Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 5/16/23: Workers FLEE Big Cities, AI Killing Office Jobs, SCOTUS Legalizes Corruption, Trump BLASTS DeSantis, DeSantis Hits Back, DEI Failures, Russia-gate Exposed, Boomer Wealth Transfer & AI Destroying Journalism

Episode Date: May 16, 2023

Krystal and Saagar discuss workers fleeing big cities like NY/DC, AI killing office jobs, SCOTUS legalizing corruption in Cuomo aide case, Trump and DeSantis fighting over 2020/abortion, NYT admitting DEI programs are failing, Obama/Hillary caught in Russia-gate scheme in Durham report, Jake Tapper admitting the FBI's failures, Boomer wealth transfer and AI potentially wreaking havoc on the future of journalism.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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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 morning. Some really interesting economic trends, some of which point in opposite directions. We want to break all of that down for you. Quite fascinating data that is coming out. Also, the Supreme Court with a unanimous ruling on corruption, very much limiting what the definition of corruption even is. So that's interesting to dig into as well as involves a former Andrew Cuomo aide. So kind of a remarkable case there. We also have Trump hitting DeSantis on abortion and pro-life groups hitting Trump on abortion. So a lot going on there in the GOP primary. We have a bit of a reckoning within the diversity and inclusion industry and a totally nonsense piece from the New York Times

that we've got to break down for you. That Durham report, long-awaited, is out with some pretty remarkable conclusions there and some pretty remarkable reactions from CNN. And we're also very excited because today, assuming everything works out and it's looking good, we're going to have a big sit down interview with RFK Jr. right here in the studio. And we're getting a good amount of time to talk to him as well. That's right. So RFK Jr. will be joining us here at the desk, the beautiful desk here in studio after the show. Here's how it's going to work. So as we've always promised our premium subscribers, they're going to get the first crack at the interview almost immediately after it's wrapped. We'll have it edited and then we will send it out, publish it on the podcast and send it out as an email to all of our premium subs. We will release

a clip later today from the RFK interview. but if you want to watch the full thing first and support our work, our ability to convene, you know, things like this, breakingpoints.com, you can become a premium member today. Otherwise, the full interview will be available for everyone tomorrow.

And promises, you know, and all that, we're not editing anything. We're not cutting anything. It will be the full uncut. There's no, you know, there's nothing being done. No funny business. Effectively, no ABC news over here, which will cut out full uncut. There's no, you know, there's nothing being done effectively.

No ABC News over here, which will cut out whatever he said. He can say whatever he wants, whatever he says, we will publish it. By the way, YouTube, that's not necessarily an endorsement. That's right. He genuinely is one of the most censored people on the planet. So from where that comes from, it's not an endorsement, but we will publish it nonetheless. And if they decide to take it down, well, that's their decision. We'll make sure that it lives elsewhere for everybody to consume because we believe in democracy here, not censorship.

Yeah, and we want to treat RFK Jr. just like we have other presidential candidates that we've interviewed. Of course. There's a lot of issues that I haven't heard him speak to that we want to get him on the record on and see what his thoughts are about how he would govern if he was, in fact, president of the United States. So big sit down interview with him. Super excited about that. We're going to schedule one with Marianne as well. She's obviously been on the show before, but we haven't done a full proper, you know, let's dig into the weeds of what your agenda is. And, of course, Joe Biden, you're always invited on the program as well.

Listen, I would love to make it happen. We put requests into the White House before. Yeah, not holding my breath, but listen, we would love to do the same treatment with the current president of the United States as well. And Trump and DeSantis. Absolutely. Absolutely. 100% interested in talking to all of them. All right, let's go ahead and get to some big economic news this morning.

New York Times with a deep dive into some pretty fascinating migration trends, which are a stark contrast with recent history in terms of the United States. Go ahead and put this up on the screen. Coastal cities priced out low-wage workers. Now college graduates are leaving too. And what they're tracking here, and you can see on this first graphic, this is the San Francisco numbers. You can see those blue bars. For years, you had a net influx of college grads heading to the largest metros, these superstar cities that seem to be gobbling up all the wealth and all the top graduates from all the top schools. For years and years, that was the case. Well, just recently, that has flipped, and you now have net out migration from these top-tier cities of college graduates. Let me just show you some more of the numbers here from other top cities around the country, and then we can dig into why this is happening.

So these are the numbers for D.C. You can see, again, for years, you had a net influx of college graduates. Now, over the past couple of years, really post-pandemic, you have net out migration. So college graduates leaving the very expensive, we can attest to, city of Washington, D.C. Let's take a look at the numbers in New York. Now, New York, this trend is longer standing. You have a lot of red here over the past decade of college graduates leaving this extraordinarily expensive city. And if we put all of this together, just put up this one last slide here, you can see there the

number of college graduates who in recent years have been leaving the 12 most expensive large metro areas. But in other large metros outside of that top 12, they are still gaining college graduates. So it really is a very select phenomenon that reflects the extraordinarily high cost of housing and cost of just living in general in these top tier, most expensive cities in the whole country. And as I said before, this really reverses a trend that has been going on for the past several decades where those cities seem to be a magnet for nearly everything. Now, with people, Sagar, I think in particular, having a kind of a, you know, reset during the pandemic, not in the nefarious term. Yes, that's right.

Version of the word. Although maybe. I mean, you know, and people being sort of forced to rethink what their priorities in life were, forced out of the workplace. And now there's a positive side to this, which is a lot more workers, huge numbers of workers having the opportunity to choose, do I want to be fully remote? Do I want to be fully in the office? Do I want to have a hybrid work model? That also opens up more flexibility where it's like, why am I going to live in some tiny, expensive apartment in New York City when I can move to a second tier city, a Louisville or an Austin, which still has all of these urban amenities, but is much less expensive. And I'm still earning my New York City salary. So many college graduates are making that choice. And it could have huge ramifications for,

you know, future economy of the whole country. I want to balance some of my thoughts here. And I've done monologues and stuff on this before. So first, let's start with the good and just the interesting. The good news is I believe in mobility. And I believe that ossified places, place like here, Washington, D.C., New York City, places where they still have these things called broker fees. If you are not from this area, Google it. It's one of the most insane things that exist in a real estate market. New York apartment hunt. Oh, it's not.

It's madness. Terrible. You're just getting robbed left, right. So, you know, to see brokers out of their fees. Yeah, I'm going to smile. OK, so that's a good thing. Washington, D.C., New York City, San Francisco, I have family members and or friends who have probably lived in every metro area in the country in the last five years. That was the thing to do. Now, without fail, almost all of them have moved.

Now, why did they move? And almost entirely it's because cost of living, crime, and just the general feeling that this is not the place that I need to be anymore, especially given the fact that I can get more bang for my buck outside. And this is having dramatic changes. Let's go to the interesting part. Because interestingly, if just 10% of the white-collar workforce moves in some way in the next, let's say, five years, this is from Derek Thompson at The Atlantic, it will be the largest internal migration in the United States since World War II. So this alone, you cannot underestimate how much this will change everything because internal migration doesn't only change the tax base of different states. It changes the political makeup of states.

Arizona is going to become way more purple because of the incoming number of people, both from California, but across the entire U.S. Idaho, for example, Boise, Idaho had one of the most booming real estate markets in the United States because of its proximity to California. But let's not forget that with changing politics, not only changes electoral maps, that's how Atlanta and Georgia become purple as well, but also places like Ohio with net out migration are going to become more red. Here's the issue. By and large, this is only a white collar phenomenon. Right.

And actually, it's becoming worse for a lot of rural and working class people who already lived in these set areas. Can we throw up the emerging divide graphic, please? The share of working Americans who moved in the previous year. But what you can see there is that in 2020, a massive spike occurred with those with college degrees. But the overall downtrend of the share of working age Americans without a college degree has gone down dramatically after the pandemic. We are now around 12%, whereas above 15% about 15 years ago. The reason why that matters is that mobility for non-white-collar workers is incredibly important

for them to also be able to take advantage of all of those benefits. So I am hearing story after story of, I lived in Charlotte my whole life. I was able to rent an apartment for X number of dollars. Now all of these workers from New York City are here and I have to move 45 minutes out. I have to drive in and I'm screwed. And now I'm paying the same amount of money for less house or for a longer commute. I have to pay more in gas and I'm farther away from being able

to save up from a house that was near my parents. I'm hearing this literally constantly from people who live in places like Charlotte or Boise or Phoenix or even, I mean, Austin at this point is like New York City, but let's even San Antonio, Houston, Dallas, all these places had major internal migration over the last couple of years. I did a monologue in the past of breaking down all those exact cities. Basically, if you live in the Sunbelt, like Atlanta or even elsewhere, somewhere in Florida, you are going to have a real hard time if you did not get the same wage increase, you don't have the same mobility of the person who has a white-collar thing. So we both have benefits, but we also have a lot of minuses. Yeah, so the downside is that this creates an unequal situation where white-collar workers are,

they have the flexibility, they have the hybrid work situation or full remote situation. They can move wherever they want, but still earn the coastal city salaries that they were earning previously, or take, you know, a relatively moderate cut off of those that's more than made up for by the cost of living going down in the places they're moving to. The downside is definitely, as you're saying, Sagar, that people who already live in those places who are seeing housing prices now go up. Now, they're not matching the expense of like a San Francisco or an L.A. or New York, but they're seeing significant increases in terms of housing prices and other, you know, other like just basic cost of living expenses. That's obviously going to be an issue for them. The other bright side, though, is that, you know, we've had this incredibly unequal economic growth across the country.

And it has fed a lot of, you know, very divisive and polarizing politics, too, where you have these couple of superstar megacities that are generating a disproportionate amount of the growth and the jobs and the economic activity, et cetera. And for the working class people who have been living in those major metro areas, it's been a positive because the jobs are there. It's been a dramatic negative because the influx of all of those people has made the cost of living so wildly unexpensive that it's just completely insane. So there are also benefits to potentially having economic growth more evenly distributed

across the country. We don't have these graphics made, but if you dig into this piece, it's not just the next tier of cities that college-educated workers are moving to. It's also small cities. It's also even rural America and small town America.

Now, this is a group of workers that, for better or worse, have been really catered to and sought after. Cities have gone out of their way to try to figure out, like, what if we create an arts district and attract this or that coffee shop? How do we bring in this group of people? Shops are nice. Let's not get out of hand. I'm not saying anything's wrong with coffee shops, but they've gone out of their way to attract this group of people. And it will be a benefit to the country if you have more evenly distributed college-educated workers everywhere across the country, if you have economic activity being generated in more towns and cities across the country, and not just in these major metro urban areas. So like you said, there's definitely, there's silver linings here. There's good, there's bad. More than anything,

it's just fascinating to see the way that this could remake both our politics and also our economy. Even a small shift in where workers are going when they're coming out of college, what that looks like in terms of the national landscape can be incredibly transformative. I also thought it was really interesting, you know, they interviewed some of the people here who had made this choice to move out of a New York City or move out of an LA, move out of a San Francisco. And they say for these high education workers, it's not so easy to separate those who can't afford a city from those who can but leave anyway. Affordability is relative and personal. For one person, it's not so easy to separate those who can't afford a city from those who can but leave anyway. Affordability is relative and personal. For one person, it means making rent. For another,

it means making enough to also join a gym, buy concert tickets, and dine out regularly. Even a professional who can afford all of that in New York may still eventually sour on the sixth floor walk-up in the laundromat that comes with it. They describe things like, you know, the people that have made this move describe mention wanting furniture that couldn't fit in a New York elevator, having a home office with a door that closes, not just cheaper housing but washing machines, walk-in closets and walls to hang artwork. So very different versions of affordability depending on where you are in that class and income scale.

Listen, I know people who make half a million dollars a year who said that they just couldn't live in New York. Right. And I said, well, how does that work? You can. Well, you can. Yeah. What you're really saying is I want to live in a 4,000 square foot house and I can't live in four.

And hey, that's fine. And I don't want to pay for, you know, whatever X amount for childcare. Whereas if I live here closer to my mom, I can have a house and I can live near my mom and I have to pay for daycare. So my net quality of life is dramatically higher. I was like, totally, but just maybe don't say that you can't live in New York. It's just that you don't want to live in New York.

And there is actually nothing wrong with that. The question is then when X person moves home or near their house, well, and who would've bought that house, and they're willing to pay cash, whereas somebody else would've financed it, well, then I can see why the people there are starting to get a little upset. And so I genuinely still think it's a net positive just because as long as we can make sure, and this is literally almost like a trickle down theory, as long as we can just make sure that some of this extra money goes into the local economy and boosts spending and ability for local businesses

and property owners and all that stuff to go up and that the working class folks can still get some share of the pie. Like, I think I'm good with it. But unfortunately, as we have generally seen, a lot of that doesn't end up happening. And then also, even in terms of the services that pop up, I was just looking yesterday, Manhattan is completely transforming the way that its tax base is working because 40 percent of workers are not back in the office.

So what have they decided? They said Manhattan needs to become a playground for the rich, basically. They're like, we need to turn this into the ultimate party destination for the people with these $500,000 incomes, with no kids who just want to party 24-7. The ultimate entertainment destination, which will require us rezoning the city and making it so that we can capture our tax base. Because if we don't do that, we are going to lose a massive portion of the way that we fund city revenues. This is also a big problem with San Francisco, New York City, and all these places. Something like 1% of the population pays almost 40 or 50% of the tax base. That means that the services for the

vast majority of the population literally relies on a few select individuals. And states are not federal governments. Like, you can't escape America. Even if you leave America and you're a U.S. citizen, you still have to pay taxes. But if you leave New York City, you don't have to pay New York City taxes anymore. And a lot of them left. A lot of them live in Florida. So even if only a thousand people leave New York City, if it's the right thousand, it can screw you. So that's another reason why keeping your tax system based on that is actually very foolish. I'm not saying that those people shouldn't be taxed. I'm saying you need to make sure that you are not so heavily reliant on a few thousand people. Or you get the Eric Adamses of the world and the Kathy Hochul's

who are like, we need to go back to the office. It's like, they're not saying that out of the kindness of their heart. They need the money. If they can't do anything, if those people don't go to the office, what if New Yorkers don't want to go to the office? Maybe you should work on their behalf, but they can't because the system is so screwed. Yeah. I mean, I've talked about, there's a real reckoning coming in commercial real estate. I hope so. Because, um, I mean, there are estimates that the value of commercial like office space real estate could decline by 40 percent. Yeah. I mean, that is an earthquake that is looming over the country. And half of the commercial real estate debt comes due in the next two years. This is a multi-trillion dollar economy that, you know, this is kind of hanging over our

entire situation right now. So that's a big piece of this. There was one other part that I thought was interesting, which is they interviewed this economist who was talking about, you know, part of it is housing prices out of control. And by the way, we should say like the politicians that run these cities and states, they've had horrible housing policies. And this isn't like a right now phenomenon. This is like right now and over decades. And so that's part of what is pushing people out is they're like, there's nowhere to live. It's wildly unaffordable, even on quite a hefty salary.

Why would I continue to do this? So it's partly these cities have had terrible policies in terms of building out their housing stock to make them affordable places where people can live. That's one piece. But this economist says, you know, some of it is that the most expensive places got really expensive. But also the middle tier places became more attractive. This economist has found since 2000, college graduates have increasingly been moving toward high amenity cities and away from the highest wage ones.

Consumer cities, as she puts it, are increasingly replacing producer cities as the places where college graduates want to live. Now, to me, that's obviously a trend that predates the pandemic. And as with a lot of the trends that we have tracked, I think the pandemic has accelerated trends that already were bubbling and already were in place. But I do think this reflects a sort of cultural mindset shift above and beyond, you know, the particular economics of one city or another, where people just have different values for what's most important to them. And that is being reflected in their choices of where they decide to live. And then these mid-tier cities, since they're trying to attract this group of people, they're building out the amenities that they would want that would make this an appealing place to live.

So I thought it was interesting that it wasn't just like these places have become wildly too expensive to live and have these other problems, but also that the mid-tier cities have kind of stepped up their game and made themselves more attractive to a broader cohort. The next big question is Starlink. When we have apps like America-wide high-speed internet, no matter where you are, that's when I want to know if stuff will really change. I mean, you saw some of this with the tech workers, you know, people where Starlink has been widely available and you can do like Starlink for RV. Some people were making like half a million dollars a year living in an RV, just driving around wherever they wanted to literally from national parks, like outside of a lake. I mean, it sounds like the life, let's be honest. Yeah. Look, 10 years from now, you know, maybe they can beam in from a studio or somewhere. I'm going to

be in a compound somewhere deep in the desert. Um, I love it out there, but you know, technology's really still not there in terms of reliability. That said, 10 years from now, I very much think that could be the case. Now, that unlocks economic potential of huge swaths, not only of the West, but here in the East Coast, which is much more densely populated. We still have a big rural urban divide. We don't have a lot of Starlink or high speed Internet access, as you know, in rural areas, even an hour and a half or so away from Washington, D.C., which to me is insane, from an infrastructure perspective. But who knows what that will unlock.

It also will unlock a lot of the global workforce when you consider high-speed internet, no matter where you are, across the entire eastern seaboard, not only of the United States, but of South America, which will be on the same time zone. I mean, I've heard this from friends who are doing like the digital nomad thing, how people in Mexico City are so angry at all of these remote American workers, but not just there, Buenos Aires, even Brazil, like any place where you can just get a tourist visa and still be on East Coast time or Central time,

apparently there are American tech workers who are down there. And remember, that's only like what, 1%, 2% of people who are even able to do that. If you just increase that to 10%, that's 10 times the number who are currently, that's millions of people who have basically total freedom. Now that's not everybody. Once again, you know, a plumber can't be working from Buenos Aires. So that's why you got to make sure

that they're doing well. That's true. But I do want to couple it with the fact that, you know, we talked about, was that in the show yesterday or no, we recorded this as an extra, it's going to post this weekend, that job satisfaction is actually an all-time high across the board. I mean, what could obviously do a lot better in terms of wages keeping up with inflation. But you had a lot of people who, blue collar or service sector workers who shifted jobs during the pandemic, either because they wanted to or because they were unfortunately forced to. And they were able to get higher wages. They were able to get, you know, in sometimes more predictable schedules and a greater sense of sort of control and autonomy over their days, which has contributed to a better landscape in terms of worker happiness.

And to shift into this next piece, we wanted to just briefly show you in terms of where we are with the economy, because it is a very weird and complex picture. The recent jobs data just came out. Go ahead and put this up on the screen. And job growth actually did accelerate in April. Wage gains increased solidly. They say this points to persistent labor market strength that could compel the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates higher. It's like, oh, we can't have those good times. We've got to screw a few lives. This is always the weirdness of jobs reports during this era. It's like, this is a great jobs report, but it also is a mixed bag because it means that the Fed is going to be more determined to crush workers and screw them over and hike unemployment and kick a bunch of millions

of the amount of their jobs and crush their wages, et cetera. But, you know, unemployment rate fell back to a 53 year low of three point four percent. They do note data for February and March was revised sharply lower. So important to note, because these numbers could also ultimately be revised sharply lower. But it does show, even though you've had this issue of inflation, which has really impacted workers and made it so that many of them are seeing their paychecks eaten away and really getting like a net pay decrease every single month. You do have this tight labor market, which has made it so that workers can shift jobs and shift industries and, you know, have some choice that they haven't had in a long time. So even though, you know, the trends in terms of migration, that choice that

the remote and hybrid work choice isn't there for blue collar and service sector workers, there are some positive parts of the labor market right now that are benefiting them as well. Yeah, I think that's right. All right, let's move on to another big trend that is being driven in part by what is going on with AI, which is a lot of white-collar jobs may be going away. So put this up on the screen from the Wall Street Journal. Their headline here is the disappearing white-collar job, a once-in-a-generation convergence of tech and pressure to operate more efficiently, has corporations saying many lost jobs may never return. So this is one of the other strange parts of our economy right now.

While you have huge job demand for service sector workers, blue-collar workers in certain industries, especially in warehousing, you also have had this tech session, which has really hit white-collar workers. And a lot of the companies that are laying off white collar knowledge workers right now are saying, we don't have any plans to bring them back because our plan is instead to basically replace, supplement our existing workforce with AI and make it so we don't have to hire back any of these workers. I mean, this is a dramatic turnaround from the way that the economy has been my entire lifetime, where it was, you know, the service sector workers and the blue collar workers where there weren't enough jobs and, you know, they were treated as disposable, et cetera. Now you have kind of a turnabout where it's a lot of white collar jobs that are being shed in this economy in this very uneven situation. They say the jobs lost in a

months long cascade of white collar layoffs triggered by overhiring and rising interest rates might never return. Companies are rethinking the value of many white-collar roles in what some experts anticipate will be a permanent shift in labor demand that will disrupt the work life of millions of Americans whose jobs will be lost, diminished, or revamped through the use of artificial intelligence. A former chief digital officer at McDonald's and Volvo, said, we just need fewer people to do the same thing. They point in particular to Meta and IBM, among other corporations. The head of IBM said in recent weeks he could see 30 percent of IBM's roughly 26,000 non-customer facing roles being replaced by automation or AI over a five year period. And for the year ending in March, the number of

unemployed white-collar workers actually rose by roughly 150,000 people. So very different picture from other parts of the labor and job market. Yeah. So here's what I generally think about this is that we are normalizing away from a very stupid period between the 1960s and the mid that peaked in the 2010s of the office job now all of the benefits of the office job had mostly gone away by after the recession great recession but a lot of the professional degrees like the idea of just going to go work for a fortune 500 company with some generic skills still wasn't paying out, but was still genuinely attractive. Some of that is still the case, since we see that in the Ivy League and the university, but what the market is basically showing us, the employment and the job market generally,

is if you have a skill, that is genuinely just going to work out for you in the long term. Because what do we learn from these, you know, these more like very basic jobs is that even, you know, people thought, oh, if I just get an accounting degree, I'll be able to do well. Well, what we see from the chart is actually accounting is going down pretty dramatically. A lot of that software related. Also, whenever it comes to real estate, back-end real estate professionals, not saying that that can't be a skill that you hone and that there is, of course, local market arbitrage.

But as we are really seeing, we're going, I think, more back to a skills-based economy. Now, that skill, though, is not the way that people used to say that in terms of learn to code. It's be a plumber or be a coder or be a nurse or be a doctor or even when you're a lawyer, like a niche type of lawyer. That's still a professional degree, but it's not like a generic marketing degree. The skill itself and your ability to dominate that niche or a very basic service, electrician, so much work in the trades is paying out in the long run and is also mostly non-automatable. And that is why you can automation proof yourself by having a skill, which doesn't take a genius to figure out what will necessarily go away and what's not. And the easiest stuff, the stuff on

the floor that you can just take away like the IBMs and the Metas, is AI for the most generic of marketing skills, like writing copy taglines for a product. And that's obviously something you can do on ChatGPT. Today, why would you hire anybody to do that? Yeah, I mean, a lot of legal work is really sort of like cut and paste. It's like, okay, especially if you're a corporate lawyer and you've got to do the same basic filing for a hundred different companies, you take the same format, you plug in the different company name, the different dollar amounts, whatever,

that's going to be very easily automatable. Now, do you need a human being at the end of that to take a look, make sure nothing got screwed up? Sure. But do you need many fewer man hours to already to accomplish that same task? Absolutely. A lot of basic bookkeeping and accounting work, same kind of deal. I'm doing my monologue today about how AI is already set to completely upend digital news just through the summaries that they're going to publish. And when you Google something, instead of getting a list of links, you get a summary of news articles. Are you going to click through to the links that are down below? Many people will not. And so that just completely upends the whole business model of digital news gathering. So a lot of these changes are already here. There's

another piece too, though, which is that a lot of these tech companies got way over their skis during the pandemic. And they thought that the gold rush that was the pandemic for tech companies was going to last forever. Yes. So you had them staffing up in ways that ended up being, you know, wildly unsustainable. And it's really wrong to do to the workers. You know, they're like, oh, sorry, we've hired way too many people. Now you're unemployed. But, you know, in case after case, so many of these tech companies really hired way too aggressively. And then when the economy, you know, went back to more of a normal state and you no longer had people locked in their homes watching Netflix all day, then you had, you know, a return and a real reckoning here. So that's part

of what is going on here, too. But as we've talked about with AI before, part of what is unique is we're used to automation hitting service sector jobs. We're used to automation threatening blue collar work. Well, now AI is really coming for these white collar jobs. And so as we just laid out, some of this is not, you know, in the future, 10 years down the road, some of it is already here. And, you know, obviously it's a negative anytime you're eliminating the need for human beings in, you know, an economy where we really depend on having, being able to earn a wage in order to achieve any sort of basic middle-class prosperity. But the other piece of this that, again, this is first time in my life that this

has happened. You've actually had a reversal of inequality. You've had inequality going down for the first time in my entire life. I mean, from the neoliberal, you know, starting really under Carter and then solidifying under Reagan and Clinton. During that era, you have just had more and more and more going to the top 10 percent of society in this gigantic hollowing out of the middle. Well, now with white collar work under threat, you're having the college wage premium go down. So that also is going to force a reckoning with how much these colleges are charging right now. You're going to have more people saying like, this is not worth it. There's not a rainbow at the end of this. There's not a pot of gold,

I guess, at the end of this college rainbow. So why am I doing this? So there's going to be a reckoning there. But it's also just remarkable to see that you are having this convergence and this lessening in inequality, which, again, is a dramatic turnaround from what we have seen in the entirety of my whole life. So that part, in a sense, is positive. But I want to see people doing better at the bottom end rather than people at the top end getting screwed is what you would ideally like to see happening here. Exactly. The last piece that I want to point to in terms of a very strange and uneven economy is that even as the labor market is really tight, even as you have very low unemployment, a lot of jobs, especially in certain sectors, you also have debt levels, personal debt levels at record highs. Put this up on the screen from CNBC. Their headline is consumer debt passes $17 trillion for the first

time despite slide in mortgage demand. So what they're saying there is people aren't taking out new mortgages, which means that they're not adding that debt onto whatever they already have. But in spite of that, the total for borrowing across all categories hit $17.05 trillion, an increase of nearly $150 billion, or almost 1% during the January to March period. That took total indebtedness up about $2.9 trillion from pre-COVID periods ending in 2019. Delinquency rates have also increased for all debts. So people are struggling to be able to pay their credit card bill, pay their car loan, pay their mortgage, whatever it is. It's up 0.6 percentage points for credit cards, up 0.2 percentage points for auto loans, and total

delinquency rates moved up 0.2 percentage points to 3%. Student loan debt also edging higher and auto loans nudging up as well, they say. So you have a picture of American people who are really saddled and struggling under a huge debt burden. And I would say part of that is certainly, I mean, a lot of this is due to inflation, due to the fact that things have gotten so much more expensive and that it's so hard to obtain, you know, to be able to make ends meet, to be able to obtain anything approaching like a middle-class stability that people are putting it on their credit cards and having to take out a lot of debt in order to be able to achieve that. Yeah, exactly. So the corporate debt, the debt part is really bad. And then in terms of corporate

America, where they stand and what they say, it's exactly the same thing. So it's a very odd situation that we're in right now. Put that up there on the screen, please, about corporate America. They say that a recession is already arrived. Obviously, we have the technical definition that we already reached, but they say Wall Street's already enduring what is the most prolonged corporate profits downturn in seven years, which is a very easy kind of definition of recession. And we can see prolonged downturn, you know, after such a long period of time, 2015, 2016, combined with the interest rates cycle, it doesn't take a genius to say where things are going and very likely to go for a longer period of time. So it's a weird situation. It's a real mixed bag out there for

absolutely everyone, no matter what industry, no matter what part of the economy you're in. So we just wanted to take some time to sort through the trends as we see them now so we can keep an eye on them going forward. Another really interesting thing that happened at the Supreme Court and I would say troubling, put this up on the screen. So this was a unanimous decision. All nine justices tossed out the bribery conviction of a former Cuomo aide. So what happened here is this guy, Joseph Percoco, who was the top aide to Andrew Cuomo, this was his boy, he was in the Cuomo administration. And then he was out for a brief time while Cuomo was running for reelection with all expectation that he would end up back in the administration.

And he did. And during that time, he basically took bribes. And I mean, it was pretty brazen. Like, I don't know if you guys watch Sopranos, but they called these bribes that they would take ZD. They were referring to it in this situation also as ZD. So pretty brazen, right? Now they argued that, oh, well he wasn't in government then. So he couldn't really be taking bribes because he wasn't in government. But again, it's like, you know, this is Cuomo's boy, you know, Cuomo's likely to end up back in office and this guy is too. So you could have reasonable expectation what is going to happen here. And he did, in fact, deliver on, you know, what he was paid to deliver on. So lower courts had found him guilty of corruption. But the justices ended up ruling nine to zero in favor of this former Cuomo aide. And what the reason why they technically

ruled is they said that the jury instructions that were given were inaccurate. Put this next piece up on the screen so that this is from SCOTUS blog. They had a good write up of this. They say court throws out conviction of former Cuomo aide. So he had that the jurors had been given instructions that the justices determined were not sufficient or were not accurate. And that's what led to this unanimous ruling. But Sagar, when you look at this case and there was another Cuomo aide whose convictions they also threw out were sort of similar circumstances. And when you consider, OK, they threw out the former Virginia Governor

Bob McDonald. They threw out his conviction as well for bribery. They threw out New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's former aides in the whole Bridgegate thing. They threw that out as well. You can see the Supreme Court really circling their wagons here. First of all, I think partly in response to the corruption allegations levied against them. This is like a little bit of ass covering for themselves personally. But more broadly, because this has been a trend going on for a long time, they're making it so that corruption is so narrowly defined, you have to literally be like taking a bag of cash that says for political corruption and get caught on tape saying, I am taking this money as a bribe

because I am corrupt for them to even count this as public corruption at a time when trust in institutions exactly from this type of public corruption at a time when trust in institutions exactly from this type of crap is at all-time lows. What's crazy to me is that the quid pro quo is not in dispute at all. They paid him $35,000 to expedite a job without union agreement. He made the call and the job was expedited,

so the quid pro quo is done. He was, however, at the time, managing the reelection campaign in 2014. So apparently that makes it okay. And I think that the clear response here is if they have decided to interpret the law this way, then we just got to change the law. I mean, there's no other way around it. I mean, we have to make it so that quid pro quos of any kind involving government services, regardless of whether you are in government or not, if you're using your influence to do so, we have to demand and expand it

so that you can be convicted of corruption. Now here's the problem though. Who's gonna lobby against that? The government services and lobbying industry here in Washington. It would put, I don't even know how many thousands of people here, maybe honestly the entire city. The entire city really runs on lobby cash, so I don't really know if it's possible. Now I'm saying theoretically we should

change the law, but listen, there's a reason that we define the law this way. And it's because what's going on around us is legalized bribery. And if we actually go after real bribery, the way that it's commonly understood, not technically understood, then we would put an entire Washington industry out of business. And that's why you have a unanimous decision here. Of course. Conservatives, liberals, they were all one on this one and on some of the other decisions that were made as well, because it's not just the present lobbyist class, K Street class, but all of these lawmakers, the public servants, quote unquote, they see themselves going and

cashing in as lobbyists down the road as well. So they're looking out for, you know, their ability right now as legislators to take campaign cash or whatever, whatever perks are given to them in order to do the will of these lobbyists. And they're also looking out for their future job prospects by making sure that none of the reforms that we would want to see made to make this law much more clear and expand it so that there is an actual standard of, hey, you're a public servant. You're not here to take bribes and serve the interests of this lobbyist class. None of that can come to pass because of people looking out for their own pocketbook and bottom line. It really is disgusting. And to see it in such a, you know, uniparty state here, every

single one of these justices coming together to make sure that corruption is so narrowly defined that it basically doesn't even exist in their minds. It's pretty disgraceful to behold. That is where it is just. I mean, I don't know. I'm on torn because technically in the way they're doing the law or evaluating the law, I guess, you know, is it their fault or is it the law? Like, I think really what it is, like we have to change the law or evaluating the law, I guess, you know, is it their fault or is it the law? Like, I think really what it is, like we have to change the law. And I think it also was passed in such a way and written in such a way to make it amenable for people like this so that it doesn't happen. It's like, you know, their, their job is to simply analyze it within the bounds of like what's on

the book. So that just means Congress has to do its job and pass a law. Now I'm not an idiot. I know that that won't change, but you don know, New York state law could apply here. Like, you could definitely apply a bribery conviction. You can change things on a state-by-state level in terms of what is technically possible. Once again, I just think that the only reason it doesn't change is that so many things are already legalized bribery that they don't want to put them out of business. Yes. Yeah, and that's the—I mean, that would be the big data problem. And there's just, like, bipartisan shame in this all around.

So they have no interest in changing the data. What would all of the former aides to Clarence Thomas and all of them do if this was not? If we were, yeah. Not just Clarence. All of them, yeah. Hagan, Sotomayor, all these people. These people are all printing money, you know, off their names. All right, let's go to the next part here.

Some politics, some really interesting stuff going on between Trump and Ron DeSantis. The open war continues, not just in terms of whether DeSantis is sanctimonious or not, but now on policy. Let's go and put this up there on the screen. Trump gave a very interesting interview to a new news site called The Messenger, and he actually hit DeSantis saying that a six-week abortion limit is quote, too harsh. So the false quote is what he said. He has to do what he has to do, Trump said, when he was asked about Florida abortion rules. If you look at what DeSantis did, a lot of people don't even know if he knew what he was doing,

but he signed six weeks and many people within the pro-life movement feel that's too harsh. Now, first of all, I don't think that that's true, that they feel too harsh, but what I think is even more interesting is that when you're reading the transcript of this interview with Trump, he has, and I've said this before, rambling answers on abortion.

The answer that he gave here in print is even more crazy. So he asks him about the messenger is asking him about late term abortions. But he both has to brag and also bring himself back to the acceptance. That's perfect in this answer. He says they've been trying to get rid of Roe. I was able to do it. Nobody else could have done that but me. And I was able to do it by nominating three justices.

What it did more than anything is give us tremendous power of negotiation, which we didn't have the pro-life movement, the tremendous power of negotiation. Now the pro-life movement has to negotiate a deal that's acceptable for them. So then they ask him about whether the six-week ban is acceptable. He says, no, I think that's too harsh.

Then he says, well, what do you think? Is it too harsh for you? Quote, I am looking at all alternatives. I'm looking at many alternatives. But I was able to get us to the table. That's the most important thing that ever happened for the pro-life movement. Would you sign a six-week abortion ban or not? Quote, I am looking at all options.

Sounds like a man who doesn't know what he thinks. Oh, he knows what he thinks. He knows he doesn't want to touch a six-week abortion ban with a 10-foot pole. We know what he thinks. We also know that, you know, at the very least, it shows that he is not a political idiot whenever it comes to abortion. But just to show everybody the quandary that Trump has now found himself in. Put this up there on the screen. The Susan B. Anthony's List and other anti-abortion, or I guess pro-life groups, whichever terminology you want, blasts Trump over federal ban comments because Trump basically said he wouldn't sign a federal abortion ban. The Susan B. Anthony group actually put out a statement

responding to the Trump campaign where they said it was unacceptable and that they would not support any White House candidate who did not support a minimum ban of a 15 week federal abortion ban. They say the Supreme Court made its clear decision, it was returning the issue to the people, and the group said that holding to a position that exclusively is up to the states is an abdication of responsibility by anyone who is elected to federal office. And, you know, here's the thing with the Susan B. Anthony group and all them. At least you can commend them. They're honest. They're very open about what they want.

They have a group. They have an agenda. They know it's unpopular, but they don't care. They want to see it enacted, and they have litmus tests. The thing is, is that they are playing a very powerful role in the GOP primary because it's not just Trump that they're going after. They're basically setting the stage for Mike Pence. This just happened two days ago, which is why realistic to have, quote, advanced gestational limits on abortion at the federal level. The pro-life groups, as Susan B. Anthony's list said, when Nikki Haley talks about national consensus, we are in agreement. She says that 72% of Americans

support abortions at least by 15 weeks, just so everyone knows that polling has changed. It did previously say that. But they say that the pro-life movement must have a nominee who will be boldly advocate for this consensus and as president will work tirelessly to gather the votes necessary in Congress. So they're making it basically 15 weeks or bust. And I mean, look, Crystal, when you're looking at that, they're just wielding their power that they know that they have. They have millions of people who belong to their group. But when you have none of the federal candidates, basically, except for Mike Pence, who has publicly signed on, then you're in a real quandary. And also, it's great for Pence, but it also shows you that DeSantis, in many ways, is running to the right of Donald Trump.

And this is why it is scrambling so many of the brains of the conservative commentariat and even of the liberal ones. Because you'll see Trump attacks DeSantis on Social Security, saying he wants to cut Social Security, and on abortion. And so then I see conservative commentators, I think I saw like Matt Walsh or whatever, being like, well, Trump is attacking DeSantis from the left. And I'm just like, yeah, but you know, his ideological inconsistency and quote unquote moderation is kind of why he won in 2016. And also the quote, very conservative voters that people always like to look at, those people are already for DeSantis anyways. He's polling very high with them. Those are the classic GOP voter, small business owner, who will vote for anyone with an R next to their name. They love Romney. They love Paul Ryan.

Of course, they love DeSantis. Guess what, though? As Romney found out, you can't win the presidency with those people. It's really only like 40 something percent of the country who will basically vote are no matter what. So you have got to win at least a significant larger portion. Those people are not very conservative. So running from the left, at least in a general election. And when I say left, I mean, really more centrist, that is smart politically. And it also shows you why Trump actually could be more electable than Ron DeSantis in many ways. Yeah. I mean, that's the part that's really interesting is DeSantis pitches himself. Part of his pitch is like he's the more electable candidate. But when you stake out these, you know, extreme positions on abortion and you also stake out a position that is anathema to a lot of American people on Social Security and Medicare based on his previous comments, yeah, that makes, that's going to put a hit on your

electability piece. I mean, the part that's interesting to me about the pro-life movement and, you know, their reaction to Trump, their reaction to Nikki Haley, et cetera, is Trump can get away with these things more than other candidates can, right? And this is why Ron DeSantis in The Dead of Night felt compelled to sign this six-week abortion ban, even though he's not an idiot. He knows this is a problem for him in a general election. He knows it's wildly unpopular with an overwhelming majority of the American people. But you've got to divide between the general election audience and the primary audience

and groups that are very organized and very powerful, like Susan B. Anthony List. And so that's why he signed that ban, because he's placing also this big bet on Iowa. And these groups are even more disproportionately powerful in the state of Iowa. So where Trump, Trump staked out this more trying to sound like a moderate position on abortion. He's been singing this tune for a while. And guess what? His polls are really high.

They just keep going up. DeSantis probably couldn't weather the storm in the same way. And here's the other thing. DeSantis is trying to appeal to an ideologically consistently conservative group that Trump, frankly, doesn't really need in order to win. I mean, Trump's strength is with non-college educated voters who, you know, have been with him the whole time where it's more of a visceral appeal and he's got those folks wherever he stands on abortion. So DeSantis is more vulnerable on these issues because of the coalition that he is trying to stitch together. And I think all the other candidates, too.

And it's just, you know, you see this in politics all the time. There are just some candidates who have the charisma and skill to pull off things that other candidates can't. And Donald Trump is one of those people who can get away with things that other people just can't get away with. And I think that is laid bare by what's going on with abortion right now. Perfectly said. You know, DeSantis has held to the same standards as a normal politician and Trump has just held to whatever the hell standards people have decided to hold Trump. That's fair. It is what it is. Life is not fair. And but at the same time, though, DeSantis is playing his hand the best that he possibly can. He had a great answer yesterday when he was asked about stop the steal at a press conference in the state of Florida. It seems like he's got a pretty

good pat answer down for the campaign trail. Here's what he had to say. You said during events in Iowa over the weekend that the GOP needs to reject a culture of losing. Do you acknowledge that Trump lost and there wasn't all this fraud that he talks about? Well, I look at the last however many election cycles, 2018, we lost the House, we lost the Senate, 2020, Biden becomes president, or no, excuse me, we lost the Senate in 2020, Biden becomes president, and it's done a huge amount of damage, very unpopular in 2022, and we are supposed to have this big red wave. And other than like Florida and Iowa, I didn't see a red wave across this country. And so I think the party has developed a culture of losing.

I think that there's not accountability. And I think in Florida we really showed what it takes to not just win, win big, and then deliver big. And ultimately, when you're doing all this, what results are you producing for people? That's really what matters. You can sit there and talk about cable news, social media, all these other things that people are fixated on. And for me, it's like, okay, what's that true north? You obviously got to win. Otherwise, you don't get a ticket to the dance. But once you do that, how are you going to be

able to actually bring about big change to make people's lives better? Next. I think it's a great answer. And I do wish we lived in a place where, at least in a primary, where results do matter for people. In a general election, I do think it matters. But whenever it comes to GOP primary, well, current polls, I guess, speak for themselves. Put this up on the screen. Once again, I wish that DeSantis' answer would resonate. And yet, Trump is actually up over last month to 55% in the Republican primary. DeSantis at a whopping 17 roughly around where rfk jr is underperforming actually underperforming in some polls where rfk jr is on the democratic side mike pence former vice president actually polling under where marianne williamson is in the democratic primary he's at six percent nikki haley's at four vivek ramaswamy at four tim scott at two

asa hutchinson at one. Larry Elder. Larry Elder. I didn't know Larry Elder was in the race. Good for him. I knew, but I kind of forgot. I have a soft spot for Larry Elder. Do you?

I have no. Anyway, so what can we say from this? Well, you know, I actually. Republican voters just love Trump. I have a little bit of a different take on the DeSantis answer. I thought it was fine for that moment, whatever, when you're not going to face a follow-up and you can just deliver your line and move on. But it does put a little bit of blood in the water because every reporter is going to watch that answer

and note that he dodged. And now every time he's going to get—because he didn't come down. He didn't say what he thought about 2020. It was a clear dodge. And so if you don't think any time that a reporter has a chance to try to drill down and ask him and push him and try to get him, that is going to happen time and time again. And so, again, it's one thing when you are in that setting and he knows he can just ignore if there's a follow up and just move on to the next question

and just deliver his answer with no pushback. That's one thing. But if he submits, you know, subjects himself to any sort of extended sit down interview with a real journalist, they're going to push and you're not going to be able to get away with that pat answer. Or if they do end up, you know, if he does end up on a debate stage, which the Republican Party is planning on holding debates. I don't know if Donald Trump is going to participate in them, but those moderators are going to push all those candidates on that as well. So I read it a little bit differently than you did. Here's the reason why I'm reading it. Politically, that's the best you can do, because what are you going to do? Most people who are Republicans

believe the election was stolen. So you can't say, no, the election was not stolen. So what do you do? We have a culture of losing. Well, that reads a little bit differently. I don't even disagree with you. Look, empirically, obviously, what does he need to do? But like the election wasn't stolen and I'm a winner. I'm a real winner. Unlike you. Yeah, that's a great answer. But you directionally have to be able to get there. And also, again, in the very unlikely scenario, but still possible scenario where he's able to beat Trump the best way possible is really what I think he's doing right now. He says we need to reject a culture of losing, and he's doing the Obama strategy. I just read this morning 50 state legislators in New Hampshire

came out and endorsed Ron DeSantis. That's huge. And two of them actually endorsed Trump only 19 days ago. So not sure what happened with that. He's clearly doing the early state strategy. He can go in, spend time on the ground, roll up and give people permission to vote for him, Iowa to New Hampshire, create a media narrative, and have a fighting chance on Super Tuesday.

Do I think it's going to happen? No. I think Trump is going to win New Hampshire. I think New Hampshire loves Trump. They have literally since 2016. Certainly possible, though. Same with Iowa is a little bit more iffy. Super Tuesday, I just really see no chance. But once again, you said yesterday, this might be your only shot. He's a 44-year-old man. What's the worst case? He loses, and then what? He's a multimillionaire.

He lives in Florida. It's not a bad life. He can go do that lobbyist game we were talking about earlier. He's got lots of connections. He will be fine for the rest of his life. He's a young man. He has a wife. He's got small know yeah maybe you should shoot your shot personally i would just sail off in the sunset um i guess on on that answer i agree with you it's the best

you can do yeah it's the best you can do to me it just underscores that he's an impossible bind because part of the base part of the coalition that he wants to stitch together, wants to hear him say it was rigged. It was stolen. Trump won. Yes. The other part wants to hear him say, this is fake news. Obviously Joe Biden won. We, you know, have a culture of losing. We need to get behind a winner. And so he's trying to split the difference between those two things and just trying not to say anything. And again, you can get away with it in, you know, one scripted pat answer. But if you get any pushback or follow up, it kind of falls apart. So so it just to me, again, it illustrates he's doing perhaps the best he can, given the landscape within the Republican primary. It is an impossible situation, an impossible needle to try to thread.

I think that's why I don't think it will work out yeah right so we're in agreement there you play the best hand you can sometimes it's not always the best yeah and then you hope like fate is gonna hand you you know hand you something you can work with yeah and you never know yeah history can roll it always rolls dies. Oh my gosh, this is such a hilarious story, flagged by Matt Brunegg. Let's put it up there on the screen. So the New York Times wrote this incredible nonsense story about, quote, why some companies are saying diversity and belonging instead of diversity and inclusion. He says, incredible stuff. Businesses are finding out that DEI consultants they hire are running programs that create even more identity-based hostility

and are responding by hiring other DEI consultants who market themselves as not doing that. As he says, quote, all of this is fake. Now, the reason why this is hilarious is that you basically have the new religion of DEI inside of every Fortune 500 company in America and have now basically for the last couple of years, especially ramping up after the George Floyd protests. People thought that they were doing the right thing. They said, oh, we're going to eliminate racism by hiring DEI consultants.

However, all evidence that we currently have, Crystal, all evidence as evidenced by this New York Times article, is that saying the, quote, diversity and inclusion and emphasizing the place of race, quote, unquote, implicit bias, quote, unquote, you know, quote, unquote, like microaggressions or macroaggressions in some cases, are actually increasing hostility in the workplace,

racist thoughts, and are having the opposite intended effect. Now, and also, do any of these people work? I have no idea why aerospace engineers are subjected to raise your hand whenever you had a racist thought literally at work. Sounds like something you should do on your own time. Now, what's fascinating to me is that the corporations are beginning to wake up to this. I personally thought that they would never move on, but they're doing it in the best way possible, moving from diversity and inclusion to diversity

and belonging, ditching some implicit bias training to still spend the same amount of money on, quote, diversity, but hiring somebody whose recommendation is stop doing the previous training and is reverting back to do nothing. So in effect, this has all become a giant money laundering scheme. Matt Taibbi had that great piece,

I think it was two years ago, about, what was her name, about white fragility. Robin DiAngelo. Yeah, Robin DiAngelo. Some of these ladies who are out there making multi- Ibrahim Kendi making millions of dollars charging these places to give them lectures and to teach their babies anti-racism and all this stuff. And instead, it's actually making people not only more racist. There's actually no evidence.

A, it's not changing anything on racism, so congratulations. And B, they are basically just bilking Fortune 500 companies to check a box when they can go to Wall Street and say, see, we have all of our employees undergoing diversity and inclusion. And meanwhile, you have employees,

I can't tell you the amount of people I know who are subjected to these things who it enrages them to their core. A, they're being taken away from whatever they're supposed to be doing. And B, they're like, I don't even agree with this. And you're basically shoving this down my throat. And you're making me angrier about this problem, which I didn't even think was a problem in the first place. The research has long been in that if you actually care about combating racism, which I do, this diversity and inclusion consultant grift complex is fake.

It doesn't work. If anything, it makes things worse, according to a bunch of data that they have in The New York Times. But you got to love that the solution to that is like, well, let's hire a different class of consulting grifters who are going to pretend to, you know, so we can still have our virtue signaling box checking exercise that we can, you know, put on our website or whatever to show how wonderful and how virtuous we are, even though we have changed none of our internal structures to actually deal with, like, the root causes of this problem. I mean, you could be spending this money on giving people bonuses and raises. You want to solve racism? Making the quality of life problem. I mean, you could be spending this money on giving people bonuses and raises. You want to solve racism?

Making the quality of life better. Give everybody a raise, especially the most working class people at your company. Take all of that money, give it as a bonus to all of your employees. And the portion of them who are minorities will now do better. Congratulations.

You know, there were a couple things that were mentioned in here that I was like, oh, you know what? That actually is a better idea. So for example, one company was going to open a new, um, location or headquarters in Denver, which is overwhelmingly white. They're like, let's go to Atlanta. And that'll just like naturally increase, you know, help us attract, um, graduates. There's more, uh, diversity in

the city of Atlanta. I was like, okay, well that's like actually a thing that makes some kind of sense, but hiring a different group of fake racist, you know, racism consultants to fix the problems that the other group of grifter racism consultants created, this is just total insanity. And the part about the New York Times article that was funny to me was, you know, they use these anecdotes of, they very credulously report on the new class of consultants that, okay, this is really going to be the solution. Now they've got it. Now they've really got the solution. They interview like a couple of people who are like, yeah, this was great. We loved it.

And that substitutes in for any sort of like evidence or evidence based research that the new class of flag go up whenever they say that the reason they switched from Denver to Atlanta, because I also know that Governor Brian Kemp and the Georgia state legislature are throwing money at companies that are coming to Georgia. So even that, I was like, are you really going because you want more black engineering graduates or you may be going because you're going to get more money by switching there? So I'm just personally suspect of basically anything that these people say. I think that the best way to do it is like what we just said, you know, give people a raise and hire people based on merit. And then when we have education, make it so you have merit-based admissions so that everybody knows that whoever is there is there regardless of whatever, you know, is there because they are the best person for the job. That's how we hire here. That's how most people should hire. And in general, like spending your time, your time is the most precious asset that you have.

When you ask people why they want money, it's because they want to be able to control their time. So involuntarily subjecting people to things that don't work. And when we're saying this, I'm not talking, you know, out of nothing. Put this up there on the screen. This is just like one of a slew from Scientific American, the problem with implicit bias training. An insane amount of evidence-based research to show that implicit bias training has either no effect or the opposite effect intended when subjected to tens of thousands of people who have been forced now to go through these programs.

So it has not had the intended effect. It is a societal problem that apparently we're trying to solve through like some corporation. It's not Microsoft training. Is Microsoft's Microsoft job is to make money. Our job is to make sure that they pay people enough money and pay their taxes while they're doing so. The rest of this,, leave it to us. Leave it to the government.

Leave it to the news. Leave it to churches or bowling leagues or any of these places. Leave it to your friend group where you can sit and talk and be like, hey, what's going on with this George Floyd thing, man? Be like, yeah, well, I kinda disagree with what's going on in the news.

Well, I hadn't thought about that before. And actually, I was listening to the show and they said this, and I read this piece in National Review, but I read this piece in National Review. But I read this piece in The Nation. You sit down and you talk. That's called society. This is not the way that these problems are supposed to be worked.

I mean, listen, you're responsible for your corporate culture. And Lord knows there is a lot of sex and race and religion-based discrimination that still exists within these companies that they are wholly responsible for rooting out. But the idea that you're going to solve a deeply entrenched problem like racism at the corporate training level is farcical. That's what I'm getting to. And when you, and you know, we know what has worked over time in terms of lifting, closing the wealth gap, closing the wage gap, especially among black Americans who have historically been treated as this, you know, horrifically abused underclass. And it has been universal programs that have lifted the minimum wage for all people, that have helped improve the plight of all working class people. Why? Because in a lot of times race is a proxy for class in America.

So when you focus on lifting up, you know, the bottom of society, this is disproportionately impactful for disenfranchised and marginalized groups. That work has to happen at the nationwide level. It has to happen at the government level. It is not going to be solved by Robin DiAngelo getting paid hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars for some bullshit corporate training that doesn't even work and probably makes things worse. But you're forgetting, though, that it makes people feel better whenever they buy a book called Anti-Racist Baby. That's what we're always forgetting.

Okay, let's go to the final part here about the Durham investigation. This came out a little bit later in the day. I had the time to read as much as I could. This thing is 300 pages. So I read the executive summary and some of the key sections, and we pulled out what we thought

were the most important takeaways from the Durham report. For those who don't remember, the Durham report was the report to oversee the Mueller report, which was then a response to the crossfire hurricane investigation. Investigate the investigators. Investigating the investigators who are the investigators of the president. And I know that this can just seem absolutely maddening. Let's just start with the very basics of it all comes back to Russiagate. What was Russiagate has now become an all-encompassing term.

I think at its core, it was this. Donald Trump and the Trump campaign, members of the Trump campaign, conspired with the Russian government, both through monetary and political purposes, to damage the Hillary Clinton campaign. That included an allegation that they were helping coordinate. Wiki leaks, not true. That they were helping coordinate other leaks, not true. That they were helping coordinate Facebook ads to help sway the election, also not true. But that was it at its core.

And it had, you know, different sub-elements, like the Steele dossier, like Alpha Bank, like all of these other allegations that have since all been debunked. We know now today that not one of those things happens to be true. But the investigation as to how said investigation was even sparked by the FBI, how tens of millions of dollars of taxpayer resources were spent by the FBI, the premier law enforcement organization, to investigate and run these things down, how the American people were subjected to this story for, what, I would say three years, three straight years of nonstop news coverage. And it's one of the biggest screw-ups by media and also by law enforcement basically since Iraq WMD, as Matt Taibbi so eloquently wrote at the time. Now, the roots of this investigation go very, very deep. And that was arguably one of the biggest stories from the Durham report.

Let's put this up there on the screen, please. According to the report, the plan by Hillary Clinton and the Clinton campaign to hire a law firm to fund the Steele dossier and to shop it around town to get media outlets to report on it, linking Trump to Russia, was briefed in August of 2016

by then CIA Director John Brennan to President Obama, Vice President Biden, A.G. Loretta Lynch, and FBI Director Comey. Now, this particular subplot of Russiagate, for those of the uninitiated, is actually called Obamagate. Yes, this just shows you how long we've been covering this. So this goes to the initial Trump allegation that President Obama, his lackeys in the White House and others were briefed on said dossier and did their best to do two things. A, to maintain knowledge of the investigation, to make sure that the FBI actually launched an investigation into this. B, they knew that it politically would have been beneficial to the

Hillary Clinton campaign. And then finally, C, is that they did their best, Crystal, at the time to maintain not only the investigation, but also elements and other damaging information about the Trump and the incoming Trump administration, by quote unquote spreading it around government, enabling it to leak when the Trump people came into office. I think that that is a tremendously significant and important point because it shows that going back to the Obama White House and the involvement of the CIA director then, John Brennan, his eventual departure of the CIA to MSNBC, and also unquestionably a part of the leaks to the press around Russiagate. He was intimately familiar with this plan from the very, very beginning and very likely

sparked some of the initial interest in this, along with Clapper, who also was then working for CNN. So part of what this report outlines, as reflected in what we just had up on the screen, is that there were separate allegations about both of these campaigns with regards to Russia. So there was the Steele dossier, Russian collusion situation with Trump. That was one unconfirmed allegation that was out there. And there was also an unconfirmed allegation out there about Hillary Clinton, that one of her foreign policy advisors had come up with a plot, which was approved by Hillary herself. Again, these were all allegations, unconfirmed, that they were going to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming

interference by the Russian security services. So both of these campaigns had potential sort of like Russian plots that had been alleged against them. And part of what the Durham report concludes is that they handled those two separate claims very differently. In the Clinton instance, they basically dismissed it and they didn't launch a major investigation into it. And in the Trump instance, they did. And what the Durham report asserts is that some of the people who were involved in opening the crossfire hurricane investigation, including Peter Strzok and some of these other names that, again, go back years now, that know, almost all of it was bullshit, especially the most salacious claims were complete nonsense, decided to take this uncorroborated report and use it as the basis to launch this investigation. So that was part of what was important to show here is that the two candidates were treated differently. And then one other piece, just before you go on to some of the other revelations here that I think it's really important to keep in mind as we're going through all of this and why this still matters, unfortunately, so many years later is this has screwed up our whole

like view of Russia. I mean, this is still reverberating in terms of the Ukraine war and how we're approaching it, how Americans are thinking about all of these things. I mean, it just never ends in terms of the impact that this all had on the American public. And if you're a faithful MSNBC viewer, like if you heard the way we were talking about this and that this was all debunked, your mind would be blown because you've never heard that on their airwaves, even though they spend more than any other network years and years and years building the sound and milking it for ratings night after night after night, led by their top performer and talent, Rachel Maddow.

So the other piece of this of why this still matters is, unlike Iraq WMD, which eventually the media all admitted like, ah, oops, our bad, we got it wrong. And there's a general public acceptance and acknowledgement of that. There are vast swaths of mainstream media viewers and audience and readers who have no idea how wrong these outlets got things. Compare Obama's response to Crimea to Joe Biden's response to Ukraine. And I'm not saying those are one to one, but there is no way that some of the madness going on in terms of U.S. support for Ukraine happens today without Russiagate. It has massive. And when historians go back 100 years from now, it's like going back and looking at war fever in 1912 in Britain and in Germany and being like, it's obvious. Something's about to go down.

And at that time, they didn't really know it. It seemed normal. It was like in the air. Well, I'm going to call it in the living through the time that this unquestionably had a massive impact on U.S. history, on the war in Ukraine, and how the US public viewed Russia. Let's go to the next part here. This is very important, from the Durham investigation. They conclude that the Steele dossier, the infamous, quote, P-tape claim, which was in the dossier, was not only an obvious lie, but whose provenance was nonsense and fabricated in its entirety by a Northern Virginia Democratic operative named Charles Dolan,

who had ties to Russian businesses and lobbying organizations, who levied said ties by planting it in the Steele dossier before then peddling it to media outlets before and after the Trump victory in 2016. And then finally, actually, probably most importantly from a national security perspective, put this up there on the screen, they showed that the Steele dossier was included in the illegal Carter Page FISA warrant, that the report shows the FISA applications included items from the unproven Steele dossier were included directly in said FISA application, where they took unverified information peddled by the Clinton campaign and used it as a pretext to spy on an American citizen. So you put all this together and what you find is an incredibly damaging report for the FBI.

I was actually a little bit miffed by the Durham report because in his executive summary, he damns the FBI. He says that they opened this investigation with no evidence whatsoever that any of it was true. They spent so many resources and all they're running down these BS claims, obviously for political purposes, but in it, he doesn't have any recommendations for new procedures. In the summary, he just goes, I have no recommendations. Just simply follow the law. I'm like, well, clearly the law's not working because Peter Strzok is a hero. Andrew McCabe is on CNN. He was literally fired for not doing his job properly. The other guy went to go work for Twitter and got fired by Elon to cover up because he was covering up his own Twitter files. Nonsense.

James Comey is a multimillionaire living here in northern Virginia. What's happening? Clearly, you can't just have law enforcement officials who don't properly enforce the law or do investigations correctly and suffer no consequences. I feel like I'm losing my mind reading this report. Yeah, I mean, most of the prosecutions, there were three separate attempted prosecutions that came out of this. Only one of them resulted in a conviction. The other two resulted in acquittal. So the prosecutions that came out of this ended up not going very far themselves. And I found that part too, a little perplexing, frankly,

because you have this whole report that lays out, you know, I think what anyone, 300 pages. Anyone would have to look at this and say, okay, this illustrates some real problems within the FBI. And it's like, all right, so what do we do about it? And he's just like, yeah, just do better next time. Like, that's not gonna happen.

It's like, no, this whole thing is broken. What is the root cause? Like, how do we get to this place? What's the root cause? How do you change that? And he had nothing for you on that front. So it is it was disappointing in that regard, for sure, because what you would like to see is some sort of reform that's going to give people confidence that, you know, the next time there's this big investigation, big, incredibly politically charged investigation, which the FBI has now bungled a few of these, that things are going to unfold differently. And instead, it's just like, just do a little better next time, guys. We got confidence that it's going to be all good.

It's so dumb. Let's go to the next part. This is so funny. So CNN's Jake Tapper decided to just tell the basic conclusions that are quite obvious from the Durham report that they are very damaging for the FBI and they do vindicate in part many of Trump's accusations against the law enforcement agency. And CNN viewers are not so happy about it. Here's what he had to say and we'll tell you about the reaction. President Trump appeared so confident of what Durham would find, he openly pressured the special counsel to release his findings before the 2020 election. Regardless, the report is now here. It has dropped and it might not have produced everything of what some Republicans

hoped for. It is regardless devastating to the FBI and to a degree it does exonerate Donald Trump. So the reaction here, Crystal, is so funny. Media Matters absolutely losing it. They say, to be clear, this is not devastating for the FBI, does not do in any degree exonerate Donald Trump. What in the world are you talking about? They say is misleading commentary. My personal favorite I just scrolled past is, good God, they are now pimping out Jake Tapper for MAGA viewers. Hashtag propaganda for ratings. Just so people know it's not working if that's the case because it's Chris Wallace just lost in primetime to Newsmax.

That actually just came out yesterday. They got a total of 300,000 viewers. I wonder how much they're paying that dude, too. Yeah, exactly. Probably $10 million a year to be last on the air to freaking Newsmax, which barely existed five years ago. Humiliating. Absolutely humiliating.

But it just shows same problems with the freakout post-CNN town hall. They cannot handle any semblance of fairness whenever it comes to describing basic facts. Well, I think Ryan, because I watched a little of you and Ryan's coverage of this while I of fairness whenever it comes to describing basic facts. Well, I think Ryan, because I watched a little of you and Ryan's cover to this while I was on my honeymoon. I think Ryan pointed this out that, you know, something we talk about in independent media is this problem of audience capture where, you know, you start feeding an audience a certain narrative and then that attracts a certain audience and all they want to hear is this one certain narrative.

And then if you veer off of that track, you lose a whole bunch of people. And so people don't veer off the track. They find reasons to stay on the track. Major problem in independent media. But it appears CNN has the same issue because they've spent years cultivating a certain worldview and a certain audience. And so, you know, in a sense, I, you know, Tapper is saying things that are just accurate based on what's reflected in the report. But you don't get to avoid complicity for over years and years and years hiding any of the evidence that what was being spun in terms of Russiagate was false. And so you can't be surprised then when there's a freakout when you host a Trump town hall. You can't be surprised when there's a freakout when you just cover the contents of this report. If they are genuinely trying to, you know, cultivate a different audience, yeah, there's, it's going to be painful for a while. They're going to lose some of the

people that they have been bringing along with them for years because they haven't painted an accurate picture of the world for them. So then when you come in and puncture their bubble, they're going to say, you know, they're, they're going to be confused. They're going to be upset. They're going to be enraged. There's no doubt about it. Yeah. I mean, what do we learn, I guess, from all of this? I just think that you can see audience capture. But more importantly, the problem for them is they don't even care as much about their audience. They care more about pleasing each other. And you just know that it drives Jake Tapper insane to see criticism from media matters you know from people who they would consider social friends allies in many respects i

feel like tapper's a little bit of a contrarian yes and no he likes to fight he does he's a dm he is a dm warrior personal experience um he sees he definitely one thing we can say for sure every comment about this he 100 read, tweet this video at him, 100% will watch it, I guarantee it. And if I say one negative word, I'll hear about it for the rest of my life. The problem that I think is that, and this isn't about Tapper necessarily, this is really just CNN and the way that the internal response is, look at the freak out from the town hall and you can just guarantee that if you say something like this, factual but potential to help Trump in any way, there's going to be a cringe on the end. Like, no, no, no, it didn't vindicate everything.

They said, well, that's not what he said. Right. He said, to a certain extent. He said, it's damaging for the FBI. The FBI is not, we don't have to religiously pray to the FBI. It's just an organization. It's supposed to be neutral. It's not, obviously. Deeply damaging. And it has a lot of problems. It's just an organization. It's supposed to be neutral. It's not, obviously.

Deeply damaging one at a time. And it has a lot of problems. Yeah. Deeply problematic. And I think that there are a lot of reasons to be skeptical of it. What's wrong with that? Last time I checked, we were in the news business. We should be skeptical of anything law enforcement tells us. My default assumption is I don't believe you. Prove it. Show us the evidence. And that's the way it should be. That's the way it should be for a lot of people in media. But they religiously had to defend the FBI during the Russiagate years, which now means that if they screw up, they can barely say they screwed up without pissing off a whole bunch of people. Yeah, because they made them into infallible heroes, which they never deserved.

Yeah. All right, Sagar, what are you looking at? Almost everyone in America can agree our economic system is not fair. Now, where we diverge is how do we address that. The wokes have equality of outcome, where we basically predetermine what the outcome for the average person should be, and then we rig all racial groups to make sure that's where they end up. The democratic socialists have visions of egalitarian futures with limited equality of opportunity, but a very, very high floor for the average individual. The economic libertarians believe that the free market itself will produce fairness,

so we should double down eventually that we'll get there. Emerging branch of conservative populists who want something in between each of those groups. In my opinion, they have a point, but I think it's always important to start with the data. What does it tell us? Where are we exactly before we even evaluate solutions? Luckily, my friend Talman Joseph Smith over at the New York Times actually did a fantastic new analysis on an upcoming largest wealth transfer in American history. What does it reveal about our future politics? Let's dive in. First and foremost, what generational wealth transfer is he talking about? The basics are this. The boomers are getting fully into retirement age.

With that comes the reality that many are beginning to die. With death comes inheritance. The boomers, due to the enormous economic growth that occurred during their lifetimes, have amassed trillions of dollars of wealth with relative ease, given cheap tuition, cheap and abundant housing, ballooning wages, ballooning stock

portfolios, and frankly, just the longevity of the effect of compound interest over time. A new analysis finds that the $84 trillion projected to be passed down from older Americans to their millennial and Gen X heirs, roughly $16 trillion, will transfer just in the next decade. As you can see from the graphic before you, the amount of wealth that the boomers hold is astounding. Some 78 trillion of the 180 trillion in existence, with the rest divided up between Gen X, Silent Gen, and Millennials,

holding the smallest share, despite making up a massive share of the population. But what is really crazy is not the generational differences, it's who within generations is about to inherit a whole lot of money. Currently, in the United States, the wealthiest 10% of households are the ones who will be giving and getting the vast majority of riches, as you can see before you. For context, the top 1% of American households hold as much wealth as

the bottom 90% combined. They will dictate alone most of the money flow. The bottom 50, by contrast, account for only 8% of all future transfers. What makes this particular situation and wealth transfer so unique is the nature of the wealth and how it was attained. The absolute vast majority is held in booming stock portfolios

invested since early working years and in real estate values by longer-held properties. The twin pillars of boomer wealth thus not only represent a large portion of what will be passed down, but the nature of how it will do so. And this is where the tax code comes in. As he notes, under U.S. law, the top 1.5% of American household wealth will be allowed for transfer to heirs with virtually very little inheritance tax or income tax. The IRS estimates it will capture about $4.2 trillion off of $30 trillion in the transfer. That's a rate of approximately 14%.

So a massive wealth transfer is about to occur. Most of it will occur within the top 10 percent of American household income, and especially amongst the top 1 percent. This has severe social ramifications. Number one, it changes the fundamental makeup of the relative rich in America. As I've mentioned here before, I've actually been on a bit of a Dave Ramsey kick, actually read his most recent book, Baby Steps Millionaires. Great book. I recommend it. The book includes a large white paper study on North American millionaires and found the vast majority did not inherit their wealth and got it by slow and steady planning over

the years with retirement savings and paid off houses. That's actually an inspiring story. The relative middle class and financial discipline can leave one pretty well off through the laws of compound interest. And to be clear, that's still really good advice. Most people would be better off if they did listen to him. But the question arises, that's still really good advice. Most people would be better off if they did listen to him. But the question arises, what share of those people will be rich in the future? Because the children of said baby steps millionaires can inherit real estate effectively tax-free through the step-up basis, segments of our real estate laws, and same whenever it comes to stock purchases. The capital gains tax is going only on the appreciation

within the period after inheritance, not from the portion when it was held by the original owner. In other words, absolutely gigantic gifts are turning over to children basically without taxes. The potential to not only widen income gaps, but gift wealth to millions who didn't work for it nearly in the same way that their parents did. Not saying they don't deserve it, but if larger shares of the upper middle class attain status through inheritance, it significantly changes accelerating trends, which make it much, much harder to become middle class today than it was 30 years ago. Inherited wealth, not only do they do what they have inherited wealth they have done since time immemorial,

they're just going to use the government and fight tooth and nail to preserve wealth and lobby for tax codes that gives control over their estates and lets them give their money to their kids tax-free. The problem, though, is we still live in a democracy. And in times of great, great inheritance, like the Gilded Age before us or the Industrial Revolution in the UK, if you want to keep a relatively free market system, you are going to have to significantly change stuff and make some compromises. The coming age of those compromises could very much change American society forever. We have not had a period like

this really since the end of the Great Depression when the initial system broke completely. Before that we had the Progressive Era. Both changed everything in the way our society was ordered, how we do taxes, the way the economy interacts with politics. Now I do not know what the solution is, as obviously many people have very different proposals. But expect this to be one of the central fights of our time. I thought it was astounding, $16 trillion. And if you want to hear my reaction to Sager's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com.

Crystal, what are you taking a look at? monologue. Become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, guys, this has been an astonishing year already of change across the media landscape. 2010's juggernaut BuzzFeed News, they just shuttered. Vox was forced to raise money at half of their previous valuation just to stay afloat. And now in a stunning fall, Vice Media has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Not so long ago, that company was valued at $5.7 billion. They are now hoping to fetch $225 million in a fire sale. All of these companies were eaten alive by their bets that social media trends and clicks would amount to vast revenue streams to justify their multi-billion dollar valuations. Investors, they poured in hundreds of millions of dollars in cash. and clicks would amount to vast revenue streams to justify their multi-billion dollar valuations.

Investors, they poured in hundreds of millions of dollars in cash. But at the end of the day, each of these companies' fatal flaw was reliance on major tech platforms to share in a sufficient slice of the wealth of digital ad dollars to justify their gigantic overheads. When ad revenues dipped this year as part of the tech session, it was the straw that broke a whole herd of camel's backs. But this is far from the end of the story. In fact, in a lot of ways, the story of widespread media devastation might just be beginning. Because now AI has arrived that is already capable of cutting the legs out from under even financially solid media companies. Just take a look at this courtesy of Futurism. Google unveils plan to demolish the journalism industry using AI. Now, in the article, they write that Google has just unveiled their new AI integrated search. A key component is what they call snapshots. Whatever

question you ask, their large language model AI will generate a summary meant to answer your query, which appears above all of the linked results. And so in a lot of instances, it's likely to be the only thing that the user actually pays attention to. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what this means for the news business. When users ask questions about news stories, let's say, was Trump found guilty of sexual assault? What are the latest Democratic primary poll results? Why did DeSantis make that weird face in Iowa? Anything. They'll no longer be presented first and foremost with this list of links to news websites where you can read about said topic. Instead, they'll most likely content themselves with that AI snapshot and just move on.

Now, this will result in far fewer visits to news sites, which will generate far fewer ad impressions and which will circumvent all paywalls and which will prevent news sites from getting you to pay for a subscription. These are all primary critical sources of news business revenue, and every one of them gets cut off at the knees by the innovation of AI snapshots. As RPG site owner Alex Donaldson puts it, quote, if this actually works and is implemented in a firm way, this is literally the end of the business model for vast swaths of digital media, LOL. Will publishers be paid for providing this grist for the AI mill? Doesn't really look like it. A Google spokesperson told Futurism, quote, we don't have plans to share on this, but we'll continue to work within the broader ecosystem, whatever that means. So what is this all going to look like? Well, if you are not a behemoth like The Times, The Post, or The Wall Street Journal,

you're probably screwed. 2010's digital media plays were taken out by betting on social media. Now a lot of other outlets are going to be taken out by their reliance on search platforms, squeezing an already struggling industry. Google, after all, accounts for 91% of all search traffic. And other search platforms like Bing, they're going to have their own AI bots as well. And the news industry, they're already in a world of hurt. After all, even large outlets, places like NBC News, Washington Post, they've announced layoffs to cope with that downturn in ad revenue. So what is going to survive? Outside of the Giants, you can kind of still make business models work that either have very low overhead or, and or, some sort of dedicated audience willing to pay. That means

a lot more hot takes than on the ground reporting or investigative journalism, both of which are comparatively expensive. It means more playing to a dedicated niche, either an ideological or personality based one, because a fervent audience willing to pay is more important than a large general audience with lower commitment. It means a lot more insider tip sheets that lobbyists and corporate interests find valuable to help their bottom line. One way or another, you'd better keep it small and provide something, whether it's genuine insight or ideological sucker or insider gossip, that people find genuinely worth paying for. Now, frankly, I don't share for any of this because I think it amounts to an accelerated hollowing out of the media industry. Giants that will all be forced to rely on for news breaking and a sea of small creators to sift through it all

and analyze it. In an analogy to the disappearance of the middle class in our broader economy, the whole middle tier of publishers, they're likely to be pushed down. An acceleration again of a process that has already been playing out over years. What other industries is AI set to casually upend

and send careening off a cliff? Well, we covered earlier how a lot of white collar jobs lost in the tech session, they're gone forever as tech companies plan to replace humans with AI. We're only beginning to wrap our heads around what this all may look like in a new era. Lucky for us, however, Daily Mail recently asked AI to predict how it's all going to turn out. They asked what 10 different American cities might look like in 2050. And according to AI image generator Midjourney, it's all going to work out great, guys.

Here's a rendering of San Diego, another of Washington, D.C. Looks lush, green, clean, finally get those long promise flying cars, apparently. Perhaps AI is right and powerful AI models wielded by a bunch of soulless corporations will actually lead us to the promised land. Or perhaps it will just accelerate all of the worst trends which are already eating away at our society and our economy. I'd wager the reality of the doomed news business is probably a better predictor than the AI's futuristic utopian hallucinations. This is the piece that was always the most clear. And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at breakingpoints.com. Okay, guys, we really appreciate you guys watching. As we said, we've got the RFK interview coming.

It'll be later today for our premium subscribers. For everybody else, it will be up tomorrow. So if you want to watch it early, if you want to help support our work, stuff like this, breakingpoints.com. Otherwise, we'll have a great counterpoint show also for everybody tomorrow, and we will see you all on Thursday. The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable, the unexpected, showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves. This medal is for the men who went down that day. On Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage, you'll hear about these heroes and what their stories

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

DNA test proves he is not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father? Well, Sam, luckily, it's You're Not the Father Week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This author writes, my father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son, even though it was promised to us. He's trying to give it to his irresponsible son, But I have DNA proof that could get the money back. Hold up.

They could lose their family and millions of dollars? Yep. Find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast.