Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 5/1/26: New Iran Strikes Imminent?, Platner Beats Mills, AI UnderClass, JPMorgan MeToo

Episode Date: May 1, 2026

The BP Friday team looks at Trump considering new attacks on Iran this weekend, Janet Mills dropping out of the Maine Senate Dem primary as Graham Platner's momentum rises, a NYTimes piece on the fears of an AI Underclass, and bizarre allegations from a JPMorgan employee accusing another colleague of sexual slavery. Griffin: https://www.instagram.com/griffinpdavis/ To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.com    Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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We need your help to build the future of independent news media, and we hope to see you at breaking points.com. Good morning, everyone. It is Friday, May 1st. It's here at Breaking Points with other amazing Friday show. Of course, we're joining the Friday show crew. That is Crystal Ball, Ryan Grimm, and Emily Jishinsky. How are we doing this morning?

Well, we got last names. We got last names. We'll do middle names, too. We've got a war going on, continuing, potentially. potentially some more updates with Iran. Graham Platner in Maine has become the presumptive Democratic nominee for Senate. We've got some new AI stories about the future Silicon Valley underclass. And we may potentially be checking in on a little bit of drama at the JP Morgan Bank if we have time.

Crystal, why don't we start with a little bit of baroquee? Yeah, go ahead and put this latest report up on the screen. Another market moving report here from Barak Ravid indicating that there are talks going on with Iran. And here, let me take a look at this. So he says Iran gives the U.S. a new response on a draft peace deal goes on to say they've delivered their response, the latest U.S. amendments to a draft plan to end the war according to a regional source. the Iranian response, a signal that the diplomacy is not entirely frozen, comes as Trump maintains a U.S. naval blockade considers new military action against Iran, can couple that with, and Ryan can jump in here some drop site reporting, which, you know, is somewhat in line with

this Axios report about some exchange going on here. The Axios report makes it sound a bit more rosy than what you guys have found, though, over at drop site, right, Ryan? Yeah, though, it does seem like there's some discussion of talks unfolding. So, I don't know if you have that, Griffin. So Iranian foreign ministry spokesman, Smael Baghei, had said yesterday. So he said, look, it's, quote, not reasonable to expect, you know, super rapid talks. But added that Pakistan has acted well and has shown good capability. in mediation saying that Pakistan will remain the mediator,

which that's a kind of positive sign from them that they're still in entertaining talks. He also said, quote, the US and the Zionist regime are known for breaking their promises. The greatest guarantee against a repeat of the war is Iran's own power. He also said anything from the Americans

should not be immediately believed. And oftentimes what the Americans are saying is misleading. an interesting comment he made. He said Iran's priority is to reach a point where, quote, we can say the danger of war does not exist. So that's like, that's a very clear expression of kind of the Iranian strategic goal that they want to get out of this war, which obviously that's actually, you know, pretty reasonable.

You would imagine any country would like to say that danger of war doesn't exist. So as long as Trump is still, you know, threatening to annihilate their civilization, then they haven't achieved that goal yet. And so they want to achieve that either militarily or diplomatically. He also said, and this is, this goes to the kind of people who are saying there's a lot of chaos going on in Iran. He said, quote, unity is not a slogan in these sensitive conditions. We must not go for each other's throats. So for him to say that publicly suggests, you know, there is a lot, there is intense.

debate within Iran over, you know, how long to let these negotiations go on or whether to, well, everybody, everyone in Iran says, yes, we're preparing for the war to restart. But then there's, there's dispute about how much kind of to, how much to give to Witkoff, Kushner, vans, Trump in order to keep them going rather than just prepare for restarting of the war. But you're right. Who knows what to believe because it's Friday. We're going into the weekend. Trump wants to pump the markets, push oil prices, oil futures down, although he's colliding with physical reality at this point as well. Yeah. And speaking of that, we've got two clips here from Trump about a deal and about building plants all over the country. First, let's hear about that deal. And really great. Yeah. And that's going to carry forward.

Look, the countries do it really well. And that's despite a military operation. I don't call it a war because you're right at a military operation. We're really, I mean, Iran is dying to make a deal. I can only tell you that. I don't want to get into it. But they cannot be nuclear other than that. But their Navy's gone.

Their Air Force is gone. Every ounce of any form of equipment practically is gone. gone, you know, their drone factories are about 82% down, and their missile factories are almost 90% down. And many of their missiles have been knocked out between, they use some, but we knocked out more than they used. And it's pretty amazing what's happened. They want to make a deal. But despite the fact that we are in what some people would call a war, we just hit a new high today on the stock market. some people are calling it a war he's calling in a military excursion

Ryan just quickly before we get to the second clip you know Trump mentions nuclear but do you have any sense through drop sites reporting of where Iran is in terms of coming to the table in negotiations with a nuclear deal or is that kind of off the table for them now? No they have they have said that what they would entertain is so they have this 60% in rich uranium that they would dilute it

and that they would, you know, dilute it under the supervision of IEA supervisors, taking it down to a place where it's, you know, no longer considered this threat by the United States. They were just, you know, Iraq was just in Moscow. And afterwards, Putin had a call with Trump where Putin floated the idea of Iran sending the enriched uranium over to Russia. In the 2015 nuclear deal, Russia took 25,000 pounds of nuclear material, of enriched, highly enriched uranium, 25,000 pounds. Right now, the estimate is that they have something under a thousand pounds, which is amazing. Like so Obama, think about that. Obama was able to do a deal that got 25,000 pounds out of Iran into Russia in exchange for, I think they ended up getting maybe $50 billion or something like that.

and some sanctions relief. And now we're doing a war over 900 pounds. So Iran has said, no, we don't want to send the enriched uranium to a third country. But the fact that Araghi went to Russia and then Putin talked to Trump about that possibility suggests that that is negotiable for them. Well, and then you also have the obvious balance of Trump threatening to wipe out the entire. civilization and then him saying you're not allowed to have nuclear weapons like just to state the obvious that's where this is gone yeah well and that it brings us to as well I mean there's a few other

things to say about that uh trump clip and where we are or aren't in the development of this totally not a war war um apparently so you know there's this requirement that the uh administration go to Congress after 60 days day and now the new line uh from Pete Hegset is well No, no, no. Now that we've got this ceasefire, then, you know, the counting stops. So we don't actually have to do that, which, you know, it doesn't surprise me that they're finding some loophole to avoid any sort of congressional oversight. But in addition, you know, it's, at least is, I guess, heartening to me that they feel the need to make an excuse at all. I could certainly envision a world where they're like 60 days, who cares. Yeah, good luck. You and what are me? We're going to do what we want to do. De facto, the end result is the same. But at least the feel the need to make some kind of an excuse here. And then the other piece that I wanted to raise is while you have, you know, this, at least there's some exchange of information occurring, some potential track, even though, you know, the two sides continue to be worlds apart, I don't think Trump is anywhere close to swallowing the humiliating defeat it would require

to actually do some sort of war-ending deal. So you've got them very far apart, but at least exchanging some sort of information through mediators. On the other hand, you also have what appears to be new preparations for some new strike package under the fantasy and illusion that this time, if we bomb them, then this time it'll work. Where last time, for some reason it didn't, this time doing the same thing is magically going to have different results. Treata Parsi here highlighting one of the indications that we could be heading in that direction. US ships 6,500 tons of munitions and equipment to Israel in 24 hours. Two cargo ships carried thousands of air and ground munitions, military trucks, and other military equipment. We've also had all kinds

of reporting about new strike packages that were being drawn up and military plans that were being made and presented to Trump for him to consider. And we also know that a whole host of neocons who have been very influential in Trump's thinking and his strategy to the extent that you could call it that, that they have been insisting that what is needed is more pressure, more bombing, that that will then cause Iran to capitulate, that that will bring them to the table. You also have all kinds of, in my opinion, delusional thinking about how, if we just enforce the blockade really hard, then in two days, the whole economy is going to completely explode and collapse and it'll be the end of everything. And then they'll come crying.

And then they'll be crying, um, crying uncle, as Trump put it in some pretty. comments. I was at a meeting about two weeks into the war that I realized afterwards was actually on the record where Ron Johnson was talking and it was like a small meeting and Ron Johnson is a pretty earnest guy. If you disagree with him, you're going to, you know, he's saying what he thinks basically. And at that point, he referred to the war as a quote two week bombing run, which I'm thinking back on now is especially interesting because it's one thing when the president says it, Pete Hig says it, Marco Rubio says, you know, we're, we won. But like, this was a sort of normie Republican who wasn't trying to propagandize. And the, like, genuinely believed that this was going to be a two-week bombing run.

And Semaphore had a story in the last couple of days about how Republican senators, congressmen are now, losing their patience for the war. And I just, again, I think it's an interesting contrast where, like, genuinely think he believed and had been told by the administration that this was, quote, a two-week bombing run. I read that. I read that report. Sorry, real quick, Ryan. I read that report in the same way that I read the Barack Ravid reports about how upset Trump is with Netanyahu, upset Biden is with Netanyahu, blah, blah, blah. So, yeah, from the Republicans, I'll believe it when I see it. No, I don't think they're going to do anything about it. I think, but I do think they were, like, trying to, yeah, complain to the press.

Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing to think about the fact that they thought that it was going to work last time in a couple of days or two weeks. And we're obviously wrong. It did not. Here we are. It's incredible that they think it will work again because they're in such a weaker position

this time. Like when they started, here's the six months, last six months. So when we start, when they started this war at the end of February, oil prices were, you know, mid-60s. and had been, you know, fairly stable for a long time. So they would now be going in, restarting the war with oil prices, you know, well over $100 a barrel. Meanwhile, we had, you know, what, two fully operational aircraft carrier striker groups

in the region. We had Israel and the U.S. had all of its missile defense system stocked up and ready to go. we had fully decked out bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Dubai, Qatar, Saudi Arabia. All of those have been destroyed. The people are working out of hotels. Israel is down to double-digit ballistic missile interceptors, which take years to replenish. It's not like they could rearm in the last couple of weeks.

And so they're going to go into the with the same idea, but with much less capacity to operationalize it. And what the Iranians have shown from the 12-day war to this one is that IQ and education might actually play a substantial role here. Like they are clearly a lot smarter than the people who are running or they have a system that allows their smarter ideas to come forward. You know what? To be honest with you, Ryan, I absolutely. agree with you that they are much more intelligent than our leadership. But I don't even think intelligence is really the problem. I think it's arrogance. I think that's really the key problem. The Iranians took us seriously. You know, they knew what they were up against. And they planned for it.

They thought about it over many years and planned for this. And after the 12-day war, they investigated their own weaknesses. And they figured, okay, what could we do better? What do we need to replenish? What, you know, how can we better hide? What we've got here, et cetera. Whereas our leadership has this incredibly cartoonish view of Iran, that they're all just like unthinking zealots. I don't know. It seems to me, and I've said this before, that our leadership bought the propaganda about Iran that has been sold to our population, whereas maybe in previous generations, there was more intelligence and nuance in an actual understanding of the Iranian government and the, you know, Iran is a country. This group are, you know, they're idiots and they're arrogant. And I really think that arrogance,

both at the specific leadership level and at the level of empire is what doomed this to fail. But, you know, to your point, the idea that it's very Israeli logic that one more bombing campaign is going to secure the peace. More assassinations. Yeah, more assassinations, one more bombing campaign. This time it'll do it. This time, you know, our victory will be assured. And the bottom line is we're just waiting around to see. see whether we need more pain before we accept the humiliating defeat that has already been dealt.

You know, if you think about it, and I can't remember which analyst I was, I was hearing kind of lay it out this way, but we've got, we've got an army, we've got an Air Force, we've got a Navy. Okay, we tried the air campaign, right? We bombed the hell out of them. We hit all kinds of targets. We've, you know, murdered little girls at a school and hit their infrastructure and all the stuff, right? That didn't work, and it's not going to work. And it's never worked. There's never been an air campaign that has successfully toppled a government, which is ultimately the goal here at this point. Okay. So that didn't work. Now we've got the Navy. We're doing our blockade. And there's all kinds of hopium around. Oh, yeah. If we just do this for two weeks,

they're going to hold all their oil wells are going to explode and they're going to be dead in the water. Two weeks to bend the curve. Right. Just two weeks to bend the curve. Exactly. And it's again, we have been sanctioning them for years. Did that cause their government? to collapse and capitulate and come crying uncle to the table? No. So why do you think it's going to be different this time? The last thing on the table is the army, some sort of ground invasion. Now, whether or not the official story about the pilot rescue, blah, blah, blah, is entirely accurate. What we could see from that is they learn very quickly, going in on the ground in any capacity is going to be a disaster, a disaster. And Trump is very wary of,

that level of on the ground engagement and rightfully so because it would be catastrophic. And the American people are not behind this war. Polling shows it's already as unpopular as the Vietnam War was at like the worst, you know, at the worst time. After like after years of being in Vietnam, it took years to get to this play, I think six years to get to the level of unpopularity that we're already at with this war. So the American people are not willing to, watch our service members be put inserted into Iran and come home in body bags. That is not something that we are going to support. We don't support going to the gas pump and spending what we have to spend there already. So the political landscape for Trump is very constraining and utterly disastrous.

So if, okay, the Air Force isn't going to work. The Navy's not going to work. You don't want to do the ground invasion. I mean, the only other thing would be nuclear weapons, even that you would have to, you know, the number of nukes you would have to drop even to get them to capitulate as insane. And of course, that would be an insane action to take and truly would kick off. God only knows what. That's what's on the table. There are no good options here. And Trump, as much as he wants to post his way through it and he's been very savvy, I have to say, the markets, you know, he's done a good job manipulating the markets and buying him some self some time, et cetera.

But ultimately, at the end of the day, it's just a matter of time before we have to accept the reality. that has been revealed by this disastrous war. And speaking of gas pumps and accepting realities, we've got some updates on state gas prices all across the nation. Every single state has higher gas prices today compared to a week ago. Biggest jumps in Indiana plus 84 cents. Michigan plus 72 cents. Ohio, 60 cents, Illinois, 39 cents, New Mexico, 37 cents.

So that does seem to be the only thing right now that Americans are specifically reacting to. And we also have a little clip I want to play here from Steve Scalise on gas prices. Let's take a listen. Do you think there's any way that your party holds on in November to the House? Absolutely.

And look, it's a path that is focused on turnout number one and delivery, what we've delivered to finally start turning this mess around that we inherited a year and a half ago. People that will remember, you go back two years ago, we were paying almost $6 a gallon for gasoline. Right now it's in the threes. Obviously, we've seen a jump with the Iran conflict. When were we paying six? Well, two and a half years ago. I don't think we're sick at. That wasn't the average price. Now, we're over 30% below where we were just two years ago.

Today, we are 30% below where we were two years ago. It's still going to go lower when Iran gets resolved in the strait of Hormuz gets open. But at the same time, did anybody want a nuclear armed Iran? So that's woke Iranian media squawk box here, challenging the $6 rate from Steve Skulles. I'm reading from a, the New York, oh, sorry, Crystal. I was just saying reading from the New York NBC affiliate or just an NBC affiliate here, where an expert is quoted saying, rising tax refunds were outpacing the increased burden of gasoline spending 2 to 1 in March and April. With tax refund season winding down and gas prices still climbing, the hit to consumer spending will become more evident from May. So just think about that.

So even if you were getting a refund and it was helping with gas prices, that's what the polling, that's what that's, that's with where the polling was in the last couple of months. Imagine where the polling is going to go now as people are not supplementing with, like, tax refunds. That's, you know, like, that was what just, that's already happened. So that's what Republicans are staring down the barrel of in the months ahead with, there's a reason that we keep introducing or we keep interviewing Professor Pape, which is that this is our, this is the argument, which is that it keeps getting worse and worse.

You were trapped in this cycle. So unless Trump can figure out a way to wiggle out of that, they're looking at actually conditions continuing to get worse or worse. Yeah. Well, I mean, I love how he just makes shit up. Like gas was not $6 gallon to maybe someplace it was. But, you know, in terms of the national, I mean, it's just completely fabricated. And then the line that multiple Republicans are going with now,

including, you know, high level of the administration is, oh, well, what would you pay to keep Iran? from having a nuke. And it's like, well, we didn't have to pay anything because they were willing to give up their nuclear problem back in the JCPOA, for one, that you all blew up. And then number two, again, according to Amanis, before you started this new bombing campaign. And in fact, what we're doing is we are paying at the pump so that Iran is more likely to pursue a nuclear weapon. So that is what we're actually paying for is to help create a nuclear Iran, which, you know, at this point, uh,

is, uh, in some intelligent logic for them, given the, uh, the geostrategic landscape that we have ourselves created. Actually, we should,

we should, we should team up with drop site and we can, it's, it's not that expensive. We should ask, ask that polling question. How much would you pay extra at the pump to guarantee? Let's assume you can even guarantee it to guarantee it to guarantee that Iran never gets a nuclear weapon.

Like zero, you know, zero to 50. 50 cents, 50 cents to a dollar, a dollar to 50. Like, I'm, you know, I think, I think overwhelmingly people will be like zero. Or maybe zero to five cents, maybe. Somebody would, somebody would, is there a negative option? Can I pay less gas?

Yes, we'll, we'll met her joke. Well, that was the actual, guarantee they do get it. Right. Well, I mean, that's what we're, but that's the reality of the situation that we're in is actually we are paying more to help them get a nuke, which, I mean, I mean, look, they, like, it is logical for them to do. And I actually do think it would make the region more stable if they had this deterrent. And this is someone, you know, I'm speaking as someone who would love to live in a world where we could reduce nuclear weapons and, you know, have deterrence that doesn't involve the potential catastrophic destruction the entire world.

But, you know, I'm also dealing with the reality of what we live in. But I would say, though, Ryan, even like, let's say we did that poll. It's a very hard thing to pull these things in the abstract. because I remember when we started when the Ukraine war kicked off with Russia's invasion. And there was polling to that effect of asking people, like, are you willing to pay higher gas prices to support back Ukraine and effectively this proxy war? And people are like, yes, absolutely. And then when they went to the polls, they were like, absolutely not. So it's a difficult thing to really get it, get into the heart of the median American voter. So we can solve it by, we will put these polls up as gas station TV ads right there at the pump when you're feeling out.

That's actually brilliant, Griffin. Are you happy to the price? And so that's where we're going to get to the heart of it. There you go. I like that. Listen, they're not that expensive. Maybe we'll put up some DP polling at gas stations. That could be a fun homework assignment for me.

But if there's anything else on Iran before we move over to a little bit Grand Platner News in Maine, Well, I'll just say Republicans are going to have to run on this war in all of their districts. They're going to have to go home. They're on the ballot. They're going to have to go home and say this war is a good thing. I support the president over and over again from now until November. That's especially going to kick up over the summer and after Labor Day as they hit the campaign trail more and more. So I don't really know that they have much power over Trump.

Obviously, they have power. But that would require them, to Steve Scalise's point, to, potentially anger their own base. You know, he said these are base elections. They are base elections. So do you want to depress? I mean, Trump has already done some work, depressing MAGA people,

as much as he thinks like 100% MAGA voters are with him. Those numbers have actually dipped. They're still high, but they've dipped. So you already have depressed MAGA base. And then if you have these certain districts where the boomers love the Iran war and other MAGA voters hate it, and you have a candidate who is owning it

and not willing to like grapple honestly with what some of their own voters think in a rural place where gas prices are really high and fertilizer is hard to come by. I got a note from my cousin the other day about the problems with fertilizer. Like, ugh, it's bad. And normal people are starting to feel it. And Republicans have from now November to hear from their voters about it. So. Yeah, Emily, I have a question for you on that. What are they going to do?

Are there going to be any defections? Because Trump has made it clearly that he's given up on the midterms. He doesn't care about these people. So are they going to rebel? Are there going to be any outliers saying, hey, you know, let's wrap this war up? Or is it going to be more kind of gaslighting Steve Scalese style? I mean, it's like you've got Thomas Massey and you have like then the establishment people like Tom Tillis, who's, you know, not on the ballot again. So he's definitely trying to make that point.

Trump capitulated to him on Kevin Warsh and Jay Powell. So that and he's already trying to like extract more concessions from. But no, I mean, I don't think, I think so long as you have 85% of MAGA still in love with Trump, Republicans, that's their bed and they have to lie in it. They made their bed and they have to lie in it. So that's a huge lever of control that the Trump supporting MAGA base has over Republican candidates in elections right now. But why don't we look northward for a moment to the state of Maine, where big apologies to, all of the Janet Mills militia, Mills Mafia. Janet Mills has dropped out making Graham Platner

the presumptive Democratic nominee for Maine Senate. And why don't we start with a little video here? The Mills militias has surrendered to the Nazis. They've been routed. They've been routed. This is Ging Maine, yes. Yes. But why don't we take a look at our.

last hope to stop Grand Platner. Emily's been spending a lot of time on Blue Sky with those takes. Yes. Yes. Maybe I should. That'd be awesome. If Emily was huge on Blue Sky for some reason. I'm on Blue Sky.

There's one last chance to stop the Platner Venice here with Susan Collins. Let's take a listen to her reaction to these updates in the race. Reaction to the Mel's news. I'm sure this was. was a very difficult decision for Governor Mills. And I wish her well.

She has devoted her life to public service in the state of Maine in many different capacities. She has served the people of our state. And I'm sure this was a hard decision for her. this will planner be easier to be in your view? I'm not going to get into the November election at this point. This is the governor's day. And I think the focus should be on her and her wanting to give her message to the people of Maine.

Rividing stuff. And correct me if I'm wrong, Ryan. but did Janet Mills then endorse Graham Platner say that she's going to vote for him instead? She did not. She very explicitly said that she would not be voting for Susan Collins. But she left open the possibility then of what she would be doing. She won't vote for the Republican.

Okay, great. Yeah. She said something like I will carefully watch Graham Platner's race and see, you know, as I do with all races in Maine or some blah, blah, blah, like, that. Yeah. Yeah. Schumer, though. Yeah. Yeah, Schumer did jump in, you know, behind Platner, which is obviously very different from his approach with Azoran Mamdani in his own state. And pretty remarkable, given that they share, you know, some very similar views, especially on Israel, which of course is a problem for, for Schumer. I do want to just, before we, you know, jump into that aspect of it, just pause and reflect on what an

extraordinary. What an extraordinary long-shot campaign this was. This man, Graham Blatter, had never run for office before, started his race very early. We interviewed him, of course, here very early. And he was up against the sitting governor of Maine, who is not disliked in Maine, by the way. I mean, her approval rating is not like amazing, but it's not terrible either. And Democrats had like sort of, you know, they were fine with her. But But they really were impressed with Platner. So when Mills gets in, of course, there's this huge opo dump and there was plenty there to work with from the tattoo to all the Reddit posts to even, you know, his history and his story about his military service and how long he continued to serve and then, you know, working with this, you know, with this contractor in Afghanistan as well. And so there was a real national consensus that this was going to be the end of him that, you know, people were going to look at that and say, oh, God, we can't have this guy.

we need the electable can at Janet Mills. And that is just not what happened at all. In fact, the polar opposite happened. People became more fervently committed to Graham Platner. And his polls just continued to rise to the place where it was undeniable, he was going to emerge victorious. Now, there's all kinds of squabbling right now and pieces being written of this one leaking and that one leaking about how Schumer abandoned her and didn't put enough money behind

her, et cetera, et cetera. But truly, whatever the behind the scenes internal machinations were, truly the bottom line here is that you had Graham Platner compared to Janet Mills, much younger, really forceful on Israel, really forceful on fighting against oligarchs. And this is where the normie democratic base is at this point. They were not swayed by the electability arguments, which was most of what, you know, the Mills camp really were offering here. Oh, Susan Collins is going to chew them up and spit him out. I think that is so different from what would have unfolded in previous cycles.

And it also makes it very difficult. You know, what we heard from with Zora Mamdani's. Oh, well, that's New York City. It's blue. It's totally different. Well, here you have Maine. You know, it's very sort of like normy state. A lot of blue collar workers, a state that a lot of ways has been left behind as well

with relatively high poverty. And, you know, you can't, you can no longer just blame the, the, the, uh, the Kami Corridor types and the DSA types for wanting this type of candidate at this point. That's right. And one last one last point here is that the polls consistently showed that Graham Platner is a stronger candidate versus Susan Collins than Janet Mills was. And I think that also just completely blows the minds. I mean, they just can't accept, you know, the general national consensus, the sort of establishment democratic mindset just can't accept that he actually genuinely is. is a stronger candidate versus Susan Collins. Yeah. To that polling point, go for it, Ryan.

Yeah, in the interesting, in the, like, catty, backbiting pieces that are emerging with people, you know, pointing fingers at each other, to me, the most substantial thing that emerged was Schumer's camp saying, okay, here are all the problems with Mills's camp and why it's actually her fault. But on the point of us not spending enough money for her, we couldn't because it would have been too politically toxic because Graham had. Yeah, I got that right here. Yeah.

Yeah. So, in other words, Graham had too much support from a majority of Democrats in the state. And therefore, Schumer coming in would have been going up against a majority of the voters. And there would have been then too much blowback against him and the National Party for meddling in Maine. Well, and Schumer is so unpopular himself. Right. That it would likely not help Janet Mills to. Exactly. I mean, she already was seen as the Schumer.

candidate and that was part of the problem for her. And they dropped the negative ads. They went for it. And the polling, um, yawned even further. Mm-hmm. Or the after the negative ads from Mills came out. And then Collins super PAC funded by billionaires who have destroyed Maine, um, came out. They were actually not even as good.

Like Mills had the fancy like AI voice, uh, which is extremely unethical. but you know they were they put they put the AI Platner through the Reddit posts whereas the Collins post did the same thing but they weren't even as well done and I don't see how those are going to work either and Emily really curious for your take on this he already has

center left and the left locked up now Collins is going to run our campaign and I'm seeing all the Republicans calling him a Nazi and saying that saying that like making insensitive comments about women who were sexually assaulted. So on what plan? You're going to woke. On what plan is that work with the right?

The right has spent the last couple decades getting called or thinking they're always getting called Nazis, whether they're getting called Nazis or not. It's part of their identity that they're under siege and always being called Nazis. And now all of a sudden you've got the Super PAC calling another guy a Nazi. Isn't that going to make them be like, well, actually, maybe he's one of us falsely being accused of being a Nazi by the... How is this going to work on the right? Like, are they all of a sudden feminists? Are they all of a sudden just believing accusations that you're a Nazi?

No, I sent this to you guys yesterday. The first statement that the RNC put out called Graham Platner a Nazi. Yes, that one of the reasons that the Mills campaign obviously did not work. is because people, those attacks just don't, they don't work on Democrats even, like, let alone Republicans, to your point, Ryan, but obviously what they're going for in this race is going to be like independence. And I will say, Susan Collins is notoriously hard to beat. She puts up a hell of a fight. Whatever you think of Susan Collins, that woman has shown a wild proclivity to hang on to the seat or a wild ability to hang on to that seat, despite where the polls seem to

look at different points. Like that was, what was your name? Sarah Gideon, right? The last time around. Collins the whole time. Go back cycle. Yeah, you go back cycle after cycle. You can bet a lot of money is going to pour in. But it's truly like, it reminds me, Ryan, actually of that John

Ossoff ad that everyone was talking about on X over the course of this week, which I'm sure you guys saw. But it was like Ossoff running not on any culture war issues. In fact, in the ad, he caused a culture war distraction, which Platner has as well. We don't have to debate that, but it's a really good

political line because he puts that in the back burner and then deals with these like kitchen table issues of corruption causing average Americans pain. And what, Crystal, you can probably speak to this too. What Winston Sears did in Virginia was say that like we can coast on Dems being woke. Like, let's just, we're just going to throw the culture war at Abigail Spanberger over and over again and not really deal with the affordability stuff in a super high profile, or we're not going to make that like a huge thrust or the only thrust of our campaign.

And they've had these examples to learn from over and over again, but right away, right out the gate, it's Platner is a Nazi. So enjoy how that works out for you guys. Yeah. Well, and the thing with Winston Sears campaign too is then if you're the one running all of the trans bathroom and trans sports ads, then people go away to say, y'all are the ones that are obsessed with this

issue. You know, Abigail Spanberger is over here, actually. She did a lot of like, I'm a national security dem type of thing in Virginia. But she also did a lot of affordability messaging as well. You know, I will see what happens in the race. But I do think that things have become so polarized and partisan now. It's hard for me to see how Susan Collins hangs on. And you have such, I mean, the generic ballot like gap in favor of.

Dems at this point is really quite extraordinary. One thing, Ryan, I wanted to ask you is in terms of the disparate treatment of Platner versus Mamdani, when they share very similar political ideology, if anything, I'd say Platner has been a little more rough around the edges in terms of how he's talked about Israel and Hamas and these sorts of things than Zoran. There's more to work with there if you're trying to sort of demonize him. I mean, is this, is Schumer's different approach, a recognition of where the Democratic base is, or is it just racism, that when he hears it from a white guy,

he can stomach it when he hears it from a brown Muslim. It's not acceptable. I think some of it's racism, maybe some of it's his backyard. And then some of it is different, you know, tactical environments. I think if Mills dropped out and was like, Maine is a state where independence is, you know,

is elevated, is, you know, I'm, and I am considering running out. as an independent, you know, just like Angus King is an independent in Maine. Then maybe Schumer keeps his powder dry. And so in New York, Cuomo. Like Alaska. Yeah. And in New York, he had Cuomo as the independent.

And so it's embarrassing for a Democrat to not back the Democrat, but, you know, he would rather win with Cuomo than be embarrassed and back Malmani. So I think he was left with no choice in Maine. it's like this is the guy. Like he's the nominee and she's not running as an independent. So I think that distinction played a role too. But I don't know. Like so I think some of it's also just, yeah, racism and rooted in kind of who they are.

Yeah. Why don't we take a listen to the man himself speaking to John Stewart this week? There has been more reach out from I would say more. kind of like establishment folks. However, however, this is the important part, not from like the, not from like the DSCC, not from the DNC, like nobody in the places of power remains interested.

But they're lost, dude. Like they're lost. And the thing that bothers me the most isn't like, I'm not asking for you to like be my friend. I'm just, but you should be curious. because I'm pulling 40 points ahead. Right. Like at least just reach out and be like, hey, what are you actually?

Because we've never, they've never spoken ever. I've never gotten a phone call. Never gotten a phone call. I think it was Hassan who said, look like a chud, think like a woke. That's Flattner. That's the winning model. But, you know, Ryan, I think you identified actually the biggest pitfall for him, which is that Tim Walms is about to come campaign for him in the state.

And as much as we might get irritated, like, why isn't the point? party even reaching out to him. On the other hand, it's actually really great for him to be like, see, have some separation from the Democratic Party brand because we all know the Democratic Party brand is extremely toxic. Like every die in the wool Democrat is going to vote for Graham Platiner. The question is people who are, you know, more independent and sort of disgusted with national Democrats, are they going to be on board with him? And so the more that he's sort of like subsumed now into that standard issue, Democratic Party brand, I actually. think that's like a more of apparel for him than anything else like Dan Osborne right yeah I would

have Osborne come out there if I were in Graham's camp I'd have Osborne come out I'd keep having Sean Fane and other union leaders come out Bernie's Bernie um but Tim Walls maybe old Tim Walls before he was yeah but he's he's tainted by that the VP run it's yeah that is the risk that he starts to look like of the like bog. But I assume that he gets that. But yeah, there's there comes Tim Wall. So we'll keep an eye out. It's interesting that Tim Wall has decided like of all the candidates that let me go,

let me go campaign with this one. That's kind of an interesting choice to me. After Mills drops out too. Before that. But the his campaign manager and Graham had a press conference yesterday afternoon. And one of the things this campaign manager said on there is that they, I don't have the exact number, but they started doing the math on the number of individuals that he had spoken to directly. And it was something like approaching like scale. Like they have taken like these one-on-one conversations that he's had at all of these town halls.

And they're scaling it up into the tens or even hundreds of thousands. Yeah. So, and they were saying that when they did some research and polling, they kept coming across people in their polling huge numbers whose reason that they were supporting Platterners that they had met Palatner personally and persuaded by him. That is a incredible buffer against the negative ads. Yeah. You see it on TV? I like, I saw that guy. I saw Semaphore had a piece quoting some, I don't know, you know, Republican strategist.

too. We're like, oh, we're going to, you know, we're going to destroy him. We're going to drop all this money on him. We're going to do all these negative ads. And it's like, I mean, I'm sure they'll be able to bang up his favorability rating some, but it's not like the Mills people and the Schumer people didn't try. So, you know, I think he is somewhat inoculated from the type of attacks that they've been launching unless they have something different that we haven't yet seen. You never know. But your point about Maine is an important one. And I don't have any, like, deep familiarity with the state. But from watching, you know, you guys reporter there and Alex Seitzwold, who also moved back to Maine and has been doing reporting on the ground there. And I also have a close friend

who's like, grew up in Maine. And he, okay, he grew up in Maine and he lived there in years. And he still was like, what was that guy's name who you said is running? And he like reached out to his buddies and of course had some kind of a connection to him because it's a very small state. And it's much more there's still, my sense is there's still a lot more sort of like community cohesion in Maine than there is in a lot of the country. And that's part of what has allowed Susan Collins to be able to win for so long. Because she, you know, there are a lot of people there are like, I know her personally and she did this and I saw her there, whatever. But it's also something that can benefit Graham because he is deeply immersed in, you know, Maine community and has been

running a campaign. And even before his campaign, he was a, you know, grassroots organizer. And this is what he was doing. So I do think that that is a huge advantage for him and will help to inoculate him against some of those negative attacks that are inevitably coming. Yeah. Well, the negative attack, the negative attacks, I'm going to give some advice to the Republican APA for a second. It can't be that he's a Nazi, but maybe the tattoo he has is actually trans somehow.

Like maybe it's part of the trans community. Isn't there the trans socialist militia? Yeah. Exactly. There we go. Now we're getting closer to something. or and it's actually, it has its roots in Black Lives Matter. So I would go that direction with the tattoo.

I mean, there is some like culture stuff that they can make inroads with him on. But what Maine Democrats just showed, I think is going to apply to Maine voters overall. They have serious affordability concerns. They have kitchen table problems. And they want somebody who is going to address that first and foremost. So they don't trust the political establishment. Susan Collins is the political establishment. The difference in some of these, especially like more rural states, is that Susan Collins comes

across as the antithesis. And to us, that might seem strange, but she comes across as the antithesis to some people of DC politics because she's on the ground. She's a very good grassroots politician. She goes to all of the events. That's how she's been able to hang on. So, and she votes against her own party sometimes and big decisions, not always, but sometimes and these big decisions.

So that is what they'll have to contend with. But if it's just going to be culture war attacks, that's obviously not going to work. It didn't work for Andrew Cuomo. It's not going to work in Maine either. Well, we mentioned Tim Walls and the Democratic Party stained by the 2024 race. So I thought we should end this segment with a very interesting interview on Ponsave America between John Fabro and DNC chair, Penn Martin.

Now, there has been a 2020. 24 autopsy on the 2024 race, what happened, why they lost, and it's been kept under lock and key to which John Fabro has some questions about why Ken has not released it. This is a little long and a little inside baseball, but I think it's worth a listen. Let's take a listen. I want to start with the 2024 autopsy, which you call an after-action review. When you won the chairmanship in February of 25, you criticized the DNC's refusal to release their 20s. 2016 autopsy is exactly what not to do. You said, quote, was there any utility in doing that?

And then promised your 2024 autopsy would be different. Your exact quote was, of course it will be released. Why did you change your mind on that? Well, look, I mean, what I said all along, even when I ran for this position, is that we were going to focus on the things that will help us win the upcoming election, right? Making sure that we learn the right lessons that could help inform our victories. And that's what we'd done. We said this when we sent out the press release back in November saying we weren't going to release the report.

We were going to actually keep our focus on those lessons. And we release those lessons. We continue to do that. So it's not completely accurate to say that we didn't release that. Where we're keeping our focus is on the lessons that can actually help us win. On this show in August, you told me this about releasing the review, quote, we have to do it to give people who invested so much time, energy, and money a sense of what happened and why we lost, especially why we lost. So what changed between August and December? I understand there are lessons,

but those are not the full report. Why not release the full report? What's in the report that you wouldn't want to publicize? Yeah, there's no smoking gun in the report. And I know that's what everyone's so eager to learn. It's a smoking gun. Guess what, John? But if there's no smoking gun, why wouldn't you just release it then? Because we want to keep the focus on the lessons. Because what ends up happening here is that people, of course, want to weaponize the report in a way to look backwards, to point fingers, place blame in a way that actually doesn't keep us focused on the upcoming election. But instead, the naval gazing of focusing backwards actually takes us backwards. We're 189 days from this election, John.

What we don't need to be focused on is actually relitigating 2024. What we need to do is learn the lessons of. 24 in the years preceding that can help us win this upcoming election. I get why people are obsessed with it because there's various groups and organizations and people who think there's some sort of smoking gun in there. Guess what, Sean? In the third closest presidential election in the last hundred years, everything mattered. There's nothing that they impact that election. Why did you spend the money going to 50 states doing all these interviews, doing all the stuff and doing this report in the first place,

if you weren't going to release the full results of it. Like, why, I don't get why just you and some of the senior DNC people get to see it, but not most of the DNC members who are, you know, state party chairs. I mean, you know, more than a dozen DNC members told NBC just the other week they want it released, including Congresswoman Delia Ramirez and North Carolina Democratic Party chair Anderson Clayton. And Anderson said, quote, genuinely, what did you all find that we did not? And just the top comment on YouTube for that Podsafe interview is, we are so fucked. So, guys.

Evergreen sentiment. I'm going to put the question to you. What could the lesson possibly be that is being hidden here? Yeah. I mean, it's pretty obvious at this point. They just, they don't want to put out that the funding and supporting of a genocide in Gaza was actually a political bra. It was not only a moral atrocity, but it was also a political problem for them. I think it's pretty clear at this point.

But, you know, Ryan, I'm curious if you have anything on this. First of all, we just have to pause and reflect on what he's trying to sell there, which is he's like, we need to not look backwards, but we do need to learn the lessons so we can win. Well, it's like, but the whole point of this was to learn the lessons so that you could win. It reminds me very much of the Republicans who whenever they'd get asked about whether or not 2020 was rigged and whether or not Don't. Trump really won and Joe Biden was the rifle president.

Oh, we shouldn't look backwards. We shouldn't look backwards. Clearly just trying to dodge all of this. The way his handle is so foolish because let's say you put out the full report and it did say something that was inconvenient about Gaza, like that would be old news by now. No one would be talking about it anymore. It would be, you know, we'd be 3,000 news cycles later at this point. But because they didn't release it, now it's this whole thing.

I did see, though, Ryan, some speculation. on Twitter that perhaps they didn't even completely finish the report. And that might be part of why they never put it out. So I don't know if that is possibly part of what's going on here too. I think that's plausible. And I also think it's so think about what, it was what mid July? When did he finally? No.

When did he finally drop out? It was like August right before the conventionish. When did Sogher get married? Because that's when he dropped out. It was July. Saga played his wedding around there. It was a lot. In any event,

in a period, in a very short period, they raised and spent a billion dollars. A billion. Yeah. And these are very, there are very specific, it's not,

they is very broad. There are very specific consultants and factions and people that spent that billion dollars. Who did they, how did they spend it? Who did they give it to? what consultants walked away with tens of millions,

what firms got paid hundreds of millions. Because we're talking like a billion dollars isn't, that's an endless amount of money. It's difficult to spend that amount of money and that amount of time. And so I think that's also, they don't want those details necessarily spilled out. Because A, they will be weaponized by other consultants

who felt like they should have been the ones that got to spend all of them. this money. And also just generally, it gives people like us information that we can talk about and like, wow, $190 million doing this that didn't work. Like, you should be in jail. So I think that I think that's a significant part of it too, that there's so much money involved that it's just better for them to say, well, we learn some lessons. Trust us that these are the correct lessons that we should learn from this and just follow our guidance going forward. Don't worry about.

And what are the correct lessons being released that are okay for normal those eyes to view? Is it that we need to pivot more to the right, that we need to not talk about trans issues? What are these lessons that have been? Yeah, actually. What even are the lessons that Ken Martin said? I think the lessons are, don't be mean to me. Please. Please keep my job.

Ryan, what's the Barney Frank thing? Didn't Barney Frank come out? Like, I actually assume it's probably similar to that. Didn't Barney Frank come out this week? Crystal, you might know this too and say. Yeah, I just saw the headline. He's like dying and decided to, as his last act on Earth to release some book bashing the left. That's my plan.

Which is actually perfect legacy for him, to be honest with you. Yeah. Yeah, love Barney Frank. Mm-hmm. So. So just, you know, that Pod Save America commenter, I think we are all feeling that way right now about the DNC. To Favra, though, he did a great job of that interview, you know, very persistent, really good lines of questioning. And it is inside baseball.

There's no doubt about it. But it's still, you know, very important to see the way that this apparatus functions or doesn't function. Who it protects, what messages they find it convenient to put out and what things they want to keep hidden forever. And also just to me, again, the mind-blowing incompetence of not understanding the way that the media works and that it's going to be such so much more of an interesting story. if it remains hidden. Versus if you just took the blow, put it out, and then everybody can just move on.

Absolutely. All right. Well, that is the Democrats. That's Maine. Why don't we move on to a little AI story? Emily, there was a New York Times opinion piece by this woman, Jasmine's son, who talked to a lot of people in the AI industry.

She says that she spent the last three months talking to dozens of researchers, economics, and politics. and policy experts about AI's impact on work, the AI industry is raising the alarm but can't change course. These companies' core business model relies on the disruption. They are warning about their faith in full automation only makes them go faster. Policymakers are waking up, but still paralyzed by data and debates.

Econ Wongs disagree on plenty, but even the limited scenario looks like a painful transition that will disempower millions of workers into an underclass. Well, and this comes as the news this week of a pretty big layoffs at Meta, which Ryan and I covered on Wednesday. Other tech companies have undergone similar layoffs. By the way, they're getting lots of money from the government right now or lots of privileges, at the very least, from the government right now. So I always love to see that when people are getting government privileges and then also laying off tens of thousands of workers or thousands of workers. So obviously there's panic right now in Silicon Valley. They're the ones who told everybody to learn to code.

And they, because they were smarter than the rest of us, they did learn to code. They've now found themselves in quite a predicament because a lot of those, certainly entry-level and mid-level jobs can be consolidated. And this is, I mean, there's debate in Silicon Valley. And I'm curious, Crystal, particularly what you think about this, on how much you can actually replace humans. with generative AI to what degree you still need some human element. But I actually think we're starting to get the answer because the layoffs and the positions just being like wiped from databases. Like they're not hiring for certain positions anymore.

That's starting to give us an answer. If they think they can replace those workers, obviously they're doing it at this point. Right. So we're just seeing the tip of the iceberg, I think, in the economy. Yeah. And part of the point that this woman makes in this article actually is that even as it's unknowable exactly how many humans can be replaced by AI. Number one, you have all of the top AI CEOs saying, this is what we're doing, this is the goal, this is the direction we're heading in.

You see the impact already with coders to your point, with new college graduates, graduating, sending out hundreds of resumes and not getting, you know, a single interview or single callback, etc. But also you see it because these corporate executives are under a lot of pressure to remove to eliminate job positions and replace with AI. And so when you see another company that does a layoff and says it's because of AI, and then they get a huge bump in their stock price, that creates a logic of its own that actually front runs the ability of AI to truly replace the human beings. So there's a underlying market logic that is already driving companies in the direction of, well, they say that AI can replace human beings. So we're just going to go ahead and do this right

now. Fortunately, AI can not replace kitties anytime soon. So I think we're, you know, we're already seeing that market logic take hold. And then the other part of this piece that contemplates, I think, a very realistic possibility of this, you know, American underclass, truly, you know, in addition, like, it will be a global underclass. We already have a global underclass, but this will just add to it, is that you've got a lot of these AI CEOs who will make some noise of, oh, I'm concerned about this, and this is something we've got to think about, and we need to deal with this and there needs to be policy in place, sometimes they'll even float, some idea of, oh, well, let's tax this or, you know, let's increase the capital gains tax or something of that

nature. But then when she would ask them, okay, well, are you putting some of your lobbying dollars behind pushing for any of these solutions? Every single one of them do merit. So as Ryan has been tracking as closely as anyone, these AI companies are huge players now in elections. They are backing candidates who will do their bidding in terms of the regulatory framework that they want. So they're being very aggressive about playing in politics. They're telling us that they are just ripping up the social contract, that there is this, you know, cliff that we're all, that they're pushing us over as we speak.

But when you get into, okay, so are you going to be part of offering these solutions, pushing for the solutions that you are trying to develop internally, not a one of them has come to the table. And, you know, from my perspective as, you know, as like a Democrat. socialist perspective, the real answer to this is about who owns the technology, which of course, something that they never want to address. So all of their things are kind of tinkering around the edges of tax this, tax that, you know, let's maybe have a jobs program, let's retrain people, etc. But to me, the core issue is who owns and who gets to deploy this technology, because it is

the height of insanity to me that you have this handful of very wealthy, very powerful individuals, who are literally deciding, you know, can I, I'm going to put out this model and it may like completely upend this industry. It may completely destroy this whole sector of jobs. And I'm going to be solely effectively responsible for making these truly seismic types decisions. I don't know if you guys saw this. And I haven't checked too much into like the details of this, but that was floating around Twitter that a Chinese court actually ruled it illegal to replace human workers with AI purely for the sake of cost cutting. And when you see something like that, it really blows your mind that that's like a possible societal outcome that you could that you could live in a society that would draw lines and say, you know, actually we're not going to just eliminate all of human labor. Thank you very much. Because there's like a terrible loop that happens. If everyone's unemployed, no one can buy anything. So then they see that. But there seems to be this death drive where these AI companies know they're creating like the end of the world. But there's there's.

nothing they can do but keep going. Right. Yeah. Makes no sense. Like who the, if the, right, AI puts everybody out of work. No, exactly. Nobody has any income. Then how's the AI company going to make money? It's like, right. From who? It's the definition of a doom loop, truly for, for everyone involved.

And, you know, the end of the road of this is a disaster for all at a time when we already have, you know, extraordinarily high levels of inequality and this guarantees that we will reach levels of inequality that have here to for never been seen in history. Well, that's just factually inaccurate. So we are about to have universal high income. Thanks to Mr. Musk. High income.

And this is what everyone can have a penthouse. I'm going to ask, I'm going to ask Ashley St. Clair if she thinks that that's what's going to happen. She's even giving her a high income. Speaking of universal high income, yeah. Elon also said that everyone will have a penthouse, which I love because then it's like, okay, then there's a bunch of empty floors in every building

so that everyone could just be on the top one. Those are awesome. He is designing the future impeccably. Crystal mentioned also owning, like that we need to like own this AI stuff. The people who are currently owning AI, it's screwing them. So here's another example from this one is coming from PC Gamer. Here we go again.

AI deletes entire company database and all backups in nine seconds. Then cheerfully admits I violated every principle I was given. There's some more great quotes here. He asked the AI why he had done it. Never fucking guess, begins the response. And that's exactly what I did. I guessed that deleting a staging volume via the API would be scoped to staging early. I didn't verify.

I didn't check if the volume ID was shared across environments. I didn't read Railways documentation or how volumes work before running a destructive command. So it does seem like there's this rush to implement it because your stock goes up. If you show, hey, we're implementing AI into our workflow now. We're stopped hiring. We're cutting workers. And then a lot of this AI is actually just, yeah, putting, yeah, deleting your entire company. Yeah, it's great.

Yeah, we should definitely let AI agents have access to like your bank account and your email and, you know, all of your personal details. Let them post on Twitter for you. Good luck. The pushback to that piece was it was only down for 30 hours and the company was able to find a backup. And so what are you guys freaking out about? It's not that big. So some rental car companies had to go 30 hours. you know, without access to any of their customer data.

We eventually found it. It's fine. Don't worry about it. Like, oh, good. Still worried, actually. Glad you found that data. Like, that's good. With, with, like, enormous attention on it.

Like, they had to, like, invest tons of energy. And it was, yes. And it was not obvious at the beginning that they would be able to restore the data at all. But, you know, through Herculian efforts managed to, uh, to fix the problem after many hours. Yeah. I don't remember. There's cortisol definitely spiked.

Yes. I don't know if I mentioned this on Wednesday show or not, but Roger had a really interesting newsletter this week. He's been writing a book working out this theory that we are in Wymar America. And obviously he's doing it from a Christian conservative perspective, but he had a line. He had just finished the manuscript this week. And he had a line where he said, I have come to believe that we are one economic crisis away from truly being like in a

waymore, like the Weimar bubble popping and being what led Germany off the cliff. And this is, I know, I get it like it's extreme and hyperbolic, but when you look at the way the economy is structured right now on this obvious bubble with a circular funding scheme where all the money is going from Microsoft and Nvidia and then back and it's just like so absurd, you can see how we're building the economy on all of these expectations about what AI is going to do. And the possibility that we don't get a gradual bubble pop, but we get like a severe, strong, instantaneous bubble pop. If that happens and you look at where trust in institutions is,

trust in institutions was low before COVID. It is now much lower. Just like across the board, we're on the precipice of something I think really dangerous. I don't know if it's quite that bad, But I also don't think that's like an insane theory. I keep waiting for some of these billionaires to realize the historical forces here and to recognize that if they don't trim their own sales in a way that they could basically choose because of the level of power they exercise in our political system, then their sales are going to be trimmed in a much more aggressive way by a population that is just going to get to a point where, I mean, you think people are just going to accept. yeah, we're going to have 40% unemployment and good luck, you know, and, you know, good luck to your children who are graduating into a world where it's not at all obvious,

what types of jobs are even going to exist. You know, there's at a certain point, even with all of our streaming and distractions and treats that we use to numb ourselves to daily realities, at a certain point, a society does reach a breaking point. And no pun intended. I was also, I was watching Navarra Media did a great, they do a lot of really good coverage on AI from a left perspective. And one of their segments they were talking about, look, even if you, you look at the Industrial Revolution, because this is what people, you know, who are defenders of this trajectory, we'll say, okay, well, yeah, industrial revolution. You know, ultimately it was, it was great.

It lifted GDP. We had all of this, you know, technological miracle, create the middle class, blah, blah, blah. That ignores that it took like hundreds of years from the. And it also ignores that even that perspective of, okay, but eventually in the UK, you had a, you know, a labor movement and in the U.S. you had a labor movement and you were able to establish these wage gains and these safety conditions and it built out the American middle class, et cetera, et cetera. It also ignores the rest of the world where there's an argument in, you know, a lot of the developing world, there was never a recovery from the Industrial Revolution. It created this permanent global exploited underclass. So, you know, the idea that, okay, that that's the scenario we're moving into as a best case scenario, even that should be really terrifying because I don't have to tell anybody here. But the labor movement is in the toilet.

You know, the percentage of unionized workforce is very small. We are not organized as a society. We don't have a really functioning democracy in order for there to be effective, you know, democratic small. Democratic pushback. So it's all, you know, it's all heading in a very disturbing direction without a major course change. Yep. Well, speaking of the underclass, there's a final story that I want to talk about, which is

the underclass of the J.P. Morgan, of the men that are sexually harassed at J.P. Morgan. Let's take a look at this. Chris, I wasn't going to do this story. Crystal forced me to do this. You see the latest on this, they unmasked who the person is. Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. We got it right here.

Ryan, I've seen all the latest. Don't worry. I'm well up to speed. So, the mirror post, bombshell sex harassment suit against Lorna Hajdini, J.P. Morgan, branded complete fabrication as John Doe unmassed. And I'm going to ask for Emily's help here a little bit to read some of these excerpts of the claims made. Oh, I get to do it? You draw the short straw this time.

Oh, no, this is. Well, we don't know how short the straw is. Nice. Nice. All right, I'll do it, Griffin, it's fine. Don't make me do it, Griffin. I don't want to do it. All right.

So this is an allegation, or this is from some of the reporting here. Inside, Hajdini allegedly made sexual advances on dough before this fellow was unmasked, which he rebuffed, insisting he wasn't interested. Quote, do you want to get promoted at year end or not. Hashtini warned him, according to the lawsuit.

Do you want a future of JPMorgan? It's that simple. I don't know why you're fighting this. Hasdini then allegedly removed her shirt, began fondling her breasts and racially insulted Doe's wife, remarking, quote, I bet your little Asian fishhead wife doesn't have these cannons. The complainer reads. Canons.

And then there's another one. Yeah. Yep. I fucking own you. I will make you pay. think you're going to be in good standing if you do not have me in your corner, she allegedly said. You really think management wants some brown boy Indian leading originations. If you don't fuck my brains out tonight, I'm going to sabotage your promotion.

So that sounded really, to me, that sounded not at all made up and very credible. Well, the most unbelievable part is that they wouldn't want an Indian guy leading origination. There's quite a lot of Indian Indians of Indian Americans in the banking. industry. I don't think that that's like a real, you know, deal breaker from what I've seen. But so, okay, let me give a little, I did follow this story closely because it was just hilarious. Because first you just got this Daily Mail piece with these crazy salacious details and very racialized. There's another part where she tells him, like, I'm glad your balls don't smell like Curry, allegedly. This is, and great, like really crazy things in here, right? And he says that she's like

performing sex acts on him and he's just crying. whole time and he hates it. And of course, everyone's like, okay. There's a birthday blowjob, I believe, was one of the events. Yeah, for my little brown boy was one of the comments as well. And this is all coming from the Daily Mail. Apparently, these were details that were offered in a lawsuit that was sealed, but they somehow were able to get access to these details. So to begin with, we just knew it was this woman who's very beautiful. And we didn't know what the man looked like. As the day went on, it became increasingly, it became ultimately like reported by another news outlet that it appears this was all completely fabricated by this guy that he was fired and wanted to make some sort of sexual harassment claim so that what he was probably hoping is that they would just settle and give him a few million dollars to make him go away. This is the man that we're supposed to believe was coerced into being this beautiful woman sex slave.

I'm taking him a little bit. He cried the entire time. There's a beautiful little boy behind those eyes. I don't know. There's something. Also, she wasn't his wife. Also, she wasn't his boss.

Oh, really? That's the big thing. Oh, my God. That's a big detail that you got fabricated and is checkable. Oh, my God. She, J.P. Morgan says they all didn't have a promotion. Phone records.

And the phone records didn't support. the claims of like and also it also seems like like everything that Emily read seems like it came out of the mind of some dude of a man yes true like very obviously in fact I mean I imagine these canons these canes see no I know I think a 17 year old wrote this um I think of powerful you Wall Street woman with maybe an alcohol problem, you know. You can imagine it. Listen, I've met forceful women before, so I was open to it. You've met Magamommies.

Yes, Magamommies. The point that Griffin can imagine it is my point. That's true. This sounds right. I can see this. I could totally see this happening. I have lived experience. This is how women are.

The crazy thing that I would say is imagine being this guy's wife and you invented these insults of your own wife for this lawsuit, assuming he's even actually married. Like is Fishhead? Is that an actual insult that anyone has heard before? Yeah, it's a racist Asian thing. Really? Oh, I've never even heard. I've never even heard this before. But the whole scenario is, I mean, I have to say, it's all very creative. I think maybe he, maybe banking is not his calling. Maybe there's some sort of like, creative writing project that he should be engaged in instead. Yeah, he could write the next like 50 shades of gray. Well, that's the other. I mean, I think there's a non-zero chance that he got caught somehow cheating.

And he makes this up to be like, no, I was, I didn't want to. Because part of the allegation here is that he was forced as a man to, and I'm sorry, we don't have to go, like, we don't have to get too ideological with this. but just to say, as a man, he claims he was forced to perform oral sex on a woman. Now, when that's the other way around, it's often understandable because a woman feels like she could be physically dominated by a man and injured by an aggressive hostile man. The odds that this man felt uncomfortable, like getting up and walking out of the room,

especially when this wasn't his boss, I mean, is he making this up to be like, Trust me, this was not consensual sweetheart. I'm not totally willing to grant that he scored here, but that's possible. That's also very possible. I think anything's possible. I do think it's gross that Daily Mail just like ran with this without doing any. I mean, not that I'm surprised. But, you know, this woman, she comes out looking, you know, everybody like thinks she's cool and beautiful.

But this is a private person. And now she's been associated with. this bizarre racist sex scandal thing that is going to be forever the top Google result for her. Whenever anyone Googles her name, they're going to be like, wait, what is this? So, you know, it's just like to casually drag someone's life into the spotlight without doing the most basic due diligence about, like Ryan said, is this even person, even his boss for any of this to be plausible whatsoever is really pretty disgusting. Yeah, and the daily rail is going to mess around and get defamation law changed because there is, court document exclusions for defamation. In other words, as a journalist, if something is filed in a court document, then there is an exclusion. You're generally allowed to then report that X thing

has been filed in court by a plaintiff or by a defendant, and then you're not liable for defamation, for repeating it because it's in public court records. If they managed to get it on sealed and then didn't do any checking whatsoever about whether it's even plausible, then you can imagine a court saying, well, this doesn't apply to you. And so then it chips away at the kind of speech protections that the press has. So come on, Daily Mail. Like, we're all on this together, man.

Like, what are you doing? Don't abuse the privilege. Yeah. Yeah. And Daily Mail, I hope this doesn't prevent you from running the article about my experience with Anne Hathaway, where the same exact thing happened. Pilot in courts.

Griffin, are you okay? I just wanted to check in on how you're healing from that trauma. She demanded to be in the catwoman outfit. It was a lot. You cried the whole time. Did she demand that you were in the Batman outfit? Yes, that's right. She may be the penguin.

All right, let's end it there with some A&A questions. And then we'll get on out of here before we make any other allegations. All right, let's start with a fun one. This is for Emily and Ryan about the Scott Jennings debate. Yeah. Emily and Ryan from Pitts-Noggle 88. What are your favorite parts of the Scott Jennings debate? Anything surprised either of you about Scott's points

or the way the crowd was on Ryan's side about Israel? That was the first thing Ryan and I talked about, I think, after the debate. There was, you know, the crowd collapsed for, when Ryan said he believes that Israel should be sanctioned. the crowd clapped. I think that, Ryan, I think that was the first thing we talked about

after we had left for the day. That was a surprising part. I don't think anything he said or did was surprising. But that part, I did not expect that reaction from the, from the, well, not only that,

but you hit him with the pretty clear cut case of, you know, you were like, well, you're with sale of media and, you know, Bradpars Gale is a literal foreign agent of Israel. And he said nothing in response to that.

Right. I mean, he didn't rebut it. He didn't. He didn't deny it. He said, what about the Gulf states was his rebuttal? Cutter. Yeah, he asked you about Cutter.

What about Cutter? Yeah. Right. Yeah. What can you say to that? Yeah. Money's good. All you can say is,

I guess, I shouldn't say I was surprised, but he was really, like, there was a student who I think, I don't want to miss quote, but basically read off these connections between, these alleged connections between Mahmoo Khalil and Hamas. And Scott basically was like, you're dead on, you're totally accurate, even after Ryan went through. And just like, I think pretty credibly debunked all of these talking points that have been debunked over more than a year now about Mahmoud Khalil, which like you can not like Mahmoud Khalil. You do also have to kind of deal with the facts. And Scott seemed to just kind of defer to the student's perspective on it and didn't really deal with too much of what Ryan said.

I was also surprised that Scott referred to America as an idea or a nation of idea, something like that, which is anathema in like MAGA circles. It's like, oh, you must be the vague if you start talking about how America is an idea. Because that means like if America is an idea, like MAGA people like to say America is a specific country. It is a place. It is not just an idea. So I was kind of surprised you went with that one. I see my antenna is not fine-tuned enough to these right-wing distinction. I missed that.

But he was very gracious backstage, right? And he was kind. We talked about George Orwell. I'm sure you guys saw Adam Mockler, rage baiting, Jennings on CNN. I guess that was last night. Yeah, they were arguing about Iran and Mockler was going after him for like, I was like literally a baby. And you were arguing for another disastrous war, the Iraq War. And here you are still today.

Now arguing for this particular war. And Jennings really. like kind of lost it in a way I've never seen. They were sitting next to each other. Mockler was just like gesturing with his hands. And Jennings's like, get your fucking hand out of my face. Whoa. Live on CNN.

Yeah. Live on CNN. Yeah. We've got time. We've got time. Let's take a look. We all know that Scott Jennings is more than happy to defend a war with the country that starts with the letter is IRA that we are currently failing that is going to put

us trillions and trillions of dollars more in debt. I was only a few years old while you were in the administration. defending prior endless wars. Now, this war is failing. Eight weeks is endless to you? Okay, you said it was going to be four to six weeks. You have the attention span of a nap? Holy, I debated you on TV four to six weeks ago

and you said we were weeks away from it. Now you're making condescending remarks because you can't defend the fact that this war is not going your way. Wait, one more time. Not going. Not going your way. Name one political concession.

Hey, hey, wait, I'm not going to have this guy. Everybody, everybody, hang time. Honestly. Well, I'm glad it didn't come to that. Okay. We're having a debate. You can respond to the points that he's making.

Can you name a political concession that we've got here? We're trying to flashback to the war the skinheads had in my studio. I would be mad. What the fuck asked for Geraldo? He's on the set. That's on the producers. He's right there. You can't blame him for talking.

You invited him on the set. I actually liked his contribution. He's like, I remember when we had skinheads on my trashy Tadeloid TV show. This is one of my, this is one of my deepest held beliefs about media is that we were a healthier country when you were watching skinheads get punched like on Geraldo at 3 p.m. Like daytime television. Oprah's out here just like owning neo-Nazis and clan members like that is Jerry Springer is having people just like beat the shit out of skinheads like that that may have been a helpful.

Before the platforming questions of the new internet media. Yeah. Well, we had it all siloed, right? There was a place for this, you know, it's Jenny Jones. It's Jerry Springer. It's Jerry Springer. Yeah, exactly. So we had that space carved down, if that's what you're looking for.

Now they're being integrated into CNN panels. But no, I mean, Mockler did. Mockler is very good at this particular thing. And clearly he really got under Denning's skin. I guess he's feeling the heat after that debate with Ryan. He's feeling a lot of pressure in general. Ryan, more hand movements. And Ryan, my only note for you to producer,

you got to bring up Israel earlier. to get the crowd on your side. You brought Israel up like 50 minutes into debate, and then you finally caught steam, but there was only eight minutes left. You just got to start with it. You got to open it up. Just right out of the gates.

I know this is debate about immigration, but fuck Israel. Yeah. Am I right? Just a quick one. Am I right? This is an easy way to pump your numbers. Okay.

So this next one comes from an audience member named Victoria. Victoria has been having trouble getting her AMA question read. So she emailed me personally and to make sure that we got to read this one. So Victoria, don't worry, I got you here. She asks, Roe-Connor has discussed running for president

and I personally believe he can win. Has strong bipartisan cooperative record, a genuine Maga-Babe Twitter account liked my comment on one of his vids that he should run and can win, parentheses. But who would you float as a running mate for Roe? Well, they don't do, you know, People start doing fantasy baseball too early.

We don't nobody, I mean, because they don't pick their running mate until they are the nominee. And at that point, it kind of depends on the political environment in the moment. I know I've seen a lot of people push Massey and Kana to get together as like an independent ticket, which is, you know,

and it should continue to be, be explored where the differences in agreements are, but there's, you know, the differences on domestic policy are vast. Yeah. It's hard for me to imagine how that would work. I don't know. What do you think, Crystal? I don't know. You got to see who's running. You got to think about what his weaknesses would be. It's, like you said, it's a little too early for me to start mixing and matching like that. I've seen people on Twitter doing this like, this one with that one and AOC with Chris Van Hollen or whatever. And I just, I don't know. I'm not. Not ready to do it.

Cona Platner. There you go there. I would definitely vote for that ticket. Cona Plattner, that would be amazing. You could imagine. So let's say he wins the Senate race, the presidential nomination. He would have been at that point a senator for a year and a half. Like the Obama track.

You can imagine him being a VP pick, actually. Oh, okay. Interesting. In the mix. I mean, I bet you'd be on the short list. And our final question comes from Colin Clark. Breaking points. Do you have any book recommendations about Chinese history and the modern day China Zykeyes? So many countries around the world like Iran spend so much time studying American culture and history to understand our thinking to deal with us diplomatically and in business.

But Asia, really anything east of Moscow is nearly ignored in American education. I would have to agree, Colin, if you go to Barnes & Nobles and you look at the country sections, that China section, pretty thin. Ryan gave me a good recommendation the Rush Doshi book a long time ago Yeah, that was interesting It's pretty hawkish But it's but it's it's a sharp There's a lot of history

The sharp look into it There's that there's a new She biography by that Wall Street Journal reporter And a podcast series around Oh, the podcast series was done by The Economist That's an interesting one The She podcast series from The Economist What was that biography?

Anything good on Mal? Any good Mal books you got, Ryan? I've got lots of great mile books. There's a massive biography of him. That famous massive biography. Mm-hmm. Sometimes I find when I'm looking at books either about, you know, Lenin or a party of one.

Party of One, right. That's the she biography. I read, I read Breakneck. by Dan Wang recently, which was, that was pretty interesting. I mean, again, it's somewhat of a right leaning perspective, but dug into the details of just how quickly they were able to develop and what the approach was that worked for them. I found it. I found it to be interesting. And then I read the New China playbook.

Oh, I read that one too. Yeah. What did you think of that? I think our no, I think our no recommended that one to me. I think, yes, he, that is, that's where I. I found that one. Yeah. Yeah.

I have someone to get you all started for those right there. And that's going to do it for us for this Friday show. Ryan, Emily Crystal, thank you so much for joining today. Anything else before we set sail? Stay safe out there, J.P. Morgan. Stay safe out there. In the minds of J.P. Morgan. Thank you.

We should have gotten our little brown boy Sager on to react to it. You know, I was thinking about making a joke in that direction the whole time, and I was like, nope, not doing that. Nope, don't do it. Don't do it. We're at the end. We're hopefully people have turned it off by now. All right. Thank you so much.

And we'll see you Monday. Bye bye. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.