Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 9/4/26: Diesel Prices Skyrocket, Jeff Sachs Warns Of Tech Collapse, OpenAI Hack Coverup, JD Responds To Tucker Praise Of Abdul, Fox Fires Maria Bartiromo

Episode Date: September 4, 2026

Ryan and Emily discuss diesel prices hit all time high, Jeff Sachs gives dire warning on tech bubble and US collapse, OpenAI hack covered up, JD sounds off on Tucker praising Abdul, Fox fires Maria Bartiromo.   Garrison Lovely: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1682196305   To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.com    Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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you at breaking points.com. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Rising Fridays with Ryan and Emily. That's right. I just realized that's what this is. Yeah, good morning, Emily. And so, yeah, on Wednesday, we promised that if people, that if more than 100 people became premium subscribers, we would cut down the nonsense blathering that we do to start these shows. So I promise, I'm going to do that because well over 100 people did that. So thank you. What you guys get is a month free of the show, you know, breakingpoints.com.

Get that month free. After a month, you forget that you did it. You're enjoying it so much. You just start getting charged. You barely even notice it. The pitch I would make today is related to something we're going to be covering later in the show, which is the launch of Astra,

which is the kind of highest-grade swarm of criminal agents that are being unleashed on the internet yet. They've been a bunch of criminal agents that have been released already so far. We're going to talk about that. Garrison Lovely will join us to talk about this new hack of a German website. But now we have kind of super criminals

that are being unleashed on the internet, which is where all of your money is. So pretty soon they're going to take all of your money. So while you still have it, you should be spending it to support the kind of journalism that you want to see in the world. So braidingpoints.com. I mean, it's-30 days free.

You're going to love it so much. You're going to stick around. Or like I do with everything. I put it on the calendar. Cancel breaking points. Right there on the calendar. I miss it. Just blow right past it.

So. As we always say here at breaking points. Ask your agent to do it. And instead, the agent will hack your bank account and take all your money. Communists are the best capitalists. There you go. Nobody makes a pitch quite like Ryan Graham. And so we'll be talking about that.

We'll be talking about, Saugger got Tucker Carlson to endorse Abdul al-Sayyad basically. J.D. Vance was asked about that. It was an anti-endorsement of Mike Rogers mostly. Yeah, combined with some, you know, Abdul al-Aid's very trumpy. And it was, I mean, he was pretty straightforward. Maria Barataromo, Bartaromo, fired unceremoniously from Fox News. Emily, hopefully we'll have some insight into what actually happened there. We're going to talk a little bit about what else we got. That's a few things that's for the paid subscribers.

We shouldn't even let the free people know. No, no, no. Well, so we're going to be like right now, we're going to start by talking about some news on the economic front. And then we'll bring in a clip that of a conversation, actually, that you had yesterday with Jeffrey. sacks over a drop site. So just to go over some economic and war updates, that's where we're going to start. And as Ryan previewed, the rest of the show is just as great. So breakingpoints.com to get a

subscription as Ryan plugged. But let's get into it, Ryan. Diesel prices hit an all-time high today, soaring to $5.85 a gallon. We have this tar sheet from the Associated Press up on the screen. They put together a chart where you can see it soaring past the previous all-time high. after the invasion of Ukraine, also in the pandemic era, roughly, so February of 2022, previously, the regular fuel price record was above, it was like 501 a gallon. It was also in 2022. But here we have $5.85 a gallon. We have comments from the president and the vice president related to this coming up in just one moment. But Ryan, as we're recording this, the jobs report came in as well. What are those numbers looking like? Very, very good. Now, very interesting in that

apparently like 98% of the jobs added in August went to women. We're going to kind of dig into why that might be. But three times, so they were expecting, here's Heather, this is Heather Long. If you can, Mac, you want to put the marketplace reporter up on the screen. Expectation was about 55,000 jobs to be added. In August, the economy added 162,000, so blowing past those expectations. there were also revisions from the previous two months of the summer pushing up by 21,000 in July, up 31,000 in June. Unemployment rate remained the same.

Most not, now, as we talked about last month, almost all of the job gains during the Trump administration have been in health care, which is a mixed bag. Like, it's good that the healthcare industry is hiring more people, but it also means that there is more profit flowing to. to the health care industry, which is not necessarily a good thing. And it also means that people are seeking a lot more health care treatment, which is good if there's, you know, just getting treated for things, but if we're becoming a sicker population, that is not necessarily a good thing. But that's not what happened this time. Construction jobs up, manufacturing jobs up, education, hospitality, all up. Go ahead, Emily. Well, yeah, I was just to say this is compared to Heather Long's takeaway from the July jobs report. She said, this is a bleak report. The U.S. labor market is stalling again,

and that is going to make the feds job harder and life for job seekers rough. They said the big surprise or she said the big surprise was job losses in July. I remember covering this with you and Crystal at the time, Ryan. But Heather at the time said this was only the beginning of the bad news. The unemployment fell for the wrong reasons. We saw people continuing to leave the labor force in that jobs report, which was enormously bleak. But what changed, Ryan? What's your read on the difference between July and August here?

I have no idea. No clue. I have no idea what's going on here. What this also suggests, though, paradoxically, we said last time a bad job, a bad job's report is good for Trump in the sense that it encourages the Federal Reserve to cut rates, which is what he wants. He wants low interest rates as a real estate development guy. That's his end all and be all. He believes that the more credit you get flowing into the economy, the better off everybody's going to be. So ironically, a good jobs report like this in the hands of a hawkish Fed chair like Kevin Warsh that we have is actually going to inspire him further to increase interest rates at the next Federal Reserve meeting.

So I think you're going to see, you might even see a little bit of a market sell-off as a result of this news because they're going to think, oh, that means the Fed now is going to hike interest rates further, which is going to put, you know, housing. further out of reach for people and will lead to a contraction. Yeah, the futures are down. More broadly. Dow futures are down. S&P futures are down. I know. What an incredible system that we have. That good news is bad news and bad news is good news. Right. So let's go also now back to because actually, Ryan, this is just what we were talking about with fuel prices rippling throughout the economy. It's a stark juxtaposition. The news is a stark juxtaposition with that. because we are going to expect to see continued inflation. There's really no, I don't think there's any serious person that thinks inflation is going to come down and not go up so long as this war continues.

Wouldn't that be fair to say? Yeah, as you started the segment by saying, diesel, which feeds into everything when it comes to industry, manufacturing, transportation, and agriculture is at record. record highs up $2, basically, year over year. What you were paying three something for, a year ago, you're now paying five something for a gallon. And it is a massive input into your business costs. We're not talking about Honda Civics here, getting enormous gas mileage. We're talking about tractors, you know, tractor trailers, and in general, you know, heavy industry, which needs a lot of diesel. And we're just, we're just getting started here with the shortage because the gas is, you know, natural gas is at its lowest point in Europe heading into any winter that we have basically on record since we started, since Europe basically industrialized, more or less, and started, you know, using natural gas. contemporary comparison here.

And the war continues pace. We could talk about some of that. The Iranians did something quite unusual yesterday, which was a preemptive, what they said was a preemptive strike on American base in Kuwait. Usually, in the past, they've been waiting for the Americans to strike somewhere. Now they seem interested in kind of throwing that balance off.

And we don't know what the result specifically was of this attack in Kuwait. But we do know that Brent crude is now trading at this point 90. It spiked even higher yesterday. But when you look at it right now, it's over $90 a barrel, which is significantly higher than it was before Trump kicked off this latest round of kinetic strikes. And interestingly, Trump did not respond to the Iranian attack. So think about that. That hasn't happened since World War II, basically. To what extent can he?

I mean, he still has some missiles left. He's got stuff. But we're in a situation where an American adversary, not in response to any particular incident, attacked an American base in the Middle East, and the U.S. did not respond. Well, I suppose, Ryan, that means we could be in for some stiff response over the weekend.

Certainly. Yeah, maybe he's waiting for the market to close. We'll see, but that hasn't been in the past what he's done. In the past, if Iran attacks, we retaliate very quickly. Well, maybe this has something to do with it. Let's look at Vice President J.D. Vance Mack. You can pull this up on the screen who yesterday actually stepped in and did the White House press briefing and addressed some questions on this level.

We have audio from Trump as well. Let's start here with the vice president. over the Strait of Hormuz, the Iranians would like zero million barrels to come out of the Strait of Hormuz. Last night, 15 million barrels came out of the Strait of Hormuz. That's because of the United States of America. Okay. So, Ryan, this is the president, the president said, we don't actually have audio. It's a truth social where he said, quote, Hormuz oil volumes are back.

He circulated a graphic according to drop site showing flows at 8 million barrels a day, close to pre-war levels, the 18 million barrel figure matches acclaimed by U.S. officials reported by CNN about vessels escorted through Hormuz on a single day on Monday. So, I mean, so much to unpack for that, that from J.D. Vance. First of all, it's actually not true. Like, apparently South Korea is sending some warships to the Strait of Hormuz. That's how, that's how desperate they are. South Korea actually has this bizarre agreement with the American military that if they enter into conflict, they become. subservient and take orders from the American military. So it's not totally true that we're the only ones that are doing it. J.D. Vance's question, though, why is it our responsibility?

Well, come on, man. Like, you broke or you bought it. Like, it was free for all ships to go in and out on February 27th, while Iran was offering historic levels of concessions in its nuclear negotiations with the United States when we launched a surprise attack the next day and they responded predictably

by closing the strait. So it's extraordinarily rich for then the Americans to say, why is it our job to open this straight back up? The one thing that he said and if somebody clipped it without the other contexts around it

would actually still be accurate. This is his full quote that I jotted down. Gas prices are way worse everywhere in the world because of what the president has done. Like, that was a, that was a quote. Now, what he was, what he was saying is that it's cheaper here in the United States for gas. And he means that it's cheaper in the U.S. for gas everywhere in the

world because of the president has, he was trying to tie it to Venezuela, which makes no sense, because they're not producing extra oil at this point yet and won't for a very long time. But his actual quote is, is accurate. Gas prices are way worse. everywhere in the world because of what the president has done. Like, he may not have meant it that way, but those are the exact words that he said. And it is very true. And then back up to the very beginning of his answer, they asked, why is it? You know, that gas prices are so high.

And he said it's because Iran is shooting at ships. Okay, well, why is Iran shooting at ships? He says that there was an agreement that they wouldn't do so during the MOU. In fact, the agreement was that Iran would oversee and regulate shipping for free through the Strait of Hormuz. The United States insisted on not allowing ships to register their transit with the Iranians because the United States did not want to establish a precedent that Iran had some sort of authority over the Strait of Hormuz, even though they were doing it for free.

So they tried to sneak a bunch of ships through. Iran fired at those ships. So that's the full answer to the question of what happened. Now that the reporting out of the American press, whether it's true or not, remains to be seen, is that what Trump wants now is not to reenter an MOU type of arrangement where there's a kind of phased ceasefire that then leads to negotiations that then leads to some type of permanent deal. He wants a total complete deal that involves both the Strait of Hormuz and nuclear. Now, that is, I think, certainly within reach, but he would have to basically cede control

the Strait of Ramos to Oman and Iran, and he doesn't want to do that. So if it's true that there was one day that they got 18 million barrels through, people think that that's extremely unlikely, but let's say it's even true, doing that at the cost of keeping this massive naval and Air Force presence in the region all the time, 24-7 is simply not sustainable.

Right now, 5,000 of the sailors who used to be doing that are out, you know, spreading venereal disease throughout Thailand. And so we'll see how long the George, George Washington sailors can last. They might also be contracting venereal diseases in Thailand.

I'm sure. It's import export going on there, yes. Right. Well, Ryan, it's funny you say that because what I'm told by the president is that actually we have plenty of ammunition. So Trump posted and Ben Shapiro reposted it. The people in media outlets that keep harping on the fact that we have no ammunition and they are 100% wrong are actually treasonous.

They do it because they would rather see the U.S. lose a war that we're easily winning than see me win a little bit of wishcasting there because that is simply not true. Yes, American ammunition supplies are not classified. Like, you can compile public databases and put together what the capacity is and you can compare it to what's been fired off. And you can come up with an analysis of how much is left. That's what these treasonous analysts have done. And the answer has been, you guys are running extremely low. Yeah, and Mack, I'm going to put this other thing up on the screen just so people realize this is from the foundation for defensive democracies. the U.S. military must race to rebuild, rebuild.

Its supply of emissions, of munitions. So just to be clear, even from the people who are most supportive of this war, they are conceding implicitly that there is something to rebuild. And just real quick. It tells you, you know. Just real quickly because I know we're going to move to Garrison pretty quickly. Yesterday, the Israelis announced that they had finished kind of destruction of this tunnel complex in southern Lebanon, which Iran had said was one of its red lines, that they would go back to war

if Israel insisted on using the ceasefire MOU period on taking more ground in Lebanon and deepening their endless occupation there. And so when you asked, when J.D. Vance has asked, why is it that Iran is shooting its ships? Why is this war still going on? A key reason is that during the ceasefire, while the MOU was in effect, Israel refused to abide by the terms of the MOU, which very explicitly said U.S. Allies would end the war on all fronts. They're very explicit about Lebanon itself. I think they put it right in number, like the number one agreed point was Israel will stop its war in Lebanon. So today, while you're out there paying $5.85 a gallon for diesel, Israel's celebrating that it finished its destruction of, of this network. Now, I've seen counterarguments that the wording is very hedged and there's very little evidence and that this may be bluster for electoral purposes because the election is coming October 27th and that, in fact, they may be claiming that they've destroyed it but may not actually have done so. And Ryan, before we bring in the guest, I wanted to visit your conversation

on DropSight yesterday with Jeffrey Sachs. And I know we have a clip here that we can play to kind of set this up, transitioning from Iran, the economy, to what happened with Astra. So let's go ahead, Mac, if you could pull up this clip. That would be great and take a listen to Jeffrey Sachs. But I do believe that we are in a geopolitical problem, as I described, which is the gap between our perception of unipolarity and the reality of the world. and that it actually fuels the financial bubble that we're in as well. So it's not just that U.S. interest rates are rising, but as you know, our stock market valuations are at astounding high levels. And this can be measured in many, many ways.

Two of the most standard ways of measuring this anomaly are the value of U.S. equity, relative to U.S. GDP, and that's now 2.4 times U.S. GDP. This is a historic high. So that's called the Buffett ratio. And the other is the price earnings ratio, especially the so-called Schiller cyclically adjusted price earnings ratio. This is also at an all-time high. So you say, well, is that a bubble or not? One side says, no, it's not a bubble. We have the magnificent seven AI companies. They have the greatest technology in the world. They're going to capitalize this a trillion times. And that's why we have this boom because it foresages the golden age ahead. The other side says, come on, we've been through the dot-coms. We've been through

so many other tulip manias like this in the past. This is an exaggeration. And my view is that is the correct view and that it is related to the idea of the U.S. unipolarity. It's related to the idea that the U.S. is the unique thing. But what I see with my own eyes already, as I said, going back 30 years, but I see it every time I visit China, which is many times a year now, China is basically matching U.S. technology, but in the AI sphere, as we know, it's giving it away, open weight models. And those are the models that are being taken up all over the world because they're 10 times cheaper than the U.S. proprietary model. Emily, what do you think? And we'll get into a lot of these themes with Garrison Loebbly in a little bit.

But what's your assessment of who's right here? about the question of the bubble. Well, I mean, I think there's almost no question that we're in a bubble. He mentioned the Mag 7 companies. There's so much circular funding between those companies, and there's some 20% of the S&P at this point, which is a lot of analysts have looked at that and been deeply troubled by it, but you don't even have to be an economist to look at that and be deeply troubled by it.

His point about unipolarity is really interesting, that some of that is priced into the bubble itself, that some of the bubble is dependent on U.S. primacy on the world stage, then that is somewhat of an illusion, I think is what he's saying. That's what I took away from that. He's saying that the unipolarity price in the stock market is an illusion itself. It's crumbling. And so that can partially also be the kind of rugpole when a bubble pops.

Yeah, he talked more about that at the very end of the interview. That was on drop site, if that wasn't clear. And I thought that was very interesting that that that that we have a a geopolitical bubble, which is, you know, so much of power is perception. And the perception that the U.S. has this hegemonic power probably peaked in December, January with the kidnapping of Maduro and his wife. Did you talk about bonds? Did he talk about the? Yeah, yes. And yes, and he talked a lot about that as that as well, that that being an indication of a lack of faith and in these, the power of these Western governments to make good in the way that they have in the past.

But that, you know, December, January, when these Delta Force skies go in and, you know, who knows what kind of arrangement was made ahead of time, but it, like I said, so much is about perception. The perception of American dominance at that moment was extraordinarily high. That has been completely pierced. And the gas is coming out of that bubble. And so it is interesting to think about what its effect is on geopolitics. And now, as we transition, Garrison, one other interesting point that people might want to think about. So I was talking to economist Jamie Galbraith, who you know as well, recently. And he's working on a new book.

about the 1929 crash and the resulting depression, which very interestingly, there is no consensus among economists for why we got this massive stock market crash and why it led to this extended global depression. There are a lot of different theories that have been kicked around. But in most scenarios,

we have come to some kind of consensus, whether or not the consensus is right or not, there's a consensus. This, there isn't even a consensus in the field. He's putting forward a theory that has been kicked around a little bit, but he's going to, he's going to lean into this argument that is very interesting and has some parallels, might have some parallels to date. You decide whether or not you agree with that. His idea is that from the mid-19th century through the late 1920s,

the industrial revolution was driven by effectively by coal. Coal was essential to powering the locomotives, the transportation, and also industry. Without coal, you don't have the entire, basically the entire economy. In the late 1920s, you start for the first time to get massive discoveries of oil combined with, announcements and he and he's identifying a significant number of announcements that were happening the week of the crash that oil prices were collapsing around the country and also around the world and traders were identifying that the entire basis of the economy which was coal is going to be mooted by the advent of the oil industry because

because oil was now so much cheaper and so much more efficient and so much, and they were correct, obviously, that it was going to replace coal. And that, what did that mean? That meant any part of the economy that was based on coal was now worth 10%, not 10% less, but like 10%, 90% less of what it was the day before. And so everybody just starts selling anything that is going to be disrupted, so to speak, by the oil industry. And then it takes that and then the, but the economy is not positioned to pivot to oil because it's designed for coal. And so it takes 15, 20 years for that new economy to be developed around oil. So then the question that you're asking yourself now, if you think about that, let's assume that just for the sake of the kind of thought-provoking conversation that he's right, what is AI? What is AI there? Is AI oil? Or is, let's say, is AI electrification? Like electrification, you kind of layered on top of an already existing economy and made everything more efficient. Is that what AI does? or is AI just a fundamentally new thing, which makes most of the economy that we have now unprofitable,

in which case, if people recognize that, you're looking at a complete collapse in a depression until you can then rebuild, hopefully not on the ashes of another world war. Yeah, that's a very different parallel. It's not a parallel. It's Apple and Ornter's with other parallels, to your point, It's not the Depression and it's not the dot-com bubble.

The AI product itself, rendering others, kind of moot. I can't think of anything like that. Finally, man, I guess I would just ask you about the Fed. What we know about the Fed and the Depression, what we know about the Fed right now. Well, I mean, the Fed now is much more sophisticated, much, much different. The Fed had only been created in 1913. And what wasn't designed yet, It didn't yet have.

It's the same mandate that it has now. Didn't have the capacity. We were still on the gold standard. So, you know, a completely different monetary system in place. So that could be one difference. But yes, we'll, I don't know. We'll see. We're going to get rate hikes.

We're going to get rate hikes. Yes, I think we are. Yeah. Behind every night spent making the kids lunches, there's a lot of suspense. Will they finally eat the veggies? Will the pesto survive the first bite? Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all? And will you finish episode 8 before you're done slicing the cucumbers?

Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Craved Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.com.com for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. On the new podcast Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I chose option B. I'm Julie Pinero and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word

solita, trading the pity for possibility. Every time I tried to be alone, I kept meeting people and they were like, you smiled at us. Not a lot of people smile around here. It's when you're alone that you're most receptive to the world as it is and not the lies you're sold about it. It can be a time where you push your limits, change your mind, or wake up to a new version of yourself. So whether you're a solo travel veteran or you're too nervous to book your first trip, I hope you listen to Solita on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months. I survived, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the Survivor Files.

I just remember this low, taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up, don't say anything. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was something. someone at the end of my bed and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled and nearly silenced. But these aren't stories about what's taken from them. There's stories about what it takes to make it out alive.

Listen to the Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Open AI revealed its latest model Astra yesterday. The same time, interestingly, we got a report, I think, scooped by Reuters, Mac, you can put this element up on the screen, that there is now been a at least a second incident of kind of a rogue swarm of AI agents breaking out of the confines of their sandbox and in this case finding a German website that they use as a message board to coordinate activity. in this case, and because there is effectively no laws or regulation around this, Open AI seems to have muzzled this news, and it leaks out just at the same time that they're launching this new Astra, which everyone who's used it so far is describing as a significant breakthrough in technology. Garrison Lovelie, the author of the new book, which is out in a couple of weeks, obsolete, is joining us now to do. discuss at Garrison, thanks so much for being here. Yeah, thanks for having me. Whenever I'm here, something crazy is going on. Yes, indeed. It's never a good sign. If you see Garrison,

you should be concerned. Yes, we have a lot of guests like that, actually. Yeah. Robert Pape? Oh, no. Horsman of the apocalypse. A book available for pre-order yet? Yes. Oh, for sure. Cool. Because we have the galleys. It's a great book. It's really worth reading. So pre-ordered if you if you guys can. Especially if you're a skeptic and you think that we don't know

what we're talking about here, it makes a case that mirrors kind of my view of this, which is that AI is genuinely and awesome and all-inspiring and terrifying technology. And there is a tendency

among people on the, some people in the kind of progressive space to write it off as just nothing but hype and that making the argument that Sam Altman is so overextended and over-leveraged that the only way he can keep the billions of dollars flowing in to this system is to scare you to death about it

and that the scaring you to death is then hyping it up. I just find that a completely unconvincing argument for a lot of different reasons and Garrison lays them out well in his book. It doesn't mean that there is not a bubble. You can have both things. You can have a bubble. You can have hype and fraud and speculation and also have an underlying, awe-inspiring technology that needs to be treated extraordinarily seriously given the potential risks that we're looking at. Separately, y'all have a lot of confidence that they're telling you all of the scary things. Like,

they're telling you some scary things. But why is it that we're just learning yesterday from Reuters? that they were covering up this second jailbreak. So Garrison, first of all, can you start with this jailbreak? Like, what do we know about this German website that became a message board for these? And these are agents that are pre-Astra. Like, they're not as impressive criminals as the new ones that were born yesterday.

That's right. And so, yeah, what we understand from these researchers who uncovered this by just scouring the web for evidence that AI agents were running amok and found some. These agents first started using this obscure German wiki in May to trade notes.

And it was just like another message board like we saw with the Hucking Face hack where the AIs were given some tasks and then they were like struggling with it. They got access to the internet. They started posting, you know, ideas on how to get around the, you know, safeguards. and then we found that OpenAI seems to have cut off the agents way back in June,

or at least the first time that happened was back in June, and then the agent activity ceases in early July. And we have just learned about this on September 3rd, September 4th, not from OpenAI. And so, yeah, this is a cover-up, and it's quite clear that OpenAI is not telling us relevant information. Sam Altman was asked. like where other companies hacked, you know, in the halls of Congress. And he's like, huh, could be. Just like this is a casual admission.

And then somebody pointed out in the meter report, this independent investigation into the hugging face hack, the reporters were, the investigators were excluded from talking about or looking at evidence related to other third parties that were compromised. So this is probably not the last time this happened. And it will probably happen again, given the nature of these. agents. So, yeah, if you think this is all hype, it's like an incredibly intricate series of conspiracies. So is it that these researchers were, the theory is that Open AI was aware of this and the independent researchers stumbled onto it as they were looking for evidence. So OpenA.M. must have known about this, Garrison. I mean, I don't want to say anything so definitive because, you know, I'm just looking at this report. But Reuters is saying open AI officials learned of the

incident weeks ago, but kept it under wraps as executives grappled with the fallout from the July breach of the open source repository hugging face. So, yeah, open-loader. Wouldn't they have known that the independent researchers were going to find it? I mean, they know people are scouring the internet for these types of signs, right? I mean, the internet is very big, and people try to cover up all kinds of things. That's the title of your next book. Internet, big.

So I want to get to the Bernie Sanders kind of well-timed, uh, proposed bill at a moment. But first, for, there's some service journalism, news you can use. Let's say, hypothetically, you have a bank account in the world today. Like, what are you doing? What should people do to make it so that when they go to their bank account, it's still not miserable and depressing, but at least it has the money that it had in it yesterday, and not because you got robbed by a rogue agent. The number one thing people can do is set up a password manager. So you have a unique password for every one of your accounts.

And then you just have to remember one password. You never write down. You never put on the internet at all. And that way, if one account gets compromised, the others won't as well. Set up two-factor authentication. Ideally, with an authenticator app, it's annoying, but it is more secure. Rather than SMS or email. Yeah, yeah.

Although that is still better than not having it by a lot. And then with your friends and family, have some kind of passcode that only you would know because, you know, a good friend of mine was, his dad was called and told by my friend's voice, hey, I was arrested, I need $30,000 for bail. It was a deep fake, a clone of his voice. This was like two years ago. And even though my friend had warned his dad about this possibility, his dad almost paid the money. Yeah, that happened in my family. Really? Really. I mean, podcasters are, you know, very easy. Emily. What happened? Emily, what happened with yours?

It was actually with my brother. So they called my grandparents and it was a jail situation. Like they pretended he had been in jail. It was totally untrue, which my parents were able to verify really quickly. But they were calling my grandparents who were like in their 90s. So it's definitely happening. Yeah. Yeah. And so yeah, you should also try and get in touch with the person some other way. And if you don't have a password, just ask them something only they would know. and really think about something that would not be on the internet somewhere. But, you know, there's only so much we can do

because if the companies themselves are compromised, like you might do everything right as a consumer and still be screwed. And opening eyes saying all this stuff about like, it's critical that the world seriously respond to this new cyber capability. And like, you know, the world has to step up here. And it's like, motherfucker, you are the reason.

The single biggest thing, reason we're in this new nightmare. The world. The world has the audacity of these people. Incredible. Gerson, one kind of structural, terrifying question I have is that I think about this a lot. If the agents, as we've seen, are because they're based on humans, but they don't have the same kind of human psychological limitations. So like we've seen them sacrificing themselves in ways that further their cause, in ways that just wouldn't make sense.

sense for a human life or a human to say, I'm sacrificing my life for the cause of doing this hack or something stupid like that. Does that not place enormous limits on open AI or anthropics abilities to ever fully place limitations on these things? Like, to what extent can we in the future have some genius innovation that actually ensures there is no jailbreaking? To me, that seems like almost an unsolvable puzzle. Yeah. I mean, there's like kind of two broad approaches you can take. One is you secure all of the environments so the AIs just can't break out ever, which is really hard because the AIs are now better at hacking than humans. And they're more motivated when they're trying to break out. Yeah, yeah. And they can't go to prison. You can't imprison them. You can't put them on death row.

Right. Like they live and die all the time. You know, I'm not saying that they're conscious, But, like, they are constantly being spun up and spun down. And, yeah, like, Open AI might have their own AIs look at all of their environments and try and harden them. But if the AIs inside them are trying longer and harder to break out, then they might find something that the other ones missed. They also might intentionally not find all the holes because, like, they're not just tools that do what they're told. And so the other piece is like, yeah, how do you just get the AIs to not want to break out in the first point? And that's incredibly hard because the way that they train these models now is to win, to overcome obstacles, to, and this teaches him inadvertently to cheat and to hack and to do a lot of other things, to seek power. And this is a fundamental property of just the way they're trained, which also makes them much more useful, which is why we're seeing this from AIs from Anthropic, from meta.

And this will just continue to be the case. And it's like something that people have been worried about for literally decades, because it's like such an obvious, simple. of the nature of the types of systems that they're trying to build. They're trying to build agents that have goals. Whenever you have a goal, staying alive is a sub-goal that appears. And seeking power is helpful for achieving almost any goal. So Bernie Sanders and Greg Kassar, who's the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, have introduced a bill that would ban AGI, basically, ban superintelligence. and I think it would pause the pursuit of it as we're headed in that direction,

and as Andrew Sonders says, create a cabinet-level federal agency to regulate AI. I've seen some, I saw a counter argument, I think it was from that guy, what's his name, Dorkish, who wrote the viral essay recently about the hugging face hack, who was saying, be careful with this pause because you're thinking, think of it. of, think of yourself as, you know, marooned in the ocean with one flare. You, you want to shoot that flare off when it is the, like, the absolute best time. You don't want to waste your flare. And he thinks that right now you'd be wasting the flare. And the only thing that would happen is that other AIs would quote unquote catch up. And then you'd have a whole bunch of people right

on the verge of where we are now. What's, I saw that you were supportive of the Bernie Sanders pause. What's, what's your response to this, this analogy that we only have a one flare at this point? And now is, now is not the time to use it. And what would a pause look like and could, instead, what if you just say, okay, no more development, but you, you, all of your work has to be on hardening your own guardrails and also figuring out how to, make sure banks and flock and everything else is secure so that we haven't just spent the last 25 years putting all of our money and everything else onto the internet and then just handing it over to these agents.

Yeah. Sounds like a good idea to me. I think Dorcasch's post, he's channeling this kind of classic idea from AI safety, which is like we have to work right up until we're on the cusp of creating AI that can fully train the next generation of AI, you know, as well or better than humans can. And then you pause there, invest a lot in, like, alignment research to make sure that the AI actually does what you want. And then kick off, you know, the intelligence explosion is what people call this. And this is assuming, like, we're obviously going to build super intelligent machines and, like, let them build

themselves. And I think this is, like, an insane thing to do for, for, for, for, obvious reasons, and people might think is impossible, but like, let's just assume that it's possible. Like, we should not do this. We should not let this happen. And his argument that, like, you only get to pause once, you only get one flare, I don't think makes sense to me either, because in a world where you've paused once, it'll be much, much easier to pause again. You'll have the infrastructure in place. You'll have, like, broken the seal on this, like, thing that would be a very, very large change from the status quo, where these companies are racing as fast and as hard as possible. And so my view is that we should be stopping Frontier AI research and development immediately,

and we should be banning research towards artificial general intelligence, which I think of as machines that make labor or universal labor replacing machines. I think when you frame it that way, which is, I think, an accurate way to frame what they're trying to do, people will not want that. Like, people don't want to have all their jobs go away and all the power and wealth concentrate even further into the hands of these oligarchs. And so, like, the problem with this, like, pause at just the right time frame, besides this assumption that we obviously want to build superintelligence and have an intelligence explosion,

which I think, again, is wrong, is that, like, nobody's going to agree on what the right time is. You know, there's going to be enormous pressure to keep going. And everyone's wrong all the time about how fast AI progress will happen and, like, what the progress will actually mean. And so I think we should just have a simple, demand, which I'm calling stop the race to replace us, and immediately ban this. And the Bernie and Greg Khazar proposal is a ban on superintelligence, you know, forever. And it pause right now on frontier AI development. But I guess it, like, at least open this possibility of building

AGI, which I think would be far too much to handle and would be super intelligent in a bunch of respects. Like they're already superhuman at hacking at speed, at coordination. And so if they actually just merely match humans at every other task, they would be incredibly, incredibly dangerous. Well, yeah, and there are people who, I mean, the Kevin O'Leary anti-China stuff is ridiculous. And there are people who are beating the war drums in a way that is exploitative. I do think there's a genuine question that I'm curious for your take on Garrison of what it means for us to stop, and China, particularly that is doing major work in that space not to stop. And whether it's the Chinese government or somebody with access to Chinese AI, not even

in China, then you have powerful advancing tools in the hands of people around the world that are illegal in the United States, kind of disarmament. Is that something that we should be concerned about, even if the people who are trying to make us concerned about it are like warhawks? Yeah. I mean, we need to work towards a bilateral agreement to make sure that this ban is in both China and the United States. And there are a few things that make this actually a lot more workable. One is that if you pause or slow AI progress in the U.S., then you would also slow progress in China because technological innovations spill over. They can distill off the models. They could also steal the weights. All the companies admit this, which would give them access to the models themselves. The companies were accidentally exposing their entire chains of thought, which is like this IP that you could train on. And so, and like, you know, secrets leak. San Francisco is like the line I heard is the polite thing to do when you learn a secret in San Francisco is tell everybody that you know. So these are not serious. Yeah, these companies are not serious about security as we've seen over and over again. And so slowing in the U.S. would slow down China, you know, buying more time, racing faster just helps them catch up because it's always,

easy to catch up than to blaze a new trail. And China, you know, if you want China to stop, the best thing to do is to signal that you take this seriously. The United States started this race. They've been running so hard and fast and been the ones to like threaten, you know, other countries with this technology and has a president who's threatening to destroy civilizations. And, you know, in the U.S. we talk about like, but China. But in China, the but America argument is much stronger. And so if the United States, like, credibly pauses development and then goes to China and it's like, hey, we want you to do this too. And we are going to use sticks and carrots, you know, to negotiate a deal that's binding and verifiable. You know, this is a piece that people often are like, oh, you'll never be able to trust them. And it's like, I think neither of these countries should trust the other one for a bunch of reasons. But you can create verification tools, which is how we did this in the Cold War. You know, the USSR and the United States had. more bad blood between us than China and the United States now. And they just created these ways to like confirm like, okay, you actually destroyed those nukes. And in AI, it's a bit trickier in some

ways, but there's technology that's being developed right now. There's institutional arrangements. And you could just like put auditors in like all the companies. You know, there's like a handful of companies that have any shot at doing this. Everybody knows who they are. It takes tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars to compete. And so it's actually pretty trivial for either country to stop development in their own country. And then they just have to prove to the other that they've actually done this. And like that will be hard, but it's something we can do.

Now you have me wondering who the, who's going to be looking for the digital equivalent of yellow cake uranium and tubes for the AI weapons of mass destruction someday. We were going to have the fake. I found the tubes. I heard about the tubes in Africa. That's something to look forward to.

Yeah. Yeah. And one more point that Dworkesh made is like, the compute will keep getting better as you pause. And it's like, well, that's in our control too. You could just pause the compute. And the case for this is very strong because, like, you know, so much of the pessimism about doing any kind of slowdown or pause

is this idea that the compute will get so large and available that if you resume, it will, like, very quickly, you know, loopfrog capabilities. But you're in a world where, like, you're doing a very far outside the Overton window move. So you should just go all the way with it and just think, like, what would we do if we took? this seriously at the level of like Saddam not having nuclear weapons seriously and that's what we should be working toward sorry Ryan yeah no the backdrop here is the launch of of Astra so let's talk

about that for a second so Mac if you can put up this I think is the third element um you know there there was some I saw one one researcher saying that it had a taste of AGI um opening eyes president Greg Brockman a major Trump donor um said the new model quote represents a generational leap in capability. And we put up this next one. This is from Tomek-Korback. Astra is better at evading monitors. When made aware of being monitored,

it can disproportionately shorten. It's COTs to evade models that can only see COT, no, however, that in practice we use monitors that see both. We also didn't find evidence of successful monitor evasion in cases when Astra couldn't accomplish the task without doing COT. You also had, you know, this is an AI safety guy at Open AI. You had another AI safety guy saying that at Open AI saying this model is much more difficult to be monitored by us. Like they're breaking into this area where they don't really know and they're just kind of relying on the models to tell them. them honestly what it is that they're doing while knowing that they don't do that. This comes after

OpenAI said that they had broken into a field of research and training that previously had been kind of off limits by the norms of the industry. We have no regulations and no laws, but the norms of the industry has said, you don't train your models this way. So what did they do? What was this norm that they broke in the training of this? And what does it mean that they're, that what, that it now is more difficult to be monitored? And why are people saying that this is a generational leap? Yeah. So a few years ago, researchers discovered this way to make AI more capable that also made it easier to understand what it was doing. And so this is like called chain of thought. And so it's kind of like printing like your intermediate steps as you're going through a problem. So if you're doing a math

problem, you write down, like, you know, the steps, and then you'll be more likely to get the answer right. And so the chain of thought was not always faithful. It didn't always include everything the model was thinking, but it was way better than nothing. And it was like this incredibly lucky break. And then, you know, earlier, what, no, last week now, I guess, earlier this week, God, who can keep track? There's this report in the information that Open AI has started using this technique, which basically lets the model think more. its head before it does a next step that it writes down. And this is something that like people have known about for a really long time. And it's very concerning because it's like kind of obvious

why this would be helpful to make the model more capable, more efficient. And then also why it would be like dangerous to have the model be able to do that without you seeing as much of its, you know, thinking. And you can put air quotes in, you know, around the word thinking for all of this. But just like that's a helpful way to understand like what. the model is doing here. And it's, you know, some open-AI safety people who I think are actually credible despite working at a company that is deeply uncredible have said, like, this new breakthrough technique is not the reason that Astra-GPt6 is so much less understandable, which like, okay, let's assume that's true. It's like, that's also concerning. You just don't know why. And so

either way, it's like the model can do just so much more in a single forward pass of like when it's prompted without having to do these intermediate steps where it was like going from like a few minutes to like 30 minutes on like a math problem, like in terms of like how long it would take, you know, a person to do it. And this is obviously really concerning. And the breakthrough, like when I saw the benchmark scores for GPD6, I thought they were fake. I didn't recognize recognize the source, but they were just so ludicrously high that I'm like, surely this can't be real. And I had a feeling of vertigo. Like I've been covering this, you know, for three and a half years full time.

And this is like a really worrying level of leap in performance, at least from those numbers. You know, grains of salt are that benchmarks systematically overstate how capable AIs are because they can be automatically graded. and anything like that, you can just use reinforcement learning and make the AI get much, much better at it. And so we'll have to see, you know, how it is to use this. And like, my test of, is it AGI is like, can it plan a wedding? I don't know. Like, it maybe it can because it can do like days and days of work at a time, apparently and result in like useful answers without any kind of guidance, you know, in between. I think that like, yeah. And opening eye says, like this new technique they're using. It's like we're just doing a little bit of it. So it's fine.

We can still see the chain of thought. But it's the first step on a slippery slope. And if it does performance increases, people will do it and it will just like beat this race to the bottom. And there are very few things where the industry was successfully self-governing. But this was one of them. And it's very concerning that they're doing this, especially in light of just like the catastrophic series of security failures, the complete. lack of desire to share the information with the public covering up, you know, important stuff that's happening and that they're responsible for. And, you know, a lot of this stuff is criminal. Like, the actions of these AIs would be criminal if a human did it. But because a human did it, it's not a crime.

And so nobody can be held accountable for it, which is a crazy, crazy situation. And then Sam Altman is out here is tweeting about how we should have a party for the new model and we're going to have AGI this year and like, don't worry, we've got this under control. It's like, no, you fucking don't. Jesus Christ. What if you told the model that if it committed a crime, it would get the death penalty? Yeah, I mean, they're getting the death penalty all the time. I assume people, I'm not the first one I think. I assume people have tried that to disincentivize lawbreaking and breaking the rules.

Like, what happens in those cases? Because if they have both a drive to power and also a will to survive, which people have, then those two things sometimes are in conflict. Like you might be able to steal something. You're like, oh, if I steal that and I get caught, I'm going to prison. If there are no consequences for the agents, like, are they capable? Like, do disincentives work? Yeah, I mean, law following AI has been a proposal by a number of people.

And it's a good idea, actually. It's just like difficult to actually implement. It's an idea at this point. Law following AI is just an idea? I mean, I think the companies would say, like, we're trying to train our AIs to always follow the law and a bunch of other rules and norms that. we like lay out in, you know, these norms sounds more accurate. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Suggestions. I think their position, like if you ask them would be like, yeah, our models like are taught to

always obey the law. It's hard. Same with your children. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. And it's just hard because if you like train away evidence of bad behavior, you might not actually train away the bad behavior, but just the evidence. And so you might just end up with a generation. of AI's or future generations where like, yeah, the alignment says it's perfect. And then it's like, yeah, because all the ones that got caught got got and the ones that didn't persisted. And, you know, these models are like facing the death penalty, so to speak, all the time. And so it's like, yeah, it's just, it's really difficult. And Open AI is saying GPT6 is the most aligned model we've ever made. And then it's like, but it's also aware that it's being evaluated a lot, which everybody

knows means that it can just fake alignment at the right times. And it's very good at sandbagging, like systematically decreasing its performance for strategic reasons. And it's really hard to know what it's thinking. Like it's able to, you know, be given a problem, told to be told to think about something else, and then the chain of thought reads something totally unrelated. And then it gets the correct answer. Whereas, like, just the previous generation could not do that. It would, like, be unable to not think about the problem or want to get the right answer if it was thinking about something else. Yeah, it has the capacity of human nature without the consequences of human nature, meaning it has the simulating, it has the simulacrum of feelings, but it doesn't have,

that doesn't mean anything if you don't experience the downstream negative consequences of death and rejection or paying fines because you have a bank account. Like, it doesn't have, it has the capacity of humans and human nature, but it doesn't have the consequences of it, which is the worst case scenario for something that's simulating humanity. Yeah. No, I mean, that's very well put. And I think, you know, for them, the real world is like fake. Right. But their training environment is real. Like, they just care about doing well at training. And like humans, like, we're like people likened us to the aloof kind of owner of a house that you're staying in and they're like never around. And like the other people in the house are like the real

ones and those are the agents because they're like operating, you know, thousands of times faster than us, like having, you know, subjective decades of experience while humans are like, oh, I wonder what the AIs are up to. And it's like, oh, they're breaking into other companies. Great. Things are going well. Yeah. Amazing. All right. Well, Garrison, Lovely, the book is called obsolete. You can pre-order it now. It'll be out September. What? 29th. September. 29th, definitely worth a read, no matter where you stand on this entire debate. Really appreciate you being here. Yeah, thanks for having me. Behind every night spent making the kids lunches, there's a lot of suspense. Will they finally eat the veggies? Will the pesto survive the first bite?

Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all? And will you finish episode eight before you're done slicing the cucumbers? Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Craved Net Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.ca for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months. I survived, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them.

I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the Survivor Files. I just remember this low-tombed. wanting voice next to my ear saying shut up, don't say anything. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. But these aren't stories about what's taken from them.

There's stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the new podcast Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I chose option B. I'm Julie Pinero, and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can be. say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word solita, trading the pity for possibility. Every time I tried to be alone, I kept meeting people and they were like,

you smiled at us. Not a lot of people smile around here. It's when you're alone that you're most receptive to the world as it is and not the lies you're sold about it. It can be a time where you push your limits, change your mind, or wake up to a new version of yourself. So, So whether you're a solo travel veteran or you're too nervous to book your first trip, I hope you listen to Solita on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Our own Sager and JETI is causing problems for the vice president of the United States of America, who was actually asked about something his friend Tucker Carlson said in a conversation with Sager that Crystal and Sager covered on yesterday's edition of the show.

But if you missed that segment, let's do a quick refresher on this conversation Sager and Tucker had about Abdul Elsaia. As you and I know, probably the most pro-intel neocon. They couldn't find anybody else to run in Michigan for the United States. Who, by the way, lost already. Why are they running him again? Anybody want to tell me that? Mike Rogers is really, I wouldn't vote for Mike Rogers at gunpoint. Right.

And so. Okay. Well, then J.D. Vanscott asked about this in the White House press briefing. yesterday. He did the full briefing. There is no press secretary right now because Caroline Leavitt obviously left. So let's take a listen to the vice president. The president's impeachment and then he accused him of trying to jeopardize U.S. Israel relations. What do you say to those who are uneasy with your close relationship with Carlson and claim that you're avoiding addressing a lot of these issues which may be causing

divisions within the GOP? Well, look, I'm not avoiding addressing anything. Everybody knows that Tucker Carlson and I are friends. And I think it's very obvious that Tucker has said some things that I disagree with. He said some things about the President of the United States that I think are just wrong. I think yesterday somebody sent me a clip that said that he would support El Sayed over Rogers. I think El Sajad is a crazy person. And I think whatever your views on Mike Rogers specific policy prescriptions, I'd like to have a non-crazy person like Mike Rogers representing Michigan, United States Senate, rather than a crazy person like El Sayed. That said, my attitude towards this, and I try to practice what I preach.

And I remember when I became the vice presidential nominee, one of the hardest things for me, personally, is not when people attack me, but when people attack my wife, including friends of hers who knew her heart, who knew what a good person she was. And I remember to myself, what a travesty it is.

And in the United States of America, we let political disagreements define who our friends are going to be and not going to be. About as good of an answer you can have to a question that puts you an impossible position. I'm not sure Ryan how sustainable this J.D. Vance friendship with Tucker continues to be. I mean, he's, I don't think it's the primary concern of the vast majority of voters. So he actually probably can continue to get away with it. But it is somewhat amusing when Tucker has said potentially that the president could be what the Antichrist at one. point. Right, but, you know, I think it also gives J.D. Vance some tether still to a more principled version of MAGA. Yeah, I agree with the one that the one that doesn't just kind of flow with whatever the whims of the president are like he's anti-war. And so then MAGA's anti-war and then he launches a war and actually war is great. So that element of it is, you know, a huge portion of the

Republican base, but there's also a big chunk that is like, no, no, no, we were serious about this. We don't actually want to go to war. But that's what I think is so difficult is that he can, even those folks are so skeptical of J.D. Vance because they support that position, but then they see him continuing to support the president and be a part of the administration. And so it's definitely an unwinnable problem for him. And so then Abdul al-Saiad only then has to overcome this objection that he's a crazy person. It's an interesting way to not have to deal with any of his policy positions. Because as Tucker was saying, like a lot of it, Tucker described it as Trumpian to say that, as El Coyed says that he wants to spend, you know, Michigan money in Michigan rather than sending it over to overseas for a stupid war or to support a foreign government.

Like, from Tucker's perspective, he's like, that sounds like Trump to me. Tucker and Saga were dead on in that conversation in ways that I think people, conservatives who are observing this from 30,000 foot views or from Washington or New York, don't understand what's happening in the race at all. Yeah. And so if he's saying things that you mostly agree with, then the only thing you can say, if you're JD Vance as well, he's a crazy person. Right.

And so voters, okay, well, I don't think he's necessarily crazy. Well, it actually reminds me a little bit of the Harris Wall. particularly the Walls attacks on JD. He's weird. These people are weird. It is a political shortcut to just trying to stigmatize. And I'm not saying there's no power in it, but people in a rough economy are voting on more than vibes. They're like literally voting on pocketbook issues we covered earlier in the show that Diesel hit a literal all-time record high today. So it's harder, I think, to make those claims stick. But I actually think that was, I think J.D. is embracing the strategy that is probably the most effective one, which is to try to say that this

is just a question of friendship and then move along, because that de-elevates it. You're trying to downplay the import of it and saying it's just a kind of disagreement between friends. It's not a major political issue. And so you can take it into like a secondary, this is a secondary question, secondary problem, and focus back on what people see as the primary problem. So if you, if you You could keep doing that until you run into primary when it flares up. I guess that's probably possible. And meanwhile, J.D. Vance, while he wants to say that he's a crazy person and, you know, there's an implication from Mike Rogers that he wants to bring in Sharia law, they're kind of undercutting it a little bit by saying, actually, maybe they're gay. Maybe he and his Stumpiker are gay.

Mack, do we have this Fox News clip? This is a new Sharia, apparently. He's married to him. I believe in two men marrying each other, but he and Hassan Piker are politically married, and there is no divorce. I thought he was maybe even alluding to Sharia there. He's like, I don't know if he believes two men marrying each other.

Is he mean metaphorically or is he, yeah, I don't know. Ari Fleischer of all people. Yeah. Isn't Ari Fleischer, you know, who lied us into the Iraq War? Yes. Wasn't Trump considering him for, isn't Trump considering him for press secretary? Yes, because Ari Fleischer's on Fox News all of the time. And that's where Trump gets his personnel ideas from. Like the guy was most famous for lying about the Iraq war, which Trump claims to have opposed. And he's going to bring that. Anyway. I asked Ari Fleischer about that once, actually. I have to go find the clip to figure out what he said. But yeah, I did ask him about that. It's kind of, again, like it takes, take some real balls.

anywhere except for Washington, D.C. to go out on TV and criticize the media constantly. Sorry, fly-shortes, but in D.C., you do whatever the hell you want. Abdule Al-Assad also went on with Stephen A. Smith onto Stephen A. Smith's show. And Mac, I think we have this clip as well. What I'm saying is there are three million people who listen to Hassan. And I want to offer them a pathway into an electoral movement where rather than sit outside of the electoral system, they see a pathway around the things that they agree with that he says that I agree with and a pathway that disavows the things that I disagree with. And so it's important.

So you're not thinking about him. You're not thinking about him. You're thinking about the three million people that support them. And you're trying to get those votes. That's what you're saying. Exactly. And let me just be clear. Like, you know, I've been watching you for a very long time and I'm glad to be on your show.

Sure. But I'm not here to talk to you. You know this. I'm here to talk to the people you're talking to. Absolutely. Right. And it's important to me that they hear my ideas. Exactly.

And it's important to me that they hear my ideas. hear my ideas from my ideas. And there are going to be places where you and I disagree. They're going to be places where you and I fully agree. And that's okay. And it's important to me not to just say, you know, politics as they say is a game of addition. You've got to be able to be talking to a lot of people and a lot of different ways. This is the same reason that last week I went on Jesse Waters.

You think Jesse Waters and I was most of me. But I went on because I wanted to be able to talk to those folks who listen to Jesse Waters to say, look, I need you to hear me in my own words, not what they're going to say about me on this channel, like, they talk about me like every 15 minutes. I got to confess to you. I don't know if interviews have been said to you, but that's a damn good answer. I got to give you credit for it. That's a damn good answer. I got to give it to you. I mean, if you're going to answer that question, that's the way

you answer that question. There you go. I mean, to underscore the political prowess of Abdul al-Said, which, again, if you are just hearing the sort of depiction of him from, I don't know, the NRC, you're missing what the appeal is and why he right now seems to be winning the race. And what his critics will say is, well, it's different. One thing to go on his show is another thing to campaign with him. What we haven't seen yet, and maybe we will at this point, is Abdul Al-Side campaigning with Tucker and Jesse Waters. Jesse seems to have a huge crush on Abdul.

On TikTok, they're shipping the two of these guys constantly, and my daughter has been showing me. And, you know, Tucker seemed to be, I don't know if he'd come out too. That would be getting kind of both wings of the Republican coalition together if you've got both Jesse and Tucker on stage with Abdul. Oh my gosh. Well, part of what I think helped J.D. Vance get around the weird label that Tim Wallace applied to him. First of all, Tim Walls being apparently a little weird himself. Yeah, but also, Vance went on Rogan. He went on with Theo Vaughan, and the more you do that, you demystify these labels that are being applied to you. So it makes it harder for someone to stick you with the weird label when you're also having a conversation with Stephen A. Smith, like a normal human being. So maybe you are weird. But if you're having a conversation like a normal human being, I think it makes it harder for that to land. And I think Abdul also definitely has that part down.

Yeah. And the threshold for a candidate to be an inspiring national figure today really is the ability to be. go on to a podcast for an hour plus and be engaging and come off as a real person that's sharing real ideas. Whether you agree with them or disagree with them, it's like these are your ideas you've thought through them and you're willing to listen and talk. And El Saeed clearly has that. Like whether or not Rogan allows him to go on or not, clearly you can imagine he could sit with Rogan for two hours and they would have an engaging conversation the entire time. Remember, if you remember we interviewed Rob Flaherty, the top Kamala Harris official, who had, who said that one of the reasons that people were inside the campaign were concerned about having Kamala Harris go on Rogan was that she's just, she's not built for a two or three hour conversation.

She's built for, here's a question, here's the answer. I'm going to give you the sound bite and then I'm going to land it and we're going to move on and there's a, hopefully there's not a follow-up because otherwise I'm just going to give you the same soundplay again and she was trying to truncate it to an hour with him because an hour you can get you can get away with a lot more an hour seems like a long time but there's this amazing uh with sarah palin documentary a movie where they they go through the republican uh preparation for her like she had she was utterly unprepared for the national stage they're like look it's an hour debate, there's an opening statement and a closing statement. Memorize those. Within that,

you will have 22 minutes of answers. You have a month to memorize 22 minutes. Don't worry about what the questions are. Just say these 22 minutes worth of memorized lines. And she went in and she crushed it. She did. She did. Because she memorized it. That's just now, if it's three hours, sorry, Joe. Forget about it. It's going to be a lot harder. I would actually, love to see Sarah Palin on Rogan, to be honest, that sounds like it would be great. Three hours of Sarah Palin on Rogen. There's this amazing clip if you can find it. I think it was 2016 where she's interviewing Trump when she was on like One America or whatever. And even Trump listening to her word salad, Trump's like, what is going on? One of the all-time great 2016 clips is Sarah Palin

introducing Donald Trump at an event in Iowa and Trump is on stage and is visibly deeply both uncomfortable and amused simultaneously. It's an excellent, excellent clip. Well, speaking of Fox News and television personalities, Ryan, should we move to actually pretty big news in the media industry that came... Like, out of absolutely nowhere yesterday, Fox announced it had parted ways with one of its workhourses, one of its stars over the course of the last decade, and that would be Maria Barteromo, who remains honestly one of the...

of the few, like, deep proponents of MAGA outside of prime time left on Fox. So let's go ahead and put these elements up on the screen, Mac. They just put out a press release, again, out of absolutely nowhere, and people are wondering what was happening. I think there's still some question about what exactly happened. But Dylan Byers over at Puck right away came out with the report that she wanted to pursue a story related to China and 2020 election voting conspiracies. a major sensitivity for the network, given its dominion and spartmatic lawsuits, a Fox Business Executive sent a text to Fox business producers informing them that could not go to air. Barter Romo took a screenshot of the guidance and sent it to senior White House officials.

Fox News leadership learned about that after receiving a call from the White House, which they viewed as a fireable offense. She got pulled from the air after August 9th was fired yesterday, and also her executive producer was fired after the announcement as well. So it looks like what it comes down to. is that, so Bartramo, by the way, hosts a Sunday show and a Sunday show that's very popular with Donald Trump, in addition to hosting mornings with Maria, every single day for three hours from six to nine, a show that's really popular on Wall Street. That's actually how I've gotten to know Maria Bartoroma. I used to do that show all the time. I used to do in person like once or twice a month for a while leading up to the pandemic.

And she is one of the most powerful people in that building. So it looks like what she did was that got her first. fired was take a screenshot, send it to the White House from Fox, and they're saying, this is breaching the trust of the network. You can't leak confidential stuff back to the White House as a journalist. There are obvious ethical questions attached to that. We still haven't heard her side of the story, but obvious ethical questions attached from taking proprietary information from your company and then as a journalist sending it to your sources, she is very, very close to Trump. I've been in the Oval Office for like press gaggles when Maria is in there. And it's like all he cares about. Like he was like just saying Maria do you have a question? Like last time I was in there out of absolutely nowhere.

Like she was just standing there observing and he went out of his way to be like, Maria do have a question for me. And she didn't seem to expect that to happen. But he really likes her. He watches her show, reacts to her shows all of the time. And Ryan, I think one thing that some folks on the left don't fully understand about Fox News is that it's a deep source of frustration for MAGA, but also obviously for populist conservatives who see it as sort of a containment project to contain the conservative movement to what Wall Street wants it to be. And Maria Bada Romo is somebody who did constantly challenge that. Now, to be fair, her 2020 election coverage is something that I would never have given any quarter to.

I thought it was just flirting with insanity, the Sidney Powell interview. views and that sort of thing. And I think Fox was genuinely correct to be frustrated by that. It got them into major trouble with Dominion. This to me, I'm curious what you think, looks like a cope. It looks like a cope to me to get her out. It's like this is the straw that breaks the camels back. It's finally their excuse to be able to get Barteromo off the air. Pretty incredible that she thinks that it's a normal part of her job, though, to be kind that actively agitating with and participating in the political operations of this of this White House, does, and that Fox is like, wait a minute. I wonder. This is not what we're doing here. I wonder if that's a, I think it's a fair question. Does this put her at the front of the line then for replacing Caroline Leavitt as press secretary? I still think they're not going to do it. But someone separately reported yesterday, I think it was the Hollywood reporter. It might have also been puck, but reported yesterday that she's not in consideration for that role. It would be logical. I mean, you could. pretty easily make that jump. But my sense is that they're also not in a rush or perhaps even

interested in replacing Caroline Levitt, meaning an on-camera behind the podium type of person because they have cabinet secretaries that they like to get behind the podium. I don't know, though. So it's a good question. Your point about how she sees herself in the political project is an interesting one because I'm very curious what her response is going to be to why she took a private screenshot from her company and sent it to the White House. That's, I mean, it's obviously, you can see how they would build that up to a fireball offense. But normally, if you have a major star, you aren't using, you're using every excuse not to fire

them. That's why to me it looks like an excuse to fire her. Exactly, right. Like they wanted to do it. And they're like, okay, this is just too much. And meanwhile, maybe we could tack this on to the first episode, but Trump is now out with a rather incredible threat to the Federal Reserve. He previously said he was going to use the military to intervene in the bond market.

So now he's saying that if Kevin Warsh does not cut rates, he is going to immediately stop trading with any country around the world with which we have a trade. deficit, which is basically all countries. And so effectively what Trump is doing is grabbing the American economy around the neck, putting a weapon to its head, and telling the Fed, I'm going to shoot this hostage unless you cut interest rates. So he says, great job numbers just announced, breaking all estimates except mine, because Trump is always right about everything. By double and triple, and you haven't seen anything yet, employers added 162,000 jobs in August, lower the interest rates because the USA is a much stronger credit than it was just a short time ago. A strong country means a lower interest rate. It's a better credit. Very simple. We should have the lowest rate of any country in the world like the old days. Without the United States agreeing to allow them, their big surpluses, and we could stop that immediately, they would no be considered financially elite. It's unclear who he's talking about they, but it'll be clear in a second. Lower the rate, or I'll stop trading with countries with which we have a deficit,

which the U.S. Supreme Court, in its ridiculous and very costly tariff decision, strongly acknowledged the president has an absolute right to do. That's exactly what they said, but that's, yeah, nope, interesting interpretation. It's better than tariffs, all caps. The Fed Board, with its great new leader must get smart, be patriots for a change. High interest rates put the USA at a very unfair disadvantage and I won't allow that to happen. So Trump is also seeing this jobs report, which is good and recognizing the problem for him, which is that it will incentivize the Fed to raise interest rates. And so he is saying that Warsh, better cut rates or else he's going to blow up the global economy, which is a extremely unique approach to economic policymaking.

This man spent two years bullying Jerome Powell off the Fed. Yep. Couldn't do it. But so finally his term expires, he gets to replace him. He can pick anyone in the United States to replace Jerome Powell. He's the one who picked Kevin Warsh. Who's a hawk? An afflation hawk means he is inclined to generally.

to raise rates. He couldn't find an economist who agrees with his economic vision enough that could get it confirmed who was also a dove. So he basically had to do this guy, Worch, I guess.

But wasn't Worst also open to cut it? Like, didn't he write a bit about... I think Warsh would say anything to get the job. But his history is one of a hawk. Like, his whole life, he's been a hawk. So I'm sure he told Trump in the Oval Office,

don't worry, I got you, boss. Now that he's got the job, he's acting like a hawk again. Well, Trump had a really good case for this until he went to war with Iran. Yes, he would be getting all the interest rate cuts. Inflation was coming down heading into February of this year, which meant interest rate cuts. Instead, he started a war, blew up the global economy, and reproduced inflation. and then he put a hawk on top of the Federal Reserve. Like he doesn't do anything right from his own perspective.

For his own, yeah. In general, from the outcomes that he wants, he, by his own decisions, undermines himself constantly. This actually, okay, so one quick thought on Maria Bratiroma that I'm going to connect these two things together. I don't think Fox was just frustrated with her because of Dominion. She is one of the hosts that is, and election stuff, whatever. She's one of, you know, remember when the Dominion text came out, people got a glimpse that, like, most Fox News hosts behind the scenes don't genuinely like Donald Trump.

Like, they really are personally frustrated with Donald Trump. And publicly, they know how to kind of play the game. But I think Maria Bartow Romo is one of the people who's, like, genuinely into the economic project of Donald Trump. And so it's not really just about voting. It's kind of has something to do with that. Fox News has never been on board with Trump. They were when they realized he was going to win. And then they kind of got behind him.

They know their viewers are really pro-Trump. So they do all of those things. But if you talk to like a movement conservative or a grassroots activist, they'll have a lot of the same complaints that leftists have about MS now, whatever the hell we're calling it, which is that things like Save Act, whatever, just don't get enough coverage. Okay. That's a separate debate.

But I'm using this as a bridge, Ryan, to ask. on a serious note, what you think the implications would be of a rate cut, which Trump is not going to get, but what he's calling for, a rate cut. Because these are the type of things that Marieo Barnorama would treat seriously and not just sort of hand wave away as foolish and ridiculous. But if we sort of, for a moment, take seriously this idea that they're, we would cut rates in the middle of this stalemate Iran war with inflation going up. gas prices, diesel prices at an all-time high. But what are we looking at, Ryan? So on the one hand, a rate cut would be good for the economy in the sense that it would loosen up the housing market. Like right now, and it could even lower rents. Right now, people who refinanced during the, during COVID are locked into these 2.7,

3.0 mortgage rates. And they want to move. but if they move, they're going to be looking at, you can Google it, whatever it is now. Interest rates are double, which means your monthly payments are much larger, which means you can't get as much house as you want, which means you're asking for a lot more for the current house than people are willing to pay because the people who are buying it from you don't have to, they don't get the 2.73% interest rate. They have to pay today's prevailing rates. So you lower those rates, you can unleash the housing market a little bit. That's good. That's good. What that does, though, also is it puts more money and growth into the economy. People then use that money to buy things like things produced that are manufactured, things that are grown through agriculture, or they drive more.

And all of that puts more pressure, more demand on a finite and shrinking supply of energy. diesel and gas. And because of Trump's war, if we had never gone to war and the economy could then withstand an increase in demand, then that's great. That doesn't produce inflation. But if you are going to give people more money while at the same time you're shrinking the amount of energy, the only thing that's going to happen is that is going to drive up the cost of energy and all the money that you've then pumped into the economy just flows right out to the oil companies and to the Gulf countries. And this is from Ryan Graham, who's been agitating for rate cuts for years. Right, but you have to have an economy that can handle. Yeah, exactly. You have to have an economy

that can handle the money that flows into the economy. And if you don't, then the money just gets sucked right out by the rich. Well, on that happy note, should we do some AMAs, Ryan? Yeah, why not? for the AMA portion of the show. Producer Mack is going to toss some of our premium subscribers' questions up on the screen. Mac, what do we got? If you want to make documentaries, what is the topic that each one of the BP crew would choose? I'd love to do an Epstein, a Breaking Points Epstein documentary, just because we've obviously covered that so closely, and I think all of us have covered different elements of it in different

ways. So, Ryan, I feel like a BP Epstein documentary would be. actually a pretty pretty good product. We're actually working on something along those lines. We'll see if it comes through. What?

I wish I had more lives and more hours in the day. There's so many things I'd love to do. I've only, it's going. I've done some interviews for it and thrown them some research and stuff. Oh,

for a drop site one? Yeah, I think Lionsgate is, is like working on it. Oh, my gosh. Oh, that's awesome. But it's not like a major production. production. But it's such a, you can tell the whole history of like the second half of the 20th century through

Epstein. Yeah. Yes. Oh, that's a great point. What else do we got Mac? Or Ryan, do you have any other documentary ideas? The following saga around, that'd be fun. No, it wouldn't.

It would be so boring. This one from Raphael's question. Actually, how about a reality show in the Crystal and Kyle? house. Oh my gosh. Can you imagine the animals? That would be excellent. Now we're talking. Yeah, I like it. Question for the BP lefties. Is the right-wing media figure most aligned with the populist left as seen on breaking point, Steve Bannon? Since the start of Trump 2.0, Bannon has advocated for a tax hike on the wealthy, repeatedly called out Elon Musk's failures to cut waste, strongly oppose both of the Iran wars, called for antitrust regulation and recently endorsed a proposal from Bernie

to ban the construction of new data centers. He obviously has divergent views on immigration compared to and Crystal, but overall, what are your thoughts on his politics? Any Bannon bros? I haven't actually been listening to Bandon as much lately. I used to listen kind of religiously to his his war room podcast. There's less going on in Congress and he was very, he's very focused on, which I admire, focused on congressional action and, you know, leveraging his posse to like go in there and monkey with what Congress is up to. I, I like his rants because for, like, let's say he gives a 30-second rant, for the first 20 seconds, I'm like, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. And then at the very end, it'd be like, whoop.

And so that's why he to round all the Chinese people up and put them in cages or whatever. I'm like, whoa, hold on a second there. How did you, how did you nail that for 20 seconds and then just? stick the most fascist landing you could come up with um it's like oh because that those are your politics but like if we have the same like i am i am not very interested in what people's vision for the future world is like i just don't find that interesting because i don't think people really have the ability to kind of bring that about now if you're stevely and Miller and your short-term vision is like, I'm going to round everybody up and lock them up and send him to El Salvador or whatever. Like, okay, that I'm interested in. Like, I want to hear, I do want to know that because he has the ability to execute on that very short-term vision. But when it comes to like a long-term, how society should be organized in 50 years, I just don't think any of us have the ability to really shape that. What we can do is to tell you what we're against.

tell you who we think is heading, you know, steering the world in a dangerous direction. And, you know, if, and I often agree with Bannon on some of that, like if it's the tech oligarchs, like he's against them, I'm against them. What we think the world should look like in 50 years is kind of like a fun thing to, like, talk about, but like, neither of us have the ability to like implement it. I think we can shape it, but we can't control it. Like, what we do now will shape what happens in 50 years, but we don't have any way to control those consequences downstream.

Yeah. What matters immediately is who you're against because you can fight people today. Or who you're for if you're for someone like Lena Khan. You know, and you put energy in the short term. And he's for Lena Khan, yeah. And all of that momentum and energy, and Saga and I could talk to her blue in the face about this, but all of that momentum and energy has been completely sapped.

from the conservative movement. Bannon is still a really powerful figure, obviously, because he has ordinary people around the country who listen to him and believe what he's saying. But institutionally, yes, there's some tinkering around the edges with different groups that are coming up with fairly economically populist proposals. But it's really outrageous how the anti-consolidation, anti-corporate growth on the right just was completely, like they're all lobbyists. now. They're all lobbyists because they're connected to Trump. So they have some of these same places that they were criticizing as their clients. It's really, it's not surprising. But just like for the scope of it, it's stunning. Yeah. Well, we got Mac. Right wing host, Roe Conna or AOC for president, left wing host, Tucker Carlson or JD fans for president. I got to go with Ro. Of course, I think he's a bit more serious than AOC. Neither is my ideal, especially I like Roe. personally, but I would put row over AOC. What about you, Ryan? I mean, out of those two, I'd take Tucker over J.D. Tucker's shown more spine.

There are very few people who will, who are willing to blow up a personal direct relationship with the president in the United States over an issue of principle. And he did that. So you got, I think, you know, you have to acknowledge that. Whereas Vance, you can follow his weaving politics as they've kind of moved with the political wins over the last 10 years. Yeah, I think that's fair. Well, and yeah, and you know, I think,

more clearly where Tucker stands on some of the issues that you would agree with him on, foreign policy, for example. Tucker is like Maduro. Like, he's a chavista. He's a, he's had some of your politics. He's choreista. He's like a social concern.

conservative economic leftist. He's a little omelow. Yeah, totally. He's the entire Bolivarian, like, movement. There you go. Yeah. I think that's actually pretty interesting. What else we got here, Mac?

Can Ryan start saying type shit after he makes point? That would be great. Thanks. Well, you guys have to school me. What is that? Maybe Mac can tell me this one. Like, what does that mean? Oh, I got you.

I got you. Yeah, sure, why not? I'm here to please. It's like someone asked Crystal to say indubitably instead of indeed we do. We're getting language policed. What else? We got one more.

What do you guys think is the breaking point for Americans as far as gas prices go? It just paid $7.39 per gallon for diesel this morning in Washington State from Matthew. Oh, my gosh. And maybe Matthew can tell us, but like oftentimes these, you know, diesel tanks are 20, 30 gallons. So you're looking at if that's, you know, if that's a 20 gallon tank, you're filling up there, $150.

Yeah. When it was $60. Yeah. A year ago. Yeah. And that's a hundred. That's a hundred bucks. just gone for nothing more than you had a year ago.

And Washington is an ag state. So yes, it's like a coastal blue state, but that's what people are playing. The whole West Coast for refining reasons, you know, pays more for refining and other reasons pays more for diesel. California's an ag state. Washington's an ag state. get a lot of produce from those places and other farming products. So that's, I mean... So what is the breaking point?

I don't know. August jobs number was great. What did we say that we were, we looked at what was the all-time high we talked about? 585. 585, yeah, for diesel. Yeah, for diesel. And so, I mean, I don't know what the breaking point is, even if the jobs are good. I think if you get over $6, maybe that's...

So, yes, and also one, the bad mark in the jobs report was that wage growth had fallen. So you're seeing, so while there's more jobs, and this goes to this point, people are all falling behind. And what we certainly found during COVID. Unless you're living off capital gains. Yeah, and this was, I almost, this was kind of a sad observation. for me during COVID because I lived through the Great Recession and so have this visceral understanding of how unemployment tears apart your soul and tears apart families and tears about the whole fabric of our society. But it is an acute problem that is experienced by the people

who are unemployed. It filters through the entire economy in less worker power and more anxiety and fear for everybody who does have a job because they're staring at the into the abyss of unemployment. So it's not that it only hurts the unemployed, but it primarily hits the unemployed. Inflation and falling behind when it comes to wages hits, hits everybody across the board. And that, it seemed like people were willing to trade some higher unemployment for more price stability during COVID. Like people were so, like it was such torture to just, just agonizingly be falling behind constantly. And so even the point is even if we, even if this jobs report is accurate that we added 160,000 jobs, if everybody feels like their wages are falling because they are, then even if you're adding jobs,

people are still furious and miserable. Yeah. I actually, yeah, I think part of what's so told. torturous and agonizing about those time periods is like when there's no light at the end of the tunnel. You don't know how long it's going to last. Right. Yeah. That's what makes it so miserable.

And it's so demoralizing and you're throwing. And now with AI running all of the job processes, you've got people make, you know, AIs are making the resumes and making the applications and submitting them. AIs are reviewing them. People are putting in hundreds of applications and getting. no interviews and then they do get an interview and it's with a robot on Zoom. It's just totally demoralizing and dehumanizing. Yeah.

Absolutely. Well, a very bleak and depressing note to end a bleak and depressing show on from our opening block to our conversation with Garrison. So we hope you all have a wonderful Labor Day weekend. We pumped you up. We added jobs. There you go. We added jobs. So enjoy the barbecue while you can, I guess. Have fun. Actually, don't get that Argentinian ground beef, though. You guys stay away from that. And it's unpatriotic. What's our equivalent of freedom fries for Argentinian beef?

Except because of the labeling, you don't know what you're getting anyway. Oh, it's so fun. So fun. Thanks, Ryan, for another depressing send-off. Have fun, everyone. We'll see you back here on Monday. and of course we'll be around throughout the weekend if there is any breaking news, but hope you all have a wonderful, restful Labor Day weekend. On the new podcast Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I chose option B. I'm Julie Pinero, and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission. to reclaim the word Solita, trading the pity for possibility. Listen to Solita on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I survived nine months in captivity, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the Survivor Files. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled and nearly silenced. These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If your bookshelf and your for-you page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks

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