mean, these things are really terrifying and we are feeding into it as we sort of mess around with it on a daily basis. Biological, automotive possibilities. We A, B test now. This can A, Z test really quickly, absolutely everything. I mean, it's just the art point is a really good one, but also the way that it will artificially sort of fabricate art or writing completely will destroy trust between humans. It has the potential to completely destroy trust between humans. And imagine when AI is linked up with – imagine when that kind of AI is linked up with brainwave scans. You are getting into the area of what Nita Farhani, who has a great book

out now called Battle for Your Brain, she calls it cognitive liberty. And this is a very urgent threat to cognitive liberty happening on a daily basis. What point are you looking at today? Well, a chart from Axios caught my attention this week. You can see it here with the headline, quote, women rule, employee rebound. Quote, the number of women in the workforce in February was higher than pre-pandemic levels for the first time, Axios reported, adding the strength of women's return to work was faster than anyone could have imagined just a few years ago when dire predictions about a she-session flooded the news. That may seem like welcome news to elite women in C-suites and corporate media, but they don't represent the rest of women in America, and here's why. Time and again, when women are actually polled, a majority prefer part-time work or staying home full-time with their children. This is uncomfortable for the left, and it's uncomfortable for the political establishment, but it's true.

And those who want to serve women best must understand it. As Scott Yenor wrote back in 2019, quote, most women with dependent children don't want full-time work, nor do they want to grind out a path toward the upper reaches of corporate or political power. In recent years, Pew and Gallup polls have shown that fewer women under the best of circumstances prefer full-time work. Married female MBAs from elite schools are 30% more likely to work part-time than married female MBAs from less prestigious schools. And that's a really interesting little fact. Let's start, though, with the Pew poll that was referenced there, which found from 2007 to 2012, the share of mothers saying that full-time work would be ideal for them rose sharply from 20% to 32%, while the share saying they would prefer not to work at all fell from 29% to 20%.

So even with that increase, the poll found only 30% of working mothers said their ideal situation would be to work full-time. Think about that. More women coming out of a recession suddenly wanted full-time work. Does that mean women got 16% more girl bossy? No, it means they were anxious about feeding themselves and their children, about healthcare and student debt and taxes and everything else. More recent Pew data from early in the pandemic when government checks had gone out found a decline, but still that only 44%

of mothers with kids under 18 said it would be best for them personally to work full-time. Right before the pandemic, Gallup found roughly 56% of all women, a 30-year high, said they prefer to work rather than serving in a homemaker role if they were free to do either, although that number is slightly less useful because it doesn't break down the options by full-time work and part-time work. When it comes to just last year, the Center for American Progress reported 993,000 more mothers were working in December 2022 than one year prior, crediting Biden's American Rescue Plan in part for the so-called improvement. Well, let's look at the BLS data. Quote, in 2021, 81.2% of employed mothers with children ages 6 to 17 worked full-time, the Bureau reported.

Remember that Pew found within a year of this BLS research, only 44% of mothers with kids under 18 said it was best personally for them to work full-time. That is not a perfect apples to apples, but it does reveal an enormous, enormous mismatch between what women want and what women do. It also fits with research like the paper from Swedish academics in 2018 that found, quote, sex differences in personality have been shown to be larger in more gender equal countries. As that paper speculated, as gender equality increases, both men and women gravitate towards their traditional gender roles. In other words, more women in good economies choose to stay home and work part-time. The more freedom women have, the more they can live in accordance with their preferences, and the more they choose to work part-time or not at all, and that is okay.

This brings us back to the Axios blurb and general celebration of women's workforce participation. It may look like progress on its face, but what it probably means is that more mothers are entering the workforce or working full time against their wishes because they have to. And by the way, those wishes are totally fine. Working women owe a lot to second wave feminists who liberated us from awful cycles of dependency, got us into academia, and fought for many classically liberal protections. A whole lot of women, myself included, are content to be in the workforce and find purpose and meaning in their professional lives. A whole lot of women, though, would rather be raising kids and doing the hard work of supporting healthy families and communities, and that is awesome. There are all kinds of different numbers that can be crunched here. The research on stay-at-home parenting can be mixed. Child care is incredibly

expensive. Women got hit hard by the pandemic layoffs. My mom worked a ton, and I loved it. She's the most impressive woman I know, but if she's 40% of the population, that's okay. All this is to say, when groups like the Center for American Progress celebrate women's and mothers' labor force participation rates as, quote, improvements, they may be speaking more for themselves than for women in general. And as Blake Masters campaigned on back in 2022, politicians should be helping families who'd rather have a mom stay home with their kids, supporting their household on one income, rather than taking the corporate bait and pushing more moms into the workforce against their wishes. There's also always been a dark side, we don't talk about it a lot, to the corporate class's enthusiasm for women in the workforce. Christopher

Caldwell noted this in Age of Entitlement, writing, quote, feminism offered corporations an excuse for breaking the implicit contract to pay any full-time worker a wage he could raise a family on. It was feminism that provided, under pressure of the recessions of the 1970s, a pretext for repurposing household and national budgets. Instead of being used for reproduction, those budgets would now be consumed. The increment in the family wage that had been meant for the raising of children was withdrawn. Families were no longer entitled to it, mothers would have to enter the workplace to claim it, but they wound up getting only a small part of it, and their competition drove down their husbands' wages into the bargain.

Earlier iterations of feminism celebrated womanhood rather than trying to reshape women into men. We're different on average, and in some really great ways, even as wealthy and educated elite women push our culture, ironically, more towards a masculinized world. In the meantime, Ryan, what's your point today? So when people think lab leak, for obvious reasons, they think Wuhan. But there's been another outbreak that's been getting a second look over the years, and that's the Ebola outbreak in West Africa from 2014 to 2016. The origin of that one

was said to be a boy who was playing with bats. Except the media made a critical mistake, it turned out. The boy was not two years old, as it was reported. He was 18 months old. And that matters because if you've hung out with an 18-month-old lately, you know it's not likely they'd be off playing by themselves in a hollow tree or a bush, which is what the story said at the time. And that's exactly, it turns out, what his father later told a journalist for Reuters. He said, quote, it wasn't Emil that started it. Emil was too young to eat bats and he was too small to be playing in the bush all on his own. He was always with his mother. So in an investigation

published last fall by Independent Science News, journalist Sam Hussaini and virologist Jonathan Latham address other problems with the bat theory. For one, no bats or any other wildlife were found with that strain of Ebola. And the species itself, the Zaire Ebola virus, comes from thousands of miles away, and there's no explanation for how it traveled to West Africa without infecting anybody along the way. The dates also don't match up. The boy was first said to have died in early December, but that was then adjusted to late December, but that still leaves a huge gap between that and the first confirmed cases in March. Nobody from Emil's family, including Emil, was tested for Ebola, and the symptoms that he had also match other diseases prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa. So the boy and the bat is one theory. The other theory focuses on a lab

run by the U.S.-based Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Consortium in Kenema, Sierra Leone, near the border with Liberia and Guinea. Now, over the years, there's been a lot of speculation. Now, some of it backed up by strong evidence that Ebola research was going on inside that lab, but there have also been strong denials that that was the case. Now, one of the lead researchers there, Christian Anderson, has finally confirmed that, yes, there was indeed Ebola research going on there. Take a listen. The problem is that people see these coincidences.

One of the new ones is the Ebola lab leak, which also is being blamed on us because we have been studying Ebola in Kenema and Sierra Leone. And lo and behold, Ebola emerged just a few miles from there in 2014, right? Obviously across the border in Guinea, but it's maybe 100 miles or so away. And people then put that together and say, oh, so that Ebola must have been a lab leak too, and it was Robert Gary and Christian Anderson again. And the reason why these names keep coming up

and the reason why we get grant money to study infectious diseases is because we study infectious diseases is because we study infectious diseases and have done so for many, many decades. And that's why the names keep coming up again, right? It's not because there's some major conspiracy theory here where all of us have been sort of fiddling with the fields well prior to the pandemic. And so what's extra remarkable about Anderson's admission there is that his colleague at the lab, Bob Gary, just recently denied that there was any Ebola research going on there, writing in a recent paper, quote, report back when they respond. Both of them have been among the most outspoken opponents of the COVID lab leak theory, and both were part of the early brain trust Anthony Fauci assembled in

February 2020. That group initially expressed openness to the idea of a lab leak, but then days later ruled it out and organized a public letter dismissing the idea as a conspiracy theory. That proximal origins letter was published in March and suppressed debate over the origin of COVID for the next year at least. And so what I also found revealing, potentially revealing about Dr. Anderson's answer there is he said, and then there was an outbreak a few miles away. And then he paused and corrected himself and said, well, it was over the border in Guinea and it was about a few miles away. And then he paused and corrected himself and said, well, it was over the border in Guinea and it was about a hundred miles away. And I would encourage everybody to read the Latham and Husseini article that dives into the actual origin of the pandemic because the conventional wisdom is that it started in Guinea with this kid eating bats in a bush,

and then it spread from there to Liberia and Sierra Leone. There is a lot of evidence that, in fact, it started in Sierra Leone. And Doctors Without Borders, which is operating in Sierra Leone, produced a report that was extraordinarily critical of this particular lab, which was right near where MSF discovered this outbreak. And by the time they started testing for Ebola in Sierra Leone, the first, say, like six cases had six different variations, and each of the mutations were like six degrees off. It just didn't make any sense that it had just gotten there. It very much seemed to everybody there that it had been there for a couple months and just hadn't been getting picked up. It was the

Kinema lab that was doing a lot of the testing and the WHO, MSF have both accused that lab of screwing up all the testing, of standing in the way of the testing at the time. So for him to say that the outbreak happened right near their lab and then correct himself, say, well, actually it happened 100 miles away in Guinea, I think to a lot of people who've watched this closely will be revealing this because they'll say, actually, it did start right near your lap. And then it went from there into Guinea. And it was suppressed first in Guinea because there wasn't enough testing going on in Sierra Leone. And so it kind of exploded there for a while. If you zoom out to 30,000 feet, I think a big takeaway from everything you just laid out is how much that this sort of the medical community, the medical establishment can get away with because other people cannot possibly follow the granularity of these conversations.

The media can't do it. The public can't do it. Now, obviously, we can. You can raise questions exactly like the ones that't do it. Now, obviously we can, you know, you can raise questions exactly like the ones that you just raised. But these questions have been raised really in the background of our political discourse because they're actually pretty abstruse. Like they're not that easy to latch onto and to follow. And so in that, with the benefit of their expertise, which is in some ways held by a small group of people, you really escape a lot of judgment because of that. And God knows what you can get away with because of that.

Yeah. And when you go back and look at the explanation that the major media gave for the start of the Ebola outbreak, this kid, Emil, and it's bizarre. First it was reported December 6th. Then it was like, well, actually it was December 28th. And then you had the major outbreak in March. And then you dig further and you say, well, what's the evidence that these scientific investigators came up with to determine that it was this kid playing with these bats? And you peel layer and layer and layer back and you're like, oh, there actually isn't any evidence here. The only evidence is that they say that the symptoms kind of align with Ebola.

But Ebola has a lot of different symptoms, and it hits people in a lot of different ways. And conventionally, doctors will say it's very difficult to diagnose Ebola just based on symptoms. You actually have to do an Ebola test because there are so many other diseases that have those very similar symptoms. And so then you ask, well, how is it that this explanation, which turned out not to be based on anything concrete, like no test was done, no smoking guns. They said, well, yep, all right, we found the bat, or even we tested anyone in his family or in the village in the days around that and confirmed that,

yes, this was Ebola. And you're like, how did that just become, okay, that's it, open and shut. We're gonna move on from that. And then you start to, how did that just become, okay, that's it, open and shut. We're going to move on from that. And then you start to, and then you say, oh, wait, there was, so actually right over here, there was this lab that was working on hemorrhagic pathogens, which doesn't that include Ebola? And then if you look, a lot of the scientists working in that lab have backgrounds in Ebola. A lot of them published work related to Ebola out of that lab. Right.

But you never really could, you know, there were still denials at anything, even recently, Bob Gehry. But then so to have Anderson, I'm curious to see how he'll respond because I don't think he meant to necessarily kind of confirm that they were doing that work in that lab. Right. So this is just one piece of our reporting on this. None of this is to say that it definitely leaked from this lab. We'll continue to follow this up. And it would be great to get Sam Husseini and Jonathan Latham, who have done great work on this, on later. And we can probe a lot of the different points because I think it is really important. And also, last point here, so do you remember that Ron Klain was the one who

was brought in to do the Ebola response in 2014? Right. And Harold, like everybody involved was like, he did a tremendous job. Heck of a job, Brian. Heck of a job, Ron. After he came in, things started moving properly and they did contain the Ebola epidemic, which, thank God, because absolutely horrifying disease if it ever does break out and become kind of endemic. The day that he was appointed to be the Ebola czar, that's when the Obama administration uh introduced its pause into uh gain-of-function research they also did not renew funding for this lab that is a very interesting point in the timeline yeah that's very very interesting and now at the same time there were some lab accidents that had happened in the United States yeah that might have been the trigger for the gain-of-function pause. But also, why did they pull the funding from the lab? And then

at the same time, what did they know? What did investigators know? If you talk about this in Africa, it's almost taken as a granted. Like in Sierra Leone, yeah, it came from that lab. Yeah. I mean, to the extent there are silver linings from the pandemic, one of them might be knowing the right questions to ask about some of this stuff. And also, I think, taking whistleblowers and people in the medical community who are raising questions and asking those questions seriously and giving them space in the press to the extent that you can to air those opinions out and raise those questions. Well, that's the end of our show today here on CounterPoints Wednesday. We will be back next week, of course. Ryan, any parting shots? Any final thoughts here? That's all I got.

That's all you got? I left everything I had on the field. I heard that you asked ChatGPT to write a Phish song about... Oh, yes. He has the lyrics pulled up on his head. It is right here. It was so fast. I just haven't closed it because I don't know what to do with it.

Yeah, I told him, write a song in the style of the band Phish about the soul of a lizard. Wanted to give it a little prompt. Give us a taste. Let's see. The chorus. a lizard wanted to give it a little prompt give us a taste uh let's see the chorus oh the soul of a lizard so cool and calm living life in its own rhythm and song that works so well oh the soul of a lizard so cool and calm take a lesson from the lizard soul and find your way to be whole in this world that moves so fast slow down and find your own rhythm to last. That's a little bit preachier

than you might get from fish, but. Your prompt is a little, I mean, of course, when you think about the soul of a lizard, you can't help but fall into preachiness. Yeah, it's true. I should not be laughing at this because this technology is absolutely terrifying. It is.

Great work, Ryan. You got it. We'll see you back here at Counterpoints Wednesday, next Wednesday. 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.

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