Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 9/2/21: Texas Abortion Law, Biden Phone Call, Newsom Recall, Trump's Next Moves, China's Crackdown, Biden Approval Sinking, America First Sham, The Problem With Theranos, Woke Capital, and More!

Episode Date: September 2, 2021

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And I'm Stacey Vanek-Smith. So listen to Everybody's Business on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, thanks for listening to Breaking Points with Crystal and Sagar. We're going to be totally upfront with you. We took a big risk going independent. To make this work, we need your support to beat the corporate media. CNN, Fox, MSNBC, they are ripping this country apart. They are making millions of dollars doing it. To help support our mission of making all of us hate each other less, hate the corrupt ruling class more, support the show. Become a Breaking Points premium member today, where you get to watch and listen to the entire show ad-free and uncut an hour early before everyone else. You get to hear our reactions

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Marshall, thank you so much for subbing in, coming down to D.C., your old city. We appreciate it, man. Thanks for having me, dude. Absolutely. So for those of you guys who don't know, Marshall Kosloff, he's my co-host over at the Realignment Podcast. Just like KKF took over while I was out, Marshall's helping me. He's going to sub in here. We are going to bring you guys a great breakdown of the news for both today and then next Tuesday. We're a pro-labor show after all. And so to make sure that our crew and everybody can have a little bit of time off,

we are not having a show there on Labor Day. Now, we don't have a bottom graphic there on the screen. You might wonder why. It's because we have a little bit of breaking news that we'll address here at the top, which is the Texas abortion law and just really what it means, because I know that a lot of you are quite interested. But we have a lot of other fun stuff that we're going to cover here in the show. The Newsom recall, Latino turnout, of course, that's something that's vitally important. We've got this new breakdown. Marshall's got a lot to say in terms of the gaming laws in China. They're cracking down on that. And celebrities, Donald Trump may be returning to social media, but he's got a couple of stipulations whenever it comes to

that. Vivek Ramaswamy is our guest in the house. He just wrote a book named Woke Inc., which is really interesting. We actually interviewed him over at The Realignment. Wanted to make sure that those of you could get more of a breaking points type interview here on the show so we can bring that to as wide of an audience as possible. But we'll start here, Marshall, with this Texas abortion law. So what happened is that very late last night, there was the decision out of the Supreme Court, which is 5-4. Now, this is kind of interesting because it happened on something called the shadow docket. So it's not like they were ruling necessarily on what was happening here. What they

were saying is that they're not going to block this Texas abortion law. Now, the abortion law, what it says is that you can't have an abortion after six weeks. Went into effect on Wednesday, and it was drafted by Texas specifically with the goal of trying to get the federal court to challenge it and have some sort of decision. Now, it's a little bit strange because it's not like it was an outright decision being like, yeah, the law is okay. But effectively, by allowing the law to go into place, they have really changed the landscape in America. So very quickly, I think it will mean, Marshall, that you're going to see a swath of states across the American South pass similar laws.

But at the same time, they may actually not get what they want because what you're going to start to see here is people are going to keep pushing the envelope. Like they're not going to necessarily stop at six weeks. Alabama or whatever will do a different one with the goal of going up to the court. And that really is where the court watchers are all going to come in here. But regardless, look, I'd rather gouge my eyes out than talk about abortion for the next hour or whatever. But look, the truth is, is that this is a highly consequential decision and it is probably going to drive politics for the next couple of weeks, if not months. I have no idea. Yeah. And here's what the story means. 85 to 90 percent of abortions happen after that six-week period. So you're going to see this real,

frank decline in people's access to abortion in states like Texas. And the part that's really interesting for me is Texas is one of those states which during the pandemic had all these blue state people from California move to it. Also look at Georgia and the South, a lot of people moving to Atlanta, those competitive suburbs. I'm really curious how these blue state migrants are going to actually impact the politics of this. Because once again, Texas is changing. Georgia is changing. That's the story of the 2020 election. That's a great point. You know, I didn't even think about that. But, you know, recently we were down in Austin whenever Crystal and I were doing Joe Rogan. And I will tell you, being in Austin, it's a whole, you know, different. Obviously,

it's cliche at this point to say it, but it's a whole different city. I was in a coffee shop. I think I told you the story at the time. And there were like three people all with newborns and they were all talking and they're like, oh, where did you move from? They're like, oh, I'm from New York. They're like, where'd you move from? Like, we're from California. Where'd you move from? Oh, we're from Baltimore. So it's like, obviously, you know, it's like mostly lawyers, like people coming down, blue state kind of escapees. But you're very right, which is that, you know, whenever the Georgia voting law happened, like you definitely saw kind of that suburban kind of pushback against that. This is the same thing. I don't know how it will impact

the politics of Texas because this is a very, very important demographic, obviously. This is the new tax base of Austin and of Houston and Dallas. And so whether, you know, how exactly it's going to intertwine with the deep red evangelical base of the state itself, that actually is an open question. And it's like you said, it really could kind of impact the state's politics domestically

in terms of backlash against Governor Abbott and more. I truly have no idea. I just don't know how it's going to play out. Yeah, I think there are two big things that we were pushing this poll around, but Texas Hispanics aren't exactly the most pro-choice part of the Democratic Party. So even as the state changes, even if we see all this talk about a purple Texas, we're going to see this merge into all these different tensions, right? The whole tension of the Democratic Party right now is, you know, Joe Biden really

dominating with working class blacks and Hispanics. But at the same time, you have this upper middle class base of the party that you're talking about. It's migrating. Yeah, I saw MSNBC and all those people really freaking out saying it's an end to Roe versus Wade. Look, I don't, you know, like really have a dog in the fight or whatever. But like whenever I see it, it's it's I think both people can see what they want to see. So the most pro-life people are going to say, well, you know, the court, they're not taking this and like outright abolishing Roe versus Wade. And then, of course, the most pro-choice people are going to say this is effectively the end of Roe versus Wade. Effectively, functionally, you're going to hear those words a lot. Like we said, and as you

pointed out, 85 to 90 percent do happen. So what does it mean? Is it outright outlawed? No. Is it going to dramatically decrease the number of abortions in Texas? Yes. Will it set a new precedent across the South? Probably. But wanted to make sure that we brought everybody that story with the latest details. I know this is the only news program that some of you watch, which I very much appreciate. So let's get to the rest of the show. This is something, God, I love that bottom graphic. Stones me every time. Let's start with the Biden call. So this is something I know a lot of you flagged for us. There's a lot of interest in what exactly is going on here. Let's go ahead and put the tear sheet up there on the screen. This broke from Reuters yesterday. There's a lot of different questions. Essentially,

what happened is that the details of a private phone call of President Biden and former President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan leaked to Reuters. Now, they don't have a full transcript of the call necessarily, but in the call, according to Reuters, what they have seen here is that the men spoke, and this was their very last phone call, 14 minutes on July 23rd. Now, what's important there is that July 23rd is kind of in the midst of that Taliban offensive. We don't yet know that they're going to take over the entire country. We don't yet know Kandahar, like all that. A lot of the full-blown, like early August, people being like, oh my God, they're about to take the city of Kabul. That's not really there yet. And so what we see here within the phone call is that Biden is very much

pressuring former President Ashraf Ghani. And I'm reading here directly from the Reuters story, says Biden offered aid if Ghani could publicly project that he had a plan to control the spiraling situation in Afghanistan. Quote, we will continue to provide close air support if we know what the plan is, Biden said. Now, this is, again, is important because he's talking there about the military aid, specifically from the U.S. Some of the critics of the entire withdrawal have been like, why didn't the U.S. continue close air support there and more? But what really people are focusing in on is that Biden was pointing to and saying that Ashraf Ghani, and he says, quote, if there is a need, whether it is true or not, there is a need to project a different picture, as in he needs to publicly project more confidence,

whether it's true or not, that the Afghan security forces have the strength that they have. Obviously, we know what ended up happening. The entire force completely collapsed and all of that. But, you know, the White House was actually asked about this yesterday. Here's what they had to say. We'll dissect it on the other side. I just want to put a pin in that report. Was the president in any way pushing a false narrative in that call with the Afghan president? I think it's pretty clear. Again, I'm not going to go into details of a private conversation, but what we saw over the course of the last few months is a collapse in leadership. And that was happening even before Ghani left the country. What the president has conveyed

repeatedly, privately and publicly is you need to stand up and lead your country. And that's something he said at a press conference in July in public forum as well. So, privately, and publicly, is you need to stand up and lead your country. And that's something he said at a press conference in July in public forum as well. So Marshall, what do you make of this whole thing? So we got this private phone call that's been leaked out there. A lot of Republicans now calling for the same type of impeachment inquiry around the Ukraine call and more. Really, I think it just goes to show how much of a complete mess the entire thing was. And actually, I think the meta story here is that having details of a private phone call leaked, like when they did under Trump and Moore, showing kind of a deep state, like pushing back, this is going to be a problem for Biden for a

really long time. And Republicans are going to try and turn this into a big political circus. And frankly, I mean, they have a lot of ammunition. That's part of the problem, right? I think this is the perfect example of why when we have a specific event happen, we not just look at that specific event, but actually project what does this mean long term? Because I know there are plenty of liberal left center people are going to say, but listen, the Trump call of Ukraine was crazy. There was crazy things that were literally said there. But the deeper implication here that we have to think about is what does it mean to live in a country where foreign policy, pretty much the one space where the president has actual

control over, is no longer private. It is actually not good for anybody to live in a world where the president has to say to myself, himself, or herself, I cannot say what I think to a foreign leader or else it will be leaked by a deep state, by a foreign policy blob, by people within my own administration who are not even political actors, most likely, who are mostly going on the career end of this, they disagree with me. Because once again, I don't think anything Biden was saying was actually incorrect, especially when you look at what happened in Afghanistan. When he is saying you need to project confidence, let's be frank about what happened over the next course of the month.

Ashraf Ghani did the exact opposite of that. He fled the country with money. He made it clear to any, you know, just imagine you're an Afghan soldier who is underpaid. You are being asked, you're probably not paid and your commanders, the government, everyone's fleeing. If you don't see confidence from leadership, why would you stand and fight? This is the part that has to be said for people. No, I agree. It's funny because that meta point is very important. And actually, a lot of people, this is why I hate the current state of politics. I'm going to get to a lot of this when my monologue, which is that, look, I, along with many people, when I remember, what was the first call that was leaked by Trump? It was, was it the Filipino president? Or maybe it was the Mexican president. I think it was the very first week that he was in office. I think one of his either calls with Duterte or with Enrique

Peña Nieto was leaked, the full transcript of the phone call. And I was like, this is outrageous. You can't have the transcript of a presidential phone call just be just be completely released all of the time. And it wasn't just that it would be like, oh, you know, he said this to Putin or whatever. And remember, they tried to subpoena the private translator notes at Helsinki. Same thing, you know, in terms of you can't have that type of situation around the president. And look, I mean, I mostly supported what was going on. I'm saying I mostly supported a lot of, you know, some of the Russia policy or whatever. But even when I don't support it, even whenever you don't, you have to allow some sort of

presidential prerogative. And yet what's already happening? We're already saying release the transcript. It's the same thing. So I'm sort of like, well, they did it to us, so we should do it to them. Greg Kelly over at Newsmax, guy never disappoints. Let's put this up there on the screen. Release the transcript. Do it now, Joe Biden. Trump released a transcript of his call with the Ukraine leader. You must release this and the audio. So they actually upped the stakes here. Now they want the audio too. And really, what ended up happening, and actually, this is exactly what I'm talking about. What ended up happening under the Trump administration, and I remember covering

some of this at the time, is that they would just make it so that they didn't have transcripts of calls, they didn't have that many people on the calls, they did everything they could in order to leak proof his private phone calls, and then we didn't have good records that people could refer back to. It's like, guys, there's a whole process around this for a reason. And really what we've created, what I'm starting to see here is, and we'll get to this whenever we're talking about Biden's approval rating, is that merits aside, this is a problem. Like this is just going to be a problem. It's going to be on the news every day for a long time. People aren't going to give it up. And, you know, in many ways, the deep state, the way that it acted against Trump is going to, they see the amount of news coverage and pickup

that this is getting. They're going to continue to do this. So whatever, you know, whatever you think, whichever side of the call or whatever, you guys should know about what exactly is in it, because you're probably going to be hearing about it for quite some time, along with the general Afghan stuff. Look, and here's the key thing. What pisses me off and what should piss everyone off here is, number one takeaway from the Trump along with the general Afghan stuff. Look, and here's the key thing. What pisses me off and what should piss everyone off here is number one takeaway from the Trump presidency should be that norms actually matter. It's actually a super cold take to say, hey, actually, maybe we shouldn't leak things. Hey, actually, maybe the president can do X, Y, and Z things.

If you were to argue to me that, look, leaking a Trump transcript of Ukraine was a break glass measure. This is a Watergate-level thing. If you're arguing that in good faith, I think that's a real argument. I think this transcript proves that that debate is over. And now it's very clearly a reality that transcripts talking to, especially after the fact, are just a political tool. And what we should do as viewers, as hosts, once again, it's important that we cover this. It's important that we say that this is actually not okay. And frankly, people should not be getting book deals out of this. People like Greg Kelly should not be getting clicks out of this.

This is actually very, very bad. And I think people overall are going to see that they're exhausted from this. Yeah, I mean, I hope so. I don't think that's probably going to happen. I can already see the, oh, they did it to Trump. And I'm like, yeah, I thought it was really bad at the time. You can go back and roll the tape on literally everything I said. On the impeachment front, this was a little interesting. So let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen for Mitch McConnell. He said shooting down calls for impeachment, quote, he is not going to be removed from office. Now, this set off a bit of a

firestorm, Marshall, because everybody was like, see, McConnell is defending Biden. A lot of Republicans were upset. Obviously, a lot of Democrats weirdly were like kind of cheering it. But I saw pushback from McConnell's own press secretary, Doug Andrus, and he said breaking Nancy Pelosi controls the House, Meaning, what they're trying to spin it as is McConnell's not saying that he wouldn't impeach Biden. He's saying that Nancy Pelosi controls the House. So obviously, impeachment's not going to happen. But as we get to in this polling segment, I would not bet on Nancy Pelosi controlling that house for more than, what, 16, 17 months now? And then I think she's out of there. And so they're kind of keeping the door open. And so I don't know.

What do you think McConnell will do? Because would he actually move forward something like this, especially, and I did a whole monologue on this this about all the lofty rhetoric around impeachment on January 6th, both of which are against, by the way, both the impeachment of January 6th and the impeachment on the Ukraine phone call, Russiagate, whatever the hell you want to call it. So, yeah, I don't know. I mean if the House, let's say Kevin McCarthy by pressure from the Republican base does go ahead and send it, what is he going to do? Because I do think McConnell will likely be in charge of the Senate there within 17, 16 months too. I mean, the crazy thing here is that everything that we're talking about is premised on Nancy Pelosi controlling the House. Because let's be frank here, impeaching Joe Biden over this is insane. We could actually look through most presidencies and see some type of troop deaths, some type of foreign policy

disasters, some type of mistake. It is obviously not a sustainable real thing to do. And in advance, we have Mitch McConnell to say what you want about him. He does not have presidential ambition. So he is not incentivized to actually say a bat crap crazy thing like, hey, we're going to impeach Joe Biden over. I mean, go back to 2006, man, like right during the surge. Remember turning on the TV and seeing hundreds of American soldiers, Marines, airmen die every single week? The notion that this is impeachment worthy in that context is completely crazy to me. I know. I've tried to hammer that home. And I was like, look, guys, I mean, the Pandora's box you're opening there is just as bad as the one that was opened under the Ukraine phone call, which we know we're pointing out necessarily because when you have principles, you have to apply them equally.

Okay, let's get to another really important story, one that I really have my eye on. Honestly, I got to say, I've got my heart in this one, even though I probably shouldn't. And so we will start with kind of where I'm biased towards the type of story, but don't worry, you're going to get the full picture. Let's quote this up there from Politico. I love this headline. Dems sweat Latino turnout in the California recall. The subhead there is there are signs that Governor Gavin Newsom hasn't locked in a once reliable and fast growing Democratic voting bloc. So this is really interesting because one of the things that they have been pushing for is they're saying,

look, the vast majority of the voters in the California recall, at least so far, two weeks still to go, with early voting are Democrats. And what, you know, me and other people are saying, so that's not necessarily going to save you. It's California. Actually, it seems that Latinos in particular, as we spoke about with Gustavo Arellano, which was a great interview, is that a lot of them don't like Gavin Newsom. Gavin Newsom is actually underwater with Latinos in the state of California and particularly, Marshall, around lockdowns, which is that a lot of these small business owners, people themselves who are employees in some of these places are the ones themselves who actually suffered. So it's kind of interesting that we could see a big turnaround.

The other thing that I would say here is that I try to look at the huge polling miss. This is before I bring you a poll showing Gavin Newsom way up. And I'm saying just the only reason that I'm still have a little bit of hope that this might actually happen. Look at what happened in Texas. Nobody expected the Laredo, you know, South Texas move towards Trump. Obviously, something's going on there. I think a huge part of that had to do with the lockdowns. A big part of it also had to do with the stimulus checks and more. But the general critique, hatred, whatever you want

to call it, of working class Latinos against, you know, this kind of blue establishment, which kind of Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom definitely embody more than Joe Biden, that's still there. And I would personally bet on the salience kind of of that force here, which is why I think things might be more fluid. Maybe I'm crazy. Maybe I just want to see Gavin Newsom get recalled. I think it would be a Brexit level event like in American politics, but I'm curious for your view on all of this. Yeah. I don't think it's Brexit level. A, because apologies to Californians. I'm an Oregonian. The referendum system is insane. I love it. I think if we could design a system from scratch,

no one would use this system. It's clearly an antique from the progressive era. Apologies. I don't know if there's a case for making some type of recall system, but I don't think people would design it this way. I want to bring up a tweet that Parker Thompson, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, brought up because he's very much in the camp that you're in.

He isn't happy with Gavin Newsom, but he says the following. I would really like to hear the case for why Larry Elder is good rather than why Gavin Newsom is bad. We can agree he's bad, but why would Elder make my life better in the status quo? I could think of several concrete ways it would make it worse. Once again, that is not me agreeing necessarily that Larry Elder makes things worse. It's just the problem that I think is going to stop all this is I do not think Larry Elder was the proper candidate to actually overthrow Gavin Newsom. If you think back to what's happening in California, say what you want about Arnold Schwarzenegger, no offense to him. I think he's incredibly

cringed right now. It was actually true in 2003 that he was really heterodox. He was different. He wasn't this traditional Republican in a state that was less and less friendly to Republicans. He's a person who could come with at least a narrative of a different approach. Larry Elder is a traditional conservative. This is a guy who is against the existence of a minimum wage. Let's see how that positioned polls of working class Hispanics. See, that's a very important point and kind of what I want to drive home because now I'll bring you the poll. So let's put this up there, which kind of does change the game a little bit. You can see there up on the screen for those who are just listening, it's California governor recall. The remain camp is 51%. Recall is at 43. Now remember, in this system, recall has to have 51% of day of or of all voters for there to

be then the next person who has the highest amount on the ballot who would be Larry Elder in this poll at 27% could then become the next governor, which is kind of what does make it such a crazy system. 27% only would be enough theoretically in order to get you elected. The pierce part of the problem, I think Larry Elder, it might have peaked too soon. I think what happened is that people saw the poll, like California Democrats who don't like Gavin Newsom, but then they were like, wait a second, I don't want a boomer Republican to be my governor. And so now they are beginning to be a little bit more activated. But here's the thing. Part of the problem is nobody ever really spends that much time polling

California because it always goes blue, number one. Number two, Latinos, as we saw in Texas and in Florida, notoriously difficult to poll. It's one of those things where people have never invested in the community. There's definitely not. It's very difficult in order to gauge public opinion. Number three is this, and this is why I still have a little bit of hope left in this race, is that who are the people who are going to crawl through? I guess there's no snow in California, but who are going to crawl through the wildfires and the smoke in order to make sure they go to the ballot or go to the ballot box or go to the mailbox and put their mail-in ballots. The people against vaccine mandates, the people

against mask mandates, the people against lockdowns. As you're seeing at school districts all across this country, who are the people who are most pissed off, who are showing up? It's the ones who are most pissed off. So when you have this highly agitated base, and then rest of the people who are just like, eh, I don't know. And this is what we had with Gustavo. People don't like Gavin Newsom. Some people, the people who hate him really hate him, but nobody really likes him. And so that is why the polling miss could be there. I mean, people forget this, but like 30 something percent, 40% or whatever state of California are Republicans, right? They just are dominated by the rest of the 60.

This is kind of their time to shine. So it really could be kind of just the craziness of the system itself, which could at least give it a chance that this might happen. You know, it's really wild here, a couple of things. One, I just want to go back to the Larry Elder point that you made, which is really the peaking too early. Because of that peak, it made the race about do you want Larry Elder to be governor? Once again, that's why I was bringing up that Parker Thompson tweet. The actual thing that was actually really bad for Gavin Newsom is do you like Gavin Newsom? This is the point that you're making when it's about that. The second point is, if you're looking at these super red states like Texas or these blue

states like California, the people who are going to actually overthrow that establishment status quo long-term, because let's get real, Larry Elder, if he wins, will not be reelected in 2022. They have to be heterodox. They can't just be the opposite of whatever is in power. They have to say, hey, I'm actually a moderate Democrat who doesn't like the lockdown policy. They are going to look much more like, this is your favorite thing, they're going to look much more like The Rock. They're going to look like Matthew McConaughey. They're going to look like Shamath Palihapitiya, the Silicon Valley investor who was talking a lot about running earlier, but he didn't actually run. And then the final thing, and this is the wild part, which regardless of whether or not Gavin Newsom wins, it is hard to look at this upcoming

generation of traditional center-left Democrats and see any hope for them from a pure political basis. Kamala is underwater when it comes to her polling. Andrew Cuomo is out, obviously. Maybe he makes a comeback in New York. There's talk he wants to do that. And then Gavin Newsom, who has been this on the scene. This is, once again, bringing it back to middle school. Since 2000.

This is a long-term, we've been hearing the name Gaffney, Gavin Newsom, for decades. So this whole Biden part of the party has been eviscerated. Yeah, it's kind of fascinating because it's true. These people are so terrible,

just as like as politicians themselves. They are not doing well in their states, part of why I want them to lose. I will put this up there. And this is, again, where my little bit of hope comes in. From CNN, our producer James found this piece, why the California recall is within the margin of error and what that means for Gavin Newsom. It's from Harry Enten. He's a polling guy I've always kind of respected, used to work over at FiveThirtyEight. So what he points to is that the polling for the recall is actually

quite limited. So even though I think we've brought people here to maybe three different distinct polls, and I want to be clear, the last two big polls that have come out of the state of California have Newsom not just up, but up big. Prediction markets and all that stuff, not even close to what they're pointing to. So what he's saying there is that when you look at what exactly is going on, is that the case with a very small number of polling data, and essentially what we have right now is there have been fewer than five polls of any type that have even been published this month. And that in the very last recall election of the sitting governor in California, which is in 2003, there were actually more than twice as many published during the same period. It's actually an interesting question as to why exactly that's not going on right now. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Yeah. That is the answer. He announced on the— Oh, that's true. I forgot about that. He announced on, like, you know, the Leno show. That's part of what this is. That's a good point.

I didn't even think about it. Wow. You know, I remember whenever he launched on J. Leno. Terminator 3 came out. It was—that was a big polling move. What a time, man. Right before Iraq, too. It must have been nice.

But really what they're saying is that, and what Harry Enten points to, is that the lack of polling period is actually, and then still, the tightness and the margin of error, even with what I'm bringing people right now, still puts Gavin very much within that margin of error. And so, you know, the crystalline saga rule of polling is whatever it is for a Democrat, add like a minimum of four and probably seven whenever it comes to Republicans. And we'll get to that later, a particularly egregious example. So that's why I kind of still have a dog in this fight. Hey, so remember how we told you how awesome premium membership was? Well, here we are again to remind you that becoming a premium member means you don't have to listen to our constant pleas for you to subscribe.

So what are you waiting for? Become a premium member today by going to breakingpoints.com, which you can click on in the show notes. All right, let's get to this next one. This one is for my friend Marshall, who's very interested in all these types of things. And it's an interesting new story with Donald Trump and the new social media app, Getter. Now, you guys might have heard of Getter. It is a social media app. It's essentially a Twitter copy, which is owned by Jason Miller. Now, Jason Miller was a senior advisor to the Trump campaign in 2016, was a big Trump surrogate here in D.C. Then after Trump got banned from Facebook and Twitter, went and launched this new platform. There were a lot of discussions, like Parler

obviously went down, Amazon Web Services and all of that. Gab is basically untouchable, and so Trump's not going to go on Gab. Nobody really knew where Trump fell on all of this because he also had his ill-fated blog for a time, which wasn't doing that well. Basically, it's a scoop from Sarah Fisher, great reporter, by the way. She says Trump wants equity in Jason Miller's social media app. So here's what she writes, quote, the former president has yet to join the app, although sources say conversations about his participation are ongoing. Discussions about equity are likely part of those conversations. So basically what Trump is saying is, I'm not lending you my brand and all of my people, Jason, unless you give me some ownership of this. Parler actually offered him equity, as far as I know, back in the day, and they decided not to do it. But what do you make of this whole thing, Marshall? Yeah, I'm obsessed with this story because it's the perfect intersection of politics, technology, and media. There's this idea and this concept of the creator economy, which is basically that because of the internet, because of the way things work right now in business, you as a media

person, me as a media person, we no longer need to go to big institutions and we actually have a bunch of tools, whether it's Supercast, which is how this show is done, whether it's Patreon. We can actually do things that way. And the implication of this idea is that the central value on any platform is actually you. I would actually say with Supercast, you and Crystal's success is huge. So if people look at Donald Trump and say, well, Donald Trump, is this trying to get equity? That seems kind of weird. My point is if I could play Donald Trump's agent for a second, hell yes, he's getting equity.

Because Donald Trump is the central value in all these platforms. I was trying to think and I was prepping for the show. There's like 15 to 20 different like free speech conservatives. Well, Mike Lindell has one. See, there's always different apps, right? And the app which is going to dominate, because once again, most of these things we always talk about are probably winner-take-all markets. No one's looking to have five different conservative-to-IDW apps. It's going to be the one that brings Donald Trump and his actual audience there.

So the key thing there is that Trump should be demanding it because let's say Jason Miller's getter really works out. And let's say it becomes a unicorn. It's valued more than a billion dollars. If I'm Donald Trump, I'm thinking, wait a second. Why am I just getting tips? Because the way it's going to monetize itself right now is advertising and tips. If you're Donald Trump, you're like, wait, why am I not getting a huge cut of money whenever this thing IPOs or sells to someone?

So this is an entirely reasonable demand. It should be done. This is the way the world works from now. The last thing, because I really want to make this clear, because it's a really important idea. The Hill just sold. For a decent amount of money, you and Crystal built this huge platform. And

under traditional media, the two of you would not have gotten any traditional upside from that. I think that's BS. I don't think that's how these things are moving forward. And I think it's important that people take that as the takeaway. If there are any people who are creators who are watching this segment right now, if you're spending time on an app because there's so many different ones, you should really be asking yourself, like, am I the primary generator of value here? And if so, I should be asking for a cut.

Yeah. I mean, I think that's an excellent point. You know, the funny thing is, though, they're going to run into some problems. So people are already pointing towards this. Didn't have an element made for this, unfortunately. But it's about how just a couple of days, about a month behest of federal law, sometimes just because that's not what you want on your platform. So I wonder, are they just going to wander into the same minefield that Twitter is? Everybody's already pissed off about Twitter. Everybody's pissed off about Facebook. Liberals are mostly pissed they don't censor enough. Republicans are pissed that they censor too much. But kind of what this illustrates to me is you do have to have, and I've said this so many times here, and I know people don't like to hear it, you have to have some type of moderation. Not, I'm not saying I'm cool with

the current moderation regime, but do you really want beheading videos to proliferate on Twitter? Like, no, I don't want that. It was actually a really bad thing. I remember covering it at the time, kind of 2013, 2014. ISIS was getting away scot-free on Twitter, and they were doing a lot of recruiting and propaganda kind of on the platform. And Twitter was like, they were very slow, frankly, to take a lot of it down. And I think that this is a good example of some of the problems that when they start to get into this business for themselves, you can say free speech all you want, but you are going to have to take some stuff down. Like nobody does want to live in a zero moderation world. How do you think they're going to handle that? I mean it's just funny to bring it back to Michael Lindell for a second.

Remember when he announced his app, his app was actually crazy moderated. He's like, I'm Christian. Yeah, he's like this is a Christian platform. You're getting censored if you're not. Right. And the key lesson there is that a lot of times, and this is why it's important for you to make the point you're making about moderation. Because I think when people use the word censorship, it obscures people's ability to think, which is Mike Lindell, your problem of Twitter isn't that there are literally some type of rules. Your beef is just that they aren't Trumpy right-wing Christian rules. Correct. So in this case,

I'm really interested in how this could possibly relate to what happened with OnlyFans. Think about this. OnlyFans walked back their no live sex policy, so that's not going to happen anymore. But the initial thing that drove that decision and literally changing the nature of their app was bank and capital raising. Regulation and whether they could actually get funding. If you're Getter, I really wonder because let's get real for a second. This thing is not going to be profitable. It's going to requireulation and whether they can actually get funding. If you're Getter, I really wonder, because let's get real for a second. This thing is not going to be profitable. It's going to require a lot of money. It's going to require the usage of banks.

I really wonder in a post-OnlyFans debacle world, is it possible for a platform to take that aggressive of a stand if they're actually going to treat themselves as a real business? If this thing is going to basically say, look, we're doing this for funsies, it's like many things in the political world, and it's really just about vibes and things like that, that's one thing. But if this is an actual business, then that actually suggests that there's going to be a major issue coming down the line.

And I would really suggest to Jason Mill and anyone at that platform to do is actually think to yourself, okay, but seriously, what do we do when January 6th 2.0 happened and not just make these decisions on the spot? Because when we see all these really, really, everyone now agrees these are bad decisions for basically like, for example, the New York Post, Hunter Biden story, which everyone now agrees was a bad decision. But not at the time. It happened because these platforms did not say to themselves, hey, like we're super afraid of getting criticized by the New York Times for

different things. What do we do when there's an emergency? Probably call Jack because instead they're just like, oh, take it down. Yeah, ban it. All right. That was the wrong approach. And I doubt, let's be real, Jason Miller is doing this level of thinking. Well, what's funny is that here's the quote from their actual website. Getter is a non-biased, not biased, social media network for people all over the world.

Getter tried the best to provide best software quality to users, not bias, social media network for people all over the world. Getter tried the best to provide best software quality to users, allow anyone to express their opinion freely. So the terrible grammar and all of that aside there, what are they trying to get at? I mean, I do think they're kind of walking themselves into a problem. And you're going to see that, like the jihadist thing, that's how it always starts. It always starts with the jihadists and the white nationalists, right? Because they always flood this type of stuff. It's like Gab, I think the same thing happened over there. And I think Gab also, what was it? It was a synagogue shooting or whatever that was transported. And they had to go and take a bunch of stuff down. And I always see this kind

of with these like very, very pro, that's like, look, eventually one of these things is going to happen on your platform. Now, the real question is, what do you do about it? Because especially whenever it's in violation of federal law, like that is where you especially have to say, okay, like this is going to be a real problem for us. I don't think they have any problems necessarily taking that down. But, you know, there's a reason that most people say you shouldn't advocate for violence, right, on a platform. And actually, I mean, that is technically, it's dubious as I understand it, but it could be legal. Or you could, you know, if you're insinuating it or like you post somebody's, there's nothing illegal, I think, about posting somebody's address and just be like, just so you know, like that's happening. But we all know exactly what's going on there, right?

So that's the problem they're going to run into, especially if they start to scale. Like if they – if Trump does get on here, I mean that's millions of people, millions and millions, right, which they're going to have. And then something – Ben Thompson, I've talked about him before, tech – is he a blogger? I don't know. Analyst. Let's call him that. His term's all merged. Yeah.

Tech stratechery is his newsletter that I subscribe to. And he wrote about this one. He's like, part of the problem whenever you're running social media companies, and again, I'm not defending YouTube's regime, Twitter's regime, Facebook. We have plenty of criticism for that here. But he goes, if you think about the scale of the problem, the problem is when you onboard all of humanity, you are onboarding also the worst of humanity, which is that, look, most people are good people. But there are rapists, murderers, pedophiles, jihadists, et cetera, amongst us. So we have to decide how the hell we're going to deal with that. Kind of the same principle applies online, which is that, look, it's a use case of one in 100,000.

But multiply that by millions, you've actually got a lot of cases. You kind of have to figure out what the hell you're going to do here. Well, and look, the answer is that you should be honest. Aside from the terrible grammar, as you pointed out, it was a mistake from them to say they're not biased because that's just BS. Everyone has a bias. I thought we'd move past this idea that I'm the totally neutral. We're totally neutral, Sagar. That's BS and that's just BS. Everyone has a bias. I thought we'd move past this idea that I'm the totally neutral. We're totally neutral, Sagar. We have no, that's BS and that's not true.

Jack Dorsey definitely regrets saying back in the early 2010s that Twitter is the free speech wing of the free speech party. That was not actually true. He didn't actually believe that. That's not me trying to dunk on Jack. It's just that he had a faulty conception

of what that meant. Jason Miller has a really faulty conception of what bias is. So what you actually have to do here, this is a skill for politicians. This is a skill for tech founders. Think of what people are actually asking for. No one is asking people to not have a perspective. But they're saying, hey, can you be fair? What pisses conservatives off about YouTube, Twitter, all these platforms, because let's get real for a second.

Most people actually have a pretty decent time on these platforms. If you're a normal conservative of sub-300 followers, you're having a pretty okay time. You're having a great time. I'm sorry. It's true. I said it. But here's what's legitimate about your gripe. You do not trust the moderators.

You see the fact that 9 out of 10 times, I'm making that statistic up, but it's directionally true, the moderation mistakes seem to trend to one specific end of the angle. So what Jason Miller should say is, look, I have a perspective saying I want this to be totally free and open. That's a perspective. That is actually a bias. We shouldn't pretend otherwise. But he should instead say, look, we are going to be a platform that you can trust. We are going to be a platform that our number one job is going to be making sure that anyone who's taking down a jihadi video, anyone who's taking down a mosque shooting, that they are trained and they are not biased and they understand what they are doing. We frankly are only going to hire people who understand that. That is what his job is to convey as a CEO.

Yeah. And you know, part of the problem that they're already beginning to have, and this popped up on Business Insider just a couple of days ago, is that they actually, the problem that because it's built on free speech, like I said, what starts to happen? Now they have problems in terms of moderation on child pornography. And it's like the more you dig into these things, this almost always seems to happen. I watched this QAnon documentary on HBO, which I actually highly recommend. And it was funny because 8chan, which is as wild of the West as it possibly gets, they have to do the same problem, right? They actually have an immense team of moderators in order to remain in legal compliance because they have the same issue. They're going to get flooded with like the absolute dregs of society.

And it's just interesting to me about how Trump and all of them are going to have to navigate this because they have to, right? And especially not just Jason Miller. And right now, you know, I think there's only a couple million people on the platform, which is actually not bad. But let's say Trump gets on there. We're talking about tens of millions of people who might follow him. They're going to have to run into these same things like every time. And the way they navigate it, you've got to think very clearly kind of up at the top. And that is why I just wish that people would do. Well, and just one quick thing, Mr. Social Media Growing Audience King over here. Yeah.

Are we actually sure that Trump is going to bring millions of people? Oh, I don't know. I'm asking you this, right? Let me take over the interview slot for a second. Is it possible that Trump isn't actually worth taking's a good question. I'm asking you this, right? Let me take over the interview slot for a second. Is it possible that Trump isn't actually worth taking 20% equity? Because I actually could totally see a bull case, sorry, a bear case for actually Trump will throw up some half-assed content, but it's actually not going to drive millions and millions of people there. And actually the truth is that Twitter, you know, Twitter is actually fine for most people. And that's that. What do you think? Maybe. I don't know. It also depends on the monetization, right? So like, look, maybe not tens of millions is where I work, but like 10 million is probably

correct. I think 10 million, that's a lot of people. Okay. And like, that's enough people where, you know, if you're advertising for like some sort of like MAGA adjacent brand, like I could definitely see how they could make that work. I'm not saying it's going to be a billion dollar company. But like could it be a hundred million dollar company? Yeah, maybe. And so like that's kind of what, yeah, I don't know. I mean it's interesting.

And Crystal and I have talked about this. Let me see if I can find it. Which is that Trump's social media, yeah, in terms of his disappearing names, this was an interesting kind of analysis, which is that this was recently, I'm reading from a Newsweek piece. I'll put the link down there in the description just because we don't have a tear sheet made. Data supplied by Brand Watch showed more than 355 million mentions of Donald Trump on the social web from the start of June to the end of July 2021. Now, this is important because June 2020 is where you start to see the most. Same thing in October and November. But listen to this. The low point is April of 2021 with 2.4 million. That is a

95% drop from its peak. So in July, the current figure is at 3.5 million. So the all-time low obviously happens in April. Not really sure what was going on in April. But anyway, that's what happens. So the figure is interesting because if you consider it, it's like this huge spike. I mean, like I just said, 50-something million, and then it drops to 2 million. And Crystal is always pointing to this, is there was a Google Trends piece back, I think, in March, which said that Trump's search regime, or sorry, I keep saying regime. I'm not sure why that's in my head. And so Trump's search results, as in the number of Google searches for him, had actually returned to pre-2015 levels.

That's actually really bad because, you know, I think I've told this story before publicly, but I believe the most revealing episode that I ever saw of Trump whenever I was a White House correspondent is whenever it was right after the midterm elections and one of the reporters came to thank him. It was like, thank you so much for doing this press conference. And he looked at him with so much contempt and he's like, it's called earned media. It's worth billions. As in, it's very much like, none of this is about you. It's about me. I'm using your platform to get attention, which is the number one commodity that I have in this world. So yeah, I don't know if he does. And actually, this is kind of an interesting point. You know, if he does actually

want to run again, he does kind of need Twitter and Facebook. And that is, this is very uncomfortable conversation that both sides have to have, which is that Trump is actually not bigger than Twitter or Facebook. But also it recognizes the fact that, well, if that's true, then Twitter and Facebook definitely do play an extremely vital resource in our discourse, which means that they are bearing very much on the utility status, whatever. You decide whatever commiserate policy options that you want there. But I do think that is true. I've seen actually some public reporting that, I think it was from Axios, it was a couple of months ago, that the Trump team saw a Trump return to Facebook as vital, quote, vital to his ability to run in 2024. And that just tells you a lot about what that

actually means if you do need to run again for when you run a campaign. Yeah. And look, like to sum it up, the part that I'm utterly convinced of is A, if Trump wants to run for president again, like you just said, it is a total mistake for him in exchange for fake equity to go onto this platform. Because Trump in a vacuum is just boring. Yeah. Without a Jake Tapper tweet or some other thing, what's the point of this spectacle? There's no point. It's not entertaining.

It's not helpful. So he's really – I guess what's difficult is they're not going to let him back on Twitter. So he's in this weird – Trump genuinely is in this really tough position where there's these two – it's not even clear there's two paths here. Yeah, I don't know. I really don't know how it all works out for him. Okay, let's get to another story, Marshall. I know this is interesting. Crystal actually wanted to cover this too, so I'm glad that we could focus in on it. I have a lot of complicated feelings on this one. So let's go ahead and put it up there on the screen. And so China, the authorities in China have announced something very interesting. So they say

that they will, for anyone under the age of 18, they're to be limited to playing online games to only three hours a week, plus only these three hours, 8 till 9 p.m. on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. And so, man, I can already see the Chinese teenagers kind of absolutely freaking the hell out. But they announced this, that there's going to be inspections, actually, of the gaming companies in conjunction with this new law to limit gaming on those for under age 18. And there have previously been limits, but now there are only three specific hours per week in which these kids can play. So this is really fascinating. The Chinese, this all happened, I talked a little bit about this in my monologue

on Tuesday, which is that there was that whole IPO of Tencent, where, you know, they IPO'd here in the United States, took billions of American dollars, stole it, went back to China. In Tencent, then the Chinese government was like, actually, Tencent, you're done. Gaming is a scourge on our society. And we've realized that it's taking away from the vitality of our youth, men in particular. This is bad. You announce this in conjunction, you're seeing a real social crackdown in China in terms of the extracurricular activity that they're allowing their population to engage in. So it's – I mean, look, personally, I think video games are a scourge. But, I mean, the American in me is saying this this is kind of crazy, but also these are children.

So who the hell knows? It's a complicated one. I don't think it's actually that complicated. And just one quick addendum to what you're saying. It's online gaming. So the key thing, because this is a critical thing. So I'm not a gamer. This is why I don't understand.

Yeah, so as we debated in my Twitter thread about coming on last night, I am not a gamer either, though I do play games, a very critical thing. I promised to shout out someone's point yesterday. I said, as people who grew up in the 1990s and 2000s, this could represent a renaissance for single-player games. Because the key thing is the Chinese, what they've created is a system where you have to log in with your ID and even some facial recognition technology in certain cases to verify it online. But if you're playing a single player game offline, it doesn't affect it. So this isn't a ban on video gaming past three hours a week. It's a ban on online gaming on, except for those three days. Well, let me ask you this though. Isn't social, isn't that type of gaming what most children are spending a lot of their time on?

So once again, I do not know anything about Roblox or Fortnite, any of this stuff. But as I understand it, what makes Fortnite and all that so fun for the middle schoolers, high schoolers, and I guess probably even older people who play it, is that it is a social game. It wouldn't be... The addictive aspect of it necessarily isn't just from that, but also what allows people to spend hours and hours and hours and hours doing it is that there's that whole community aspect. People are talking, chatting or whatever within that is like, is that? Well, no. So that's the joke about a single player game renaissance. Like the gaming industry, obviously post 2003 really moved into online games being huge, and you're totally right about Fortnite, all those different parts.

What I'm just saying, though, is that it's not literally that gaming – it's very precise to be what's talked about here. There is no way to prevent people from playing single-player games. We're purely talking in the online sphere. Secondly, let's not just buy Hook, Line, and Sinker, the video game addiction thing, right? Like we're not gamers, but I think it's actually really important to note that I don't think there's any actual evidence that people are addicted to gaming. And we shouldn't confuse your dislike for Fortnite for like all these people who don't like this thing that I like are addicted, right? There are people who don't use social media, so everyone's addicted to Twitter.

I'm like, well, are they? Or are you just describing a behavior you don't like? I could see where people are like, people are addicted to comic books and people are addicted to television, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Which they did say in the 90s. The question is, what and how should society actually exist in order itself? Now, I am frankly thankful as a non-gamer, this is not on the table in the US. Because once again, we're looking at gaming, I could definitely see a cadre of people in this listenership and viewership who say, hey, gaming's bad. I'm okay directionally with this. But actually, the state shouldn't have the ability to say this. And look at where there are actual real consequences. This

is where I think the Chinese model is so devastating. Look at the one-child policy, which has now been relaxed. That was the Chinese state, because to bring up Ben Thompson again, you were talking about him earlier. In his writing about this, he was like, look, this should make clear the Chinese Communist Party is a deeply ideological party. It has a specific vision, how society looks, how it should be ordered, and they will do what it takes to make that vision look like. An example of that was the one-child policy.

We think our population is too big. We think we can determine the number of children you should have, this, this, and that. Look at the disaster they now have with the terrible sex imbalance, which is causing severe— Actually, this is part of the problem, what they're trying to replicate. But once again, this came because they intervened in this way. Like, everyone here who knows us knows we are not doctrinaire libertarians. But while it's easy to dunk on the Cato Institute, I think we should take a step back and look at truths, the different sides you can say, which is that, like, hey, actually, like, having a totalitarian state that could just wake up one day

and say, actually, I hate video games, and we think it's addictive, so we're going to, it's actually probably not a good thing. And that's not me just making excuses for the video game industry. But it's really saying, hey, like, actually what makes our system unique and why I have confidence in ourselves long-term

is that the government cannot do this. Right. You know, it's interesting. Let's put up some more details of this. So put that Wall Street Journal tear sheet up there on the screen, please. The government announcement said, quote, all online video games will be required to connect to a, quote, anti-addiction system operated by the National Press and Publication Administration. So the regulation, which takes effect on Wednesday, will require all users to register using their real names and government-issued identification documents. Other details of enforcement weren't made public, and phone calls to the national press and public

administration went unanswered after business hours on Monday. So in response, this is interesting, and it kind of heads back to my Tencent thing, which is that it will automatically boot players off after a certain period of time. It will use, as you said, facial recognition technology to ensure that registered users are using their proper credentials. And the government is seeking, this is what they said,

quote, to effectively protect the physical and mental health of minors. Now, the reason we're picking this up is this is actually a pretty big deal, as Marshall pointed out, not only in terms of the deep ideological view of the Chinese Communist Party, but they're cracking down on a lot more social elements within their society too. And this is all coming kind of to the front right now, post coronavirus, where they really do feel emboldened. And I think this is an interesting point too. You know, they lied about COVID. They, I mean, look, if you take a look at the body of evidence, they possibly covered up the fact that they might've been responsible for this whole thing. And the population was really not with them during the Wuhan lockdown and all of that. But they regained kind of the trust of the people.

And this is from what a couple of analysts that we've spoken to have said, is that by making it so that they effectively quashed coronavirus by around October or November. Yes, of course, with lockdowns. And I am saying even with the lies and the cover up and all that, you can see pictures out of Beijing and out of Wuhan. And they're very clearly like by October, November, December, they were not as worried about COVID even close to as we were here. That China and the Chinese population in particular saw that as, okay, so even though you guys lied, even though all of that, they did still kind of protect us, quote unquote. So with this new feeling of being emboldened, what you see now,

now they're going after celebrities. So I found this fascinating. Let's put this up there from the Daily Mail. China declares war on celebrities who are deemed social tumors that must be removed. And it's kind of the same thing, Marshall. They're going after our version of like Instagram influencers who they don't like. They're like, ah, these people are spreading like Western consumerism and infecting the minds of our children and, you know, all of this. And I'm like, wow, like, look, I'm not a fan of any of this either, but it's like you said, you know, the American in you goes, look, I don't think the state should be doing this either. Yeah. And that's the key thing here. There's a lot of pessimism on both of our shows. It's easy

to look back at the past two decades of our political consciousness and think, wow, things are really terrible, and I'm not confident, and this, this, and that country could do it better. But seeing a rising China offer a contrasting model and really seeing how no one actually wants to live there, right? There are a lot of very online people who are like, that's so based. China's canceling. It's like, you guys are the same people who oppose vaccine passports and other lockdown mandates. So like, if the state could say, we think that Instagram influencers are social tumors, they definitely are like, yeah, close your business for the next five years until you do whatever we want, right? So I think it's, I think the key thing is people should not derive their political philosophy from Twitter because there's a lot of contradictions here. I think it's actually really important that the reason why I think you and I are confident in this country long term is that despite all of the big disagreements we have about Medicare for all, immigration, there's actually something actually liberal in the classical liberal sense.

Not to sound too Dave Rubin-y. About like, you know. Dave Rubin. Yeah, not to be too Dave Rubin-y, but I'm trying to be good faith here. But actually, the state can do some things and it can't do other things. And we can have a debate

about Medicare for all. But like, guess what? President AOC can't say, hey, everyone needs to log in to a facial recognition ID-based software thing because of video games. But look, here's what

we actually should do. Because like, once again, and push back on me if you disagree. This is a real issue. I don't want this to come off as us claiming oh, this is all fine. Video games aren't a problem because look, you and I are upper middle class. We're going to be

successful. Our children, it's like someone tweeted about this, how Mark Zuckerberg's kids aren't allowed to use iPads. So there is this very interesting class bit here where if you're looking, it's basically like with divorce. Where where, like, rich people got divorced first, but then they, like, stopped doing it, and the rest of the people kept doing it more and more. There are going to be norms that are going to be unfair. So, I don't want to basically say, hey, just work it out.

I could not have video games, but you figure it out. It's not about work it out. It's, A, government should study this. Like, there should actually be a real study of, like, is this actually an addictive thing? Hey, like, actually, should we get information in study. Is this actually an addictive thing? Hey, actually, should we get information in front of parents about these types of things? And then we could have a debate, but I don't think there's any proof that playing Roblox is addictive. No, I think you should talk about

it in, we think we should talk about it in schools, and that is really where a lot, and also, look, I mean, not to get all, you know, personal responsibility here, but like, Crystal takes her kids' phones away whenever they play. That's a norm. Dude, our children are not going to have phones at the dinner table.

Especially when they're like six years old. No iPads. Okay, let's get to another important topic. This is about Joe Biden's approval rating. So this one really caught my eye because it showed to me how much trouble he's in. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. So we have this poll, Economist YouGov. You might say, wait, what are you talking about, Sagar? Biden's job approval rating is 47% and his disapproval rating is 46. Yeah, but go ahead and take a look at that sample number. And this is what I really wanted to point to. That sample is a D plus 14. So that means that Joe Biden's approval disapproval

is essentially tied in a poll, which is weighted 14 points high for Democrats. Now, as Varad Mehta, he's a polling guy who I trust, pointed out, Biden on his luckiest day in the midterms would have a D plus four electorate, meaning that this is 10 points oversampled and he is still barely holding on to his approval. So look, what does that tell you? What it tells to me, Biden is in deep, deep trouble on his approval rating. Everything that we have seen in the last couple of weeks says a couple of things. His big lead marshal was COVID. He wasn't just leading. It was like two through one. It was like 65%. Now, 50. As Crystal says, a lot of this is out of his control with Delta, but some of it isn't. Fauci, Walensky, the lockdowns, school masking, declaring war on Florida, all of that, that actually isn't his control. And personally, I think that's probably the biggest

mistake of his entire presidency so far. And yeah, that includes Afghanistan, especially pushing kind of the lockdown regime. And if you start to look at the polls, which, and look, these are Republican weighted. So I'm telling you with everything I can to please take this with a grain of salt. But also, it does mean something. It doesn't mean everything. Check this out from Rasmussen. Put it up there on the screen. 60% of voters that, again, that they polled, agree that Biden deserves to be impeached. Now look, they didn't point to Afghanistan or anything in particular. But the reason why I think it's important is what I discovered about impeachment during the Trump era is it wasn't when they would poll it, it wasn't actually about the merits.

They were just like, yeah, I don't like Trump. So when I look at that, I see 60% on this end, and then I see a barely tied in a very, very heavy Democratic poll. Truth is somewhere in the middle, right? Like I said, the Chrysalis Saga rule, add four or five, four to seven. So he's maybe six, seven points underwater. That's a big problem. That's a big, big problem. And figuring out exactly why really is kind of the story of politics right now. Yeah, I mean, the key thing is, I think our shared unified theory of Joe Biden,

why he uniquely amongst the Democratic candidates was the right candidate to beat Trump if you're a Democratic partisan, he was the normal guy. I think it's always so funny when, before Afghanistan, Republicans made the Grandpa Joe in his basement arguments. Like, actually, a lot of people are exhausted by politics.

And actually that sounds pretty good. People don't like how he's not hyper-alien. They don't like how he's always in the news. That was actually a really strong case for him. That strength turned into weakness during Afghanistan because as you've discussed, as we've discussed, most of the population in this country supported ending the war. But for a variety of partisan reasons, both good faith and bad faith, a lot of people were like, wait, this plot was terrible and they did not like what they saw from Joe Biden at a presidential leadership level. It was very clear

that this was not a man who was in his prime, both politically, physically, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It was a total disaster. And that is what drives it. And then when you combine this with lockdown and COVID going on, when I say normalcy, I don't just mean normalcy in terms of he's not in your face all day, which is, once again, I'm personally really enjoying it despite our business incentives here. At the same time, though, normalcy also means, hey, it's hot girl summer and we're back and COVID isn't a problem anymore. And for a variety of reasons, that didn't happen. So you're seeing this perfect intersection of these two issues that were primed to hurt his two biggest strengths. And then if you don't have that, he's just a Democratic partisan. So of course it's 50-50. Yeah, I pointed, I mean, I made a lot of big predictions before Biden was inaugurated. And I

said, I thought he'd have a 70% approval rating, but that was predicated on two things. Number one, the economy would continue to do well. And number two, that COVID will be over. I was like, all he's got to do is get people vaccinated. The biggest mistake that Biden made was, and look, you could think what you want around Delta and maybe you agree with it. But I kind of read the mood as the country as people are done. People are totally over. And by bringing back and kind of acquiescing to the lockdown

regime, to the, you know, the masks everywhere. And look again, I know everybody out there, Sagar, you literally got COVID. You're right. It's also fine after a week. Is that you can point to, you can point to all of this and say that the existence of the feeling of this is not going away anytime soon, whether you blame Biden or not, that's still going to lead to your pessimistic view of the country. What I thought that he was betting on and moving forward was the ability to make sure that to project a, guys, it's over. We're moving on. I sent everybody these checks. Let's move forward. But they decided that Delta wasn't just a new variant, but kind of a new round two of COVID. By doing that, I think they spelled their political doom because I do really believe that Trump, and the only reason that he was so, so

competitive is that there was an actual huge silent majority of people who said, I just don't think COVID is that big of a deal and I don't want to deal with this stuff anymore. And a lot of that is going to come back to Biden right now. You know, this is probably the most disagree we'll get on this episode because I'm of really mixed feelings about this. It's hard for me to look at what happened with Biden and impeachment in Afghanistan next week and assume a lot of his critics are in good faith. So to your point, when you're talking about how, you know, what he could have done was just say, it's over this, this and that. I'm sorry, but I entirely see the entire right wing part of the media and political ecosystem instantly pivoting to aggressive COVID measures. The second that he would have done what you're describing,

I'm not trying to explain for Joe Biden, I'm just trying to really, I'm trying to understand the dilemma we're in as a country through this lens, which is that the second he would have said that, taking the path you described, I think you would have seen

a whole set of people, frankly, like in the South saying, oh, under Trump, this was getting under control. Now Joe Biden, it's crazy. Where's Joe Biden? Why is Joe Biden in his basement? Why is Joe Biden saying it's over?

I think if Joe Biden had said what you effectively just said he would have said, he would have gotten absolutely wrecked. Because once again, the problem here, and there's no way to get around this, so I'm not pretending we can just push this away like Deo Sec Machina style, is that this is a policy problem,

aka how do you handle COVID that's infected by politics? You're talking about why is China normal right now? I did a lot of dunking on their system. A benefit of it is that they're just like, no, we're just going to end COVID. Yeah, they're like, lockdowns are in effect until they're not. And that's it. And then we're done. They can just do that. So Biden, so, and this is so frustrating because I know we can't just wish politics away, but it just seems like, once again, it seems as if COVID really fell Donald Trump. And I think there's a decent chance that COVID fells Joe Biden. This is a toxic issue that there's

no win on. I think Biden is screwed. And I really think COVID is the number one reason. And the other problem too, is that on the economic optimism that we saw, you know, I made this joke because I stole it from Twitter, which is that it turns out the roaring 20s were just three weeks in June. And like, actually, it was a glorious three weeks. It was a great three weeks, you know. Super great. I remember already the EU apparently is shutting down. So I'm glad I got in while I could. But what you can see is that that feeling, that is what he would have rode to at least a chance in the midterms. Now, I think that he will probably get hammered bigger than they did with the Tea Party back in 2010. Let's go ahead and put this Politico one, just because I want to show you, we're not cherry picking here. It's almost every single poll that we look at. Biden underwater

there, 47 approval, 49 disapproval. Again, add in some more Republicans, and I definitely think the disapproval number is higher. And then finally, really get to the aggregates. As we would always say in the election, look at the aggregates. Look at what happened here. Let's put this real clear politics graph up there on the screen. Check out that crossing, that red crossing just in the last two weeks. You are just going to continue to see that go up. Already the economy is completely stalling whenever it comes, because of COVID, uncertainty, Delta, and all of that. Add in the COVID disapproval number, then you add in politics, the culture war, and all of that,

and you just have a very toxic mess that Biden is going to deal with from now on. And I do I personally think he's really screwed in 2000 and in 2022. So there we go. Wow, you guys must really like listening to our voices. Well, I know this is annoying. Instead of making you listen to a Viagra commercial, when you're done, check out the other podcast I do with Marshall Kosloff called The Realignment. We talk a lot about the deeper issues that are changing, realigning in American society. You always need more Crystal and Saga in your daily lives. Take care, guys. Okay, let's get to my monologue. About two weeks ago, the GOP found its mantra in Afghanistan. We want to leave, but not like this.

Now, from the beginning, I've said this repeatedly. When you say that, you're being a patsy for the neocons who never wanted to leave and are simply criticizing the withdrawal in bad faith because it covers up their sins of the last 20 years. You can say, yeah, but what about the equipment? Why didn't we hold the city of Kabul? Why not Bagram? Each one of those decisions is code for the simple truth. A bigger presence that does a more, quote, orderly withdrawal would have made the ISIS bombing at Hamid Karzai International Airport look like a cakewalk. Just imagine dozens of U.S. checkpoints around the city of Kabul, around the Afghan army equipment, ferrying people back and forth to Bagram. We are talking potentially hundreds of U.S. casualties. I personally say, screw that. You can say otherwise if you want, but be honest

about what you are proposing. I'm at least acknowledging the ugliness of my position. Now, you should acknowledge yours. But below the we should have withdrawn differently crowd is a simpler and uglier truth. The truth that most of MAGA were never really principled. They are mostly cattle being led to the neocon trough, once again because their brains have been rotted by the culture war. Biden did something, so it must be bad. I swear, I have seen people online with America First in their Twitter bios, then talking about conditions-based withdrawals and retweeting neocons. The forever war mantra, it is almost sad to behold. But the final nail in the coffin came

when I started perusing not just the rhetoric that the so-called America First GOP is proposing, but the actual policy. Nothing crystallizes it better than this. As usual, my eagle-eyed friend Richard Henadius spotted this one. The House Republican Conference convened to come up with policy proposals about how they're different than the Democrats. So what is it exactly? The briefing was conducted by none other than Robert O'Brien, that was Donald Trump's own last national security advisor. Here's what he came up with in response to say that the U.S. has diminished credibility abroad. They said, we're going to deploy 250 M1 Abrams tanks to Poland to bolster defense capabilities on the Eastern Front against the Russians and bolster NATO. That's not a joke.

After endless talk in the Trump years, Russian reset. Maybe we shouldn't be defending NATO. Russiagate is crazy. Isn't the real enemy China? Why are the Democrats so hawkish on Russia? Yeah, and this is all they can come up with that would have passed for conventional wisdom in defense terms during the Reagan second term? Really what it shows you is how brain-dead the GOP foreign policy elite are. When in doubt, default to what you know. Same thing when it comes to economic policy. No matter how bad the crisis is, Stephen Moore has an answer. Payroll tax cuts, this is the same version as that. Take Kevin McCarthy, the GOP House leader himself. Just days ago, McCarthy defaulted to what he

knows. We actually should have a permanent true presence in Afghanistan. It was only when a reporter pointed out to under Trump, McCarthy said that we shouldn't, that he then changed his mind and said, well, no, actually, we should withdraw. But then we should have kept Bagram Air Force Base permanently. Isn't that also a permanent presence? But I digress. It's a complete joke. I've brought you endless examples like this. My personal favorite remains Donald Trump Jr. citing Iraq war drum beater Tony Blair as an example that

Biden is destroying the transatlantic alliance. It's almost too comical to bear considering I had to live through four years of tough talk from these guys about how America is back and we don't care what these Europeans think. It's all about us, baby. When Trump withdraw troops from Syria and left the Kurds behind, it was America first. Damn the alliances. It's about our troops, not anybody else. Now, as so many have so aptly pointed out, the GOP is mounting some major defense of dual citizen American Afghans as if they really care. The same it said they say for Afghan interpreters. Now look, I'm passionately in favor of helping these people, but I happen to

remember when the Trump administration shut down the visa program for them when negotiating a peace deal with the Taliban. Look, I know this is going to piss a lot of people off who mostly like it when I stick it to the media or when I go after Joe Biden, but that's the easy part of my job. The hard part is telling people who don't want to hear it that they're getting played. And that's what's happening here. The best explanation I've seen so far is from the New York Times' Ross Douthat. He writes, quote, you have the GOP who postured as cold-eyed realists under Trump, suddenly turning back into eager crusaders, excited to own the Biden Democrats and relive the brief post-9-11 period where the MSM treated their party with deference rather than contempt. That's really what it was all about. The truth is,

is that when the Republicans criticized the media over the last several years, they only did so because they weren't on their side. But now they are. They don't mind it at all. And the casualty of that is dead American soldiers and more wars, but they don't care. It has been absolutely incredible for me to watch people who cried about the deep state for years now use their leaks against the Biden administration or trust CIA intelligence reports as long as they serve their narrative against the Biden team. It's almost like they're not consistent. All of this is to say, partisan people are always going to be partisan. But what's distressed me is watching people who held

completely opposite positions just switch on a dime so fast. To see so many messages and outrage about Afghanistan as people are being absolutely played by GOP leaders just because they also happen to share your position on critical race theory, is the worst part of this. Now look, the next crisis, who knows if Joe Biden has the stones to do what he did with Afghanistan again. If a Libya-type crisis comes up, I guarantee you the GOP will be clamoring to intervene again. They haven't learned anything. And the people who suffer won't be them. It's their voters, and worse, the rest of us, who see reason and aren't blinded by partisan hate.

That's the thing, Marshall, that really gets me, is to have these people who were talking about America first. One more thing, I promise. Just wanted to make sure you knew about my podcast with Kyle Kalinsky. It's called Crystal Kyle and Friends, where we do long-form interviews with people like Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, and Glenn Greenwald. You can listen on any podcast platform, or you can subscribe over on Substack to get the video a day early. We're going to stop bugging you now. Enjoy. Marshall, what are you taking a look at? Yeah, I, along with the rest of America,

am obsessed with the Elizabeth Holmes Theranos story. I loved Bad Blood. It's on our Audible account. John Kerry at the Wall Street Journal. Really good reporting. Really compelling story. There's a movie that's coming out. All the different parts. But what I really want to focus on today, especially as the trial goes on, is the broader narrative of what it says about America and even the technology industry. Because the number one thing that if you talk to anyone in Silicon Valley about Elizabeth Holmes, they will say,

whoa, whoa, whoa. that's not on us. She was not really funded by traditional venture capital. Traditional healthcare wasn't engaged. And the only VCs who actually put money into the company were actually people who she personally knew through familial connections. So from that perspective, it's not quite clear that the story of Theranos is really a story about Silicon Valley. Rather, I think it's a story about the American political and foreign policy establishment that in a weird way intersects with the conversation that we were just having around Afghanistan. Because if you actually look at the board of Theranos and the folks who were involved, it's actually a little incredible. It actually shows that there's a world where Elizabeth Holmes should have become a politician and not tried her hand at launching a massive startup because she had multiple secretaries of state.

We have a graphic of that, actually. Let's put it up there on the screen. Yeah, this list is incredible. We have George Shultz, who famously besmirched his legacy when he turned against his grandson, who was a – well. He passed away recently, so rest in peace, of course. But it was a really horrible way to end his legacy. You had General Jim, Mad Dog, Mattis. You had Henry Kissinger. You had all these people who went all in on this company.

And you have to ask yourself, why were these the people who you wanted to have on your board? Why was this the way this actually went down? The part that's actually really fascinating, too, is the interplay with the war in Afghanistan. The reason why James Mattis was a part of all this is because she met with him back when he was still in the military because the idea of part of her pitch, and this ended up being part of what's fraudulent about Theranos, was we are going to use this blood testing device on the battlefield. I remember in the documentary about the actual what went down,

there was literally, she had a flag that had supposedly flown in Afghanistan. It was an American battle flag in her actual office. So there was this perfect tie between the foreign policy establishment, military establishment, all these different people. And what just really, I hate to say grinds my gears but actually grinds my gears is this is really the closing era I think of a time when the elite of this country had real credibility to spend where you could say, listen, I was secretary of state. So you want me on my politically neutral board or Or I was a general of the apolitical military, and I can engage on the board. It really was the closing period for this very specific moment. And I think, luckily enough, we won't be doing these types of things moving forward.

I don't think people would say, oh, wow, Mike Pompeo is on my board. That's a really great thing. Or, hey, this politician is on my board. Anthony Blinken, he may do some consulting work, which I largely have no problem with, but this is not going to be the scenario where there's any credibility here. And I think the last part that I'm always really just thinking about here is that you had this scenario where this set of people was so obsessed with gaining into something that seemed to be moving forward, technology, but it was really susceptible to a specific pitch from a very specific founder. This was, well, she dresses like Steve Jobs. She looks a little different. She plays masculine and plays the boys. This is very much an artifact of that real quick lean in Sheryl Sandberg 2013 era. And something that you've seen discussed

in our reporting on WeWork and all these other companies in Silicon Valley is that this 2010s period is really about the cult of the founder. And that critique goes too far sometimes. I think Jeff Bezos, regardless of how you think about him as a political actor, was really, really essential

when it came to the success of Amazon. You know, Elon Musk, everything he's done has been very key to this. Mark Zuckerberg said the thing on Facebook. But with the success of those companies, it really left a moment of vulnerability where you could have people like Adam Neumann, like Elizabeth Holmes say to themselves, hey, I'm going to design myself in a certain way. I will be able to con billions of dollars of capital and take honestly well-meaning but 90-year-old plus people like former Secretary of State George Shultz on for a ride there.

And it's just really important we put a close to this because I'm not going to name names here, but I was at a dinner recently where I actually very depressingly learned that former politicals in the Trump administration are going around trying to find jobs at defense tech companies. Because as we are talking about moving past this Afghanistan era, we're obviously moving to a point where there's great power competition. And they're just saying, hey, let's get in on the next thing. And I hope that we can just really just draw a line there and say that if we could agree with this class of people who doesn't know what it's doing about Afghanistan, they don't know what they're doing when it comes to technology investment. It's a, you know, it's an interesting point that you make there because it's true. You know, George Saltz and Kissinger and Mattis and the rest of these people, former head of the, former director of the CDC, let that sink in. Former director of the CDC was on the

board of a fake blood company. Same thing, former Secretary of Defense William Perry, former retired U.S. Navy Gary Roughead, two former U.S. senators, the former CEO of Wells Fargo. This is the who's who. Financial crisis of Afghanistan, of the entire post-war international order. It's like, what does that tell you about what exactly these people are and the judgment that they have about people? Not a good look, right? It really isn't. If all it takes is a charismatic woman with a fake deep voice and a sweatshirt on, or sorry, a sweater on to fool you into one of the most improbable devices ever conceived, which was clearly fake and which they clearly did not do their diligence on.

I mean, the evidence for Theranos not working was there in like the first six months. Her advisor told her, this is the photo of her, she talked to her advisor at Stanford. She said, this doesn't work. Yeah, when she was like 19, right? Yeah. It was like, this isn't, this isn't because I think it's oftentimes easy to not even make excuses because sometimes startups and Silicon Valley is really effing hard. But like, this was actually a case. And once again, this is why traditional venture capital was passed. This is why traditional people in medicine passed. But once again, Henry Kissinger is thinking, Hey, you know, I'd love to get a nice little feather in my cap and be a tech investor.

That's cool. No, but that's the problem. And the fact that they fell for this so clearly just says so much to me about these people. And it really is one of these things where you have to look at the mindset that they brought to whenever they were developing this post-war system and Afghanistan as exactly the same thing. It's about wishful thinking. It's about having way too much hubris about what you actually know. It's about not doing your real due diligence

whenever it comes. And it leads to a total and complete disaster. And George Shultz is the only one who took real reputational damage after Theranos. And that's because he literally threw his own grandson under the bus, which is freaking crazy. If you guys haven't gone and you hadn't read Bad Blood by John Kerry, you are listening to, what is it, The Dropout, I think? Yes.

Which is an ABC great podcast, and I highly recommend them. you look at this and you see how clearly that the whole thing was completely fake from the beginning, it just makes it even more astounding the level of con artistry that was able to spiral up to the top. Not only did she fake her way into becoming a billionaire, she faked these people using their credibility to make it so that it was undeniable that she could make fake deals with Walgreens. And every time I cover this, I want to make sure that we actually highlight who some of the real victims are. The victims are the people who used Theranos blood kits and got bad medical diagnoses and then had all sorts of, took the wrong drugs they were supposed to. It's not just a financial problem. Cancer diagnosis, like terrible diagnoses.

Literal, like cancer or diabetes, whatever. Those are the people I think about the most and who Elizabeth Holmes really hurt, allegedly, for her lawyers. Anyway, we have a great guest standing by. Vivek Ramaswamy is the author of Woke Inc. Let's get to it. Joining us now is Vivek Ramaswamy with his new book, Woke Inc. So let's put that beautiful graphic that we had made for the book there up on the screen. And this book, Woke Inc., debuted at number two on the New York Times bestseller list. Marshall and I actually

interviewed Vivek over at our podcast, The Realignment, and we wanted to make sure that we brought a little bit of this to the overall audience here. So Vivek, welcome to the show. It's really good to see you. Good to see you again. Yeah. So let's get into exactly what this book is all about. Why did you decide to write it? What exactly happened in the overall corporate sphere that made you want to do it? And maybe give the audience a little bit of background on who you are. Yeah, I'll give you two minutes of background. My parents, probably like yours, came over from India over 40 years ago. They didn't come with much money to Southwest Ohio where I was born, but they did come with an education.

That's what I got. And though I wasn't born into elite America, I have lived it for the last 15 years. I went to Harvard, graduated at the top of my class in molecular biology in 2007, went to Yale Law School along the way. I was at a hedge fund for seven years in New York as a biotech investor. at the top of my class in molecular biology in 2007, went to Yale Law School along the way. I was at a hedge fund for seven years in New York as a biotech investor. I actually had, right before I started my company, I actually had a failed career as a stand-up comedian, where I learned the lesson of any time something really annoys you, you write it down in a notebook. Turned out it didn't serve me well in stand-up comedy in New York. It did serve me well on the job as an investor, where I wrote down all the things that annoyed me about pharma and instead started

a pharmaceutical company based on what I wrote down in that notebook. So I did that for about seven years, got a number of medicines developed, a couple of which I'm proud to say are with patients today as FDA-approved products. The one I'm most probably proud of is a drug for prostate cancer. But I kept jotting down things that annoyed me. And one of the things that started to really annoy me was the inauthentic inauthentic proclamations made by my peers in business in the investment world, fellow CEOs that really reached a fever pitch in 2019 and then hit an even higher fever pitch in 2020. And so I authored an op ed in The Wall Street Journal arguing that I thought that actually stakeholder capitalism represented a threat to the integrity of democracy itself. It was supposed to be a one and done. Instead, an agent approached me, told me to blow it out into a book. That's

what I did. Eventually, that became Woke Inc. a year and a half later. But along the way, I started writing and speaking out about subjects that were increasingly controversial that I actually had to step down as CEO of my company in order to speak with total candor as a citizen. And what I do in the book is I reveal what I see as the defining scam of our century, where corporate elites in this country pretend like they care about something other than profit and power precisely to gain more of each of them. And I think that new trend is dividing our country to a breaking point and represents an existential threat to American democracy because it demands that a small group of investors

and CEOs determine what's important to us on questions from racial justice to environmental change rather than the democracy at large, which is, I think, the premise on which our country was born. So that's what the book's about. And I'm happy to talk more about it. Sure. Yeah, Vivek, congratulations on number two. Now, I'm going to do my best crystal impression here and just ask the obvious question that everyone on the left of this audience is asking, which is, what is here for us, right? Like, the word woke is in the title.

Once again, number two, so this really resonated with people, but I'm guessing that's more of a right-leaning audience. Why should people who are to the center and the left end of the political spectrum think that there is something useful for them here? Yeah, sure. So first thing I should say is I'm not sure, actually, a lot of that was entirely driven by conservatives. I don't know for sure. I've been grateful, actually, for a lot of warm reception I've received from some thoughtful

minds on the left as well. This was intended as a book both for the left and for the right, and here's why. I think both sides need to be skeptical of corporate overreach. And the good thing about the left is that that's actually been part of the left since the last 20 years, skepticism of corporate power. If you're on the left, you're skeptical of Citizens United because it permits corporations to influence elections through electoral contributions. Well, I think that stakeholder capitalism is actually Citizens United on steroids. It just doesn't permit companies

to write a few checks to influence an election. It demands that corporations use every resource in their arsenal to be able to play a disproportionate role in our public debate about the most important questions that ought to be settled through our democracy. And to me, whether you're on the left or the right, that is not America. That is a corporatocracy, not a democracy. And while corporations may be pushing progressive values today, once they become vectors to push values, they become vectors to push anyone's values. And I think today we're actually even

seeing that behind closed doors in how they are pushing, for example, the values of the Communist Party of China right here in the United States, again, in a way that should threaten both liberals and conservatives. And so what I describe in the book is this arranged marriage today between big business and a certain wing of the progressive left, what we could call the progressive identity politics focused left. Yet what we see is that both liberals and conservatives are duped into submission because of their own philosophies. Conservatives are actually duped into submission because their inner conscience tells them that the free market can do no wrong without recognizing that the free market that

they idealize doesn't actually exist today. I tell a lot of stories in the book about how companies are indirectly acting as agents of the state in ways that you don't see. But liberals are duped into submission because many of them love the causes that these companies happen to be pushing today, but they could be pushing different causes tomorrow. And the final story I'll say that I think is an important distinction for the left in this book is a distinction between what I think of as the Bernie left and the squad left, where I think what corporate America actually managed to do was to use the 2008 financial crisis in the aftermath as an opportunity to recover their impression in the minds of the public by marrying the new progressive identity politics focus left, the part of the left that

says racial injustice is the problem, and put the part of Occupy Wall Street that said economic injustice was the real problem. What they did is they were able to put that up for adoption. That wing of the left is now stale. It's now neutered as big business has taken up the cause of racial injustice and fixing misogyny and bigotry. They've ultimately abandoned the project of actually focusing on economic empowerment and fixing economic injustice, which is something that I think the Bernie left and even a lot of the classical left overall ought to worry about. So that's a big part of what's in the book. Vivek, one of the things I respect the most about your work is that you don't, you're not just, you know, barking about woke politics or whatever. You're actually talking about the structural problems. You use the word

stakeholder capitalism. Can you explain to people what that is? And then more importantly, what you get to in the book, how can you fix it? Like what are the corporate fixes that we can have? Yeah, sure. So stakeholder capitalism refers to the idea that corporations are bound to serve not just their shareholders, but also their stakeholders, which include basically all stakeholders in society, workers, disempowered minority groups, even the climate is now considered a stakeholder by many corporations. And agree or not, that's what the philosophy says. There's actually something really coherent about it, too. And I expose what I view as the strongest case for stakeholder capitalism in the book, which is that corporations couldn't have existed even in society without

society giving corporations great gifts like limited liability. The idea that if you're a shareholder of a corporation, you are not liable for what that corporation does. If you think about that, that's an extraordinary gift that ordinary people don't enjoy in their everyday lives. Corporate shareholders do. And so what stakeholder capitalists argue is that in return for that grand bargain, you effectively expect that society gave corporations and their shareholders all these great gifts. All we're asking is that you take some societal interests into account in return. It sounds pretty reasonable. What I lay out in the book is actually a more precise view of the history of corporate law in this country that I think was long misunderstood,

even misunderstood, if I may say, by Milton Friedman himself, the first dogged opponent of stakeholder capitalism 50 years ago. And what Milton Friedman missed is that actually he never responded to that criticism. What I say is there actually is an obligation that corporations and their shareholders have to society, but it's a different one. It is to stay in their lane and not to use their undue power that they gain from gifts like limited liability to exercise power outside the market in other spheres of our lives, including in our democratic politics. And that's why corporate law mandates that directors of boards stay in their lanes and only maximize profits for shareholders, not just to help those shareholders, but to protect the rest of society from corporate

overreach. And so that's what the heart of the debate about stakeholder capitalism is all about. It's also something I've tried to do in the book is to really offer the best argument, both for stakeholder capitalism, as well as for the woke movement. I know that word has been weaponized recently and carries some connotations that have made it popular on the right and suddenly unpopular on the left. I think that woke culture posits a worldview that we ought to talk about in the open, giving its fairest shake, saying that actually the social universe is governed by certain invisible power structures that disempower certain people and empower others and result in injustices that we need to talk about by waking up to what those previously invisible power structures were. I think that's a worldview that a lot of people

share. I think it's a worldview that has its origins in classical Marxism. And again, I don't use that as a pejorative. I actually think Marxism is an intellectually rich mode of inquiry that we ought to engage with in the present day. Now, I ultimately reject that narrative in part because I think it divides us. And I think what's happened right now in corporate America is a cynical marriage between that new woke philosophy and corporate America, where actually the stewards of that philosophy are themselves actually often leaving the very values they're advancing, hanging out to dry. I tell an example of how State Street built a statue called Fearless Girl

to represent feminism standing up against the Wall Street bull. Turns out they were actually just doing it at a time that their female employees were complaining that they weren't being paid as much as their male colleagues. And as I tell in the book, of course, what does a firm do when a female employee says she's not being paid enough as much as her male colleagues? They do the thing you'd expect. They built her a statue. And there's some funny further layers to the story I tell where they even sue the statue's creator for creating three unauthorized reproductions of that statue later on. So this is the kind of stories that I tell in the book that reveal how both sides are really harmed by this cynical arrangement. My last question within the crystal left channeling is basically, it's interesting how you're combining climate change stuff

with traditional woke critiques as something that's the matter of the system. Because if I'm thinking about someone who thinks that, once again, we live in an era of a climate emergency and there's always big problems, government is utterly deadlocked right now. Nothing is happening. We're not going to see any big climate deal between the US and China. So one of the only actual means that a lot of people on the left see of exercising power or forward movement is through corporate behemoths, which aren't encumbered by gridlock in Washington, D.C. So what do you say to that argument?

Yeah, well, I say a couple of things. First, on the merits, which I don't want to touch on a ton here because there are even better people than I who can comment on the merits of where we stand in our progress towards achieving environmental change, environmental benefits that have nothing to do with climate change, as well as environmental benefits that could drive benefits in staving off climate change. I think another good book that came out pretty recently was Steve Koonin's book, Unsettled, which I think everyone ought to read as a side note. He was someone in the Obama administration, scientist, well-trained in the field, worth a read. Now, I think that the problem with corporate America getting in on the act is they have no incentives to actually solve the

underlying problem. They have every incentive to signal their virtue along the way. If you look at the top polluting cities in the world in terms of not only pollution in general, but also contributions to the carbon footprint in a way that contributes allegedly to climate change, actually, almost all of them are not in the United States. And so I think that many corporations do nothing to be able to change their behavior abroad while pretending to signal their virtue here at home. And one of the principles I advance in the book, both with respect to climate change, the climate change-oriented behavior of corporations, as well as their behaviors on causes that relate to racial justice or conceptions of diversity, is that once as a

corporation you have earned a reputation for goodness. At some point, your interest becomes in preserving the appearance of pursuing virtue rather than actually being a steward of virtue itself. And I think it is a lot easier to appear to be virtuous than it is to be virtuous. And I think that inherently the nature of what a corporation is makes it a particularly bad steward. We cannot trust a corporation to do anything other than cultivate the appearance of goodness when they're ultimately rewarded for that appearance. And I think that increasingly what we're seeing is a lot of daylight between what it means

to appear to be good and what it actually means to be good. We can even debate what our conceptions of the good are. I think that's what the right and the left often differ on. But even if you had a steady conception of what the good is, the main case I'm making in the book is that inherently the nature of what a corporation is means we can't trust a corporation to be a steward of that. If we do, all we're going to solve for is actually optimizing for the corporation appearing to be a steward of the good. That's exactly what we've done in recent years. Excellent point. Vivek, we really appreciate you joining us here on Breaking Points. We'll have a link down there in the description for

everybody to buy the book. Thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming. Thanks, everybody, for watching. Marshall, thank you for stepping in. He's going to be back on Tuesday. Remember, we're taking no show on Labor Day. We have really enjoyed being here with you guys today. If you can support us, the Supercast link is right there down in the description. We really appreciate it. It makes and enables us to bring you all of the stories for the team that we have here and more. And it really is a privilege every single day to be able to do this show. It's been three months to the day since we officially went independent, announced it.

I honestly can't even believe it. It's just been completely blown me away. I know Crystal feels exactly the same. So we appreciate your support so much, and we will see you. Oh, go ahead. Yeah, and just one quick thing. I, speaking for myself, really enjoy being here. But, of course, if you enjoyed what Sokka and I are up to,

go check out the Realignment podcast. We're on YouTube. We're about to cross 50,000. Let's get us there, hopefully by the end of the weekend. But also we're on Spotify, Apple Podcasts. We have lots of great conversations like this. Correct. We'd love for you all to check out what we're doing there. 100%. Okay, guys, we will see you all on Tuesday. Thanks for listening to the show, guys. We really appreciate it.

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