Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 6/11/24: Carville Says Biden Shouldn't Have Run, Lindsey Graham Drools Over Ukraine Minerals, US Drivers Secretly Monitored

Episode Date: June 11, 2024

Krystal and Saagar discuss James Carville saying Biden shouldn't have run, Lindsey Graham says Ukraine war needed for minerals, American drivers secretly monitored, Juul ban backfires.   To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.com/   Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Hey, guys. Ready or not, 2024 is here, and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show. Good morning, everybody. Happy Tuesday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed, we do. Lots of interesting stories

breaking this morning to talk to you about. So we have new calls from Democrats, including James Carville, for Biden to drop out. So a little late in the game for that, but we're still going in that direction. Thomas Massey, Congressman Thomas Massey, Republican, spills the tea on AIPAC babysitters to Tucker Carlson. Got some interesting analysis of AIPAC donations to get into with you. Lindsey Graham making some very revealing and I guess very honest comments about the Ukraine war and the real reason that we are so deeply involved and invested in that. Your car may be tracking you and snitching

to your insurance company in a way that could cause your premiums to go up. Sagar is taking a look at the FDA, doing some shenanigans with regards to e-cigarettes. I'm looking forward to hearing that one. It is one of the greatest, it is a crime against humanity. Crime against Juul users. Well, that's humanity. Okay. All right. Well, I'm looking forward to that one. I haven't read that one yet. And I'm taking a look at a new investigation into claims of Hamas mass rape on October 7th that has already created, it was like kicking a horn and it's not as great a huge backlash. So a lot to dig into there. Also looking forward to speaking in studio this morning with Anel Sheline. She is a former State Department employee who resigned about two months ago over her

objections to the war in Gaza and our unconditional support for Israel. We're going to talk to her about why she resigned, what she saw at the State Department, and also some new developments. We had a UN Security Council resolution passed about that ceasefire deal that the Biden administration claimed was Israel's idea. But for some reason, Israel's the only party actually at this point that says they reject the deal, their own deal, supposedly. So a lot that's interesting there. Looking forward to speaking to Anel this morning. Yeah, it's always great to hear from people who are actually on the inside. She can tell us about what it was actually like to work there and then also react to some of the things that are going on right now. So before we get to any of that, just a reminder,

making sure everything is good on the local side. If you have any issues from the migration, remember, you can send them email support at locals.com. And you can support us, breakingpoints.com. You may not realize it, but today's a big day. It's our first time since moving over to local. We've got two monologues right here in the show. So I know premium subscribers, you guys have been asking. We just had to get our workflow and everything, and there you go. So I hope you enjoy the show today, breakingpoints.com, if you want to become a subscriber. As Crystal said, though, there is some interesting development on the Biden is too old discourse. We're kind of under an oscillating thing. First, we were allowed to say it, not allowed to say it. Now only some people are allowed to say it.

James Carville is apparently one of those people. He gave an interesting interview a few days ago that only now has been taking notice why he did not think Joe Biden should run again. Let's take a listen. It isn't a choice that I was crazy about. I actually was very public that I thought that President Biden should not run for re-election. But he did, and it's him and Trump, and that's where I am. And I'm 1,000% behind President Biden.

It's the choice I got. Where does the Democratic Party go? Well, one of the underappreciated things about the current state of the Democratic Party is there is enormous, I mean, almost could say, I mean, there's no Bill Clinton, you know, can say that about someone. But with that type of skill. Oh, so there you go, Joe. So first of all, Carville says something which is basically not true, Crystal, because we've been covering this for a long time. He did not ever say publicly or vocally that Biden should not run again.

That has not been his M.O. now. Maybe he said it at like a D.C. cocktail party. I was going to say, maybe he may have said it out in the circuit. He certainly did not say it here. Carville, of course, the former campaign manager for Bill Clinton, kind of a, what, just a cable news star, I guess, for the last 30 years or so. He's got that, like, he's a character, you know. He's a character. Yeah, and he's looked like he was 100 years old for my entire life somehow. So I guess he could be a very trusted authority in terms of the aging process and what is appropriate. There is a good

documentary, if anybody wants to watch it, called The War Room. It's actually on HBO Max now. I just checked. It was an inside camera crew that joined the Clinton campaign when nobody thought that they were going to win. And so they actually were in the room for the entire course of the election, including all the way up to election night. So we want to see how Carville really was in action along with George Stephanopoulos. I do recommend it. But at the very least, he's a longtime Democratic elite pundit and other for him to be saying something like this is pretty astounding because they're admitting the weakness of their candidate. At the very same time, let's put this up there from Nate Silver, the polling prognosticator. He says it is clear now that Democrats would have been better served if Biden had decided a year ago not to seek a second term, which would

have allowed them to have some semblance of a primary process and give voters a say amongst the many popular Democrats across the country. As he shows you, Biden has now hit an all time low in approval just yesterday. Dropping out would be a big risk, but there is a threshold below which continuing to run is a bigger risk. Are we there yet? I don't know. But it is more than fair to ask. I mean, we are now at a point really where historically it is very difficult to even put Biden into perspective. There's really only two options. He is the most unpopular president ever, including more unpopular than Jimmy Carter.

So since the invention of modern polling, or every single poll and all of the averages are totally wrong. Now, the funny thing is, both are equally likely, I would say. There is still a strong possibility that he could win the election. In fact, Nate wrote an entire piece, I recommend people read it, about the path to 270, where he makes the case we talked about on our show yesterday about the path to 270, where he makes the case we talked about on our show yesterday. The path to 270 for Biden through white older voters in the industrial Midwest is still very strong. He could lose the entire Sunbelt, a lot of the emerging parts of the country, and he could still win the election. But it is an incredibly narrow path and one that

if things trend in this direction, if even somewhat accurate, is going to be extraordinarily unlikely. I mean, look, we covered yesterday a poll that had them tied, you know, among registered voters. I think Biden was up by one among likely voters. Trump was up by one, but just a total jump ball. So, yeah, the remarkable thing is that both major parties seem to have chosen what is probably like the weakest candidate that they possibly could. And so that's what's keeping Joe Biden in the game. You know, if Trump were to like get locked up and drop out of the race because of it, that would be the Democrats worst nightmare, because I think basically any other like generic Republican would probably beat Joe Biden by 5 points, 6 points, 7 points, somewhere in that zone, fairly handily. They would sweep all of the battleground states,

very likely. On the Democratic side, it's not really theoretical. We know because we can see the polling in each of the Senate races where every single Democratic Senate candidate, the good, the bad, the ugly, whatever they are, wherever they are on the ideological spectrum, whatever their level of political talent is, they are all dramatically outperforming the top of the ticket. So Democrats, I think after the midterms, foolishly thought, oh, actually, you know, this went better than we thought. And so we're good. We don't need to think about another presidential contender. The Biden team, the thing that they have probably been most competent and most effective at was closing the door to anyone from any elected from within the party. Obviously, Biden did have Democratic primary opponents,

even though the party just pretended they didn't exist. That also was very effective in keeping Biden's grip on the Democratic Party apparatus. But that was the thing that they did most effectively. And so now, even though everyone's looking at the approval rating, looking at the polling and going, guys, this is kind of a disaster, especially when you're telling us democracy is on the line and this is all existential and we're putting our weakest possible candidate forward. You even have James Carville, who's obviously a party stalwart. He's as loyal a Democrat as you could possibly get, admitting that Biden should have dropped down a long time ago. Astead Herndon on Twitter has been making a point that I think

is also really worth keeping in mind, which is that this idea that Biden would be too old to serve a second term really originates with Joe Biden himself. Last time when he was running, part of his pitch was, listen, guys, I know I'm getting up there in years, but I'll be the sort of steady hand on the till, the senior statesman to get us through this rough, rough Trumpian waters, get him out of office, right the ship, and then hand the keys over to someone in the next generation. He really suggested very strongly that was an important part of his pitch and what made him appealing and allowed him to win and ultimately prevail in that Democratic primary. So it doesn't even originate with the voters themselves,

although I'm sure they were concerned about that at the time as well. Joe Biden really bought into that argument and understood that argument at the time, even as now they try to pretend like it's preposterous and how dare you and it's ageist and it's ableist because of a stutter or whatever. Yeah, it's all because of a stutter, Kristen, actually. That's my favorite. That's the real issue, of course. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. This is the same, you know, the same normal stuff going on. Biden's economy, good metrics, bad vibes, and few levers. I mean, it's one of those where I don't know if to laugh or cry at this point because what people don't seem to understand is they're like, well, the metrics are good, but people don't feel that it is good. And it's like, well, maybe the metrics are bullshit. You know, we were talking just yesterday with one of our producers about how the unemployment rate is even calculated.

Is it an actual true capture of the unemployment rate or is it just the same way it's always been calculated? Hmm, maybe these like antiquated formulas from the 1970s, which was the best thing to come up with for the pre-computer era, maybe that doesn't fully capture it. Maybe the quote-unquote CPI bundle is not exactly the most accurate way to measure inflation. What if we were to just look at the way that people preference things in their lives, food, housing, and shelter, or food and shelter, look at those two things and just think about what inflation looks like that over the course of Biden presidency. Oh, now it's 25%. Oh, that's actually very high. Now we're talking about bad metrics and bad vibes. It's not a difficult thing to understand.

It's really frustrating the way that the media continues to write about this. The housing piece to me is just so critical. Yes. And so central. And I really think, you know, there's all this analysis of, oh, why is Biden holding on to his older voters, but younger voters are fleeing him in droves? And I really think that if you just look at who are the homeowners, who are the asset owners and who are not, you can see very clearly where Biden's coalition has eroded. So, you know,

predominantly older people tend to have, you know, they had a chance to buy a house. They had a chance to accumulate something in their 401k or be invested in the stock market. And if you're young or if you come from a minority community that historically hasn't had a lot of net wealth, you may be shut out of that. And so the economic landscape is totally different for those two groups of people. And to me, it's just a very simple and obvious explanation for the divergence between how different demographic groups feel about Joe Biden. And yet it's almost completely ignored. There was a very revealing, very interesting quote from Ben Harris, who's a former senior Treasury Department official who helped craft Biden's economic agenda about these

economic numbers and why, even though you have jobs reports that show a lot of jobs gains, why they aren't giving Biden credit, quote unquote. They say in this article, even if the trend of positive economic news continues, it's unclear whether voters will give credit to the Biden administration inside Biden's orbit. The fear is that there's little new the administration can do to change the perceptions of a, quote, stubborn electorate that's living through an upswing, yet simply refusing to believe it. There it is. Quote, if half of the people think that unemployment is at a 50-year high when it's actually close to 50-year low, this is a problem of misinformation. It's a problem of perception. That's that Ben Harris dude I was just telling

you about who helped with the Biden agenda. I think, unfortunately, it'll have a major impact on the election. So it's the voters' fault. They just don't understand how good they've got it. They're being stubborn because they're not going along with what the Biden administration wants them to feel about the economy. It's so condescending that you can scarcely believe it. And you can see in this attitude, there's no attempt even to understand it. There's no attempt to give any credence to the economic anxiety that

many, many voters are feeling. And the fact that they feel the bite of high prices continuing, they feel very much the fact that housing, if you aren't already a homeowner, is getting increasingly out of reach. The numbers about how much the average mortgage cost has skyrocketed over just the past couple of years are truly breathtaking. So, you know, they basically are like, yeah, we're not going to try anything new because we don't think it'll work. So we're just going to, you know, hope for the best and remind people that Trump is bad. And hopefully that'll work. They're just going to keep relying on stories like this. Go put this up there on the screen. Quote, this is from the Wall Street Journal.

I'm not blaming them because they're a business publication. So they're writing it the way that they should. This is hiring wages are up, reinforcing the economy's resilience. It says the U.S. posted surprisingly large gains in both jobs and pay, even though the unemployment rate ticked up to 4%. So they say that the U.S. job growth burst past expectations last month, even as the unemployment edged up. Employers added some 272,000 jobs. Now, again, whenever they talk about ticking up, and let's say, for example, that we keep

wages, and we say wages, though, across the economy are up. However, if you read at the very, very bottom of the story, wages across the economy, though, are difficult to measure. Federal officials have recently been hiding actual inflation data more than other factors that would influence those numbers. In other words, are wages keeping up with inflation? Absolutely not. And now let's push back to where I was earlier. I'm just talking about CPI inflation, which is a bundle of a bunch of different things. Let's talk specifically about what they talked about in that Politico piece, housing, gas, and food. Not a chance. You have lost a lot of money, actually, in terms of your overall purchasing power from the last four years,

even if your wages went up by 10%, you're still 15% or whatever in the hole. Everybody intuitively understands this. I've been speaking with many friends, many who are trying to buy a house or saving up for a down payment. When they calculate what their expected mortgage is, they just give up. And these are people who actually make decent money, many of whom are like big law lawyers who probably make, I don't know, a quarter mil a year on top with their spouse. So they're probably pulling $3,350. But we live here in Washington, D.C. Average home price is somewhere around a million in terms of where people want to live.

So that's $200K that you're going to need just saved up for a down payment, which is very, very difficult. And then assuming that you even qualify or let's say you have less than that, if you're going to pay PMI, you've got mortgage payments, which are double digits with the current interest rate. They're like, I can't afford that. They'd be like almost 40% of my take home pay. And these people are frankly rich by most American standards. Okay. But even drop the numbers to a normal American housing market for 500,000, I believe the average home price in the US is now some $500,000. I believe the average home price in the U.S. is now some $450,000, something like that. When we peg what that both price is,

along with the current mortgage payment, it is some 35% to 40% of average take-home pay, even if you make some $100,000 a year. Good luck to you. I mean, that means that 50% of the country, you're done. It is not going to happen. And then over that, or I guess it can, but you really would, you're going to have what, an hour and a half commute or something? Quality of life hit? That's going to be very significant. So all the numbers that people can intuitively see when they're interacting with and trying

to ascend the ladder of a quality of life, not in an unreasonable way. You're not buying yachts. You're not flying all around the country trying to just buy a house. It is extremely difficult. And that is what the Biden people won't acknowledge. They don't even look at it. RFK, you know, to his credit, actually did on our show talk about housing. And I know he has some housing stuff that is out there, but there is no major candidate that is making this like the central issue to them for right now. And that's a huge mistake. I mean, Trump benefits because he's simply the anti. And, you know, in some ways,

people can project whatever they want onto him. Yeah, that's right. I mean, it is really the opposite of the incumbent advantage now because people are so like understandably down about the direction of the country. Being out of office is almost an advantage at this point. So, you know, I just think the level of arrogance from the Biden team and, you know, they call the electorate stubborn. They're the ones who are stubborn, who are looking at these numbers and like, no, we're not going to change. We're not going to adjust. They'll just they're going to come along. We think, we hope. Listen, it worked out for us last time. Joe Biden's in the White House. So, you know, we don't need to actually offer anything. And that's what's really astonishing is

think about the way that this country is supposed to work. Like, think about how much we talk about democracy and how important that's supposed to be. What percentage of voters says the economy is their number one issue? And yet you have really neither of these candidates that has offered anything significant in terms of an economic plan or vision. I mean, Joe Biden, like, there are things that he has done that we've talked about in this administration that I support, that I think were a good direction. But in terms of delivering for people in the here and now, it's just, it's non-existent. It's non-existent what he's even promising in the next year. And we know the promises don't always come reality, but he's not even promising anything. So it really is remarkable. And James Carville, Bill Clinton, obviously not a big fan of Bill Clinton or the way that he ran his administration.

But when it came to campaigning, they understood that the economy had to come first and foremost. And yet, not only do you have no plan on the economy, you have so much focus on funding foreign wars that regardless of how you feel about those foreign wars, obviously a lot of voters are going to come away with the correct impression that that is much more of a priority to Joe Biden and, by the way, the overwhelming majority of the political class in Washington than their well-being day in and day out. Yeah, and that's where sheer political talent also just comes into play. There's an amazing moment in the 92 campaign debates. You can go watch it on YouTube where some lady asked Clinton a question. I think it's, I don't know, she asked George H.W. a question about the national debt,

which, lady, what are you doing? But it's been 30 years, so we'll forgive her. She asked George H.W. Bush a question about the national debt. He answers it about the national debt. Clinton is like, she's not talking about the national debt. She's talking about the economy. And he rattles off like 10 statistics about how everything, Al Gore had a famous saying, he's like, everything that's up should be down, everything that's down should be up. He's like, we're gonna turn things right side up. It was a good turn of phrase. But my point is that they understood intuitively that H.W. Bush and trickle-down economics was deeply out of touch with the current recession that was happening there at that time. And they were hammered at home every single time that they would talk about that. So, obviously, 92 gets carried in.

But people forget, 96 was a blowout election completely. And it was all because he continued on that economic legacy. And even though he didn't really do very much while he was president, he benefited from a lot of different stuff. He still was laser focused on that message. And even after the whole Lewinsky thing, he left office with a 66% approval rating. So there is a lot to be learned here about just literal sheer political talent. And neither of the candidates we currently have who are major in the race are even trying to emulate any of that when it's one of the most successful strategies of my entire lifetime as a politician. Frankly, even more successful than Obama, if we look

at how he left office with his approval rating. Clinton had more of the common man. Yeah, that was his thing. That was his thing. I feel your pain. There was a lot to be, that was very interesting about his 92 campaign in particular, where he really positioned himself as, tried to position himself in a more populist direction vis-a-vis H.W. Bush, who's this, like, you know, patrician scion of an extremely wealthy, like, political dynasty, and did all sorts of Mitt Romney-esque things to signal to the public, like, this guy is nothing like you. He does not

understand your life. And obviously, you know, this is disputed, but with a little help from Ross Perot, he's able to ultimately get over the top. So in any case, to take it back to Carville's original point, in terms of sheer political talent, Joe Biden is no Bill Clinton, no doubt about it. And Democrats have really been fortunate. You know, they were fortunate with Clinton because he was an extraordinary political talent. Barack Obama was also in a very different way, an extraordinary political talent. Hillary Clinton, not so much. And Joe Biden, at one point, he had some things going for him politically, you know, in the sense of empathy. That was what he was really famous for. But those years have passed him by, no doubt about it. They've stuttered away.

Senator Lindsey Graham, who is one of the biggest Ukraine war hawks possible, if this guy was in charge, God forbid, we would already be in World War III. There's no doubt, whether it's with Russia or whether it's with regard to Iran, like any number of World War IIIs Lindsey Graham is constantly looking to get us into. He made some comments though that were, I guess, very honest about the real reasons why we care so much about Ukraine. And spoiler alert, has nothing to do with democracy or with their sovereignty or human rights. Let's take a listen to how Senator Graham explains why we should be super committed to Ukraine.

They're sitting on $10 to $12 trillion of critical minerals in Ukraine. They could be the richest country in all of Europe. I don't want to give that money and those assets to Putin to share with China. If we help Ukraine now,

they can become the best business partner we ever dreamed of, that $10 to $12 trillion of critical mineral assets could be used by Ukraine and the West, not given to Putin and China. This is a very big deal, how Ukraine ends. Let's help them win a war we can't afford to lose. Let's find a solution to this war. But they're sitting on a gold mine to give Putin 10 or 12 trillion dollars

of critical minerals that he will share with China is ridiculous. Sagar Karis, your thoughts on this one? Well, first of all, you're not supposed to say stuff like that ever since the World War I and the Great War, because that's when literal territorial conquests went out of style. And if you embrace that, then you are Putin. That's basically Putinism. Putinism is we have the right as a great power to seize this territory under whatever democratic means because we can and for economic purposes. Because we want that lithium or whatever. This is part of the thing.

That is so patently ludicrous. People used to say that about Afghanistan, too. They're like, well, theoretically, there's X amount. It's like, yeah, what? The Soviet Union and the Russians ruled Ukraine for, what, hundreds of years? If they were going to extract any thing of true value like that, they would have done it already. And more so, if that remained true in the modern era, then the Ukrainian government would have done it already if it was actually going to be possible. The reason why it's not possible is that Ukraine is a stratified country along ethnic lines with deep corruption and which basically has

huge internal contradictions that go against each other that don't make it a functioning nation state, just like Afghanistan. Does it sound familiar? So underlying, you know, resources or whatever, who cares about that? It's about the functioning apparatus above that's actually, you know, able to bring that stuff to market, to be able to trade it. There's a reason they're known for grain and have been known for grain for hundreds of years, okay? But how much do you think that this is reflective of other elites thinking, like in the Biden administration, etc.? I would say it's very difficult because I actually don't think there's a better case for U.S. involvement in Iraq and specifically in the Middle East on oil than there is for this. Because, like I just said, nothing he's saying is even proven or actually like true in terms of its deliverables.

I think a lot of it just comes down to like Putin bad. If anything, like I said, he is probably exhibiting more of a Putin-esque like Russian mindset about why we need Ukraine. But regardless, what is he saying there? there. He said, we need to quote unquote, help Ukraine to turn it into a mineral vassal state that can work as our electric battery vehicle manufacturing hub. Someone should go and ask Ukrainians. Someone should go ask the Ukrainian grandpa who's 62 years old and had one week of basic training on the front line, whether that is why he is fighting and be like, Hey, do you, is that the future that you want for yourself? He's like, wait, I thought I was fighting for self-determination. It's like, hey, buddy, we got some news for you about what you're really doing that. I mean, like this is straight up out

of World War One, like out of the secret treaties of the Bolsheviks published. That's a view into this mindset. Yeah. The Washington Post did do an article a little while back just to confirm the mineral deposits that Lindsey Graham is talking to, I'll put this up on the screen. They say in the Ukraine war, a battle for the nation's mineral and energy wealth. And they frame it from the other direction of not like, well, this is why we should be here so that we can turn them into our lithium vessel state, as Tucker put it. But that's what the Russians are really after. And in fact, a lot of the mineral wealth is in eastern Ukraine, the area that is most in dispute.

It's also the area that is the most ethnically Russian. The one that actually speaks Russian, you mean? Yeah. Right. So they say Ukraine harbors some of the world's largest reserves of titanium and iron ore, fields of untapped lithium, and massive deposits of coal. Collectively, they're worth tens of trillions of dollars. The lion's share of those coal deposits,

which for decades have powered Ukraine's critical steel industry, are concentrated in the east, where Moscow has made the most inroads. That puts them in Russian hands, along with significant amounts of other valuable energy and mineral deposits used for everything from aircraft parts to smartphones. Ukraine would also lose myriad other reserves, including stores of natural gas, oil, rare earth minerals,

essential for certain high-tech components that could hamper Western Europe's search for alternatives to imports from Russia and China. Ukraine is widely known as an agricultural powerhouse, but as a raw material motherlode, it's home to 117 of the 120 most widely used minerals and metals and a major source of fossil fuels. So, I mean, I do think that there are not only this, but there are other business interests in Ukraine. We've seen the way that like private equity has been very excited about the idea of how much money we're going to pay them basically for Ukraine reconstruction. And obviously, the longer the war goes on and the more devastation there is, the more opportunity there is for those reconstruction dollars to flow into their coffers. So, you know, and obviously you have the military industrial complex that are always chomping at the bit for a new war and, you know, what that means for their bottom line. So this is an important part of the story of how we end up constantly engaged in these different wars, whether it's directly or proxy wars like this one, and why they seem to go on forever because you have a lot of people who are either currently profiting from the war or looking forward to future profits from that war.

That is a much more accurate and frankly, I think, correct economic case that can really be made here is why do you think Blackstone, JP Morgan, and all these other people are holding summits about rebuilding Ukraine? Because the American taxpayer is going to pay for it. They're going to finance all the fake bonds and all this other stuff. And we're going to be the guarantor of all of their debt. It's disaster capitalism. It's happened time and time and time again. And then we'll create these fake state-owned companies in Ukraine who, oh, they just happen to become filthy rich oligarchs too, who end up, you know, basically being some corrupt people on the planet. But it's all good

because America is going to get its 20%. And by America, I mean the banks, not anybody who is like a normal average working person and or the politicians who will then go work for the banks. That's if there is an economic case to be made for why U.S. elites care about Ukraine. That's what it actually is. We're all dressed up by this BS around minerals or democracy. But I mean, at the very least with Graham, this is why you, if anything, it is more evil to, it is straight up actually out of World War I to have imperial powers dress up their conquest of territory in some grand fight against fascism or Kaiserism. And then a treaty comes out and it's like, oh, well, actually behind the scenes we were splitting up, you know, all the remains of Eastern Europe or Istanbul and Constantinople or whatever. It's like, no, that's what it's really all about. It probably has always been that way, but, you know, with very few exceptions. But you're not supposed to say this stuff out loud. And that's why it's so gross. Yeah. I mean, it's hard to say

which I prefer. I mean, I do prefer this. I will say I want honestly more than anything. Yeah. We can talk about it. Exactly. Because it's confusing to the American public if it's dressed up in values that they really believe in, right? That they actually earnestly care about, right? And that they actually earnestly are concerned about the Ukrainian people and what this has done to their lives and their futures, etc. And so it confuses them about what our involvement is actually about. I do think it'd be better if you had Joe Biden and others who were talking nakedly about their like wealth extraction plans out of this war, because then we could have honestly put it to the American people

of like, okay, well, is this worth it to you? Is this like what your priority actually is? Cloaking it in humanitarian values while the true end is just, you know, feeding the profit machine is grotesque. So I guess, thank you, Lindsey Graham, for your rare honesty, I guess. But your worldview is gross. This is a very interesting one. I'm sure that's, I mean, quite literally is going to affect all of us. Let's put this up there on the screen. Is your driving being secretly scored? The insurance industry, quote, hungry for insights into how people drive, has turned to automakers and smartphone apps like Life360. So it says, you know you have a credit score, but did you know that you might also have a driver's score? A driver's score reflects how many times

you slam on the brakes, how much you speed, how much you look at your phone, how much you drive late at night. Then that driver's score is then being bought and used by auto insurance companies to variably adjust your auto insurance rates. It says, correctly, for the last two decades, auto insurers have been trying to get people to enroll in these programs that they monitor their day-to-day driving. They say so that the rates can better reflect their actual risk, but you could flip it around and say so that the rates can also variably spike whenever we see you doing something, quote-unquote, risky. Well, why is that bad? Because it is a complete invasion of privacy that uses not only the vehicle, but your phone to gauge all of the details of your everyday life. It is also, frankly, not really fair. I've been thinking about this because I drive in rush hour traffic here.

Well, if I slam on the brakes because somebody's an idiot in front of me, I'm getting penalized. And it's not my fault, you know, that people drive here in bumper to bumper. And by the way, if you're not bumper to bumper, you're just going to get cut off and then you're the sucker who's in the drive. So my point is just that there are so many perverse incentives and different ways where this could spike insurance rates for some consumers. Others who maybe have a different commute would be paying less. It would basically put the burden on, you know, let's say people who have to drive in rush hour traffic and they would have to pay much more, even though they're the ones who are, you know, frankly spending more time on the road, etc. It's just one of those where the privacy element of it shows what the invasion looks like. And I would be remiss if I didn't say also that this comes just, we're taping this segment the very day after that Apple announces this major integration

with OpenAI and with ChatGPT. So now, you know, at the OS level, your data is hardwired into a large language model where, what, you think that, you know, all of the Geico and all these other companies aren't going to be then using that to churn even more and create predictive models of your driving so they can variably adjust. I mean, you can just see what the future here looks like where they're going to squeeze every single dollar that they have out of you. And really, in some ways, the most disturbing part is people have no idea. Yeah, they don't even know. I didn't know this was happening. You download an app like GasBuddy is the one that's mentioned here, which helps you, I guess, be more fuel efficient.

GasBuddy is a cool app, actually. Well, it used to be a cool app. Now you need to read the disclosures very carefully because, yeah, the apps that are on your phone and your car itself is snitching to your car insurance company and selling your data. And I'm talking about down to the minute, like second by second diary of what you are doing in the car. One individual who sort of went on this quest to find out what they knew about him was ultimately able to obtain his driver score and all of the information that had been sold to these car insurance companies, he said there was a Microsoft Excel file with time-stamped lists of his every offending event and the latitude and longitude for where they occurred. In the speeding tab, for example, there were more than 200 second-by-second entries

for the handful of drives during which this individual, Mr. Lethern, had exceeded 85 miles per hour. Like, they are tracking you second by second. Where your eyes are, how often you're on the phone, whether you put the brake on a little too hard, whether you accelerate it a little too fast. Like, I think people would be horrified to know that you feel like when you're in your car, you feel like you're kind of in, like, you're in your space. I mean, supposedly your property. Yeah, you're in your property. You're in your space. Like, you feel like this is a, you know, obviously there's people who can see in the window, but you feel like this is like a private space.

You have no awareness that everything you're doing in there is being tracked. And GM actually, we can put this next one up on the screen because New York Times had done some reporting on this previously. GM had made a deal with LexisNexis where they were sending, you know, with these digital dashboards, they're tracking everything that you're doing in the car and they were selling it to LexisNexis, which was selling it to the car insurance companies. Now, I think after this report and backlash, they stopped with this deal. But this is where we're at. You know, cars have so much digital technology in them now. They're integrated with your smartphones, especially through Apple CarPlay. I could actually put this next piece up on the screen because this was something that Matt Stoller revealed to us in the context of the Apple anti-competitive DOJ suit. So CarPlay, Apple wants to take over like your entire dashboard

through CarPlay. And the thing is for automakers, CarPlay has become very popular. You know, people really demand it in their vehicles. The only major automaker that doesn't include it, I believe, is GM at this point because they want to be able to gather your data themselves, I guess, and sell it off. They don't want Apple to be able to sell off your data. But so you have this full integration of everything you're doing in the car being tracked and exploited. And I just think people are completely oblivious to any of this that's going on. Oh, absolutely. I was looking for while you were talking.

Yeah. On Tesla, they used to have this thing called a safety score, which is exactly what you're talking about. And it would measure hard braking. I actually opted out of it because they were using it as part of, quote, unquote, real-time insurance, which exactly uses your safety score. And I was like, well, it's not fair, you know, because you drive so DC and Maryland, there's a whole meme in the DC community about quote unquote Maryland drivers. And you know, if somebody cuts you off and you're constantly like in this battle and war against all of these other idiots that are on the road, you're being

penalized in real time as a result of other people's bad driving. And that's really what I mean about the weird and the perverse incentives and about the way that this could all be applied. So, I mean, the real TLDR on this is that when we think about the phone and then the car and as it fuses together, your phone already has a compass, an accelerometer, everything. But they don't even need the car, honestly, at this point. And then we've combined with a large data model.

It knows everything about your driving already if it wants to. And then all it takes is a few B2B deals between Geico and something else. How many people really paying attention every time they hit allow on their iPhone? Of course. Yeah, because that's what they would. Oh, well, technically, we asked you whether you wanted this or not. You read through through the 80 page disclaimer consent form that you have to sign when you get this app. Nobody does. Also, people are terrible judges of their own driving. And there's a lot of data to support this in terms of overall survey as opposed to how they actually drive. Well, what is Geico going to tell you or whomever? This is going to help you because you're a good driver, right? And you'd be like, yeah, i'm a great driver boom next thing you know you know you're you almost get into a crash and someone

cuts you off and your insurance premium goes up by ten dollars a month and also i don't know if everybody knows this car insurance is up by i think 40 year over year car insurance is totally out of control uh so much so that I monitor my charges very religiously. And I was like, what the hell is going on over here? And I looked into it and I was like, oh, it's not just me. It's the entire country. There's a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes. They claim that it's outside of their control.

When somebody jacks their price up by 40% over a single year, you should probably think about why exactly that is. But the point here is just the technology. And it's not just in insurance, by the way. This is the whole economy. I just saw a story yesterday about Uber. Uber will actually increase the price of your ride if your phone battery is very low because they know you're desperate. You're like, you've got to get home because your phone is going to die. Yeah. I mean, in a way it's genius, right? You're like, well, it's true. I'll probably be willing to hit 40% more if my phone's at 5% because I'm screwed if I can't get home. But that's pretty bad, isn't it? There's a lot of variable pricing in Uber Eats as well. Uber Eats, McDonald's. McDonald's is making a killing through Uber Eats because their stuff is cheap if you're willing to go to the store.

When you're drunk at 2.30 in the morning, people are going to pay a lot for McDonald's. They're paying like primo prices or for Taco Bell or for any of these. And Uber Eats knows that. So they use a variable price. The driver usually doesn't get nearly as much. And these people are walking away with billions and billions of dollars. This is what they're using AI for people. Yeah. Not to benefit humanity, but to price gouge you to the greatest possible degree. Seriously. I mean, there's whole companies that are spun up

now to do the variable pricing you're talking about, exploiting whatever data they get. The phone battery thing is crazy. They'll use whatever info they can to figure out how desperate you are for this particular product and how willing and able you are to pay for this particular product. And they'll just turn the dial up, squeeze you for every bit that you're possibly worth using AI to fine tune the art of price gouging. What a world. All right, Sagar, what are you looking at? As people who watch our AMAs know, I am a fan of nicotine, which in recent years has had a major cultural resurgence thanks to the development of both smokeless vaporizers and tobacco-free pouches from companies like Zinn or Lucy. This cultural resurgence of nicotine, instead of

igniting a fair conversation about the trade-offs involving the drug, has instead sparked an insane bipartisan moral panic, which has both hurt market competition and actually made public health in America much worse. vaporizing vaping. Juul, through proprietary technology and innovative patents, invented a vaporizer which was small, sleek, and then most importantly delivered the same nicotine hit as an actual cigarette. The impetus for starting that company was actually two smokers who had tried desperately to quit consistently and were unable to find anything in the marketplace which worked for them. In other words, the intention of the company from the outset was explicitly to help people quit smoking, which it did both for the founders and increasingly for millions of smokers. But then something unintended happened. People who started using Juul and nicotine may not

have otherwise ever have smoked, largely because they intuited that Juuling, while probably not quote-unquote good for you, is still a hell of a lot better than actually smoking. Well, here's where the nanny state kicked in. Juul innovated by creating different flavors of so-called nicotine pods, the most famous of which were mango and creme brulee. Quickly, they became attacked by the US government because of its own success. Despite literally millions of people switching from cigarettes to vaping, including enjoying those flavored pods, the FDA, under the Trump administration, put them into their sights. In 2018, facing massive regulatory scrutiny, Juul had to pull

flavored pods from its stores. This was under a later rule by the FDA to combat the so-called youth vaping epidemic. Now, since it's been five years or so since that actually happened, we can see and evaluate the results. How did things work out? Let's see. The FDA killed Juul, which was an American homegrown innovative company. Instead, what's happened has been a massive rise in disposable flavored vapes from China. The way that these flavored vapes are able to circumvent US law is by illegally shipping to the US, constantly changing ownership and

regulatory structure, and being disposable as opposed to permanent. At the same time, they maintain the flavored vape market to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars in the many years since. So the government killed Juul pods, flavored, only to then turn around and hand the market share to China. So if that's not bad enough, a new analysis from the National Bureau of Economic Research finds that not only did the flavor ban kill Juul, that in selected markets where flavored vapes were no longer available, youths from age 18 to 20, quote, began switching to combustible cigarette smoking. Furthermore, they found zero evidence that flavor restrictions have any effect

whatsoever on the tobacco or nicotine usage of adults who are older than 21. So basically, they killed Juul to combat youth nicotine use. The youths then switched to straight up cigarettes. Those 21 and up just bought Chinese vapes with God knows what in them instead. And if that's not enough of an insult, it is now the admission of the failure by the FDA, which is not getting nearly enough attention. Just a few days ago, the FDA has now reversed itself, placing Juul Labs products, quote unquote, under scientific review, removing the ban on its products. And furthermore, humiliating themselves even more. They had to announce a new task force to go after illegal flavored vapes that are flooding in from China. So to recap everything that's happened so far.

FDA went after Juul. They said they're targeting kids with flavored pods. Those kids then switched from actual flavored pods to cigarettes or the exact same product sold by Chinese companies with very little quality control or oversight by the government. Years later, the FDA says they are now unbanning Juul and are setting up a major task force to target the very vape companies that they created a massive market for in the first place, and now they have an actual youth smoking problem on their hands because cigarettes are cool again. Yeah, that's what happened.

All of this for nicotine, a product that once you divorce from actual carcinogenic cigarettes, is arguably one of the greatest nootropics known to man, not to mention neuroprotective against Alzheimer's and a central part now of the human life for centuries, which you don't even need any of the downside risk. Now, let's be clear, that's not health advice. You have to be 21. I'm not a doctor. It's also one of the most addictive substances known to man. So buyer and user beware. But at the very least, wherever you fall on nicotine, you have to at least admit this. What the government did to Juul is criminal. They killed the only American innovator in the space.

They gave the market to China. They created more actual teen smokers. They are now creating a task force to address the problem they created. You don't hate these idiots enough. This is an iHeart Podcast.