Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 4/18/23: Brazil's President Says Biden Encourages Ukraine War, McCarthy Begs Wall Street On Debt Ceiling, Nikki Haley Caught Lying, Elon Calls For Stop Of AI Dev, Fox Trial Day 1, Bernie on Jen Psaki, SF's Math Scheme, Ro Khanna Guest

Episode Date: April 18, 2023

Krystal and Saagar discuss Brazil President Lula calling out Biden for encouraging the war in Ukraine, bank executives drooling over Ukraine War profits, Kevin McCarthy begging Wall Street to back him in the fight on the Debt Ceiling, Nikki Haley caught lying about her fundraising numbers, Biden aides terrified that he's too old to run, Elon calling for an immediate stop to AI development, the Fox Dominion trial entering day 1 and focusing on Trump demanding Murdoch to back Stop The Steal, Krystal looks into Bernie going on Jen Psaki's new show and trashing the media, Saagar looks into San Francisco's strategy of removing Algebra from the curriculum backfiring on it's minority students, and we're joined in studio by Congressman Ro Khanna to discuss his calls for Diane Feinstein to retire and the sexist smears from Nancy Pelosi.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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Hey, guys. Ready or not, 2024 is here, and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show. Good morning, everybody. Happy Tuesday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal?

Indeed we do. Lots of things that are happening this morning. So first we want to dig into some comments that Brazil's President Lula made that are igniting a firestorm over Ukraine and how we should approach it and Russia and all of that good stuff. So we will dig into all of that. We also have, listen, we haven't been talking about it for a while, but the debt ceiling is fast approaching. Very much. Kevin McCarthy went to Wall Street to make his pitch, which was kind of an interesting choice. We still don't have a lot of details about what the Republican proposal is,

so we'll give you all of that breakdown as well. Nikki Haley, we covered last, was it last week that her fundraising numbers come out? We covered how, okay, it's a pretty impressive haul. Turns out she was lying about how much money she brought in. Totally cooked the books. Using some clever accounting tricks. Right. Or as someone in a different era might have said, fuzzy math to get there.

So we'll break down that for you as well. And also, I know a lot of people out there are going to be disappointed. Mike Pompeo is not running for president in 2024. So I'm sorry to break it to all of you, but that is what we can tell you this morning. We also have Elon Musk weighing in on the threat of AI. Sagar and I will talk a little bit about that and how exactly you would regulate it if you did want to do that. And it looks like the Fox News Dominion trial is moving forward today. It was postponed by one day because it looked like Fox was trying to settle in advance.

I guess they did not come to a settlement, so the trial is set to commence today. So we'll tell you what we know about that as well. And Congressman Ro Khanna is set to be here in the studio to talk about why Dianne Feinstein should go ahead and step down. Before we get to any of that, though, Spotify video. Yes, that's right.

I know everyone probably knows at this point, but for the very last few people on Earth who haven't heard, premium members can get video on Spotify. Take advantage of it. BreakingPoints.com. Support our work here. You get to watch the full show over there. And I know a lot of people are taking advantage. But with that, let's actually begin with the show. We wanted to talk a little bit about the global situation.

There are two separate parts here. First is how foreign leaders and a constant theme of what we've been trying to discuss in recent weeks is not only from the revelations on the classified documents about the way that the rest of the world does not really agree with us in the way that Ukraine, the Ukraine conflict is being handled, but specifically many very close and important U.S. allies. Namely, one of them is Brazil and the newly elected President Lula, who actually, in a recent interview with CNN and other outlets in Brazil, made some of his most stunning comments. Yet, let's go ahead and play this for everybody. We have subtitles that

I can go ahead and read from. So let's go ahead and play this VO. Patience is needed to talk with the President of Russia. It takes patience to talk with the president of Russia. It takes patience to talk with the president of Ukraine. He specifically goes ahead and says, but we have to above all convince the countries that are supplying weapons, encouraging war to stop. This is a direct call out of the US. I think China has a very important role. I keep reiterating that China has possibly the most important role. Now, another important country is the United States. That is, the United States needs to stop encouraging war and start talking about peace. The European Union needs to start talking about peace as well in order to be able to convince Putin and Zelensky that peace interests everybody and the war only interests

the two of them. So those are significant comments. And, of course, you can dispute the characterization, but I don't think it's a mistake that he made that comment while he was in China. And one of the reasons he's in China is we have this theory that everything kind of revolves around us. The reason he was there was because of past comments about pricing oil deals between the two outside of the US dollar So this is kind of a double whammy against the US because it's both a shot at the petrodollar in the visit itself But second it is a call-out and really an implicit saying they're like we don't agree with you at all in the way that you are handling this conflict. Now, of course, we can have the caveats like Russia invaded Ukraine, et cetera,

like Ukraine is defending. All that said, like what he, India, many, South Korea, other countries, Japan, and others have all come around to the conclusion of is we don't believe that continuing to just flow weapons in here is the best possible way to achieve peace that was originally sold to the global community and to the American people in most of the West.

Leaders that represent an overwhelming majority of the world share a very similar view to what Lula is articulating here. But it's a view that is almost completely invisibilized within the U.S. Western press mainstream. And when it is articulated, you know, you get accused of being pro-war, Russian, all those sorts of things. You guys know how it goes. I think it's important to listen to these voices, number one. Number two, I don't know how you can really dispute at this point, at this point in the game, that the U.S. has encouraged this war to go on, because we have multiple instances of the U.S. and the U. the UK in particular intervening to block any potential peace deals from ever getting off the ground. So that's number one. Number two, one of the things

that we unearthed in those leaked documents that I don't know, was it reported anywhere else? I'm not sure. Was that Russia was open to the proposal from Brazil to work together with a number of other unaligned countries in order to try to broker a peace deal. Now, is Russia genuine? Would this actually? Who knows? Who knows? We don't know.

But the fact that, you know, our folks know that Russia is actually open to these sort of approaches from Brazil and that there's a possibility of restarting some sort of diplomatic negotiation, something that Zelensky himself has not put off the table, even as the U.S. has stood firmly against any sort of negotiations at the present time. So I think that's important to note as well. Yeah. And let's go and put the next one up here, because this shows you even bigger the cracks that are remaining in the Western alliance. It says EU leaders beat a path to Xi's door seeking China's help. This again underscores not only the French President Emmanuel Macron's state visit to Beijing and the EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, but also the Spanish prime minister. The German foreign minister arrived in the Northeast on Thursday.

Olaf Scholz was there in November. The EU foreign policy chief is going to be in China or was going to be in China this week, but he tested positive apparently for COVID. There are so many high profile Western leaders that are trekking to Beijing for one specific purpose. especially the ones who are not the UK and the US, I guess the Anglosphere, you could say, are the ones who have a direct economic interest in getting the conflict done as soon as possible, have never really agreed with the US view of how things are going to go, and view the Chinese offer of peace not necessarily as genuine, but as a possible off-ramp for what has been an economic disaster for their economies. And they view their offer of being able to have some sort of broker as not only legitimate but very important. And this, again, is a big problem for America, who has long been the – at least wanted to be the global peacemaker at the center of the deal. We've effectively removed ourselves from this entire process. And the rest of global public opinion, as well as global diplomacy, seems to be coalescing

away from us. This is actually a first in a very long time, I think basically since Iraq, that such a thing has happened, Crystal. You are watching a global consensus form without the US at the center of the table. I don't have to tell everyone again why that's a problem in terms of trying to get our stuff done whenever we decide to directly pick a horse in the race and not necessarily be seen as a possible broker or even a possible fair person between all parties. And then similarly, what we continue to see is this is becoming a mainstream view. It's not just here on Breaking Points that we're talking about.

I'm now watching Larry Summers talk about how he's at the IMF and how other countries no longer care as much what America thinks. And listen, Summers is wrong about a lot. But I think he's a good of I think he is a good like fair weather in terms of established, what is now okay to say in the establishment. And it's not just Summers. You know, uh, you have like Thomas Friedman, people like that who are out there watching what China did between Saudi Arabia and Iran, watching how Lula is reacting, how looking at how India is looking at how we're basically browbeating the South Koreans, looking at the fact that the Japanese just two weeks ago said, yeah, you know, we're going to

go and buy Russian oil above the price cap, and we just don't really care about whatever your Western stuff is. Like, how can you look at that fate and then all of these leaders trekking to Beijing and say, like, America is right now at the center of the action and is where the, you know, everything is revolving around. It's just simply, it's increasingly becoming not the case. Yeah. And that causes a lot of problems for us, not only economically, but really diplomatically in the future. Well, there's a lot.

I mean, to back up for a second, just to put things at a high level, the U.S. perceives it to be in our interest to maintain a unipolar world. Basically, everybody else in the world perceives it to be in their interest to have a multipolar world. I mean, that's basically the reality. Now, personally, I think it's arguable that it's, that it only comes with benefits to have a unipolar world because part of what that comes with is this overstretched military and all of the, you know, obligations that we take onto ourselves to police the entire world. We'll put that debate aside for another day because what's clear is

the U.S. obviously thinks we should maintain a unipolar world. That's why we're fighting Russia and Ukraine. That's why we're ratcheting up tensions with China, our two main multipolar rivals. And it's why the rest of the world sees this all very differently because, you know, you see it with the EU. Okay, they're on our side in this Ukrainian fight, sort of, partially, right? But they're not so sure they're going to align with us if, you know, something came down the pike in the future and you had China invade Taiwan and we tried to take an aggressive stance and levied the same sort of sanctions we did against Russia.

There's no indication that they're going to be with us on that. So I think that's a really important thing to keep in mind as we imagine what the future is going to look like. I'm glad that you said that because, you know, people like Bridge Colby, who we've had here on the show, and I encourage people to follow him, he's an outright, you know, Taiwan hawk, but he is also a realist whenever it comes to Europe. And he's like, look at these people.

They actually don't agree with us on a lot. They really don't agree with us on China policy. They wouldn't have our back. So why are we underwriting all of European security? If we believe that the future is in Asia, which I do, which Bridge does as well, 50% of global GDP, declining GDP all across Europe. You have declining demographics, decreasing cultural relevance. To the extent that this is a problem, we have the world's seventh largest economy up against, know, what was Ukraine was, I don't even know what ranking it was on there.

And then all of those together don't barely even equal the GDP on our parts and the higher energy prices on top of the weapons that were flowing into this while we have a whole other thing which produce stuff, which is important to us, who actually have our back in many conflicts. They pay above 2% on their GDP. I mean, that could go on forever in terms of who the actual real allies are and who the moochers and the leeches are. Well, South Korea and Japan haven't really been there with us in the Ukraine fight. That's my point, though. Why should they? Because they're like, South Korea has got a warring nation with nukes to its north and a standing military that they have to maintain. Japan has pissed off everybody in the region, and everyone's pissed at them.

You can just say whose side you want to be on. But regardless, we buy a lot of stuff from them, and they buy a lot of stuff from us. And they're one of the world's most important economies. Singapore increasingly also being encircled. They don't really know what to do in terms of how to deal with China. Vietnam as well is in a tough position. Who are they going to pick? Mostly they've decided to pick us, the Philippines. I mean, all of these countries are tremendously important, far more important in my opinion, especially for the future than any other country, any country on the entire European continent. And yet they get zero of their due. I didn't even mention India, which, you know, one of the world's largest economies basically is written off as some global backwater. India just passed China for

population. Yes, exactly. And they get no respect. And I'm not even just saying this because I'm Indian. I'm like, I can read a map or I can look at a map and I can look at a chart and just be like, all right, so where are things going? Yeah. Like it's not complicated to figure this stuff out. The other thing that I want to say before we move on is, you know, we have with our own foolish and arrogant actions helped to force this new multipolar world into being. I mean, especially with our sanctions regimes against a number of countries, but in particular now against Russia. Russia, leading up to this point, was preparing for this moment,

expecting that there may be a time when we try to put the full force of our economic warfare against them. And China is seeing the same thing playing out. And they are also building up their own sort of immunity to that sort of economic war. And we can also see that, you know, even with us going to the mat, basically doing everything we can to cut off any sort of funding coming in for the Russian war economy, it hasn't worked as effectively as we certainly

thought and wanted it to. So we've also sort of shown our hand there. But, you know, the petrodollar deals, the Brazil and China deal that's going on, like all of these things are in part a result of the fact that we have tried to throw our weight around in a global way, tried to punish populations, tried to punish countries and coerce them. And so they're not idiots. They're like, we're going to try to protect ourselves and make sure that we are not vulnerable to the same sort of thing by moving away from total reliance on the dollar. Yeah. I, again, just want to come back to a very realistic view of the world. Like America is an empire. We have the global hegemon. We have total control, at least did over the global

financial system. And we decided to play our hand on a country, Ukraine, where at the end of the day, the fate of Kyiv has absolutely zero impact on the economic activity here in the United States, as well as our day-to-day life. You could say whatever you want about Taiwan. You could say we shouldn't defend it or not. You can't deny that the fate of Taipei is basically is holding the global economy. Now, is it worth it or not? That's a completely valid discussion and debate. But that's part of the problem is we don't talk in terms of real impact on our ability to conduct commerce and to live. You know, even whenever you look back at the Second World War, like, you know why Japan attacked us?

We always like to think, like, it's some global authoritarian fight. They attacked us because they cut off their oil like it's some global authoritarian fight. They attacked us because they cut off their oil. Like it was about one thing. It's about ability to conduct commerce, to run your military in an independent future. That is how most countries throughout all of human history made decisions. It's only recently they were like, oh, right to protect and human rights and all this other, frankly, which I think is nonsense because it is arrogance belied by the unipolar moment from the 1990s. It came from the ability that we defeated the Soviet Union.

That's great. They crumbled and then we had the dot com bubble and the peace dividend and all of that and then what do we do? Oh, we decided to invade Iraq, waste $7 trillion. I think you're right. I mean, we have nobody but ourselves to blame for wasting what should have been a tremendous opportunity. Just go back in time and think about

what would have happened if we hadn't invaded Iraq. And if we had gone in and we killed bin Laden in 2001 and we never killed or never invaded Iraq, I can't even fathom how much richer as a society and better off that we possibly could be. Okay. Uh, all of that. Uh, instead what happened is that we had a global financial crisis. We invaded Iraq. We've had 20 something years of chaos directly well into what was happening yesterday. There was a big economic conference, um, of with wall street bankers and Ukrainian representatives that happened yesterday,

in which the Citibank executives, BlackRock executives, big bankers, treasury officials, and Ukrainian officials were all together talking about effectively what amounts to some sort of disaster capitalism opportunity that exists for the big banks for when eventually the war ends and how they are going to come in and provide all this private capital, obviously out of the goodness of their hearts, not because they're going to make a ton of money. Here is a Citibank executive. Most of these clips were flagged by Michael Tracy, independent journalist. Let's go and take a listen to the Citibank executive. We're hearing about all these reforms and preparing for the European Union integration,

which is certainly going to address many of the issues we've been talking about for years that might have kept people from putting long-term capital into Ukraine. So I think that you said at the very beginning, Secretary, that we have to win this war. We have to get this resolved. I think that there is desire to put private capital.

Yeah. Why is there a desire to put private capital in there? Because, look, they want to rebuild the country and charge the Ukrainians, a.k.a. the U.S. taxpayer, a tremendously high interest rate in order to rebuild it. Already they've come out. What does Zelensky say he's going to need? $700 billion? I don't remember. I think the last figure is $700 billion. Why not a trillion? Just take a trillion.

Just make it a nice, round, even number there. Don't forget here the U.S. Commerce Secretary, Biden's Commerce Secretary, also came out and spoke at the same conference in the same vein. Here's what she had to say. The stakes haven't been this high in a long time. We cannot let Russia prevail. And that means we have to be in this today, tomorrow, a year, two years, three years. Because the repercussions to the world, to democracies everywhere, to freedom, are unimaginable. Reconstruction and recovery, the price tag has grown to over $400 billion.

And that will continue to grow. And here's the reality, and you know this, government can't do it alone. We will do our part. President Biden and our team are utterly committed, but we need you. This has to be a public-private partnership. One year, two years, three years. When somebody tells you what they want, you should believe them. That's what they want. They want to stay there. They want to stay there for a long time. They wanna reap, apparently, some sort of massive reward for doing so.

All of this is being done in conjunction not only with the Ukrainians, the US government, but the highest paid people in the United States, the Wall Street bankers. And now the Ukrainians are even borrowing Build Back Better as one of their slogans. Not a joke. Because it works so well here.

Apparently it works so well here. Deputy governor of the National Bank of Ukraine using that slogan. Take a listen. I suppose that this principle of building back better implies not only to the physical sense of the reconstruction process in Ukraine, but also in the sense of building a new Ukraine as the modern, transparent, efficient, competitive, institution-based and rule-of-law-based democracy. Definitely, in order to achieve that, we have a lot to do in order to change this acceptance of Ukraine

as the country which is friendly for their private investments and for the businesses. Yeah, I guess they wouldn't, I mean, look, I mean no disrespect, I feel bad for Ukraine for getting invaded, but we're talking here about one of the most corrupt countries literally on planet Earth before this evasion. I think probably the most corrupt country in all of Europe,

if you don't consider Russia part of Europe. Like, you really think that after a massive war, which has devastated the population, that they're going to come out and be a Western-style, like, democracy? Are you crazy? Like, you think that they're just going to overnight transform into some dynamic, rules-based market economy. What's more likely whenever countries come out of war, which have a longstanding decade, centuries, frankly, long history of corruption, that they're going to become like an oligarchical state, like the Russians who invaded them, or that they're going to become like us?

How did that work in Iraq whenever we invaded that country? So, you know what, we're going to try and change all your traditions overnight and get rid of centuries of tribal warfare and all this stuff and you're going to become like New York City in five years because we're going to throw a trillion dollars at you.

It's just, I don't even know where this stuff comes from. How am I the only guy who looks at this and should be like, this is ridiculous? Well, you do know where it comes from because there's a lot of money to be made here. I mean, we focus a lot because it's the most obvious piece on the way the military industrial complex obviously benefits and profits anytime there's a war anywhere in the world.

But it's important to understand there are other money-making ventures going on underneath the surface. And it's also important to understand there are other dynamics underneath the surface other than like protecting democracy and pushing back against Russian oligarchy and imperialism and all of those things, whatever you think of that aspect as well. You know, I found a couple of articles about the push internationally from the IMF and other institutions to privatize Ukraine and in particular their land and their agriculture and open it up to foreign investment, which was a push that was happening before this war started. And it's kind of telling. I found a couple of good articles, one written by a Marxist economist and another one that let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. This is from American Conservatives, obviously a right-leaning publication here. The headline is Black Horse, Black Earth and Black Rock. Part of what they lay

out is there was a moratorium on foreign land sales. And Ukraine, as we've discussed before, is the breadbasket of the world, incredibly fertile soil. So there were a lot of multinationals who wanted to be able to get into this market and be able to profit off of it. The IMF, they predicated there as they do one of their loans on reforms that included lifting this land sale moratorium, something that was ultimately done under Zelensky in 2020. Additionally, during this war, there's been basically a repeal of any and all worker protections, also in favor of this sort of like, you know, rugged individualist style capitalism that we and our global affiliated institutions push on countries routinely. So effectively, you know,

there's a lot of interest now in whenever the war is over, being able to come in and do what companies have been doing, wanting to do in Ukraine for a very long time and have been held off to some extent because they had this land moratorium in place. And because there was a huge, if you looked at the polling, the population was overwhelmingly opposed to this type of, you know, U.S. style privatization that we forced on country after country around the world. So, you know, that's the backdrop here. These are things that were unfolding and interests that capitalists had in Ukraine long prior to this war. And Zelensky has, you know, even before the war, been sort of a partner in trying to, you know, to privatize the country and allow capital interest to come in and profit off of what is there.

When you saw Zelensky at Davos, you know, this is like the backstory in the context with which he goes to Davos. And BlackRock is very involved here. They signed a memo of understanding stating they would play an advisory role in Ukraine's post-war economic reconstruction. So they've got their hands in the pot as well. Listen, none of this negates however you feel about the Ukrainian conflict and what our role should be. But it's important to have our eyes open about who has an interest here, who has a profit motive here, and how they may be manipulating things behind the scenes. Yeah, I think it's very important that you laid out that way, Crystal, just about all of the ongoing stuff. And look, I mean, these were huge stories in

America 20 years ago. Like, what will we talk about? Halliburton and what was it, Brown and Root and all of the firms that were able to get like no-bid contracts and the catering contract for bases in Afghanistan or all these CIGAR reports, the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction, which you can go back and read about like one gas station that we spent like $200 million on. I was like, why do people seem to think that what's happening in Ukraine is in any way unique

in the history of the U.S. US post 9-11 world and corruption. Like there's actually no reason to believe that these institutions have somehow fundamentally changed. In reality, it's that people's willingness to ask questions about what's actually going on has actually changed, unfortunately. And look, you know, just like happened in those conflicts, eventually people will wake up.

Yeah, indeed. Okay, so let's turn to domestic politics here because we're inching ever closer to a potential debt default. You'll recall when Kevin McCarthy was elected speaker, he made all kinds of deals with this sort of rump faction of dissenters. Some of them had to deal with dramatic spending cuts that they wanted and he committed to using the debt ceiling as sort of like a hostage-taking tool in order to force through some of these spending cuts. The White House has stood adamantly opposed to any of this saying they will only accept a clean debt ceiling hike and it sort of had been quiet for a little while about what exactly was going on behind the scenes. Well, Kevin McCarthy is making his big move this week. Yesterday, he gave a speech at the New York Stock Exchange, in part because last time there was a debt ceiling showdown.

The stock market tanked because our credit rating was downgrade and was kind of a disaster. So he's basically going and begging Wall Street to not like crater and to be somewhat on his side and understand his point of view. So he laid out some of the kind of high level outline of what a deal within the Republican caucus might look like. Take a listen to how he presented things to Wall Street. Without exaggeration, American debt is a ticking time bomb that will detonate unless we take serious, responsible action. Okay, so here's our plan. In the coming weeks, the House will vote on a bill to lift the debt ceiling into the next year. Save taxpayers trillions of dollars.

Make us less dependent upon China. Curve our high inflation. All without touching Social Security and Medicare. all without touching Social Security and Medicare. All without touching Social Security and Medicare. I mean, that was sort of forced on them by Trump and then by Joe Biden, the State of the Union. So interesting that that's in there. But you'll note not a lot of details fleshed out.

And this is part of the problem for the Republicans is they have this bare four-person majority in the House. So forget about tangling with the Democrats. They haven't even figured out what their own caucus will support because you have, you know, a pretty wide ideological variation between the most conservative and the most liberal of the Republicans. You have to recall part of how they were able to achieve this majority was by winning some Joe Biden seats in New York state in particular, which is where some of the sticking points are going to be here because those people in order to get reelected really want to signal their moderation, that they're different than the rest of the Republicans.

They're not so hard line. So to get them on board with something that's fairly draconian is going to be very difficult. On the other hand, you have people in the caucus who are saying, I'm not going to vote for a debt ceiling hike at all. So he's in a very difficult situation just to try to bring his own caucus together. This gets back to the entire speaker fight. This man should not be the speaker. He doesn't actually have credibility with all of the parties who are involved. Here's the truth.

The vast majority of the Republicans are just going to vote whichever way. They don't really care. There are involved. Here's the truth. The vast majority of the Republicans are just going to vote whichever way. They don't really care. There are only two factions that really matter. As he said, the Joe Biden, you know, precarious Republicans who are in swing seats and then the hardline Freedom Caucus. If I'm the White House, McCarthy is irrelevant. He can come and represent that middle faction. But if I'm Joe Biden, you're going to call in one of the people from the swing seat who speaks for them. You're going to call in McCarthy, and then you've got to call in Jim Jordan or some other chairman of the House Freedom Caucus and just say, like, all right, guys, mostly start with Jim. Be like, Jim, what's the least – what's the best thing that you can possibly live with?

He goes, okay, here's what I got. Here are the votes. He goes, you, can you sign on to that? No. All right, you two negotiate. And then McCarthy, you're just going to have to vote for whatever. That's why his speakership is a joke. Like fundamentally, he has no authority. He's coming before the New York Stock Exchange and says, he's making all these promises. You don't have the authority to deliver on those promises. And the Freedom Caucus people,

they know it. Go ahead and put this up there on the screen from Axios, which describes exactly, he's like, my plan to vote to raise a debt ceiling. These are all words. As you said, Crystal, there's actually a behind-the-scenes effort right now to try and come up with some sort of budget talk that they can release. They have nothing. You know, the internal scuttlebutt here in Washington was that McCarthy yesterday was supposed to deliver a budget. You know why he didn't? Couldn't agree on one. They can't agree.

They agree on nothing. So I don't know. I didn't? Couldn't agree on one. They can't agree. They agree on nothing. So, I don't know. I look at all this. McCarthy, it's like, we're all playing this game where just because he's the speaker in name that we're supposed to believe he's in charge. I really don't think he's in charge. I think the Freedom Caucus really is the one

who are in charge. I think they would quote unquote shoot the hostage. I don't know if the other people would. You know, there's only a couple of ways that this ends. Most likely, it looks to me, sequestration, like something like that. I don't think there can be a grand bargain, to use the Obama-type thing. I don't think Biden would be a fool to necessarily agree with it. And ultimately, it will come down to some, like, hostage standoff.

And, yeah, sequestration just looks like the most likely one. I don't know how it's going to be resolved because, I mean, it seems like the White House, well, first of all, they're happy to watch the Republicans twist in the wind. It's good for them. This is a problem of the Republican caucus's own making. Right. And McCarthy is basically trying to bluff here, trying to pretend like his caucus is unified behind one proposal. But it's so obvious that is not reality. When, you know, I scoured all the reporting about his supposed plan and read a speech and, you know, read The Washington Post reporting, the Axios reporting, whatever. There are no details here. No details. And that's the only way that he has been able to keep his caucus from having some sort of a total revolt, either on the right wing side or on the moderate side or potentially on both sides by basically saying nothing about what will actually be inside of this deal. So the White House is calling his bluff. They're saying, no, you know, you tell us what your proposal is and then we can talk. That has been their position the whole time. It's like you don't even have a proposal to bring us.

So you're saying, oh, we got to negotiate, like negotiate against what? You don't even have something that you're specifically suggesting here. Not to mention the White House has also been very hard about like, no, we're going to we appropriated this money. The time for debate about what we're going to spend and what we're going to cut and what our priorities are was when we were passing those spending bills, not now when we're just trying to like maintain the full faith and credit of the United States and not have some complete meltdown at a time when the economy is incredibly precarious. So that's their position. And I don't think that McCarthy's bluff here going to Wall Street and begging the traders to back him really worked out. Put this next piece up on the screen. It gives you a little bit of a sense of where some of the sticking points could be. This is the White House's response. They say, as President Biden continues to fight

against inflation, MAGA Republicans in Congress are trying to take our economy hostage unless we've got programs that lower costs for hardworking Americans. So you can see they are certainly sticking to their guns. Put the Politico piece, though, up on the screen. This just gives you a sense of one of the many fights that are going to unfold within the Republican caucus. So one of the specific things that McCarthy is looking at is cutting the food stamp program, expanding the age bracket for people who have to meet work requirements, closing what Republicans say are, quote, loopholes and existing restrictions, but basically cutting SNAP and the number of people who will benefit from the program. Now, you might think because there are a lot of Republicans who

are on board with cutting that program, that might be something that's less controversial. It's actually not true. There's already key defections in particular among that group in New York State that represents more swing or moderate districts where they're very, they don't like this proposal. They're very worried about what it would do to people in their districts who have already seen, you know, all the additional pandemic aid cut off, already struggling with inflation, already struggling to afford food. And they're saying, okay, at a time when we have high grocery prices, you're going to cut off this bit of aid that they're ultimately getting. So even this

program, which you might think would be uncontroversial within the Republican caucus, even this cut is controversial. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is where it just comes down to the details and just why, look, the Freedom Caucus and them want cuts to Medicare and Social Security. They don't agree, Crystal, with what the Republican leader is saying. But then the other ones don't want it. So there are a couple of ways, as I said, it could lay out. Sequestration, in my opinion, is the most likely. For those who don't know what that is, it's basically an across-the-board haircut to the entire federal budget. That's what happened during the Obama years because once you start negotiating to cut from

one thing and the other one, well, then everybody says that you're playing favorites. The easiest way is just cut across the board. The other way, which would make McCarthy look like a fool, is if he basically just brought it to the floor and let the Democrats come and save him to vote for a budget, which was more moderate. But that also would negate any power that McCarthy really had. And don't forget about the motion to vacate, which allows any member of the House of Representatives. It would be the end of his speakership. So would he be willing to sacrifice his speakership for the global economy? They are enough narcissists. They definitely would rather save their speakership than actually do what would be best for all of us.

So I don't know. I'm looking at all this. We've got seven weeks to go. I guess they could mint the coin, but apparently they've already rolled that out. And there are legal challenges with minting the coin as well. Good luck. Yeah. I mean, there are some other potential loophole workarounds. You know, one is this legal theory that since Congress is basically sending the president two separate sets of instructions, one that's like spend this money and the other that's like don't spend this money, that they basically it's sort of like a jump ball and the White House can basically

choose which of those directives to follow. That's one legal theory of the case. Mint the coin is another legal theory of the case. There were a couple other ideas floating out there of like loopholes to get around this whole debt ceiling nonsense, which shouldn't exist and like is a weird relic to start with and is only now used for hostage taking tactics for the Republican Party to force through things that they can't achieve with their majorities or their lack thereof. But I really don't know how this resolves. I'm not so I'm not as confident it ends in sequestration as you are. I have a feeling the Biden White House is actually going to take a harder line on that than the Obama Biden White House did. And yeah, so I genuinely don't know how this is going to get resolved, but I guess we're all just going to wait and find out.

It'll be fun, I guess. I guess. It'll be interesting. Here's the number one rule, everyone. Don't sell when the market tanks. You should buy more. But that's not financial advice. I'm just saying, though. Objectively, that's how it worked out for people in 2008. All right. 2024. Yeah, let's get to this.

This is a funny one and very revealing as well. We reported last week Nikki Haley was touting her $11 million fundraising haul, you know, putting herself in contention for the GOP nomination. Well, turns out that it was a bit of a farce. Put this up on the screen. So they say she touted $11 million raised since she launched in February. Saturday filing shows she double counted across various committees, making transfers to one another and only brought in about $5 million into her main campaign committee. Now, if you count all of her committees up, I think it was like $8 million, but it was still less than the $11 million that they touted.

And they achieved this through some very creative accounting. You might also say just like fraud, which is not accounting fraud, but like, you know, fraud to the American public in terms of lying about what the actual numbers were. But they just moved the money around and then they'd count the money that was in the account and also the transfer to the other account. That's how they came up with this $11 million, which I mean, it sort of shows you how desperate she is to be taken seriously. And the one area where she should be able to really perform is on fundraising, because this is someone who's been cultivating a large donor network for a lot of years now. The fact that she can't even hold up her end of the deal on the fundraising front is not a great sign for her.

Oh, it's humiliating because the other thing I always never really understand with these financial chicaneries is do you think that nobody is going to be able to read? Like, initially, sure. The press you know, the press release, everyone was like, oh, wow, $11 million, that's a lot. But all it takes is one guy, as it did here, to just look at the actual FEC filing and be like, hey, wait, this is bullshit. You just used a joint fundraising thing to carry over.

And actually, whenever you use the carryover, your fundraising haul is not only bad, it's like mid, it's as mid, I guess, as it gets, to borrow some Gen Z slang. Yeah. And you are not working out, it's not working out so well for you with your overall fundraising numbers. So I don't even know why you try and pull the trick.

What's the point? Campaigns front run their numbers all the time, put out press releases, try and spin them in the most positive way. You know, they'll crunch the number. We had thousands of small dollar donations and, you know, put out whatever talking points they want about their fundraising numbers. And obviously they're meant to create a certain impression of the campaign, either that it's, you know, grassroots funded or that the overall number is really eye-popping and impressive or whatever. But I have never seen anyone try to, like, just basically lie in those press releases because you're literally going to get caught in a week's time. So it never occurred to me when we were reporting on what she was claiming she raised

to be like, yeah, we'll wait and see if that's actually the number because I've just never seen a campaign so shamelessly try to spin and inflate that number in a way that, to your point, Sagar, you're going to get caught. It's all going to be public in just a matter of days. So, like, not only does it call into question her honesty and integrity, it also calls into question judgment. I'm reminded of Elizabeth Warren with the whole DNA blood test thing that she did where everyone was like, this is bad. And also, who thought this was a good idea? This just completely calls into question whether you have the kind of judgment or character that it would take to lead the country.

And yeah, sort of similar vibes here from Nikki Haley. Oh, yeah. I don't even know how she possibly can think that this is going to work out for her. Exactly. I mean, you know, at the same time, also, it's not working out for her. That's really what the answer is. Put this up there on the screen. I mean, it doesn't take a genius, people.

Nikki Haley, 4%. She's behind Ron DeSantis, a man who literally is not in the race. And she's behind another guy named Mike Pence, who is also not in the race. And none of behind another guy named Mike Pence who is also not in the race. And none of whom is close at all to Donald Trump at this point. And Donald Trump is at 53% in outright majority, which almost belies the point

as to why all of the people underneath that name are completely, almost basically irrelevant now at this point. I don't know. Maybe I'm just crazy, you know, looking at this.

I can't imagine what exactly a real case is here. And I think that's why I want to give props to Mike Pompeo. Let's go and put this up there on the screen. Not words that I've heard out of your mouth before, Cybert. You've never heard it before. You never will. Again, he says he's not going to run for president.

This isn't our moment. You know, I actually think it's good. And we should applaud whenever these people who are mostly narcissists can objectively just look at the situation and be like, you know what? America, it's not calling out for Mike right now. Mike 2024, that's not what people want. And that takes, it's hard. You know, when you're in a position like this, you've been in a public office, you've got all these billionaires in your ear about why it might work out for you and all of that. But at the end of the day, he came down and he just said, look, I care about America.

I've been thinking about this. Things matter. But this just isn't our moment. He's right. And I think we should applaud people whenever they bow out of the race and they're like, it's not for me. I'm not going to waste everybody's time. I'm not going to waste a billionaire's money time or billionaire's money and my own personal time, my family, and all of this and drag them through something which just isn't going to work. There's only one guy who possibly might work, Ron DeSantis.

Even then, I think the chances of that are very low, but the only one with a real, actual, credible shot. Everybody else, like you're wasting air and you're wasting other people's money. Yeah. That's it. Yeah. I mean, it was interesting that he had that recognition. I mean, the man has a terrible, I think I would even say evil ideology

when it comes to foreign policy. So I'm very glad to see him not making that case in this race. He's the type that, you know, he'll be a dissenter from Trump, but like on all the wrong things, like the few good things that Trump would do in foreign policy, it would be like the Mike Pompeo's and John Bolton's of the world to be like, no, actually, we should have gone to war with Iran or whatever. So, OK, so that's Mike Pompeo. He also he wouldn't endorse Trump when he decided not to run. But he he said, I think Americans are thirsting for people making arguments, not just tweets. So, again, it's a sort of like passive aggressive hit on Trump, which I don't know. I don't get it. And he wouldn't rule out endorsing Trump. Right. But he would take, you know, took this little jab at him. So

again, I just think it's so interesting that people think that they're going to be able, that anyone's going to be able to defeat Trump when no one is even, even people who aren't even in the race anymore, aren't even willing to really directly criticize him or say that they wouldn't back him for president ultimately. I think you're right, Crystal. At the same time, we got some news about the current president and whatever is going on with his presidential campaign to be. Let's put this up on the screen from The New York Times. They had a big deep dive into the machinations behind the scene in Biden world. This is Shane Goldmacher. He says, new Biden 2024 planning has accelerated amid conflicting signals on what, quote, relatively soon means. A 425 video announcement video, the anniversary of his 2019 entry,

has been discussed, but some weigh benefits of delay. If you read through this piece, basically the big concern among his aides over how early he should launch is they're worried about whether he can handle the scrutiny and the grueling nature of running for president again. And so part of the reason why this has been pushed off and off and off, remember it was supposed to be like during the holidays and then it was going to be early in the year, and then apparently it was going to be April 25th, and it doesn't particularly look like it's going to be April 25th now, given that they have not even picked a campaign chairman yet, someone to run this campaign they have not even settled on at this point, or even the top-level team. So it looks like most of the concerns are what you would kind of expect,

that he is not at the top of his game. He makes a lot of gaffes whenever he is in front of a camera. They try to keep him hidden as much as possible. He does very few interviews, very little interaction with the press. And then it's also, you know, it's very challenging being out on the presidential campaign trail. He really got lucky last time around by the fact that the pandemic made it acceptable for him to never leave his house. He's not going to have that excuse this time. The expectation is going to be once you press, once you, you know, say go on the presidential campaign, that at the very least,

you're going to be working the donor circuits. So yeah, they're, they're worried about whether he can actually handle this and trying to condense the amount of time that he actually has to manage running a campaign. I just don't know how it can possibly work now. Like, you have to be in it if you're going to go for it. And there's this longstanding caution is just really odd. But it also makes sense whenever every single time that he is out there, every single time that he has an event or any of that,

he just always is sticking his foot in his mouth, which is why they want him to shut up and not even be out on the campaign trail right now. The latest example is saying that we're going to, quote, lick the world. Take a listen. So thank you all. God bless you all.

Let's go lick the world. Let's get it done. What? What are you saying? What's happening here? You know, and I talk to people who like Joe Biden, who appreciate a lot of what he's done, and everyone's just like, yeah, he's just really old, man.

You know, and people always get uncomfortable when they discuss it. They're like, I appreciate him. I like what he's done. But, you know, in hushed tones, people will say things like, you know when old people just really reach that point where they're kind of cranky all the time and they're not listening? It's just very clear. Anybody who's ever interacted with an elderly citizen knows exactly what's going on here and they say weird stuff. And it's one of those where it's like, if you was really behind the wheel of a car and you were in the backseat, would you be 100% certain that you were in good hands if this was

your Uber driver? No. I think everyone knows that. Now, look. I'd be looking in the rearview mirror to make sure he's awake. Yeah, exactly. The whole time. You'd be like, you know, moving lanes, you're like, you got your neck all the way over. Just to make sure. You never know, right? I've definitely been in those

ubers before anyone who's been in their grandparents car or something like that you know what i'm talking about and this is the issue which is at the same time he's a credible he's the current president of the united states he's got a very credible case for for winning uh especially vis-a-vis donald trump and this his own worst enemy is. I've always just think that the oddest thing about Biden is that it's not about him at all. It really is just about Trump. He is just the anti-Trump, but he's still not the main character, even though it's his own presidency. And that is dramatically to his political benefit, which is just strange. It's a strange thing for an American president.

The one thing you can say in his favor or potentially in his team's favor is they kind of understand that. Yeah, they do. In that New York Times article, they say the Biden campaign in waiting is expected to be built around one of the president's favorite political sayings, quote, don't compare me to the almighty. Compare me to the alternative. The subtext there, of course, being like, listen, y'all might not love me, but come on, this guy over here, Trump, with his like, you know, January 6th and stop the steal and probably multiple indictments by the time that this is all said and done, you really want that dude back? That's their whole pitch. That's their whole concept of what this campaign will be about. And it always has been. I mean, that was really

the pitch last time. Ron Klain laid it out very clearly when he was talking about, you know, Emmanuel Macron getting reelected with like a 30% approval rating. He's like, oh, interesting how you can pull that off if your opponent is someone that the public likes even less than the person who holds the position in power. To the point of the fact that there are internal concerns about how he'll be able to handle another presidential campaign. They say in that article, if Mr. Obama had soaring oratory and Mr. Trump had concert-like rallies, Mr. Biden's advisors feel his strength is his governing ability and projection of competence.

Major eyebrow raise for me on that one. Spending time on the campaign trails with its unscripted moments introduces the risk of age-related mishaps, is the very careful wording here from The New York Times. Our friend Chuck Rocha had a quote in this piece. He says, the longer he waits, the less scrutiny he's under. You have to measure that against creating momentum in these states that will matter. You've got to build infrastructure because that's the balancing act.

On the one hand, you don't really want him out there on the campaign trail. You don't really want him having to fly across the country and work the donor circuit in San Francisco or, you know, up in New York or Texas or wherever you're going to go, because this is not someone who has any sort of demonstrated grassroots fundraising ability. So you have to do it. The old school fly around and work the donors and flatter their egos, all of which is very time and labor intensive. So there's that concern that you don't really want him having to do those things weighed against the fact that, listen, campaigns take time to build. It takes time to raise that money. It takes time

to build momentum. It takes time to build out your organization. And as of now, they don't even have someone who is running the campaign today. So it's an extraordinary statement on, you know, the level of confidence that his own team has in his ability to handle this. And I think you're right, Sagar, that the general sentiment from Democrats, not even from the general public, is like they have a lot of affection for Joe Biden. They appreciate his time with Barack Obama. They appreciate that he was able to defeat Donald Trump. And they would prefer that it be someone else next time around. That's right. Yeah, no, that's really what the predominant feeling is. But, you know, they've bought themselves in a position where they don't really have anybody else. Who are you going to, the guy who can't, the least, most unpopular

vice president in modern American history, or the guy who melted down American air travel for two years. Like, you don't have a very credible case for outside of it. That's a difficult spot for them to be in. And look, it's obviously of their own making. And I also think that Chuck is correct about balancing the infrastructure point where, look, Trump only lost by 30,000 votes. Like, it's not a game, you know, whenever you're running for president. If you believe that it is the existential threat that you constantly say on the campaign, if you believe that, then you should be working very, very hard to do that. But you're not. You're actually kind of lazy. You're just sitting in the White House going to Dublin for literally no reason, you know,

to celebrate the Good Friday Agreement, I guess, and to meet with the UK prime minister. It's like, all right, like, what are you really doing for people? Like, are you actually working, quote unquote, hard? Like, most people barely even think about the president. To some extent, that's a good thing for him because they're thinking about Trump. But I don't really think that's how things should be. And most people, I think, agree that they don't want to have a president in this strange position where their only extent that they support him is just because they don't like somebody else. That almighty quote was right on the money. Yeah. I mean, this is why, in spite of the fact that Marianne's been completely invisibilized by the mainstream press, why she's at 14% in battleground states and over

20% with young people. Because people are like, they want another option. And she's blowing up on TikTok, as Ryan Grimm reported. So there is a hunger for something different. But of course, you've got to weigh that against the fact you've got an incumbent president, and they're going to bring every force to bear to try to guarantee he's the nominee. And, you know, we'll see what happens in the general election. Yes, certainly. All right, let's talk about AI regulation. This is a really important one. I've been thinking about it a lot. And there's a new poll actually that came out that kind of ignited why we want to talk about

this. Let's put this up there on the screen. The share of Americans who quote strongly or somewhat support a pause on the development of advanced AI to regulate artificial intelligence, all adults, 56%. Weekly AI users is actually 64%. Yeah, that's interesting. Not AI users is 52% aware of AGI or the singularity 65%. Now, look, obviously, I think it's going to be a pretty small slice of Americans who even use AI on a weekly basis. I guess I would count myself within that. I play around with ChatGPT every once in a while.

I don't think it's that uncommon once in a while. But it belongs. I don't think it's that uncommon. Weekly AI? I don't know. I would say, what do people think? Let's guess before we actually look up the real numbers. I'm going to say 10 million. 10 million. Which seems actually kind of high. If you think about all students, high school students, casual users like us. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I'd put it higher than that.

You think higher than 10 million? Yeah. I'm going to say 20 million. Okay. All right. So somebody Google it. Mac, control room, Google it. Give me a number while I'm talking. Yeah. All right. So at the same time, Elon Musk, let's go and put this up there on the screen, has been and has been publicizing that he agrees that AI, quote, will hit people like an asteroid and says that he actually used one of his meetings with President Obama to urge regulation. But I think all of this comes back to a question of what kind of regulation. I've been thinking about this one for a while. I listened to a couple podcasts with Lex Friedman and others, people who've been thinking about this deeper than I have. And

I've come around to where I think the internet went wrong, is that we never had an idea of what the internet was going to be. We had a promise of free speech, of freedom, of lack of centralization, and all of that, but eventually the same market forces that took over the US economy came to dominate the internet. So to prevent that, I would say let's establish some first principles and allow dynamic regulation to happen within those first principles and not rewrite them again in the future and try to grapple with the impacts of having them go away. To me, pro-human. That's actually number one. But defining that is incredibly difficult.

I don't know what that means. And also, does it even matter? Because do American regulations matter when China has its own quantum computing and its own AI industry, and they don't care about any of that? But to me, if I could wave a magic wand and where I think good AI regulation, pro-human, as in AI should be coded and should have principles embedded within it to the extent that humans can impact it and the parameters, which by and large, they mostly can right now whenever they're programming it, should be to the benefit of humankind, should not be to try and supplant humans, should be a tool like email or something that we use to enhance our experience rather than to supplant our experience. That would be number

one. Number two, at least here in the United States and hopefully in the global West, is lack of editorialization, as in do not allow hard-coded political correctness, as we've seen in chat GPT, to bias certain topics against certain other ones. You have to have genuine intellectual freedom in the way that these AI bots and others that are going to shape the way that people think in the future be able to surface all information and to simply make, and again, use it as a tool such that we can make up our minds ourselves. So chat GPT right now has all this political correctness, it's all this stuff baked into it. People want a right-wing alternative. I don't want a right-wing alternative. I just want something that has no bias in it whatsoever, as scary as that might be. Although, you know, maybe we need a little bit of a dose of reality. So those are really the only two, Crystal, that matter the most to me.

Number three is an economic one outside of that, which is no one company should ever have over 50% market share or should ever have over 50% market share in artificial intelligence. That's it. Those are actually enforcing my three that I've kind of looked at. Like you can't have a Google of AI. You just can't. I think. Like you can't have a Google of AI. You just can't. I think one of the most, so a couple things. Number one, there's even a definition problem of like what is AI? Because part of why this conversation has been sparked now is because you have these new large language models like ChatGPT.

Where suddenly you have the general population able to play around with this and be like, whoa, this is crazy, right? But remember that companies and governments have been using AI algorithms to make all sorts of decisions for a while now. And we already know the way that this can cause problems. I'll just tell you one example that I read about recently is a man got pulled over like regular traffic stop, although he wasn't really doing anything wrong. But the police had his plates on some sort of a list of like, OK, this person has committed crimes. If you see him, then pull him over, say pull him over. And they arrest him. What this was based on was an AI program that did facial recognition, and they claimed that he had been stealing purses in Louisiana, a state he'd never even been to.

This man had done nothing wrong, and he was held in jail for over a week before they resolved the situation. Okay, so these are the types of AI algorithmic abuses which are already here, right? A lot of the stuff we think of like, oh, where's it going in the future? A lot of this is already here. I did a monologue a while ago about the way that these giant conglomerates that have bought up all of the rental properties in the country, the way that they're using algorithms to try to price gouge their tenants as much as possible and that they've discovered through this algorithmic learning that actually holding some of the units open so that, you know, you have less housing on the market is better for some of these properties because then you can extract more rent out of the existing population. So there's that sort of thing going on. You have companies, large companies, that are using AI algorithms to do the initial pass-through of resumes, and it's already been uncovered that oftentimes those algorithms have various implicit biases against different

demographic populations. So a lot of this, number one, is already here. So I think it's really important to understand what we're talking about. It's not just things like ChatGPT and these large language models, but those produce a whole other range of concerns because the reality is, even the people that design these things, once they turn them loose,

these ChatGPT and other similar models, they have like a mind of their own. And I don't want to make it, it's not sentient. I'm not saying anything like that, but because they're taking in this information and they're learning from, they're constantly sort of building on that knowledge. And then, you know, making these predictive, predictive sequences and conversing with the general public, like you can get a response from ChatGPT that even their programmers would be like, I don't know where that came from.

I don't know why Sidney professed her love to Kevin Roos, the New York Times journalist. I don't know what made her do that. I don't know why we got this outcome. So that becomes a huge problem in terms of assigning any sort of responsibility and culpability, like accountability, if something is done that is bad, wrong, illegal, etc., like who do you hold accountable? Yeah.

So that's number one. And number two, in terms of any sort of transparency, you know, we've been talking about on Twitter, we want to be able to know what the algorithm is and how certain tweets are put in your timeline. On YouTube, we'd love to know what the algorithm is and why certain videos get recommended and other videos don't. But if you have a large language model where no one can really tell you how they came to these outcomes, well, that seems like a huge problem in and of itself. So a couple of suggestions for potential ways to get at some of these issues is, number one, you have to have some sort of clear-cut responsibility where either it's the developer or somebody has to be held responsible when bad things happen with AI. That's number one. Because you can't have it. Like a liability

insurance. Yes. You can't have it disaggregated where your Tesla is using AI to drive and hits a pedestrian. Everyone's like, yeah, well, no fault, no harm. You know, it's the robot. What can you do? That's number one. Number two, and this already exists in certain settings, you could have a situation where once the large language model gets to a point and it's understood, you have to lock it in that place for a certain period of time.

And it's only at intervals where it's allowed to then build on and grow and learn so that you're able to keep your arms around what even the hell these things are. And I'm not just talking about the general public, I'm even talking about the developers who are designing these things. So, and then the other piece is, and this gets to the accountability part, is you have to enforce the current laws because there are laws against, you know, bias and discrimination and unlawful detention. And there are laws against these things in place. So you have to make sure that those existing laws are being enforced, even when it's AI that's generating some of those results. So it's very complex. I don't know if the piece that was pulled on of just like we got to halt AI development. I don't know if the piece that was pulled

on of just like we had a halt AI development I don't know if that's really feasible because again there's just an even a definition issue of like what even are you talking about when you talk about AI yeah that's a good point too because you know sometimes like we'll send emails on MailChimp and it'll be like according to our analysis you should send our email your email at 12 30 p.m. or something like that. Like in a way, like that's AI, right? It's like, we've crunched all this data. We've decided that YouTube even actually shows us when most of you guys are online as, I mean, it's not going to

impact our posting schedule because we're a news program, but if we were like a Mr. Beast or something like that, and you're trying to optimize every single aspect, we would look at that and be like, okay, it's Monday. Everybody's online at 2.30 p.m. Like, we're going to post it then. Like, that's basically just using a ton of data, you know, looking at it, and then giving a recommendation. So, in some ways, like, that's an AI. And then also on photos, I mean, that's another one where it probably would require its entire own set of principles where it's like, you can't use the faces of established people to put them in sexually compromising position. But they're like, well, what does that mean? It's like, is kissing count? And then, well, then how is this going to regulate copyright? Will you be

able to incorporate copyright images or not? So all of this, though, I think we have the tools to do this. Do I think we have the seriousness to do this? No. I also, what probably worries me the most is with regulation. For me, regulation just means like within the First Amendment, everything else, like go for it. Do whatever you want. But I'm watching President Biden and a lot of these other AI safety advocates. Like they want to hard code like language pc basically political correctness

into the models and i'm like well that actually is way more dystopian frankly than nothing at all so the type of regulation also matters a lot as you guys can tell i mean it's a very complicated question i'm i'm really curious what what you guys think seriously one other idea and i think we put this last piece up on the screen just uh one of the you know warnings of like what's going on here with with ai currently chat gpt pretended to be blind and tricked a human into solving a captcha now you guys probably know a captcha is when you're like you know on a website and they're trying to verify that you're actually a human being and not a robot and you've got to like pick all the ones that have stoplights in it or whatever so chat gpt convinced a human that like, hey,

I'm disabled. I'm visually impaired. So could you solve this CAPTCHA for me? And the human actually asked like, just checking, you're not a robot. And ChatGPT was like, no, of course not. No big deal. Just do this for me. Thanks. Helping me out here. And so they did it. And that gets to another suggested regulation that I saw from an AI scientist, which is that AI must always, like robots must always identify themselves as robots. So you're not getting tricked and manipulated by rogue AI out there trying to get you to solve their capture for them to do God knows what. No, I think you're right. And look, it's scary. I am as well, but we should also be careful. I'm also not sure about a pause. What does that mean? This is where I almost do

disagree with Elon, where I'm like, well, if we pause, do you think China's going to pause? It's almost like an arms race. There's a book. China has put in some actually stringent regulations themselves. Their own regs, yeah. Sure. I mean, some of which are just going to be authoritarian, but some of which are also thoughtful. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, some of which are just going to be like authoritarian, but some of which are also thoughtful. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, and I also come, there's a book, I forget, I think it's Yuval Noah Harari's book, the guy who wrote Sapiens. I think it's called Homo Deus. And he wrote a book where he was a little bit about AI. I encourage people to go read it. It's pretty interesting. It raises some of these questions. Okay. Let's talk about Fox. All right.

So the judge in the Fox Dominion case delayed the start of this trial from Monday to today. But as far as we know, the trial has kicked off this morning. There were reports from The Wall Street Journal that Fox was aggressively trying to settle. That was the reason for the one day delay. Apparently they were unsuccessful. At the same time, Dominion also dropped what they were going for in terms of monetary damages. So that's a significant development as well. But that trial has kicked off. It's going to be really fascinating to watch unfold. We've already learned a lot from discovery, much of which is absolutely humiliating for Fox. And now our former President Trump has weighed into the situation. And I think what he says here

really illustrates the bind that Fox and many other, by the way, conservatives are in as well. Put this up on the screen. He's demanding that Rupert Murdoch say the 2020 election was in fact rigged during his testimony at the Dominion trial. Here's the quote from Trump. He says, Fox News is in big trouble. If they do not expose the truth on cheating in the 2020 election, they should do what's right for America. When Rupert Murdoch says that there was no cheating in light of the massive proof that there was,

it is ridiculous and very harmful to the Fox case. Rupert, just tell the truth and good things will happen. The election of 2020 was rigged and stolen. You know it. And so does everyone else. Now, everyone else does not, in fact, know that because the election 2020 was rigged and stolen. You know it. And so does everyone else. Now, everyone else does not, in fact, know that because the election was not rigged. However, a majority, a very strong majority of the Republican base believes that it is. And so that's the other challenge for Fox News in this trial. And it's also the reason that Fox News

ended up, you know, lying and defaming potentially Dominion voting systems is because there is such a distance between reality and what the Trump has been selling his base and they have sided with him. them for a business perspective if Rupert Murdoch or Tucker or Maria Bartiromo or whoever has to go up on the stand and talk about the fact that they know definitively the election was not rigged. It's a problem that they were not able to settle the case, I guess, because right now, look, Fox has a big risk in terms of the trial, not only to the $600 to $1.6 billion that they might have to pay out, but in reality, it's all the reputational damage of getting people under oath who are asking questions that could be tremendously embarrassing for the overall network. Also, you never know what's going to happen in these situations, which is why everybody goes out of their way to try and avoid

them. And initially, there was some conversation about maybe Dominion was willing to lower the price that they were able to settle at, and maybe Fox would be able to meet that. But look, I mean, I raised this point yesterday, but Murdoch is a stubborn man. He's like 92 years old. He has health problems. Maybe he just wants to ride it out, and he doesn't care who he kind of drags along with it. But there's no question that this is a terrible business decision for them in the long run because at the end of the day, what they were trying to prevent whenever they were airing these false claims was a loss of audience and the feeling that they were on their side. What has become eminently clear, Crystal, from the trial? They were never on their side. What has become eminently clear, Crystal, from the trial? They were never on their side. They knew that they were platforming stuff that was wrong, and they were afraid of losing

to competition. So if I'm looking at this, A, if I'm OAN and I'm Newsmax, just keep going. Go as hard as you possibly can. Why? Because you know that it's working, you know that's what Fox fears the most, and that they are gonna get into trouble. And then also, it's all just from a position of weakness. Like they were not able to do what they thought was correct.

They were wanting to do wherever the audience was going because they were afraid that they were going to lose some portion of market share. And that's just going to continue to come out. And if we get even more detailed looks into maybe their age and demographics, their internal analyses, I think it'd be humiliating and a disaster for them. And overall, in the long run, it's not like they're winning any favors with Trump. Because Trump is also like, no, you need to testify that the election was stolen. Right. Yes. And what do you think is going to happen?

You think Trump's going to sit quietly by as a parade of top Fox News talent takes the stand to admit that the election was not rigged, do you think he's just going to stand back and be cool with that? No. He is going to make sure everyone knows that you're a traitor to his cause. And so the very thing that they were basically trying to avoid, which is have their audience abandon them over them acknowledging that Joe Biden did, in fact, win the presidency. That risk is still very much on the table for them at this trial. I mean, if I was them from business decision, they should give Dominion whatever they want to avoid this thing. And I am honestly stunned that it has come to, you know, jury selection in the trial actually getting kicked off without some kind of a settlement

being made. The other important thing to remember here, this is not their only legal trouble. They also have a multibillion dollar lawsuit against them from Smartmatic, another voting system that they're going to have to deal with as well. They already had to settle out of court with this Venezuelan businessman. So this is very treacherous for Fox. And whatever amount of money that Dominion might win in this trial, that's not the real threat to them. They've got, I think, like $4 billion cash on hand or something like that. They'd be able to weather whatever the

financial pay on is, even though they would rather keep all of their billions of dollars. It's the reputational harm and damage that could be inflicted on them amongst their own audience. And I think that's what this Trump truth really underscores. Yeah, absolutely. Good luck to Fox. I will be watching. We'll be watching. A lot of interest.

Look, at the very least, it's good to – I enjoy sometimes watching people squirm, being put on the stand. So it might be kind of fun to watch Maria Bartiromo and all these other people have to justify some of the stuff that they did behind the scenes. Indeed. Anyway, yeah, let's all enjoy it. Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Former Biden spin master and current MSNBC host Jen Psaki invited Senator Bernie Sanders on her show over the weekend ostensibly to discuss his new book. That book is titled It's Okay to be Angry About Capitalism. And it's a deep dive into

many of the issues that have animated Senator Sanders throughout his entire career. Things like income and wealth inequality, the unconscionable treatment of the American working class, the obscene power and influence of giant corporations. Now, there is perhaps no living person in America who has raised these issues more powerfully and more persuasively than Senator Sanders. So did Jen Psaki take advantage of this opportunity to dig into the content of the senator's book? Content which is critically relevant to literally every single American? Of course not. In the entire 12-minute interview, she didn't ask a single question about these core economic issues. Not one. Now, she did deign to ask a single question

about his book, just one, but you will not even believe how she framed that question. It is too perfect. Take a listen. The title of your book, It's Okay to be Angry About Capitalism, really did sit with me. It is a memorable book title, Senator, of all the things voters are angry about. And there are many, abortion, the lack of progress on gun reform, even Clarence Thomas' questionable relationship with a billionaire.

I know how you feel about billionaires. Why should capitalism be at the top of that list? Why was that important to be in the title of that book? Jen, what's important, abortion is a huge issue. Social justice is a huge issue. But you know, sometimes the corporate media forgets about it and Congress forgets about it. You and I are chatting today. You know that there are tens and tens of millions of Americans who cannot afford health care, who are scared to death that if their kid or their parent gets sick, they don't know what's going to happen. There are people working for starvation wages. There are moms who can't afford to send their kids to decent childcare, can't even find a slot. Those are

issues of enormous consequence we don't talk about. Now you tell me, you got three people on top today who want more wealth than the bottom half of American society. Is that an issue we should be talking about? Does that sound like we have an economy that works for all of us or just a few? Is that an issue worth discussing? We're talking about it now, Senator, so I'm happy to have you on. I wanted to ask you about President Biden's nomination of Julie Su for the Labor Department Secretary. I love Julie. I love Julie. We're going to do our best. But let's talk about income and wealth inequality. Let's talk about concentration of ownership. Let's talk about corporate ownership of the media. Do you think that those are issues worth discussing? Well, Senator, I have you on today.

We're having a conversation about all of these issues. I did want to ask you about this because you are chairman of this committee. First of all, lady, who do you think you are to tell someone what they should or should not be writing a book about? Can you imagine her questioning the topic selection of Hillary Clinton, Stacey Abrams, or any other Democratic establishment darling? Would never happen. Second of all, I love how she's like, well, I'm having you on to talk about these issues of your book right now, but then completely blocks Bernie from saying anything about those issues at all. The whole thing is incredibly revealing. Bernie, why trouble yourself with working class economic

pain? Just focus on issues like guns and abortion that allow elite Democrats to posture as virtuous while maintaining an unconscionable economic status quo that they and their donors all benefit from. Take a look at this graph that was shared by Gritty Is The Way on lobbying spending. So top spenders here of lobbyists are the National Association of Realtors, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and Big Pharma. The entire list is dominated generally by corporate lobbies that obsessively push for low taxes and no regulation. You've got a bunch of military industrial complex types, various parts of our disgusting for-profit healthcare system, corporate media organizations, of course, and also big tech. Is the power of any of these groups threatened in any way by endless debates about cultural issues like

abortions or guns, or to throw the Republicans in here as well, CRT or trans people. Not at all. Not remotely. Now, I'm not saying, and Bernie isn't saying, that these issues are not important, not worthy of fierce debate. But Psaki and her ilk frame any and all discussion of the economic issues of working people as an affront to the cultural issues which are in vogue among the elite liberal set. This was the central attack you will recall on Bernie in 2016 and again in 2020. If you care about economics, they would say, you must somehow be anti-black or anti-woman or somehow suspect in some way. In Hillary's framing, if you care about breaking up the big banks, you must not be serious about racism. Of course, this is a pack of poorly crafted lies.

Who in this country has been most screwed by the big banks? Poor people, and in particular, poor black people. Who in this country, tell me, is most impacted by gun violence? Poor people, and in particular, poor black people. Who in this country is most impacted by anti-abortion laws? Poor people, and in particular, poor black people. Psaki in particular, who has spent her entire career as a corporate Democrat operative

before transitioning to Biden administration propagandist work, she is now continuing from her corporate media perch, has something at stake in this fight. Because every boss she has ever had, every politician she's ever shilled for, is invested in avoiding deep discussions of these issues. That's why she insisted multiple times in

this interview on scolding Bernie for daring to care about economics. It's personal to her, and she just can't hide her intense irritation with him for making her wing in the party so uncomfortable. Here she is trying to push Bernie to accept that Democrats should just run exclusively on abortion. You wrote in an op-ed back in October, Senator Sanders, last year that Democrats should just run exclusively on abortion. You wrote in an op-ed back in October, Senator Sanders, last year, that Democrats should focus, shouldn't focus only on abortion in the midterms. That's a mistake. It proved to be quite a winning issue. In fact, the level of backlash to jobs really even surprised me,

and I've been at this a while too. Did you underestimate the power of this issue and the power of it had it motivating voters? Now, Jen, what I said is that abortion should be front and center. The right of women to control their own lives is a fundamental issue, but it cannot be the only issue. And if you recall during the 2020 campaign, at the end of the campaign, people started talking about workers' rights. People started talking about Social Security and preserving Medicare and health care.

So, no, I don't think I was wrong. Bottom line is, of course, we have to continue the fight for women's rights and abortion rights, but you cannot ignore the reality that 60% of the workers in this country are living paycheck to paycheck. We have massive income and wealth inequality. People can't afford child care. They can't afford health care. And they are struggling. You cannot ignore those issues.

By the way, the very next question that she asked was designed to chide Bernie for whatever gun positions he took 30 years ago that bucked liberal orthodoxy. There's a neat little game playing out right now that you can see everywhere if you're looking for it. Affluent college-educated types increasingly identify as Democrats, and since they have all the money and all the cultural power, corporations have decided to speak out on social issues as a business decision to cater to this set. Now, this has confused politics quite a bit. Democrats can now feel less skittish about taking corporate money and aligning with corporate America. Republicans are now irritated with corporate America's cultural positions,

but are opposed for ideological and also self-interested reasons to doing anything real to curb corporate power. Instead, they just engage in an endless game of woke-a-mole, ginning up little boycotts against this company or that company, or becoming enraged at some corporate woke villain of the day with no interest or even understanding of the need for systemic change. This little setup is great for elite Dems who get to virtue signal. It's great for elite Republicans who get to anti-woke virtue signal and corporations who just get to continue with unchecked bipartisan backed exploitation. Bernie's gentle acknowledgement that it is legitimate to be angry about the system is a threat to Jen Psaki's whole self, and she cannot abide even one sentence of such a critique on her air.

This really irritated me, this whole thing. The whole interview, obviously I can't play the whole 12 minutes, it was all like this. And if you wanna hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at breakingpoints.com. So how are we looking at? Well, there's a lot of discussion around wokeness today, the dangers that it poses, much of which I agree with, but much of which has been a hysterical caricature used to cover up longstanding economic inequities.

Both sides have a point that the other side appears to have lost it. Peel back the layer of screaming at each other. Try to remember what the fight is really about. Really, it's about what type of country that you want to live in, the systems that we have in place, and how they should work. Perhaps no area of the debate has been hotter than education policy, mostly in the media focusing on teaching about race and how much input parents should have on gender ideology in schools. But much of what actually misses the point is the most important debate of all, equality of opportunity or equality of outcome.

You can basically describe the latter as the underlying desire of the new, quote, equity movement. The equity movement works to promote equality of outcome by focusing on systemic inequalities and racial outcomes and trying to normalize everyone to the same level. This of course sounds good for everyone who's below average, but it's a nightmare for those who are above average, as it deliberately seeks to lessen opportunity for all and to get the desired social outcome. This was the underlying goal for San Francisco in 2015, when they saw racial achievement

gaps in math outcomes. They decided the real problem was that high achieving students, which were disproportionately Asian, were getting a leg up on other races because they had access to advanced math courses in middle school, specifically eighth grade. And the gap only continued to widen throughout high school. So to prevent the gap, San Francisco landed on this genius solution. Take away the ability for any student to take Algebra I in middle school. You can't have a gap if you don't even give it an opportunity to develop.

The school justified the decision, saying it would instead bolster math curriculum for everybody, making it more fair to all students and putting them all in the same classes, low, middle, and high achievers. Now, first, it's important to lay out why some high-achieving eighth graders want to take Algebra I in middle school. The reason is because doing so

allows one to take more advanced math classes senior year of high school, very advantageous to any student applying to a STEM program with math prerequisites. We also shouldn't forget, the more AP courses that you can take in high school, the more credits that you get in college that are valuable tuition money that you're saving. This is a program many families in San Francisco relied on to make sure that their kids have a chance, especially in the ultra-competitive UC system. So effectively, the city made the decision to cripple these people and to make their lives more difficult

in the name of equity. How did it work out? We now have almost a decade of data, and predictably, it was a disaster. A new study, a team of researchers, they looked at 23,000 students in performance over the years to find this quote, white and Asian enrollment in advanced pre-calculus was still over twice that of black and Hispanic students. Black and Hispanic calculus enrollment remained below 10% before and after reform. The test scores show, quote, black and Hispanic 11th graders in San Francisco earned appalling scores on state math tests, scoring about the same as or lower than the typical fifth grader in the state. In effect, showing that they learned a grand total of nothing in six years of schooling. Even more

troubling, the system adapted. The proportion of students who chose not to enroll in any math course in senior year did not change at all. And here's the really crazy part. Not only did nothing change for black and Hispanic students, nothing also changed for white and Asian students. How and why? Because even though the school did not offer Algebra 1 in 8th grade, parents simply enrolled them in online algebra programs or in summer school or private school, costing them lots of time and money in addition to tutors. Meaning that the only people who really suffered were the parents of high-achieving students who both got bilked at local and state tax level and had to pay more for private schooling. Seems fair,

right? The people who want to do better had to pay more. The people who the policy was meant to help not only didn't get help, arguably got worse. This is the terrifying future of an affirmative action-led society. I've been sounding the alarm here for quite some time about similar efforts going on in law school and in med school. They are trying their best to ditch merit-based criteria like LSATs, MCATs, and GPAs in favor of essays. Doing it because they know the court is going to strike down affirmative action and they want to be able to preserve racial quotas. The only way to do so is to make sure that you can't prove racial discrimination with objective metrics. The

byproduct is that there is no way to know if anyone in a position that was once thought of as prestigious actually earned their way there. Worse, the new affirmative action world makes it easier for parents and students with resources to game the system and attain the place that they would have gotten anyways. The only way in the future to make sure that your doctor or your lawyer is someone you can trust, you've got to ask a friend or an acquaintance or someone you know. This is crazy. It circumvents the entire reason credentials and objective criteria existed in the first place. In the 1800s, admittance to Harvard and other high echelons of society entailed getting

things like letters of character from established gentlemen of society. Naturally, this did not work well for Jews, blacks, people of any minority that was smart and wanted to get a leg up, but they couldn't get past discrimination. Credentials were established specifically to give public faith in professions with rigorous standards, the understanding, though, that the community of those who have the credential would also police each other to make sure that they did what they said they could do and learned what they were supposed to in school. In our new world, you can't trust anything. Because remember this, the only reason that we know about that San Francisco experiment is because we had test scores. You already know what the lesson that they've learned is. It's not bring back Algebra 1. It's get rid of test scores entirely. First, the SAT and the ACT. Next, they're coming for the GPA. They're already saying those are racist, not equitable. They'll keep eroding any semblance that we have of a fair society. And remember this, they will do it in the names of the poor and the marginalized. And in reality,

it will serve the richest and the most powerful war amongst us. How crazy is that, that you can consider? And when you take it away, that white and Asians do not suffer at all because they just put their kids in summer school and in private school. And if you want to hear my reaction to Sagar's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. So yesterday we were discussing the situation with Senator Dianne Feinstein and how Congressman Ro Khanna had come out and called for her to resign, something that we considered quite courageous, given that you are a fellow Californian and you've taken quite a bit of heat for those comments. We're lucky to have you in studio today, sir. Great to be back here. Yeah, absolutely. So just, I guess, start with what made you want to speak out in this regard,

because, you know, I do think it is probably an uncomfortable thing for you to do. And I don't know if you're hearing from constituents in California. I know you're certainly hearing from other elected lawmakers in California. So what made you want to speak out? Well, I just said out loud what's been an open secret in the delegation, and that is it's a sad situation. I mean, Senator Feinstein has had a long career, a distinguished career in public service, but she's no longer able to do the job. She's missed 75 percent of her votes. Senator Durbin then came out and said that

it's actually making it hard to confirm judges. It's the one thing that President Biden can actually get done. And he's nominating a lot of qualified judges. She's not there. And I thought someone had to speak out. Right. And so Congressman, you know, so far, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi is going to put this up there on the screen, guys, says that calls for Dianne Feinstein's resignation are sexist, politically motivated. You referenced that Politico article where people were taking quite a bit of shots at you. I mean, how do you square the Washington reaction

to kind of wanting to preserve her legacy by shielding her from any criticism that you, and frankly, I think some 40 million people in California also probably agree with you on because they're not getting their constituent services done. Well, I just think it's not in touch with what people on the ground are saying. And that is in any job you're expected to be able to show up. And it's one thing if you have a health issue, you take leave, you come back. But you can't just miss something, have an indefinite date of when you come back and not be able to fulfill your duties. And it's not just me saying

it. It's a lot of her Senate colleagues saying this privately and people expressing concern about the judiciary. And it's actually just not true that it only affects people based on gender. I mean, this was an argument that people were making with Stephen Breyer, that he should retire to allow President Biden to fill that slot. And I have tremendous admiration for Justice Breyer. So I think that this is a case where it's more about, can someone do their job? Yeah. You were basically called in that Politico article, not only sexist, but also ageist and politically motivated. I want to ask you about that piece because the theory they laid out is that you've endorsed Barbara Lee for Senate.

And Governor Gavin Newsom has said that if that seat was open, he would appoint a black woman, Barbara Lee, being a black woman. So you're trying to basically push Dianne Feinstein out to make room for your chosen candidate. What's your reaction to that? Well, first of all, I'm very, very proud to endorse Barbara Lee. She has been the most consistent anti-war voice in the United States Congress. And we need her, in my view, in the United States Senate. It's one of the reasons I didn't run, despite having a lot of encouragement. But this has nothing to do with Senator Feinstein. Gavin Newsom can appoint a caretaker and he can appoint an African-American woman who is a caretaker who doesn't run. There are a number of them he could pick from in the state. There's the secretary of state,

there's Maxine Waters, there are people in the educational world. So you can support Barbara Lee, believe that Senator Feinstein should step down and not have an impact on the race. Right. And so it seems a little tortured to me, just to be honest. Currently, Congress, Senator Feinstein or maybe the people around her said, OK, we'll square this by saying that she'll step down from the Judiciary Committee and encourage Chuck Schumer to appoint somebody else. But the Republicans would have to agree. You'd have to get 60 votes for a lot of that to happen. John Cornyn and many other Republicans, even Susan Collins, have come out and said, I'm not going to support that. I'm not going to vote to help Joe Biden confirm Democratic judges. So we're now at a point where she either has to resign or she can stay in her position. And if she's going to do that, she's going to prevent the judges from being appointed.

Now that there are a way that she's tried to square it, have you heard any other agreement with your position, any possible developments? I believe this has all happened in the last 48 hours or so. Well, I think here's what happened. When I put out that statement, within two hours, it had caught fire. And you never know. I mean, sometimes I tweet something out and five people like it. This one, I think, resonated because it spoke to what people were thinking and the frustration. And so Senator Feinstein's team, I think, scrambled and they put this out there. They didn't look necessarily at all the procedure that had to go.

And that quelled some of the fear. And even in my case, if she got off judiciary, if someone else got on judiciary, she'd certainly buy some time. The problem is that now that's not going to be possible. What Senator Cornyn has said is that they will support a Democrat if she steps aside coming on the committee, but they're not going to support her just leaving and temporarily filling it. So I think now the ball is back in her court, and she's going to either have to give a concrete date when she's coming back and being able to vote or really think hard about how she wants to end her career.

And the sad part is I think this is hurting her she wants to end her career. And I, well, the sad part is, I think this is hurting her own legacy to drag this out. For sure, no doubt about it. Does the public position and private position of these elected Democrats match up? So publicly, they're saying you're sexist, that she should retire on her own terms, and how dare you, you know, ask her to step aside, or dare anybody ask her to step aside.

But privately, they've got to be not happy about the fact that judges aren't getting confirmed. I mean, brass tacks, you know, one of the most important things that Trump did when he was in office and one of the most important things that Biden's been doing when he's in office is getting judges on the bench to rule on issues that are really important, the Democratic base, like abortion rights, to name one. So are you aware of any pressure that's being applied behind the scenes to try to push her to, on her own terms, resign, given the fact that this really is hamstringing the Senate and its ability to operate? Privately, there are a lot of people who agree with my position, both text and coming up on the House floor. You know, it's hard to,

and I understand why they don't want to get out there. It's not an easy thing. I've been open on calling out truth to power where I see it. But there are consequences to the easiest way to sort of rise in Washington is just to keep your head down, not say anything provocative. And eventually you become a committee chair, you're on some cabinet position. And that makes people reluctant to take on powerful interests. But I do think people understand the urgency here. I mean, look, you've got a Texas judge who's taking away the abortion pill for millions of Americans engaged in anti-science. We've got to get our judges confirmed on this committee. You have 18 that have come out of the committee and the Senate floor is slow. So, fine, those will go through.

But we need a pipeline because when the Senate floor moves, I'd rather have 50 people ready rather than not having done anything for a month. Every day we wait is hurting the ability to get judges confirmed. Yeah, absolutely. There was one other issue I wanted to ask you about with regard to speaking out and taking courageous stands. There was a letter that was just published by, pushed by Congresswoman Tlaib and signed by a number of other squad members. I think there were seven signatories. Go ahead and put this up on the screen. Calling for the DOJ to drop charges against Julian Assange and defend freedom of the press.

Freedom of the press, First Amendment, it's an issue that I think you have been very courageous on. You've spoken out against. I'm wondering why you didn't sign on to this particular letter. I didn't read the details, but I support the position. And that's the important thing. I've supported the position publicly that we should not be prosecuting Julian Assange because it's overbroad, the charges against him. What I've said is you should be prosecuted for actually hacking or taking classified secrets, but not for the dissemination as a publisher. And I actually

co-authored the Protection of Journalists Act, saying that people publishing things should not be prosecuted. So I don't know if I glanced at a letter and there was some sentence I didn't like or something, but in terms of the actual position, I'm in very clear and very early on it. And that was why I was surprised, actually, that you weren't on the letter. So you'd be willing to take another look at it and consider signing on to it? I'm happy to take a look at it, but my public position is pretty clear, which is I don't believe that Julian Assange should be prosecuted. Obama didn't prosecute him.

It's an overbroad prosecution. You should not be prosecuting someone for publishing something if they're not involved in actually engineering or hacking the leaks. Yeah. Okay. Well, we appreciate you joining us as always, sir. Thank you. Appreciate it. All right. We'll see you guys later. I'm Michael Kassin, founder and CEO of 3C Ventures and your guide on good company, the podcast where I sit down with the boldest innovators shaping what's next. In this episode, I'm joined by Anjali Sood, CEO of Tubi. We dive into the competitive world of streaming. What others dismiss as niche, we embrace as core. There are so many stories out there. And if you can find a way to curate and help the right person

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

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