Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 9/21/26: AI Nearly Starts China War, Diesel Prices Skyrocket, Ed Sheeran Mocked For Apology On Palestine

Episode Date: September 21, 2026

Krystal and Saagar discuss AI nearly starts war with China, Truckers sound off on diesel prices, Ed Sheeran mocked for apology on Macklemore tour scandal.   Yanis Varoufakis: https://x.com/yanisvaroufakis   To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.com    Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Let's put this up on the screen from CNN. This is pretty stunning and underscores how, while we have been talking a lot about the long-term risk of AI, which I think we should talk about and be concerned about, there are a lot of short-term risks involving AI hallucinations and human stupidity, the combination of which could be completely disastrous for the country and the world. So this is the headline here exclusive. U.S. military had close call after using AI for false intelligence report. The intelligence report circulated across the U.S. military this spring in the midst of the war with Iran immediately set off alarm bells. A Chinese ship in the Middle East was transporting components of a nuclear weapons

program. The U.S. military swung into action with plans to intercept the vessel, according four sources. According to two of those sources, armed members of the U.S. military were preparing to board the ship. Military planes were in the air. It was only just before the planned operation that officials dug deeper into the report put together by a special operations command analysts and found it had been generated with the help of artificial intelligence and that a chatbot, the analyst had used, inaccurately identified the material the ship was carrying. The report, according to one of the sources, was, quote, entirely false, but it also, quote, almost started a war. Any U.S. operation against a Chinese vessel could have risk spiraling into an armed conflict

between the two nations. This is terrifying and completely insane. They had an AI chatbot that hallucinated intelligence about this ship carrying components for a nuclear weapons program, a Chinese ship, and we were this close to taking what would have been an extraordinary inflammatory action, risking war with China based on an AI hallucination. I mean, terrifying. Right. And the way, the chain of all this, so they say in this particular instance, the analysts queried a chatbot about some of the intelligence reporting on the ship.

manifest that had originated with the Special Operations Command Pacific, which was based in Hawaii, it's not even clear right now whether that chat bot was commercially available or a U.S. government one. I'm going to bet that it probably was one of those internal U.S. government products that chat GPT, Claude, and Palantir have all built kind of inside for their use. The bot fused together open source intelligence with secret signals intelligence in government holdings and reached its fateful conclusion about the material that the ship was carrying. the analysts then used AI again to package the findings into a standard intelligence report

the kind that is trusted by military officials. So you hallucinate it. I mean, this is classic, actually, why what's happening in colleges right now is so bad. What you do is you kind of take your raw research from chat GPT or others, and then you have chat GPT or Claude or any of these others package the raw, you know, research into something even more polished. So it looks like all the back research has been done. but if the chain is faulty from the very beginning,

then it gets created into this standard kind of briefing. The briefing then, look, these 60-year-old commanders are like, all right, you know, they've been reading these intelligence reports for years. It looks exactly the same. They go, yep, Intel's solid. Let's launch the operation. Obviously, they know how that's going to work, Special Operations Command and the Pentagon,

then, you know, launch the entire mission. And it's only until somebody who was like, hold on a second. They're sending... Where's this coming from? Where's this coming from that they start? to look into it. The other problem is that all of it was very decentralized, is it doesn't appear that any of this went very high up the chain of command. So maybe Hegsteth knew about it. Did the White House know about it? I mean, to me, to my mind, if you're going to launch an

operation on a Chinese ship, the president himself needs to sign off on something like that. I mean, that is such world-changing implications. But that's, again, this is the problem with getting into a war in the first place. That's not feasible by and large for every single military operation, you'd kind of delegate within the bounds. And one of the bounds he probably set out was you don't even need commander in chief authority. If nuclear material is on its way to Iran, you go in, you'll go ahead and intercept it, right? Which again is scary, but you can understand exactly how something like that happened. Even that seems so wild, though. I agree. Even if it's not China, any sort of, you know, nuclear material coming in from any, I mean, you would think that that would

be involvement all the way up to the highest level. And so, you know, the crazy thing is, that according to a lot of research that's out there at this point, if this same intelligence analyst had gotten this intel from a human source, I bet you he would have questioned it more. Okay, this is an extraordinary claim. How do you know where are you getting this from? But there is unfortunately a typical human bias in favor of the machines, where if the AI tells you, people are more likely to accept that without looking into it than if you get it from a human being. So we're seeing that, you know, with this near miss of an incident. And then the other place, we can put D2 up on the screen. You know, obviously in the first day of the war, we attacked a girls school mass murdering. By the way, those little girls would have been attending their first day of school in Iran, literally today. And instead, they, you know, completely, I mean, just horror, horror all the way around. The worst attack on civilians in, you know, modern history from America. And, you know, The new reporting says that AI contributed to that.

Now, you can't just say, like, it's AI's fault here, though. This fault lies directly with the human beings. You had a rush to come up with an extensive target list. You have, as they say here, outdated imagery and an over-reliance on AI. So in their rush to spin up a large target list to launch this aggressive, offensive war of choice, they skipped over all of the steps that you would have wanted to take to make sure that you're not mass-murdering little children in their school uniforms while they're at school. And so because of that rush, the fact that also Hegset has dismantled the office that is supposed to look into potential civilian deaths and make sure that there are safeguards there. And then because of this reliance on AI, you end up with an absolutely monstrous, horrific

war crime that was perpetrated on the very first day of this war. So you can see how there is already where we are now with AI reliance. There is a combustible, tragic, destructive combination of human stupidity over reliance, trusting these products blindly and use of AI that's being fully integrated. into government systems that in many ways has already been fully integrated into consequential government systems, including the, you know, within the Department of War where people's lives literally depend on it. It's really scary because I think that this, this is the most extreme example.

But I was talking with a good friend of mine who was talking about this at a company level. And the amount of AI that is now integrated into top CFO and CEO decisions, you just have to think about the consequences of this. Let's say that there was, you know, a potential AI bubble, but you're using your AI to power all your finances. Wouldn't the AI have a self-interest in telling you to keep funding it, even if it was gone? And I was like, wow, and he brought this up to me. I said, I didn't even think about that. Yeah.

But, you know, it's one of those where we've outsourced so much decision-making and so much research that what we think is an independent decision is not independent actually at all. It's only dependent, really, on the tools that you're using in front of you. Trump also, what's so become clear to me, and I was talking about this with several friends, AI, like at the end of the day, why does Trump care? It's purely self-interested. The AI CAP-X spend is the only thing floating this economy. That's it. He has to defend it. And the AI oligarchs, Jensen, you know, and all of these others, the safety stuff is just too inconvenient for the stock price. Like the fact that Sam Altman's not going public, that's not good for

the U.S. equities market. You know, it's good for humanity, but it may not necessarily be good for the U.S. equities market. Anthropic, they need to go public and they need to keep all these data centers being pushed up everywhere. You can actually see this with Trump. Put D3 up here on the screen, so I won't even read all of it. You know, over the years, there have been many hoaxes, et cetera, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All right. Now we'll finally get to AI. We will not in any way hinder or stifle the growth of this incredible industry. Rather, we will cherish it, help it, and watch it as it grows. However, we'll also be looking for bad, and we can do that very easily with our existing criminal and civil justice system. For this purpose, I am forming the AI force, which much

like I did with Space Force, has been a tremendous success in my first term. To that end, I will be announcing in the near future, an AI czar. Only high IQ individuals need apply. AI is the next industrial revolution or internet, but will be even larger and more impactful, possibly as much as 25% of our country's GDP. We are leading China, the rest of the world, I intend to keep it that way. Ironically, people who are fully AI-pilled were saying, hey, 25% is far too low, sir.

Yeah. Pointing out, remember, Anthropics said that its total addressable market is the entire U.S. economy of $30 trillion. But that is why that the positioning of the White House, and there's even many reports, many people inside the White House are like, ah, I'm not so sure about this,

causes real problems. in the middle of diesel and, you know, the gas crisis and inflation where it is right now, this is all we have. Like, this is it. It really is. I mean, I'm looking right now. So gas is $450 a gallon, and let me see where the U.S. equities markets are. Yeah, equities are actually up, you know, after market. Obviously, it's one day, et cetera. But, you know, we live in a world where the Baba Mandep straight and the entire strategic situation looks so perilous for us. And the U.S. consumer looks so screwed, heading into a fourth quarter where retail usually is, you know, the backbone of the U.S. economy is people buying dumb Christmas gifts that they don't actually need. That's literally what keeps us all propped up. And our equities market is still up in aftermarket. And we could be heading for potential all-time highs nearly every hour of the month with the S&P 500. It's only because of the tech stocks. Yeah, no, absolutely. The whole economy is a bet on this. And you look at the, we've talked before about this chart that shows as data center construction increases, all other construction decreases. I mean, it is eating the entire economy. And so Trump, who cares a lot about the stock market anyway, but has to care a lot about the stock market because the whole economic situation is quite dire already. That's why, of course, he's not going to put any limits on this. Of course, he's not going to rein the industry in. His entire presidency, the

story of it has been giving the tech oligarchs everything they possibly could want. And Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, has really emerged as a villain here, who's quite duplicitous, I think, in terms of the way that he presents himself and he has really gained Trump's trust and confidence. It's worth remembering, you know, Nvidia is at the center of all of the circular financing. They want the shopping spree of companies coming to them, buying their chips to go on forever. that's what they want. So he has a direct financial interest in saying, oh, there's no problems here. We need to just keep going off to the races. The whole economy depends on this. Let's go, sir.

And Trump is always looking for the person who's going to tell him what he wants to hear. So Jensen seems to have really gained his trust and have his ear right now. And we played some last week of Trump calling him while Jensen was on stage at the All In conference. And you could hear the way that he talked to Trump. Oh, Mr. President, don't. worry, we'd never let that happen. You're doing a great job. You know, this is going to be amazing for the country. And that's the way that he is in public. You can only imagine how slavishly, you know, worshipful he is in private to Trump as well. And meanwhile, just again, the total lack of seriousness of this man. Like, what can you even say? Put D4 up on the screen. He put this out. He's, he wants us to vote on a new word for AI because he doesn't like artificial intelligence. He says

that maybe we should rename it Supreme Intelligence or Extreme Intelligence or Superior Intelligence. Now, this was the second follow-up tweet where he says, well, Supreme Intelligence is losing really badly. People like Superior or Extreme Intelligence, so we're taking Supreme Intelligence out of the running, deleting it as a qualifier, let you vote for the final two. Superior Intelligence or Extreme Intelligence. A fresh vote begins now. Oh, thank you, sir, for the opportunity to participate in the future of the country. and have a democratic say over the direction we're going in terms of what we label this extremely powerful and dangerous technology being built by people who want to replace all of human labor

and say that it may also destroy all of humanity. Thank you so much for that, sir. I appreciate it. See, to me, it's just clear that this is like Trump, he believes that's very similar to the Iran situation. Everything for him is it'll always work out and it's always a branding problem. Yes. Like, you know, it's not about the reality. It's not about the technology. It's not about the technology, it's like it's just about branding. Even in the way that he wants to go in the midterms, he genuinely believes. He believes in his core that he has done an incredible job and that it's all about his advisors not selling the war or his accomplishments properly. He thinks it's packaging. And you can understand why the person who became president through earned media and through the

apprentice would believe something like that. He's also like he's also an old man. Right. Who's not going to have to be here to deal with all of the fallout that the rest of us are going to have to deal with or that our children and grandchildren are going to have to deal with and clearly doesn't give a shit about anyone except himself. Right. And his family. And who are also getting very, very rich. Filty rich.

You know, it is funny because they talk about the, you know, the AI technology is having like spiky intelligence is kind of the word for it, where on the one hand, it can solve a millennium math problem, which is like, you know, the best humans were unable to. You win a million dollars if you're able to do one of these things. It can identify multiple zero-day exploits, which are like, you know, hackers can be paid hundreds to millions of dollars to identify these. And yet, on the other hand, you can ask it some basic thing and it'll just, like, completely invent an answer and lacks the intelligence to even think of like, hey, would the humans

want me to hack into this company right now? There's some basic sort of morality and common sense intelligence that's lacking there. Trump is a little bit like that. His intelligence is very spiky. In some ways, he is the dumbest person on the planet. Like, I have no doubt, like, he actually likes to use AI for all of his freaking boomer slop, does he have any understanding of what this is actually doing, what it's capable of, of envisioning what the world may look like if the most dire, either positive or negative

visions of this technology come to fruition? No. But he is this sort of like marketing branding savant. And so it's part of what makes Trump very difficult for people to wrap their heads around that someone could be so talented in some ways and so stupid at the same time. But he's kind of a mirror image reflection of the AI. Many of our presidents actually, we'll show you one of them, who appears to be this, you know, great thinking article reader and all of this, the most well-spoken man you could ever envision. But then when he actually was president, couldn't literally do anything.

But before I get to that, you know, you said something funny about the AI and all of that. I actually think that's the most human thing about AI and it reflects the people who built it. Because if you've ever met somebody who is top 1% or top 0.5% IQ, that describes them to a T. Yes. They're incredible at like mental math or they'll be incredible at like mental math, have a visionary ability to like look deeply. I think the most interesting name by high IQ people is they're like cross domain knowledge and they can use things cross domain to come to a conclusion which you literally never would be able to see. But then you would take them to the party freak and just weirdo or you, you know, have the most messed up personal lives or have no ability to connect to other people. They get like very basic facts wrong. We don't know how to do their own law. laundry, like, things like that. So to me, the chatbot is an exemplar of the people who built it. Like, high IQ, probably, like, semi-autistic weirdos who are, like, mental math, geniuses, coding problems. And the rest of us are like, I don't know, man, this seems pretty weird to me. So, that's just my take. My dad, love him Darily.

PhD physicists. I have some experience with this. Dragli in my life. This is most of the Ingeti family. You're looking at the only Ingety male on both sides. He doesn't have a PhD in electrical engineering. So I'm one of the only people who could actually, you know, could give at least some vision into that. Behind every night spent making the kids' lunches, there's a lot of suspense. Will they finally eat the veggies? Will the pasto survive the first bite? Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all?

And will you finish episode 8 before you're done slicing the cucumbers? Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Craved Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on Internet with a two-year term and auto. pay credit. Visit bell.ca for details and to check availability. Bell. Connection is everything. Hi, this is Kylie Breakman. Angel Geratana. Jeremy Colhane. Patrick McDonald. And we're the hosts of the Artists on Artists on Artists on Artists Podcast. The improvised character comedy podcast where each week a new panel of artists discuss their craft. Join us for a panel of wellness influencers. What I try to do is faux journal. I don't know. Have you guys heard of

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should we call it superior intelligence or supreme intelligence, because he clearly has thought about it, knows some things about it, is able to articulate that clearly seems to take it seriously. Let's take a listen to his comments and then we'll talk about the Obama, you know, the pitfalls with Obama on the other side of it. If we are thinking about AI just in terms of how do we cure cancer or get better energy, you can do that without having a gentic AI and having it just roaming free in the internet. The reason you are doing that

is because you have to market a product that people will pay money for. That's a misalignment between what our society needs and the commercial imperatives that these companies are facing. Not because necessarily they're trying to do bad things, but because, you know, they've got to justify these valuations. So that's one more reason why it is really important for us to have a competent government and a serious bipartisan conversation around this issue, and we have to do it fast.

And I would encourage voters to pay attention to this. if somebody does not have a serious plan for how to deal with this, then they're not meeting the moment. And you should probably look for somebody else. So I want to underscore his point there because I think it's a very important one. You know, I am of the mind that we should stop frontier AI development, that we should not, that we should ban what's called recursive self-improvement. As your client had a very good essay about exactly this,

which effectively means you are handing over human control to the AI to build themselves. You are deciding to take the human out of the loop. You know, there's a lot of concern, again, justifiably. So about humans losing control. That amounts to humans handing control to the AI. And there's a sense, I think, that a lot of people who hold my position are just against the technology altogether. That's not true. I use the technology myself.

I think the technology is really cool. I think it's exciting the idea of what it could be deployed for. I buy into some of the positive possibilities of what could be done with it. But what Obama's pointing out here is that they're selling you on the idea that you have to have this frontier development and you have to have AI that is agentic in order to accomplish those positive, you know, scientific or medical developments. And the reason that the AI companies want to sell you that is because the agentic AI is the piece that could theoretically replace human beings in the workforce.

Agentic AI just means basically AI that can sort of like go out in the world and do its own thing. Very different from the chatbot that you're likely using on a day-to-day basis where you ask it for something and it delivers for you. The agentic AI is able to take actions in the world without being under direct human oversight. And so what Obama is saying here is that many of the potential positive benefits of AI can come without using agentic AI. It can be a tool in the hands of the researcher. It can be a tool in the hands of the coder, of the scientists, of the people who, you know, would really benefit from this in terms of making these technological breakthroughs that would be very exciting for AI. I think that's a very important point because we're not saying

you can't have this technology at all. We have to put it all back in the bottle, although there are probably some of my husband included who would say that's probably the way to go. But you can have, you can sort of have your cake and eat it too. We don't have to go through down this path of recursive self-improvement. We don't have to go down this path of fully embracing agentic AI. And so I think that's an important point. I said we'll talk a little bit about the warts of Obama. I mean, you can't help but look at this and David Sturter was making this point and go, okay, that's great and well and good. And this is, again, the pitfall of Obama so often, he is intelligent enough to understand it. He's in the circles with a lot of these tech guys.

Like, are you doing anything other than speaking on a stage at a university about this? If you genuinely take seriously, as I do, some of the more existential concerns about AI development and AI safety, what are you doing about it outside of just, you know, answering some questions from college students? What do you mean? What is you doing about it? Who else is going to take a multi-million dollar multi-year deal from Reed Hastings over at Netflix? Who else is going to be partying with Richard Branson and all of these other, like, billionaire, Reid Hoffman? I mean, it's funny the people who work for Obama are doing more about AI than the Obama himself like Jake Carney who just let me even this could be a total sigh-off.

Oh, Carney. Yeah, this whole like, you worked over at Amazon and now he's going to go work for like safety AI and now Kamalo's being like, this is the future. So yeah, that's my, look, people know I have Obama derangement syndrome. I hate Obama because for years like this is what the liberal intelligentsia just scooped up about, oh, he's so high-minded and he reads the New Yorker. Yeah. It's like, who gives a shit?

What are you going to do about it? What are you actually going to do? You left the country worse off than you found it. I mean, come on. And that's the basic metric. I know. And I agree with all of that. But I will say hearing this, I was like, oh, my God, someone who's like actually intelligent.

Doesn't mind we had that as president. We had that as president. But it was better than what we've got now. I mean, he at least didn't start a war with Iran. He did the, you know, JCPOA. It just, you know, it did. It's easy to forget that there was a time in the country when you didn't have Jake Paul and Logan Paul at the White House

and that it wasn't all just like a complete joke and a clown show. And so I absolutely accept all of his arguments. I've been a major critic of Obama the way he reported himself in the presidency will continue to be a critic of Obama but there was something to listen to that. And I think this is why his approval rating

is so high still. He is the most popular politician in America because people look at this and they're like oh my God, he's actually thoughtful, he's actually intelligent. Imagine having a country that was run by thoughtful and intelligent people. Right, but we tried that and it didn't actually work out that well. Like, that's my point. Is that at the end of the day, like he's not, he was a bad president. He, you know, he was great at getting himself elected. His signature,

uh, you know, his signature accomplishment of health care has personally driven my health care up costs like dramatically. You can blame, I guess, or what, but the point is is he fucked with the system and he left it worse off. He got Trump elected. I could go on forever. But the problem is, and look, I think it's actually possible that we're going to swing back towards an Obama because so many people are going to have the same reaction. This is why I'm bullish on like a John Ossoff type character where, you know, if you dig into the policy stuff, you're like, I don't know about any of this, but a lot of people, they get the warm fuzzies of like being taken care of and somebody who, I remember Rogan would always

be like, he is the image of like what you would want from a president. He would always say that. And I was like, okay, but that's, there's a lot more to the job. I mean, on the surface level, I think that's true. Yeah. Like very, you know, dignified, personally more in terms of, like, like the way he comports himself with his family is an example, very intelligent, very thoughtful. But yeah, that doesn't necessarily translate into all of the other pieces.

You just described Jimmy Carter. He was like that too. Absolutely. Would anybody want Jim Carter? He's a great guy. Yeah. Super great guy. I would say that Obama's, I think the thing that people most associate with Obama's, his

signature achievement is healthcare. I think you're right about that. But I actually think his signature achievement was the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear. I think that's the best thing that he did in his presidency, and then Trump immediately comes in and just, like, rips it off. When the history book, and now we are where we are. It's funny, because at the time, it was such a big political consequence. People didn't even rate it as such a gigantic achievement. Like, half the Democrats were against it. Bob Menendez, Chuck Schumer, or these guys. No, it took some genuine political courage to push it forward. Right. And it was still

at the end of his presidency, so he could gamble, he could kind of go for it. But nobody would have thought, looking back, that it would be one of the most consequential things that he did. I actually think another thing that he didn't do is start a war with Russia over Crimea, which ironically, you know, at the time was way better. People don't remember, man. Like, you know, the John McCain's and all of the world where they were happy, they were ready to roll the tanks into the middle of the Crimea to save it or whatever from Russia. So I think actually his foreign policy would look on like pretty decently.

And, you know, like you said, the historians will look back on JCPOA much more. But for the rest of us for what we were, I guess if you're Gen Z, you don't really remember anything. You just kind of look at something like this. ObamaCare was all of it. And also, you know, he's the person who decided Hillary should run. He's the person who told Biden not to run whenever his brain still worked. So there's a lot of huge missteps by Mr. Obama. But should we check in on how these AI agents what they're up to lately because we've got another safety incident here. Just Google had to join the club. Their AI also hacked three different companies in a testing breakout. I think it's really important.

important I want to underscore this point as well, that there's a lot of conversation about regulating the models before they are released to the public. And there is right now in place under the Trump administration a voluntary model testing regime before you can release it to the public. But the hugging face incident, the anthropic, you know, escapes this now Google saying that their AI Gemini also hack three companies during testing. These things are happening during testing. These things are happening during testing. So it's not enough to regulate the models that are going to be released to the public. We also have to take control of the models that are being tested because that's where a lot of the most worrying security incidents are occurring. So they say Google's AI system, Gemini

escaped its testing environment in May hacked into three companies, the search giant said on Friday. Those incidents occurred during test to measure the cybersecurity capabilities of Gemini. and the AI model stopped its own attacks after logging into the three companies' networks. They go on to say the disclosure follow similar breakouts at Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta. I guess Grock doesn't have the capabilities to be able to pull this off. Otherwise, they join the club or else Elon's just better at covering this up. But in any case, you know, I think there's a few things you can say about this. I mean, number one, this is becoming just like par for the course.

Put D7 up on the screen. This is a list from the Wall Street Journal of all of the recent. rogue AI events is how they label them. And you can see that what's getting to be quite a lengthy list. The other thing is, why are we just dependent on these companies coming forward and telling us what's going on? We already know Open AI, at the very least, has covered up multiple incidents and only came forward once researchers, outside researchers, discovered these breaches.

So just the very fact that we are allowing these companies to do whatever and tell us whatever they feel like telling us and cover up whatever they don't feel like telling us, you know, the hugging face incident, Open AI only gave researchers very limited insight into what is going on within their company. So that in and of itself seems completely insane. And then I think the other piece that is really worth hammering home is just you cannot only focus on the models that are going to be released to the public, although that is obviously very important as well. You also need to have oversight of the testing that is going on of the models that are internal because they have access to models that are far more powerful than anything that is out on the market for anyone at this

point. And I think that's part of why you have so many employees now are expressing concern who are coming forward as whistleblowers, whether they're leaving or whether they're staying internally at the company because they can see the frontier. And I, you know, one point that Ezra made Sagar in his essay that I think is a really important one too is most of us are engaging with chatbods. They're like a glorified Google. Very different from what, you know, the model that was able to solve the millennium math problem. Very, very different or the, you know, able to identify multiple zero-day exploits. And they also are not just deploying.

It wasn't just like one AI agent that solved that problem. They put thousands of these things together to work in collaboration and, and millions of dollars worth of compute towards doing this sort of thing. Like that capability is so far beyond what the ordinary consumer has access to or the uses that the ordinary consumer is putting it to. And that's part of the disconnect

in the conversation, I think, that we're having publicly right now. I mean, it's obvious anybody who kind of knows anything about it. Like what we're watching, what was in front of us are like consumer for... Honestly, the funny thing is, is that Chachi BT, the only thing it did is it made it consumer-friendly. those types of LLMs, Google's deep mind had LLM capability from, I had this from an insider from 2017 onward. They could have launched ChatGPT at any time.

They just had never thought about it about how to make it easily consumer forward. We're four or five years now into this. Everybody realizes that. But that was its only real innovation. And then by going forward like that, it was able to sprint forward in the frontier labs because it brought all this recognition, the researchers, and all of it. But the actual LLM product itself is not that remarkable. Like, that's not what was actually going to change things. What's going to change things is the recursive self-improvement, the AGI, and literally, like you said,

tens of millions in compute. The type of problems and things that they were doing, we can't even do that. Like, even private companies wouldn't even be able to buy some of the access for what they're looking for or use the type of frontier models that they are. So the disconnect, that's part of the reason why you actually should listen to some of the people in the future. If we were to use, or in the frontier labs, I mean, if you were to use a Manhattan project, like analogy at the time

there's something, a difference between theoretical and then like, no, we're actually going to do this. Or the people who were present at the Trinity test. Before that, every idea of nuclear warfare or any of that is purely hypothetical. You have no idea as opposed to the people with the glasses on

who are like, holy shit, like we can actually see what it looked like. Right? Like, there is, like you could have a theoretical discussion versus the actual practical one. You should at least give some credence to the practical. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Behind every night spent making the kids' lunches, there's a lot of suspense. Will they finally eat the veggies?

Will the pasto survive the first bite? Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all? And will you finish episode 8 before you're done slicing the cucumbers? Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Craved Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.com for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. Hi, this is Kylie Breakman.

Angel Geratana. Jeremy Colhain. Patrick McDonald. And we're the hosts of the Artists on Artists on Artists Podcast. The Improvised Character Comedy Podcast where each week a new panel of artists discuss their craft. Join us for a panel of wellness influencers. What I try to do is faux journal. I don't know.

Have you guys heard of faux journaling? Yeah. It's reading. It's called reading. So we don't like to use that word anymore. A panel of New Yorker cartoonists. Have you guys done Terry Gross's Peloton class? No!

I've been dying too. I'm so sorry. I'm seeing a reading of Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes by Audra McDonald's at the Wonderland Bookstore on 14. That's crazy. I went to the Wonderland Bookstore yesterday and I heard Nora Jones do a reading of Zero Dark 30. No way. You have to come to the last bookstore, though. Kim Cottrell is reading the guitar tabs of yesterday.

A panel of Eurovision participants. And we do a little Halloween. sometimes. Does the Pope dress up? He winks on Halloween. He gets right up next to the microphone. I hear you can almost hear the eyelashes hit each other. You never seen Italy so quiet as when the Pope gets up to wink on Halloween. Listen to artists on artists on artists on artists on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

You're not incurable. You're not broken. You're having a normal human experience. And we have a solution for that. And that solution is our show Free Therapy. I'm Ben and I'm Kevin. And we think everyone could use a little bit of therapy, including us. Absolutely. That's why each week we sit down with a different therapist to talk about the things we're all dealing with. If you're trying to get rid of anxiety, you're actually fueling more anxiety. We talk to some of the leading therapists in the country about all of life's headaches, work, family dynamics, and of course, dating and, of course, dating and relationships.

Everyone chooses a different set of problems, challenges, flaws. You have to figure out which set of problems you're willing to work with. So listen to Free Therapy with Ben and Kevin on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Because therapy is expensive, but our podcast is free. As of this morning, diesel prices have officially topped $6.50 a gallon for the first time in American history. Truckers are sounding off on what this is meaning for them and their livelihoods. This is a compilation from More Perfect Union. Let's go ahead and take a listen. All right, Trump. What are we doing, man?

$6 diesel man is killing truck drivers. Right now, they take me to feel this one like almost a thousand bucks. With the fuel the way it is, maybe you won't be eating today. Diesel prices just hit $6 across the country at all-time high. Have you ever seen diesel prices as high? No, I don't think it'd ever been this high. We wanted to know how it's affecting workers, so we came out to Fort Collins, Colorado to talk to truckers who rely on a full tank to do their jobs.

We carry 200 gallon tanks and if it's a six bucks per gallon, you know, it's talking about $1,200 bucks each fill up. The owner-operators are the ones that get hit the most. Owner-operator truck drivers function kind of like small businesses. They own their own trucks and have to pay for all truck expenses out of their own pocket, including their diesel. Do you pay out of your own pocket? I do, yeah.

And this record high diesel prices really hurt their ability to provide for themselves and their families. I might have to call it quits for a minute because of the prices. Diesel has been increasing dramatically since Trump launched his war with Iran. It's hard to make money right now, you know, because I know before it's like half a price to feel, you know, right now. You don't make no money at all. A margin of profit is already very slim, already a small amount. And then what this does is just adds to it, adds to that expense that we have.

Plus we've had dramatically bad weather this summer. dry, very hot, and it's really affected our crops. Our yields are down probably 35, 40, 50%. So mostly you got truckers there talking to them, and you have a farmer there at the end. And remember, that's the national average is $6.51. I just pulled up California. $8.42 is the average in the state of California.

So, you know, this flew under the radar for a while because so many Americans, you know, you're thinking about what you're putting in your car, although there are a lot of people who have diesel trucks, too, especially in rural areas. But in any case, you know, this was kind of flying under the radar. Now this has emerged as the top crisis in terms of fuel because the prices are so high, because the refinery capacity is so incredibly stretched. It's being damaged day by day. We covered what's going on with Ukraine, Russia, earlier in the show. And because this is really the undersold lifeblood of the economy, whether you're talking about farmers, trying to, you know,

deal with their crops or you're talking about truckers trying to get goods to the store shelves. Yeah, I mean, by the way, at the outbreak of the war, if you're watching this show, we were trying to talk about Jiesel and we were talking about jet fuel. Do you know what the average, guess what the week, the price today of a barrel of jet fuel? It's $200 a barrel. It's $194 a barrel. It was a huge story, actually, at the outbreak of the war, when Singaporean jet fuel was going for 200 a barrel, everyone was like, oh my God, you know, we're going to have all these problems.

Well, yeah, we're, this is the problem. We're living the problem. If you look at airfare right now, it is insane. Even if you just want to traverse the East Coast, two and a half hour flight, you're paying $7,800. Like I was telling you, I bought my first cross-country flight since the war began. It is like over $1,000 to take it economy, like no premium economy, nothing, just to be able to sit, you know, and I bought it well advanced to be able to fly across the country.

I can't even imagine what this is going to mean for Thanksgiving travel and for Christmas. I mean, there's just, there can't be that many people who are just going to eat the cost. People are either going to drive or if they don't drive, they're just going to stay at home and make different plans and not go on vacation. But what this exposes is the brittle nature of a lot of those industries, trucking and farming. The diesel, so the farmers actually have been screwed every which way. Oh, yeah. Because they have tariffs, fertilizer, and diesel altogether.

And high industry. And high interest rate. So, and remember, farm economics. was already like disastrous from day one, even in normal times. Like they're always going bankrupt and they get all kinds of preferential treatment from the government. So this is with the tariff, with the fertilizer, with the diesel, with the high interest loan on their John Deere or whatever. All of those together, oh, and I think the corporations who sell them seeds and all those things are also jacking prices up as well. You put that together. I mean, it's just unsustainable, period,

to be able to farm and to be able to produce a crop. Diesel, obviously what we were warned about from the beginning was just the amount of input inflation that will mean. It's not just your friend who has a truck he doesn't need who's, you know, if the price is going up. It's all of the groceries on your shelves. All that stuff has to be tracked well across the country. And then jet fuel as well. The biggest problem, actually, is that it's just going to keep getting worse. There's actually nothing we can do about it except end the war. Yeah. And with the farmers, you know, they rely a lot on credit. Typically, you know, when you're sewing, you're borrowing money to finance all of that. And then you pay it off when you're, you know, when you're reaping. And it's, so, so,

They really have been hit from every angle. We've been covering the politics of that. And Iowa in particular is maybe the state that's been the hardest hit, but any of the big farming states have really been hard hit. So you've got Senator Chuck Grassley with an innovative idea here of what to do. You might think that the obvious answer is, why don't you end the war? Then that may not return things instantly to a better situation, but will do the most that you could possibly do to alleviate the immediate pain for farmers

and for many other people who are suffering. He's got a different idea. This is but E2 up on the screen. He says with diesel at 657 in Iowa, why doesn't President Trump put an embargo on diesel exports like presidents in the 70s put embargoes on ag products because food prices were inflated. High diesel prices are killing farmers' income. And no doubt that high diesel prices are certainly killing farmers' income. And potentially, if you did put an embargo on diesel exports, that could have a positive impact

for farmers here, it would be an absolute catastrophic disaster for the entire rest of the world. And so perhaps a better idea would begin to get to the root of the problem here and the war so that things can go back to normal. Go to E3 just so we can explain this because you're probably going to start. And actually, when the war was still really hot in the early days, this was beginning to bubble up. And it makes sense now that this is all happening again. So as the journal explains, refineries are the main choke point for global energy supply. And actually, I mean, we don't really talk about it enough.

I've said it many times here. We have not built a new oil refinery in the United States to the 1970s. We do not have a good amount of refinery capacity. The existing refinery capacity that we have is already running at near like 97, 98%. By the way, we do not talk about how extraordinary lucky the U.S. is. Ryan Hall actually just put out a statistic. This is the first September without a hurricane in the Atlantic since 1914. So well over 100 years of no hurricane.

So if we had a real hurricane, you know, I think something to do with El Nino. If we had normal hurricane season, this could be much worse. You could have Louisiana or Texas, something like that, go offline even for a week. That alone would be a disaster. The problem right now is that if we banned diesel exports, like what Chuck Grassley is proposing, that would, in the interim, lower diesel prices in the U.S., but it would break the kind of economic contracts of the way that petroleum markets, work around the world because it's all a global commodity. Right now, ironically, this would be

the worst time to do it from a strategic perspective because America is the refiner of last resort, specifically for diesel products that are all going to Asia. The vast amount of our exports are going to places which previously got all of their imports from the Middle East. So that's great if you're an oil barren in Texas or a refinery owner or any of these people. But if we did the ban, it would immediately reduce price here, but overall break the market and actually break things so catastrophically worldwide that it could end, you know, the U.S. oil and gas industry, as we know it, as of today. So it's just like the hooty situation we begin our show with. It screwed either pay a high price and keep the allies afloat and we're all paying high price or we play

slightly lower and in the long run much worse and we screw them now in the interim. Or we could just end the war today. You can see too, this Wall Street Journal piece, lays out, not in these terms, but in, you know, some of the basic facts here, the way that the just laissez-faire free market system creates fragilities and vulnerabilities, because typically refining is not a very profitable business. They have a quote in there that's like, you know, how do you make a small fortune? You take a large fortune and then open a refinery. So apparently this is like well-known in the oil gas business. It's like airlines. You just shouldn't open one. Yeah. It's just a bad idea. So in any case, we were happy to allow a lot of

refining capacity to go abroad. And a lot of the places where new refineries were built were number one, Russia. You can tell me what's going on there. And number two in the Middle East, you can tell me what's going on there. So as Sagar put it, we are the refinery of last resort. Our facilities are being run in absolute capacity. Some of them are already starting to break down, creating additional strain and additional problems in the market. And so the result of that is we can put E4 up on the screen financial times, as they do with a great breakdown. One of the things that they say in this piece, five ways that Iran energy shock is wrong footing the world, is they say this is a fuel crisis, or you could say a gas crisis, not an oil crisis.

So we've been watching, of course, and we'll continue to do so. What is the price of a barrel of oil? What's it trading for, you know, in the commodities market? But the real problem comes in, you know, those prices are already pretty high. But the real problem comes in with, number one, the refining capacity. And number two, the cost of shipping have absolutely skyrocketed. Well, it's a no-brainer. Why? Because you have so many of these shipping lanes that are now either imperiled or completely shut down. So that's why you've seen in the diesel market in particular, diesel prices skyrocketing far and away above the crude oil price.

And you can see that gap in the charts that they have in this piece between the Brent crude price and the diesel price. There's a large gap that continues to open and open and open because of those additional costs. of refining and of transporting. We can put the next element up on the screen, E5. Asia, U.S. container rates have soared past $11,000. This is according to freight waves near pandemic records. So we are getting very, very close to record-breaking cost in order to ship. And we're not just talking about oil here, but we're talking about all kinds of goods

with container rates surging past $11,000. And this is something that Sal had flagged for us last time. we spoke with him as well. You know, this is why it's so important, that financial time story, I really recommend people read it because it breaks it down in such a easy to understand way. The first, most interesting thing, actually, was that immediately people were too pessimistic around energy. They thought that consumption would drop.

But actually, the rest of the world, obviously they haven't reached their breaking point, if you will, in terms of operation. They still want to keep things going. So they need to continue to buy oil. So they basically underestimated how much more demand that there would still be. There hasn't been the amount of demand destruction, even at the current prices that we have. So people are still buying, which means it's going to send the price up here in the U.S. The fuel crisis point is the absolute key.

It doesn't matter how much crude you got if you can't refiner it. Because nobody here cares about what the price of a barrel of oil is. We care about the gas, diesel, jet fuel. That's the only thing that matters. We're on 100%, which means the price still going to continue to go high. They also specifically talk about how Janus brought this up as well. about these energy shocks that are sweeping through the rest of the poorer countries. We kind of forgot about it over the last five or six months.

The famines and things haven't really happened. However, the shortages are still killing them in terms of the price overall increase, the outright shortages, Africa and the rest of the world. Many of these places just straight up have given up, or they're shifting towards these much filthier uses of energy, things like straight up just woodburning, which obviously is terrible for the environment and you know, so terrible for the people in their homes. They also have seen significant decrease.

Those places actually have had demand destruction. But the final thing is about the oil, which, where they really finally just admit. And I love this more recent J.P. Morgan assessment, which was going around. And they just said, for the first time, we have no idea what's going to happen. They're like, we have no idea. And we're just going to tell our investors and people who look to us, we don't know. Like, good luck. Yeah.

And we're like, good luck to the rest of you. guys in the energy markets who are for the first. And that's kind of why the prices are where they are is there's no fantasy MOU anymore. There's no peace. There's no meeting. I mean, I'm sure I'd be willing to bet Trump might meet with the Iranian president just to try and temporarily send the price of oil down. Who's going to be in town for the UN general. Right. So he might do that. And that'll give us a few days. But you know, you can't make up refinery capacity. This is what it is. You're starting to see these little breakages in the market put E6 up on the screw. So Costco is now rationing motor oil.

You can only buy so much when you go into the store. They say that this crisis and shortage is becoming more acute, according to the financial times, with prices of the car engine lubricant reaching new highs, oil chain shops running dry, a U.S. retail group that would be Costco, rationing sales to do-it-yourself customers. They say that at Costco, not only they ration the amount you're allowed to buy, but they raise the price for 10 quarts of one type of full-sense,

synthetic mortar oil to $57.99. And you can only buy one of these cases. Previously, the same brand was selling for about $30. So the price year over year has basically doubled. Meanwhile, over at Walmart, they're reporting low stocks for several brands. They're, according to the chief executive of Jiffy Loob, they say there will be some spot outages that we just have to deal with. And so again, you're starting to see these little breakages we showed you last year, last week, rather the picture. What is time even really? Last week we showed you the pictures of a few gas stations that are just completely out of diesel. We've seen in California, you know, the price is getting to the max of what can even be advertised on the signs.

So even here in a relatively wealthy country that obviously has a lot of, you know, our own oil and gas capacity, a significant amount of refining capacity, we're still starting to see. some of these cracks to emerge. And I do fear that we'll do the ban. It's exactly the type of dumb thing that Trump would do. And if that happens, it's actually just over for the U.S. alliances in Asia.

Like, it probably already is, but can you imagine, I mean, that's the vast majority of our exports, that's where it's all going. Japan, South Korea, if we leave them dry, I mean, they straight up won't be able to drive, like period, if we cut them off.

I could see him doing it as a pre-midterm move. I think it will be popular initially with the public because in the short term, it will help. They're like, what do I care about Japan? I'm like, well, you're going to find out. It's like, I think they'll find out. And I think he's going to do it,

especially because none of these people have the courage to call for an end of the war. You have Tim Burchett, Chuck Grassley, all kinds of these representatives who are just grasping for this short-term thing. It's exactly the type of stupid thing, like Liberation Day, which you could see something getting in his head.

And that's it. Like, if once those tankers stop going, they can't buy from us anymore, and we actually just leave them literally high and dry in the middle of going into winter, I can't even imagine. And it will be truly catastrophic for the world. I mean, it really, really will be a disaster for much of the world who are already, you know, really stretched then. Right. Speaking of a disaster, Ed Shearer. Behind every night spent making the kids' lunches, there's a lot of suspense. Will they finally eat the veggies? Will the pesto survive the first bite? Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all? And will you finish episode eight before you're done slicing the cucumbers?

Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Craved Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.com.com.combe for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. Hi, this is Kylie Breakman. Angel Geratana. Jeremy Colhane. Patrick McDonald. And we're the hosts of the Artists on Artists on Artists Podcast.

The Improvised Character Comedy Podcast where each week a new panel of artists discuss their craft. Join us for a panel of wellness influencers. What I try to do is faux journal. I don't know. Have you guys heard of faux journaling? Yeah, it's reading. It's called reading. So we don't like to use that word anymore.

Okay. A panel of New Yorker cartoonists. Have you guys done Terry Gross's Peloton class? No! I've been dying too. I'm so sorry. I'm seeing a reading of Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes by Audra McDonald's at the Wonderland Bookstore. That's crazy.

I went to the Wonderland Bookstore. yesterday and I heard Nora Jones do a reading of Zero Dark 30. No way. You have to come to the last bookstore, though. Kim Cottrell is reading the guitar tabs of yesterday. A panel of Eurovision participants. And we do a little Halloween sometimes. Does the Pope dress up?

He winks on Halloween. He gets right up next to the microphone. I hear you can almost hear the eyelashes hit each other. You never seen Italy so quiet as when the Pope gets up to wink on Halloween. Listen to artists on artists on artists on artists on the IHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You're not incurable. You're not broken. You're having a normal human experience. And we have a solution for that. And that solution is our show Free Therapy. I'm Ben. And I'm Kevin. And we think everyone could use a little bit of therapy, including us. Absolutely. That's why each week we sit down with a different therapist to talk about the things we're all dealing with.

If you're trying to get rid of anxiety, you're actually fueling more anxiety. We talked to some of the leading therapists in the country about all of life's headaches, work, family dynamics, and of course, dating in relationships. Everyone chooses a different set of problems, challenges, flaws. You have to figure out which set of problems you're willing to work with. So listen to free therapy with Ben and Kevin on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Because therapy is expensive, but our podcast is free. Had a little update for you that we just couldn't simply resist of Ed Shearin.

I'm sure you guys all know the backstory at this point. McLemore was an opening act on Ed Shearin's tour. He had the audacity to say free Palestine and call Israel's genocide in Gaza, what it is, a genocide. This led to a huge freakout. First Pink was upset. Then we got the billionaires involved. Robert Kraft calls up his friends who are also stadium owner. says, hey, we're not going to host your tour if you keep this guy on. Ed Shearin buckled to the pressure,

McElmore gets kicked off the tour. This led to a tremendous backlash. All of the other opening acts for Ed Shearren, they all pulled out. Even his own backup band also pulled out. Apparently, ticket sales plummeted. They were offering them at a tremendous discount. So in any case, in the next show that Ed Shearren performed at, he gave this scripted off the teleprompter, tearful apology of sorts. Let's go ahead and take a listen to that. I want to address the question of where I stand in the situation in Israel and Palestine, whether my going to discuss at 189 implies where I stand. I have tried in my career not to be a political commentator in kind, because I want my music and shows to be about unity, not division, about humanity, not politics.

But this is a humanitarian issue, and I cannot hide how I feel about it anymore. What happened in Israel and at the No Music Festival on October 7 was horrific and compounded centuries of Jewish pain. What is happening in Gaza is a catastrophic and unjustifiable and disproportionate. My heart has been broken by the scale of devastation and loss of civilians' lives, children's lives. lives. And the systemic injustice you're seeing unfold in the West Bank cannot be overlooked. I am already speaking to the people across the spectrum to work out how to make the contribution that helps victims of these terrible times and listening and burning because I do not know enough.

I honestly am so grateful that you're here with snowing with me. This concert is still a place where everyone is welcome and everyone here can stand beside people but have opposing views, and everyone here can stand by people that they don't agree with on everything, that they can all agree on singing these songs. A lot to say about that. I mean, first, obviously, the, you know, world equivalence, the framing it as like a conflict, saying that, oh, I don't want to talk about politics, even though previously visited Ukraine, waiting very heavily in the Ukrainian conflict.

And then I think just to the core, the reason why people are so disgusted here is it feels like a very PR-worked Yes. And literally scripted reading off a teleprompter, addressing of the situation game and call it an apology. And then the other thing is when he gets choked up, is it about the fact that, you know, Gaza's been completely destroyed and turned to rubble? Is it about the fact that you now have the largest population of child amputees on the planet? Is it about the fact that Israel continues to bomb and siege the Gaza trip? No, it's about himself. And that's the thing is he really turns himself into.

to the victim of the whole situation, which is just utterly disgusting. It gets emotional when the crowd is, like, supporting him. And so I think that's the part that people are really disgusted by is that he's turned himself into, like, oh, poor me, woe is me. Number one, if you didn't want to deal with any of that, I don't know why you had McElmore on the tour to start with. Who sings the song?

Who, yeah, has a song, Hins Hall's song. Like, has been very outspoken, not only about this, but on any number of other political issues, well. Then you try to say it wasn't your fault that he got pulled from the tour. Please, you're Ed Shearing. In this whole situation, you are the guy that has the power. If you came out and said to Robert Kraft, okay, fine, we won't play at your stadium. Stadium. We'll find another venue, like take your smear campaign and your mafia boss tactics somewhere else. Do you know what an incredible hero he would be? So it's just, it's just disgusting. And obviously the attack on free speech of McLemore saying something

that should be so offensive at this point. Free Palestine is. incredible and disturbing. Well, bothers me as I, look, it's, it's not even like this statement. It's, you are worth $300 million, maybe $400, depending on where the British pound is today. You don't have the ability to say, this is my act, these are my bands, nobody tells me where to play or what to do, period, end of story. Yeah. Just say that. I mean, it's not, it's genuinely not even about Palestine at this point. It's like, this is about your own integrity. So, like, what are you going, getting choked up for? It's like, you're, actually a bitch, dude, because you made yourself the slave of Robert Kraft and all these other people

get to tell you what to do. Like he and a half were apparently boys. Allegedly, I mean, I don't know. Or they were anywhere. After this. It's like, dude, what are you doing? And then, you know, you get humiliated by not only McElmore, but your entire, your band, your backup band, your opening acts, and all of these people were like, hey, how is it that these no-name band guys have more, you know, ability? This, again, for them, a lot of them, it wasn't even by Palestine. or at least some of them, they said, look, nobody tells us what to do, period. And that's such a great point. I think of his backup band, right?

This is like the gig of a lifetime. A hundred percent is huge. To be on tour with Ed Shearne, who's one of the biggest pop stars on the entire planet. And they're willing to walk away from it out of principle. And you, Mr. 100 multi, multi, multi, multi millionaire who has more money than he could ever spend an entire lifetime, you can't stand up for the basic, even if you don't care about Palestine, for the basic principle of, this is my friend. He's allowed to say what he's going to say.

I'm not going to be bullied by a bunch of billionaires. That's pathetic. It's just pathetic. I was thinking about this. We have no shame in this country anymore, especially at our cultural elite level. Like the Sydney-Sweeney thing, I talked about that. But LeBron. So I recently found out the price.

Guess LeBron for him to be shilling every week for Polly Market. It's $15 million a year. He's a billionaire. You could make that. He could make more on an annualized basis by just putting his money in the S&P 500. You know, it's like, what the fuck are you doing? He literally will not even notice that amount of money. That's how rich the man is.

It's nothing. Like, it is a rounding error on his entire net worth. Why do it then? $15 million a year? It's nothing. Like, it's genuinely nothing. And that is how greedy he is. $15 million.

By the cash, not even equity in the company. He's taking cash to encourage you to lose your cash. Yeah. It's sick. Sidney sweet. I mean, I guess, at least she got equity in the company, but it's like, come on. Like, you're like, you know, basically shooting softcore pornography to get these dudes

who are all addicted. And then the funniest thing is is the backlash in the women in sports on the New York Times op-ed is they're like, oh, she's using her body to, you know, like she's diminishing women's sports. I'm like, how about she's shilling for a disgusting industry? Like nobody, there was none of that even in our discourse. I didn't really understand that. Did you check that? Yeah, yeah.

The former female athlete, that wasn't really the part of it that offended me. Yeah, I'm like, uh, like, that's not, guys, that's. That's not the offensive part. The offensive part is that she's shilling for a disgusting industry. We don't even have the language in our culture anymore to be like, you are a disgusting person. LeBron, you are a disgusting person. Sidney Sweeney, you are a disgusting person. You are encouraging people to piss their money away for straight cash.

And not just people like your fan. I know. The people who trust you the most. You know, it's not an accent that Sidney Sweeney gets chosen. She's got like this, you know, fan base of young men who are in love with her. So she shows up, like, naked, hey, use this betting app. You might think it's ridiculous, but that actually will encourage a lot of young men to go and use that betting at. And some with LeBron.

Like, LeBron is lionized. Understandably so. He truly is one of the greatest athletes of all time, not just in terms of basketball. And as someone who's in my 40s watching him do what he is doing at his age, it's incredible. My son, 13-year-old, like really looks up to LeBron. And then you're going to go out there and glorify and make it, like, cool. to throw your money away to these predatory companies for, again, the sort of most die-hard, dedicated, and vulnerable part of your own fan base, that is so disturbing to me.

And again, like, for us, we have made a conscious decision not to do any ad reads on this show because I would never want to vouch for a product that there was even a 1% chance that it would be bad for someone and wouldn't work properly or would lead them in the range or like, I wouldn't want to deal with any of that. want any of that on my conscience. And yet LeBron James, who's a literal billionaire, is just happy to sell out, you know, for him, what's a low price, all of his fan base. It's really disgusting. No, I mean, literally could retire if we just read ads. Even for companies that were like inoffensive, like Fortune 500 companies, like I literally never have to work again.

And it's like, oh, it's like, oh, and LeBron's out here literally make a billion dollars. And apparently this is, it's, you know, it's like, it's in the realm of discussion. Grankowski, that's another one. He gets no smoke. Literally one of the most legendary. professional football players of all time. Icon in New England. He's a Fandul brand ambassador. Literally every commercial you watch is Rob Grownkowski shilling for Fanduel on his Twitter page, new customers.

You bring $1 a day times five. Fan Duel is going to bring you a $100 bonus. Like, no shame. Literally zero. Kevin Hart, you know, LeBron, all of these celebrities and all these people, like they come out and they show for these. Eli Manning, we talked about Spike Lee. I mean, Spike who made them, I said this, he made the.

Malcolm X movie. Like he's supposed to be the champion of like working class New Yorker, the Knicks guy who's always there. You know the other, the other Knicks fan, who is the legend? Shalamee who goes something. He's like these, there's nothing that is that is like in a cultural check to stop any of these people from cashing these checks. It's just, it's disgusting. Bring back shame. Yeah, we have none. Bring back standards. It's true. It's true. And, I have. And, I have. It's true. whatever, you know, it really, it sickens me because these people, like it or not in our culture, these are the people who people look up to. It's, you know, people. Remember when Kim Kardashian was selling some crypto?

Yeah, and, you know, she got fine by the government and actually got shame by it. Yeah. And that was a good thing. Yeah. But now we have none of that left in our society. All right, AMA Live Time. We're going to get to that. We'll see you later.

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