Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 9/8/23: Krystal And Kyle Debate Briahna Joy Gray On Green Party And Biden, Twitter Accused Of Aiding Saudi Human Rights Abuse, Trump Floats Debating Meghan Markle, Historic Antitrust Movement, And New Push For AI Regulation

Episode Date: September 8, 2023

This week the Breaking Point team looks at Krystal and Kyle debating Briahna Joy Gray on the Green Party and Biden, Twitter Accused Of Aiding Saudi Human Rights Abuses, Trump Floats The Possibility Of Debating Meghan Markle, Matt Stoller ON A Potentially Historic Antitrust Shockwave, And New Push From Experts For AI Regulation Within Congress. To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Hey, guys. Ready or not, 2024 is here, and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show. Crystal, had an interesting conversation with Breanna Joy Gray about third parties and Cornel West. So set it up for the people. What are we about to watch? Yeah. So some of the comments

that I made about third parties and Dr. West's third party bid attracted a lot of attention, apparently online. And so Kyle and I wanted to have a longer conversation. He basically shares my view on third parties. So we wanted to have a longer conversation with someone who's a good friend, Brianna Joy Gray, who has a very different opinion on this. So we could go through all the things back and forth, et cetera. It's going to be available on Crystal Con Friends sub stack. If you guys want to subscribe there, you can get the whole thing on Friday this evening. Otherwise, we are going to post this clip now that you can watch and enjoy and take from it, whatever you will. Here you go. Welcome everybody to a special edition, I'd say, of Crystal Kyle and Friends.

Not only is it Crystal Kyle and Friends, it's also sort of like a dual thing going on. We got Breonna Joy Gray in the house, and this will be on her channel as well, the Bad Faith Podcast. A little crossover episode. A little crossover episode. Love that for us. Definitely, definitely. Looking forward to it. So we're going to discuss Cornel West's campaign and everything around that.

And I just want everybody in the audience to know, because I don't know if we've said this publicly before, that he's been invited on multiple times and he just hasn't come on yet. And this goes all the way back to when he launched. We invited him on. He hasn't come on yet. Will he eventually? I don't know. It's up to him.

Ball's in his court. And we had him on before. We had him on before. Yeah, before he announced his campaign. I mean, we're going back to when the People's Party thing launched. We invited him on all the way back then, too, and just haven't heard back or anything. But I just don't want people to think we're debating Cornel West. But like Crystal and Kyle are refusing to talk to Cornel West.

We'd love to talk to Cornel West. We want to have him. You know, we'd love to have him on at any point in time to discuss anything and everything. So we're going to discuss his campaign a little bit here. And so I want to lay out what my position is And then Brie, I'll turn it over to you And you can respond to it And Crystal, you can jump in at some point

And say what your position is We'll go through all the things We'll go through all the things So here's my position First of all, in the Democratic primary Because I'm a registered Democrat in New York I will be voting for Marianne Williamson Very happy and proud to say that

I'm the chief Marianne Williamson bro out there I'm leading the charge Now, in New York, I'm the chief Marianne Williamson bro out there. I'm leading the charge. Now, in New York, I'm in a safe state. So would I vote for Cornel West in New York? Yes, because I have a 95% agreement with him on policy. And I think it would be nice to get the Green Party in a position where if they become more viable because we get ranked choice voting or something, it'd be nice to grow their popularity a little bit. And when we get ranked choice voting, I think they kind of automatically become a lot more viable. So I'd like to help out in that process. But if I'm in a swing state and it's Biden versus Trump, I'm at the point now where I don't even think it's a tough call.

I would definitely vote for Biden because either in that situation, even if other people are running, either the Democrat or the Republican is going to win. And in my estimation, Biden has definitely passed what I would describe as my bare minimum purity test. And I think if it's him or Trump or even him or DeSantis or anybody, he just blows them out of the water. And so I think I'd happily vote for Biden in that instance. Your response. So I similarly was voting for Jill Stein in New York in 2016. I did the same.

And I also happen to believe that strategically, it makes the most sense to apply pressure to the Democratic Party by voting for not Biden in a primary. Marianne Williamson is obviously the most progressive candidate in the primary. And then vote for Cornel West in the general. And I know there are a lot of people in my audience who are frustrated by that plan because they think that it takes something away from Cornel West's run or it affirms the Democratic Party in some way to

vote for Marianne Williamson running as a Democrat. I don't feel that way. I feel it's a little hypocritical to have that position, given that we all just enthusiastically voted for Bernie twice in the primary the last two rounds. You can make a distinction saying that Bernie wasn't independent and he always identified as an independent. And Marianne Williamson doesn't have that kind of cloak of distance from the Democratic Party. You can say what you want. I don't I don't see those things as mutually exclusive in the least. So that is also my plan. I differ from you only in so far as that I would say it's a more difficult choice in a swing state to decide what you're going to do. But I frankly respect people who feel comfortable. It has not been something that I have to contend with, but I respect people who feel comfortable voting third party even in swing states.

The reason is this, and it goes back to that early bad faith viral Noam Chomsky interview in which I asked him about a month before the 2020 race. Look, I said, I take your point. Let's say Trump is an existential threat. Let's say that he's a unique threat among all Republican candidates. My concern is that every year,

because we all vote for blue, no matter who, because most Democrats vote blue, no matter who, or most left-leaning people do, the message that gets sent out is that Democrats don't have a bar. You can go as low as you want, as close to the Democratic Party, Republican Party as you want, and there's a ratchet to the right effect. And Republicans know that they can keep being more and more extreme. And so I want you to explain to me what you predict to be the stopping point at which we're no longer saying this new Republican is the worst that has ever happened. This new Republican is the worst that has ever happened. Tell me you're not going to be saying the same thing about Ron DeSantis or Vivek Ramaswamy or whatever other person comes down the pike. And he was unable, in my subjective view, to respond credibly to that

claim. So if somebody could tell me strategically what the stopping point is going to be of making this argument of the lesser of two evils, I would be open to the idea that, OK, this is the last one. Donald Trump, fine. He tried to steal the election. Fine. That is a new line that he has crossed. But absent an acknowledgment that we are creating our own destiny by lowering the bar in these ways, I'm not comfortable coming out and criticizing anybody who no longer wants to be complicit in that kind of a system that's enabled the Democratic Party to not have a primary, treat Marianne Williamson as badly as they've treated her, treat Bernie Sanders as badly as they treated him, and openly come out and say they don't have to hold a free, fair election. The DNC argued that in court, you know? So let me explain a little bit of my position. I think that'll help respond to some of what you said there. And I'm also curious to dig in a little bit more to your analysis of how the Biden administration has actually been in reality. So last election in 2020, I did live in a swing state. I lived in Virginia, still live in Virginia, registered in Virginia. And it did not feel

good to vote for Joe Biden. But I decided to vote for Joe Biden, which is something I said publicly at the time. But I said something very similar to you, which is like, listen, this was not easy for me. If you wherever you live, swing state, not swing state, et cetera, you do whatever you analyze is the right thing to do. And the reason that I voted for him primarily at that time, even though I thought he had an atrocious record in the Senate, even though, you know, complicit in the Iraq war, complicit in bad trade deals, complicit, you know, like terrible things on crime, all that stuff, right? The primary reason I voted for him was because of the National Labor Relations Board and because labor politics and building out union power in this country, to me, is one of the most important goals and something that I think we all

share and leftists generally believe. Now, in retrospect, not only do I feel good about that vote, he's actually surprised me. Now, I've got all kinds of issues, right? On the National Labor Relations Board, though, specifically, they just issued a ruling which could be a complete game changer for unions. And just to explain to people a little bit, basically, in the past, bosses could union bust with impunity, no accountability. Now the process going forward is completely changed. If bosses are caught union busting, then that's it. There's no more election.

It's canceled. They have to recognize the union and start bargaining with them. That's the biggest shift in labor relations we've had in our lifetime. So that's why at this point, I'm not only you know, it's likely to marry and supporter as well. But we can all see the most likely outcome is it's going to be Trump versus Biden. Not only would I say that protecting the Biden National Labor Relations Board is important enough for me to vote for Joe Biden, but it is important enough that I would actively encourage them. I'm not going to shame them for whatever they decide to do. But I would actively encourage people who are in a swing state to vote for Joe Biden, if for no other reason than to

protect that board. So I think that's a perfectly defensible position. And I had this conversation on my podcast in the last episode, and there were people who would characterize that position as, I mean, you've heard the thing, you've been on the internet, you know, being too credulous about Biden or, you know, being too comfortable in one's own position in life and not needing enough change and being happy with the status quo. People will say things like that. I think actually that if your priority, if you believe the path to meaningful change is going to primarily come through a kind of, I don't say this dismissively, but a kind of labor incrementalism, meaning there are meaningful labor gains that happen, but are not the type of which would radically transform the system the way that

some people want to happen in a shorter term. And the way that some people might argue Bernie Sanders represented his movement as the goal of being, then that's a defensible position. But I also, I have to hold space for the reality that there are people for whom, even as significant as those labor gains are, it's simply insufficient. And what they see when they look at the trajectory of the last 50, 60 years of Democratic Party politics, when they look, when they read Listen Liberal and see the longer game, the Democratic Party making a concerted choice to back away from labor in a way that has gone on for decades and isn't necessarily turning around as a consequence of Joe Biden

having some good NLRB appointments. So let me actually, then I want to jump into it. So number one, I don't think that in like massively increasing union density, I actually don't see that as incremental change. I mean, if you look at the chart of the decline in the middle class and the decline of union density, you'd be hard pressed to find a more significant factor. But I made these arguments as well. But the other piece is I feel like those same people who are right about the Democratic Party, they were right about the analysis and listen liberal, right about the fact that you had this free trade, bipartisan consensus. And in large part, a union busting bipartisan consensus. Also don't acknowledge that there actually has been a notable shift in the Biden administration. Now, my big issue in the Biden administration.

Now, my big issue with the Biden administration, I mean, there's a million of them, right? On foreign policy, I've got problems. But my biggest issue economically with the Biden administration is the way they've allowed the pandemic relief, the short-term pandemic relief programs to fall away and leave a lot of ordinary Americans more in a more precarious financial position now than they were at the beginning of the administration. And that's not nothing. But when I look at the long term, when I look at the fact that, listen, with the Inflation Reduction Act, with the CHIPS Act, with infrastructure investment, you're talking about industrial policy in a way that would have been completely unheard of in the Clinton Obama era.

When you look at not just the NLRB, which I said is like the core for me, but also his antitrust appointments and the fact they're really trying to reverse decades of neoliberal attack on any sort of trust busting. I feel like none of those improvements that have made Biden on that front way better than Obama, way better than Clinton. I just feel like there's no willingness to acknowledge any of that whatsoever. I don't think the issue is acknowledging it. It's how much it matters to you, how weighty that is to you, and how much you see those kind of meaningful, find common meaningful improvements as really core to the nature of the project that

you're on. And I think that what some people are frustrated by is that this went from feeling like in both left media and left politics, a bigger revolutionary project that was going to the core of our capitalist system and wanting to radically change the way that human lives are valued, what we consider to be the nature of our social safety net, what we believe to be the nature of what we consider to be human rights. And they wanted to join a movement that validated what many of us felt intrinsically,

emotionally for most of our lives, that something in the milk very much wasn't clean. And Bernie came along and articulated that it was legitimate for us to be asking for something more. And so at this point, it does feel as though there has been a kind of a bait and switch. It's not that what you're describing isn't true or legitimate. And I said this on my podcast. If your priorities are what

you have kind of articulated your priorities as being, I think it's a perfectly legitimate argument. But I have to hold space for the fact that for many people, it simply is inadequate. Wait, let me, can I respond? Yeah, go ahead. Let me jump in here. So my issue is that many people on the left are, I would say, dishonestly refusing to acknowledge any good things that were done. We could all on the left list, like here's the 57 things we hate that Biden did.

But when something good happens, I'm the only one talking about it. And then I get accused of being a DNC shill. Now, I'm not, I'm not like, look, I'm the only one talking about it. And then I get accused of being a DNC show. Now, I'm not I'm not like, look, I'm not blind. I think in order to be intellectually honest, you have to look at here's the good things that happen. Here's the bad thing that happened. I'm going to give them all to you. And then you could judge how much you value each and which one you weigh more and how that factors into your like voting analysis. But I was like the poster boy back in the day where people viewed me this way as like he's the purity tester. He's like the main purity tester guy. And I didn't vote for

Biden in 2020 because I didn't think he would pass my purity test. Now, at the time, people could go back and watch the video. My purity test was super fucking lenient. It was like, if I'm convinced you're going to do like two or three of the things that I value highly, then I would vote for you because I know it's basically down to just the Democrat and the Republican, no matter how much we want to wish the Green Party or libertarians want to wish the Libertarian Party into existence. And so when I look at the record, again, I can list all the bad things, but you just mentioned the NLRB raising overtime pay, or you mentioned the thing where, you know, they automatically recognize the union if the bosses try to bust it up. There's also the overtime pay rule where now it's not $33,000. It's about $55,000 a year where now you get overtime pay. That's a huge, huge change.

Student loan debt reduction and even Biden even coming back after the Supreme Court tried to slap it down. And he said, no, I'm going to try to do it through the Higher Education Act now. There's little things we could go after. Oh, the interest rate. Yes, that's bad. I agree with you on that. But we got to recognize that that is all things considered a step in the right direction, pulling out of Afghanistan. He actually had the balls to do it, even when the media was shitting on him relentlessly. And I didn't see anybody on the left coming into his defense at that point. I saw a lot of people. I was like the only fucking one. It was like me and Matt Iglesias. I definitely defended him. Okay. Well, then it's like three people. I didn't, and all

these, oh, I'm so anti-war, anti-war. He pulls out of Afghanistan and it gets, it gets messy because that's what happens when you pull out of wars. And all of a sudden, oh my God, you know, it's the end of the world. I thought that was actually a good moment for the left. I saw a lot of consensus good on you because we almost resented

and kind of were enjoying the extent to which he was getting, you know, dogpiled by the mainstream media and we were the only ones defending him. So I would quibble with that a little bit.

I didn't see much defending him. I really didn't. Kyle, what people are responding to, if I can offer this, is not the idea that you are accurately describing advancements, good things that Joe Biden is doing. I think you can also say Obama did some good things. No, Biden is way better than Obama, not even close. That's not the point I'm making. It's not that one is better than the other.

You could also sit here and say Obama did good things. Now, the way you bristled at me saying that, I could say, oh, why won't you just acknowledge that Obama did good things? The same way that you're saying that leftists won't acknowledge they bristle when you acknowledge that Biden did good things. And it's because we have different standards and we're making different kinds of comparisons. That's not my issue because they're not even acknowledging the good things is my point. I have a list of 47 things here. I've heard nobody talk about any of them. But let me let me get to the core of this point. The reason that people are frustrated with that kind of analysis is because it's been used for so long by liberals to justify why people shouldn't be asking for more. I'm not saying that that's what you're doing. But if you bring up

something like student debt, when the consensus of all the student debt experts that I've talked to on my podcast, people from the Debt Collective, the Asher Taylors of the world, the legal experts I've brought on, is that there was a path toward doing this, to canceling all student debt that would not have been been ongoing until beginning of this month for the last three years, was the same authority that he could have canceled all student debt with a stroke of a pen. He chose not to do that because he decided to means test the program. He circulated those documents. I got one in my inbox last August, I believe it was, to see if you qualify for student debt. It was a very easy form. But when he did that, that started the clock for people to be able to challenge it in court, which what six states did, two of them were successful, and now here we are today. Not only did he decline to do the unstoppable mechanism to actually cancel all student debt,

he additionally chose to use a legal authority, which when many legal experts said was the most vulnerable one. So you're now saying, well, he could have used the Higher education act. He did. No, he did. He could have, he could have done that in the first instance, but he didn't. And now we tried it again through the higher education act. The idea that it's like, it's a conspiracy. He doesn't want to actually cancel it. No, he, he appealed the case like four or five times. And then at the end of it, when the Supreme court said, no, you can't do that. He said, fuck you. I can. And he did the higher education. That's exactly what we wanted him to do. Then he does it. And people go, oh, that's not good enough.

It's like, that's ridiculous. What we wanted him to do was first and foremost, just cancel this. No, no, no. I expected him to do nothing on student debt. This is the point I'm trying to get across to you is that I expected nothing from Biden and he did way more than I expected. Let's be honest about that. We have different expectations. We have different expectations. Of course I'm going to talk about it through my expectations. I'm me. But let me, I want to pivot this conversation a little bit because what we really have is a tactical disagree. We could quibble about student loan debt. We could quibble about all kinds of aspects of Biden administration. All of us would like him to do more. There's no doubt about that. Our political, but hold on a second. Our political, our political aims are ultimately very similar. But I do think the student loan debt example is instructive because it shows what has been effective in terms of securing real gains versus what has

been ineffective. Jill Stein running in 2016. I don't think she was a spoiler, but the Democratic Party thinks she was a spoiler. They put that out to the public. So in the theory of change where a third party would force all of this revolutionary change on the Democratic Party, that should have worked. But instead, it served to allow the Democratic Party to basically demonize and dismiss third party efforts. And then they prop up Joe Biden. So that definitely didn't work. However, the fact that Joe Biden had to be on a primary debate stage versus Bernie and Marianne and a whole lot of Elizabeth Warren, a whole lot of other people who were pushing

him on student loan debt cancellation forced him into a position of doing something when he 100 percent would have done nothing otherwise. And we can see that now because, you know, the fact that they've basically like blocked any sort of real Democratic price process within the Democratic primary has made it possible for him to literally promise nothing for this next term thus far. So you can see how the third party effort was not successful in bringing about whatever revolutionary change people want to see. And the process that Bernie engaged in and that Marianne Williamson is engaging in now was far more effective in actually delivering results. And that's what I'm focused on. So first of all,

you, I think, are both fundamentally, dramatically overestimating and overstating and giving way too much credit in the second that you can make your labor point, the student debt point. Absolutely not. Joe Biden promised and coerced people to the polls by saying he was going to cancel at least $10,000 of everybody's student loan debt and moreover cancel all student loan debt for graduates of HBCUs. And he went down to Georgia, a state that he not only needed to win for the presidency, but needed to win for the Senate. And where there are three of the major HBCUs in the United States of America made that promise and people knocked doors and turned people out to the polls on the basis of that promise, which he immediately stopped talking about the second he got elected and reneged upon. He also knew, he knew the authority that he had to cancel law student debt. And I know because all of these student debt advocates have been talking about how they were directly liaising with this office and communicating these points, and they chose to

ignore them and do a plan that he knew could be abstract. You can say it's not a conspiracy theory. That's conspiratorial thinking. But it's either a conspiracy or he's an idiot. Those are the options. And I'm not especially comfortable in validating either of those things. Now, you were saying that you were looking through the prism of your own perspective. No, I was saying I expected nothing from him like we all expected nothing from him. Absolutely not. The people that he promised. I expected nothing from him. I expected nothing of Joe Biden. He was the guy who brought us NAFTA. He's the guy who brought us the Iraq war. He's the guy who wrote the Patriot Act, wrote the crime bill. I expected nothing of him. When a presidential candidate makes a promise to people and lies to them in order to get them to go to the polls,

I believe that it's my job as a member of independent media to make it clear so that people don't fall for those kinds of mistakes going forward. People, if Biden wants to run as I'm a milquetoast incrementalist who's just better than Trump, he can feel free to do that all day and night. And then he would have lived up to the expectations that he set for himself

in the context of a primary campaign. He did run as a milquetoast. He promised to cancel all student debt for every graduate of an HBCU and $10,000 to $20,000 of student debt for people who earn less than $125,000 a year. Now, that might not matter to you. And I have defended you guys against claims that, you know, you don't care about this stuff because, you know, you're out of touch and it doesn't affect you in material. I think that some of those claims get really silly and overly personalized. But Biden made a choice to tell 44 million Americans who have student debt that he was

not only going to not fulfill his promise to them, but that in the middle of the debt ceiling argument of a couple of months ago, the one thing that he was going to bargain away to get the debt ceiling passed was ending the student loan moratorium. So now it's not me. I'm not I'm not the one in control of whoever votes. He has to make the case to those 44 million Americans who's who's he's starting their student debt up. Right.

Months stronger or weaker than what you expected, because it's way stronger than what I expected. Hold on. Way weaker than what I expected. I expected nothing from a student debt. Nothing. The real question, though, is we all want all of the debt to be canceled. Duh. Yeah, of course. What is going to most what is the most likely path to get us there?

It's not Joe Biden, obviously. Hold on. But I don't see how Cornel West getting 5 percent of the vote and unintentionally helping to reelect Trump. That doesn't get us there at all. Let's get into that. So for two things. If you have a primary contender actually able face to face to pressure him, we have seen the way that that can potentially work. So why is that an argument against Cornel West? It doesn't have to be exclusive. But do you think that the project of defeating Trump is worthwhile at all? Because I would turn back on you. You asked the question, like, where's the bottom of the lesser evil question? Like, where where does that end? I would turn it back on you and say, where does it become not just a lesser evil, but like, actually, this person is significantly better. And I would say that Biden, for my disappointments with him, for all

of the things that I talk about, plenty, including disappointments on student loan debt, including on the pandemic relief that I talked about, including on the railways, all these things, right, Ukraine. At what point, though, do you acknowledge that this person is a lot better than Donald Trump? And so when you're in this binary choice where let's not pretend like Cornel West is going to be president of the United States, it is worth making the choice in that situation to reelect Joe Biden and get the NLRB and get the antitrust stuff and get what is at hand the stage, but I'm not going to vote for him. I'm not going to weaken the person who's ultimately obviously going to be the president of the United States. I'm going to, why not vote for Biden in the primaries? Why? And it's, you're wrinkling your bow because it's a ridiculous argument. I completely agree. I don't see the argument for Marianne and against Cornel West, they have nothing to do with each other. You can vote for Marianne in the primary. You can be happy that she's on the debate stage, which obviously they aren't allowing,

which is material to this argument, I've got to say. Some people are, you're saying, what is the Green Party going to do? The Democratic Party has demonstrated that it won't host a free and fair and open primary. I get that. But how does Cornel West getting 5% of the vote and helping unintentionally to reelect Trump. So how does that move us towards our two things? One, you said this in the now viral clip. That just framing Cornel West, the spoiler, looking at those polls in those polls that you referenced, Biden is losing in both of them with or without Cornel West in the race. Now, Cornel West makes it worse. I just want to clarify one thing.

I'm not blaming people or saying like it's their fault for Trump getting reelected or whatever. But I am saying we would like it if the way the Democratic Party responded to Cornel West would be to cancel all the student loan. But we know that's not reality. So let's go. We know that what ought to happen and the reality of what will happen are two very different things. Let's get to the second point. Yeah. You framed the 2016 votes for Jill Stein and the reaction of the Democratic Party subsequently as evidence that a concerted movement effort to withhold one's votes has been proven ineffective. It is obviously the case, Crystal, that there was not a concerted effort in 2016 or any kind of structural movement to withhold one's vote for Hillary Clinton in favor of Jill Stein. It was just a bunch of us angry Bernie bros, a very small number, by the way, because we all know sitting here that more Bernie Sanders voters in 2016 bent the knee and voted for Hillary Clinton than Hillary Clinton voters in 2008 bent the knee and voted for Barack Obama. We all know these statistics. We've been saying them back at neoliberals for the last five, six, whatever years. That being said, there was no argument to control the media narrative

and present an opportunity for actual leverage and change. So there wasn't like a group, there was no spokesperson. There was no politician. There was no left media that was saying, here, I have a organized movement, an organized group of people who are willing to actually change their mind and vote for the Democratic nominee in exchange for various concessions. That didn't exist. And I'm, by the way, not advocating for it. I know that some of my friends like Nathan Robinson have said that Cornel West should do exactly that, say that he'd be willing to drop out in exchange for various concessions. I think that's better than nothing.

I think that's more than, frankly, I love Marianne and I hope she's successful, but that's more than Marianne is likely to get out of this. However, that is not even my plan, my perspective. What I am saying, though, is that knowing that the Democratic Party is fundamentally not willing to be fair. They're willing to rig the election. They're willing to change the order of the states. They are willing to completely block Marian out of the media. It feels rich to say that running within the Democratic Party is manifestly and demonstrably more effective in actually changing the outcome of the policy than Cornel West, who at the very least, you keep being very dismissive, Kyle, about this 5% matching fund.

Well, I've said like two words in the past 10 minutes, okay? So I'm not being dismissive about anything. I haven't gotten a fucking word in. Okay. What is it that you're chomping at the bit to say, Kyle?

It's the structural barriers against running as a third party, as rigged as it is by the DNC against the outsider Democrats, which it definitely is. It's even more rigged against third parties, which is why they always get

like 3% of the vote. Which is literally why... And Bernie got 43% of the vote. Which is literally why people feel it is a structural advantage to get someone like Cornel West to 5% of the vote so they can get federal matching funds. To me as a voter. He'd get 40% as a Democrat. For me as a voter in New York, I'm not interested in shoring up the Democratic Party. No, that's him getting his ideas out of shoring up Cornel West. That's the whole point. I am not a Democrat.

I understand that. That's very clear. But I'm saying that would shore up Cornel West. And the people who also don't want to vote for Joe Biden under any circumstances are not Democrats. And fundamentally, you can make your argument. I think it's a perfectly legitimate argument to make to Democrats.

I think that Democrats might think that Joe Biden is a manifestly better Democrat than other Democrats. It's not about whether you're a Democrat or a Republican. It's about what are your political goals. And I think that we share a lot of the same political goals. But no, there's a big one that we don't share. But hold on. So I still don't understand.

Just lay out for me. Yeah. Like what in the ideal scenario happens and how does that constitute any sort of revolutionary change or help to further the goals that we largely share? Yeah, I think for one, getting federal matching funds for third party candidates,

since I believe third parties are going to be a much better vehicle to actual meaningful change in this country than the Democratic Party, is infinitely more significant a goal. But third parties haven't gotten a single electoral vote in years.

And it's like round and round and round and round in a circle. No, but it's true. I mean, look at Ross Perot had all the money in the world. It didn't matter. He didn't get one electoral vote. He didn't get one electoral vote. Do you agree that rank choice voting needs to come first? That's the important question.

Do you agree that if we get rank choice voting, then yes, overnight, third parties become more viable. But until we get them, they're not viable. I think that Cornel West running in a general election where he has been doing this, he's been talking about ranked choice voting in interviews, but continuing to talk about how the onus is on the Democratic Party to prevent the spoiler effect.

He is in a position now running in a general election every time he goes on TV to say, if you're upset at me being a spoiler, you need to look at the Democratic Party, who across the country for the last decades has been purposefully undermining any ballot measures that effectively put into effect ranked choice voting in Maine, in North Carolina, the way they attacked Matthew Ho. I am not the enemy. They are. And that's the burden shifting, the narrative burden shifting I think the left should be engaged in right now. To the extent that you think that Cornel West can ruin Biden's chances,

isn't it Biden's responsibility to find those votes, not among disaffected third partiers who don't owe him anything anyway, but the tens of thousands and millions of disaffected Democrats who aren't going to vote for him? We've all talked about this together. In Wisconsin in 2016, there were 88,000 registered Black voters who voted in 2012 who declined to vote in 2016. That's like two or three times the margin by which Hillary Clinton lost in that state alone. And yet we're sitting here talking about whether or not Cornel West is going to pull some third party voters away from the Democratic Party. It's the difference between what I would love to happen and the reality that we have experienced now.

I mean, we've we tried it before in 2016. It did not help. What did we try in 2016? The third party effort. Jill Stein was not a spoiler. It is not those voters fault who voted for you like you guys that voted for Jill Stein. But she got blamed anyway. But she got blamed.

And then the left was further marginalized as a result of it. So I just I don't see the connection. If I did, I would love to vote for Cornel West. It would feel way better to vote for Cornel West. I share his politics almost 100 percent. But I don't see the connection between voting for Cornel West and achieving any of the aims. And I see a much more direct connection between protecting the Biden National Labor Relations Board and allowing this little budding, exciting, amazing, potentially transformational labor movement to actually grow. Whereas if Trump gets reelected, which is, listen, it's the fact based on how the Democratic Party is going to respond to Cornel West's election bid. It is more likely that Donald Trump gets elected with Cornel West

in the race. And that to me is a massive loss because we know what his record is. We know what his National Labor Relations Board was. We know who his labor secretaries were and how they were engaged in all this union busting. And so I see a much more direct connection between that moving the ball in our direction than, you know, Cornel West getting 5 percent and either his candidacy not really mattering at all or being used once again to, you know, smear the left and marginalize the left and say these are just the people that are interested in getting Trump elected. So to that second point, I'm going to be honest. Not only do I not care about arguments that the left is going to be smeared, I think it's silly because no matter what we do, the left is going to get smeared. Bernie won Nevada and it was, oh my God, we're going to decapitate people in Central Park. You know, it is, I think, deeply unrealistic to expect that there's ever going to be a left movement that genuinely challenges power in this country that's not going to be smeared. And if you are choosing your political strategy on the basis of what's going to get you a pat on the head from MSNBC, I know that's not what I'm not,

I don't mean to mischaracterize you, but that is. But listen, that's fine. And I agree with you. Left is going to be smeared. But the question is, what is actually going to move the ball forward? And I just don't because I don't see policies. All the question is, what is actually going to move the ball forward? I'm confused by the way you keep asking that. Because I don't see- Because policy is all that matters at the end of the day. Because I don't see how Cornel West getting 5% and helping to reelect Trump ends up with things going in a better direction.

Why do you keep saying it like that, Crystal? He gets 5% and then the Green Party, a third party effort, it gets stronger and more well-funded and more able to compete in future elections. Until we have ranked choice voting, there is no even 1% viability for them. Can you admit that? Can you acknowledge that? Who do you think? That it's until we get ranked choice voting, no third party has any chance in hell. You agree with that, right?

Who do you think has been doing most of the ranked choice? Are you going to answer that? Who do you think? I'm going to answer it. It's a simple question. I'm going to answer it in my own time, in my own words, Kyle, respectfully. It's a simple one. The ranked choice voting thing.

If we get rank choice voting. I go around. I do a lot of podcasts. And I don't know what's going on right now. It might be the phase of the moon. We had the double moon last month. But I'm getting a little frustrated with feeling shouted down and disrespected in every single space that I go into. I got to say, I promise I'm going to answer your question, Kyle.

Sit tight. I got it coming for into. I gotta say, I promise I'm gonna answer your question, Kyle. Sit tight. I got it coming for you. I'll sit tight. I, who do you think has been doing the bulk and the best funded ranked choice voting advocacy in terms of getting it on ballots and getting it passed in the United States of America? Third party voters.

The Libertarian Party. Yeah. Because unlike the Green Party, I'm no like fan of the Libertarian Party, but for obvious reasons, they were enormously better funded than the Green Party. And they, as a consequence, have been able to make much greater gains in actually getting ranked choice voting passed around the country. What I'm saying is that there's a tangible material benefit to getting more money for a Green Party, whatever third party happens to be. But right now, all we have is the Green Party for obvious reasons. Getting them more money to do the work across the country to advance third parties,

ranked choice voting, rather, is exactly the goal that you're articulating. So, yes, I do see a direct connection between your goal, your stated goal of getting ranked choice voting and voting for the Green Party. You know who's not going to fight for ranked choice voting? The Democratic Party. Here's my point. Here's my point. Here's my point. There's not even a 1% chance or a 0.1% chance of Cornel West winning unless or until we get rank choice voting. So I have to be honest, I feel like it's self disenfranchisement to really

like put all your effort into third parties before we get rank choice, putting the cart before the horse, in my opinion. That's my point. And on the issue of Democrats versus Republicans, we know either the Democrat or the Republican is going to win. And clearly we have a disagreement in terms of how good of a job Joe Biden is doing. Because like I said, I expected nothing of him, Brianna. I expected, this is the guy who brought us the Iraq war and the Patriot Act and NAFTA. And he's like the poster child of the conservative Democrat and the neoliberal. But then he gets in office and he does all these things which shock me. He massively reduced the drone war by over 90 percent. He, like I said, pulled out of Afghanistan.

The Supreme Court overturned the EPA's ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. And the Democrats slipped into the IRA, a provision that redefines carbon as a pollutant, which then allows the EPA to start protecting the environment again. If we didn't get that, and yes, that was brought to us by Democrats, we would be beyond fucked on the issue of climate change. We still are, but we'd be even more fucked if the EPA couldn't do basic EPA stuff.

We have project labor agreements for hundreds of thousands of construction workers. That came to us from Biden. $15 minimum wage for federal contractors and employees. That's from Biden. Gun reform with red flag laws and closing the boyfriend loophole. Those are definitely good things.

Katonji Brown Jackson on the court. A George Floyd executive order to create a registry of abusive cops. We have the PAC Act, which is health care for veterans exposed to toxic burn pits, which every single Republican voted against. He added 800,000 manufacturing jobs. I didn't expect any of these things. So when I talk about Biden the way I do is because none of these things were on the menu and we got them. So now when I look at the fact it's either going to be Trump or Biden, a standard

generic Republican or standard generic Democrat, the way I feel now versus the way I felt in the past is like, oh, this is definitely way better. If you ask me in 2019 or 2020, I'd be like, I don't know, man, flip a coin. 52% maybe a Democrat's a little bit better than a Republican. Now I'm looking at it like it's not even close. One blows the other out of the water. And all I care about is the policy. And when we have all these policies, I mean, we have a 15% corporate minimum tax rate now. That is not something we had previously. You'd have corporations paying nothing in taxes, or they'd even get a negative tax rate, which is a subsidy effectively from the taxpayers. These things are not nothing. We have a 1% tax on stock buybacks. They're cracking down on wealthy tax cheats. Like all these things are very good. They're objectively good. So do you agree that Biden

is better than what we expected on the left? Maybe you've already said that your expectations on the ground and it seems like he's surpassed your expectations. He has not surpassed mine. I don't know. I don't know what you want me to say. But he's not better than what you thought. No, he's not better than what I thought. Really? No. Do you expect him to be better than I did, for sure? Well, I expected him to, well, I didn't really expect him to fulfill his campaign promises, but I'm not going to pat him on the back when he so flagrantly lied about them, no. There's been a lot of talk by Elon Musk about free speech and about how and when to bow to the wishes of authoritarian governments, censorship and all of that. But one case that we definitely wanted to highlight is what's happening with Saudi Arabia.

Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. For people who don't know, Saudi Arabia is a place where Twitter and or X, I guess, is now currently known is extraordinarily popular. It's very important in Saudi society. And currently, there is a lawsuit going on right now that says that Twitter and or X is helping Saudi Arabia actually commit grave human rights abusers against its users, including by disclosing confidential user data at the request of Saudi authorities, quote, at a much higher rate than it has for the US, UK, and or Canada. The lawsuit was actually brought last May by Areej Al-Sadhan, the sister of a Saudi worker who has forcibly disappeared and sentenced to 20 years in prison, surrounds the surrounding

infiltration of a California company by three Saudi agents, two of whom were posing as employees in 2014, 2015, and led to the arrest of the brother and the exposure of the, quote, identity of thousands of anonymous Twitter users, some of whom were later reportedly detained and tortured as part of the government's crackdown on dissent. They have now updated their claim last week to include new allegations how Twitter willfully ignored

or had knowledge of the Saudi government's campaign to ferret out critics, but because of financial considerations and efforts to keep close ties to the Saudi government, which is a top investor in the company, provided assistance to the kingdom. Now, clearly, what they actually said is that this was under the leadership of them, Chief Executive Jack Dorsey. The question, though, is how Twitter, the company, will be actually handling this as we go forward, and especially important in light of what's currently happening right now, let's put this please up there on the screen, a Saudi man has just been sentenced to death after his tweets were criticizing

the country's leadership. Saudi activists say that his tweets and his retweets were presented as the evidence of his so-called crime of insulting the king or the crown prince and then supporting a terrorist ideology. So what you can see here, Crystal, is the analysis of the case is the guy had 10 followers and he mostly retweeted posts critical of MBS. And now he's being literally sentenced to death. He is the father of seven and a retired teacher. There's also a question here about how they got his user information because he ran two anonymous accounts on the site on X. He was not a public account. So all of this is really important around how Elon is going to be handling not only such requests, but is he going to speak out against what's happening here, against this man?

I mean, being sentenced to death for something you did on your platform is completely insane. Jesus Christ. Yeah, well, and this is super relevant because, put this last piece up on the screen, Saudi Prince Al-Waleed is Twitter's second largest shareholder. So Saudi government officials have become incredibly significant in terms of funding Twitter overall, which is why, you know, always when a government is pressuring a social media company to do whatever, that becomes a very complicated set of issues for whoever is running that company. But when you have a lot of cash involved as well,

it makes it even more difficult. There's actually a lot of layers to this because, first of all, Jack Dorsey, one of the areas where he has been critical of Elon Musk, including on our show when we interviewed him, was about Musk's approach to government requests with regard to the platform. And Dorsey had to try to have more of a consistent at that level sort of free speech principle where it wasn't just about, okay, whatever the laws of the land are, that's what I'm going to abide by. Elon has explicitly stated he has a different view, which is that whatever is legal in that country, whether they have a dictator or whatever the situation is, that's what they're going to abide by. That's what he used to justify, you know, censorship of, I believe it was a BBC documentary about India, about the Indian

prime minister. That's what he used to justify the censoring of an investigative journalist in Turkey. That's been his sort of like, okay, this is my guidelines. This is how I operate. So number one, since this happened under Jack Dorsey, you can see how even with his stated principles, clearly he wasn't always living up to what he was claiming he was doing. And number two, you see in the case of this man who's being put to death because of something he said at Twitter. I mean, this is a really dramatic case in point test of the Elon Musk principle of like, okay, well, if this is legal in Saudi, are you just cool with it? Like even when it's, you know, people are being rounded up and sentenced to death for exercising, you know, the most basic understanding of free speech, are you still okay with that if it is technically legal under that jurisdiction?

I mean, I think that that's a poor standard to hold. It's a terrible standard. But that's exactly what he has articulated to be his guiding principle. Yeah, it's incredibly dumb. Look, this is the problem with owning Twitter, with owning or X, with having a platform which engages in speech and then holding ideals here and trying to balance business and all of that. He willingly stepped forward into it with a free speech, quote, absolutist position. So, I mean, you're supposed to abide by that.

Just saying you're going along with government regulations, I mean, and every dictatorial government on earth will just pass whatever thing that they want you to do and you're just going to do it. That's not how we should, American companies should operate. And if they are, well, we should absolutely change the law in order to make sure that they don't do that. So anyways, lots of interesting stuff going on here. But first and foremost, just what a ridiculous and barbarous decision in order to slaughter somebody and probably behead them publicly for the crime of posting anonymously to your 10 followers. Unbelievable. Unreal. Okay. We'll see you guys later. Hilarious moment in a recent new interview with Trump. He wants to debate,

not do the GOP debates. Somebody else. I'm not even going to tease it. Let's take a listen. 90 million people. And the only thing I think that might draw an audience that even approaches that would be if you were to sit down with the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle and Prince Harry. They don't like you much. Would you do that for the ratings? Well, I don't know that they don't like me. I said that I don't think they're very appropriate, what they're saying, what they're doing. And I didn't like the way she dealt with the queen. I became very friendly with the queen. She was an incredible woman. At 95, she was so sharp.

She was 100%. When you watch Biden, you say, this is a different planet. But they treated her with great disrespect, and I didn't like it. And I didn't like the idea that they were getting U.S. security when they came over here. Now, I think it's not a good situation going on with the two of them. But I didn't know that they don't like me. Somebody mentioned it might be possible. They wouldn't be the only ones.

But I mean, that would get ratings, wouldn't it? Oh, if you want to set it up, let's set it up. Let's do something. I'd love to debate her. I would love it. All right. I need this to happen. Obviously, first, I need Trump to do the actual GOP debate.

So I think that's good. Democracy, et cetera. But I need to see this debate. I mean, it's just, it would be such great content. And yeah, I just, there's so much to say. I mean, for me, everyone knows, look, yes, it's true. I can't stand Meghan Markle or Prince Harry. I think they're complete narcissists.

Of course, the South Park episode on them nailed it, the whole we want privacy thing. They are so lazy as well after the revelations about their Spotify deal where, I mean, I just can't imagine that, Crystal. Having somebody else sit in for you and do an interview and then come in and record your voice on top of that, that's so crazy when you're getting paid millions of dollars. And they were doing this like once a week or something like that for their pod. So anyway, I just thought it was hilarious. It was one of those where it will never happen. I kind of wish it would happen.

It would be like a throwback to the old days. But Hugh Hewitt is not wrong that a lot of people would watch it as they watch the interview. Yeah, it was such a like random question. But then he ended up getting such an amazing response. Yeah, I don't know what made him think of that, but it ended up getting an incredible response. I mean, listen, I don't even know what point to make. I kind of disagree with you. I don't know that I could handle this thing.

There's just no one to cheer for. It would be amazing content, but I just don't know if I could take it. So I'm hoping this remains in the land of fantasy. Really? Oh, no. This would just be incredible. I mean take it. So I'm hoping this remains in the land of fantasy. Really? Oh, no. This would just be incredible. I mean, it'd be one of those. She's so she's got the same thing that Kamala's got going on that like Aaron Sorkin-esque

like wants to be a world historical figure. My favorite story about Meghan Markle was apparently it was during the child tax credit or something like that. Not child. There was some legislation where she was lobbying for and she somehow got the individual cell phone numbers for some U.S. senators and would cold call them. And they'd be like, hello. And they're like, this is Meghan Markle. I'd like to. And they were like, who like what makes you think I care what you think about this legislation? I have to say literally at all. I just like I don't really care. Like I generally generally

find them annoying, but like that's as deep as it goes. But there seems to be this deep vein on the right of just absolute hatred, obsessive hatred. I have it. Of these two people who have no real power. They're sort of like cultural media dilettantes. And I don't really understand it. I don't really understand why there's such a thing around it. I think that there was the attempt, the media creation of like the,

to embrace and to like, to embrace and to respect the narcissism fundamentally of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, who were trying to destroy a 1,000-year-old institution just because they thought they were better than them. And yeah, I find that just like, I mean, as a semi-traditionalist, like with respect for norms and all that, I find that just like, I mean, as a semi-traditionalist, like with respect for norms and all that,

I find that just like deeply offensive. I think that there's a lot of stuff that you can say about the royal family of legitimate critiques. And I don't think any of theirs was real or it was real really at all. And like the Trump people are not really known for their like respect for norms.

Yes and no. I mean, I think that there is like a reverence, so to speak for, I don't know, I can't explain it. I can only tell you why I can't stand her. And I think a lot of it is media as well. I think, you know, I mean, the car crash is the most famous thing where, I mean, people credulously, you know, looked at it. And basically, people credulously took the word that they were like in some harrowing car chase or any of these when they're clearly just looking for attention. And I don't know, for me, it's like,

there are certain figures, her, Jussie Smollett, and others where, you know, just even that temporary willingness to take them seriously just is one of those where I cannot stand them. They repel me in such a repugnant way that I just, I don't know. I, she, I'm, I don't know.

I'm totally willing to admit this. I have Megan Derangement Syndrome, 100%. She absolutely drives me crazy. Yeah, I can't really, I don't really get it. I have to be honest with you. I don't really get it. That's all right. Which is part of why I wouldn't be eager to actually see this thing come to fruition

because it just would feed into this, what I see as complete sort of obsessive, unhinged relationship with this one random woman. Fair enough. You know, it would be healthier if we could all just forget that she existed. Although for her, that would be the worst thing of all time. That's not what she's looking for. All right. We'll see you guys later. Hi, I'm Matt Stoller, author of Monopoly-focused sub-stack newsletter, Big, and an antitrust policy analyst. I have a great segment for you today on this big breakdown. It's about the first big antitrust trial of the 21st century, which starts next Tuesday

against the search giant, Google. I want to start with a picture of an octopus. Since 1890, there have been a few big monopolization trials that have shaped the biggest corporations in America. So starting with Standard Oil around the turn of the 20th century. So this is a cartoon of that corporate behemoth. You can see Standard Oil written on the top of the octopus's head. And there's a reason for that. Americans have traditionally symbolized the monopoly power as an entity with tentacles reaching out everywhere, hence an octopus.

It's actually still a good metaphor today. So Google, which is worth almost $2 trillion in terms of its total value, has a lot of tentacles. It knows more about most of us than our families because it answers intimate questions from billions of people every day. It controls much of our communications to boot. It has 95% market share in search, annual revenue of a little less than $300 billion a year, and 15 products with more than 500 million users apiece. We've perhaps never seen any corporate asset as powerful as Google Search.

Marketing professor Scott Galloway in 2017, he went so far as to say that, quote, Google is God. Okay, so why is Google on trial? And what does this trial signify? Well, Google is on trial for violating antitrust law, which means, in short, that it has an illegal monopoly. The government argues that Google controls roughly 90 to 95% of general search and search advertising, and that it has used this remarkable market share, monopoly share, using illegal tactics to keep rivals out of the market unfairly. Now, Google, of course, disagrees,

but we'll get to the details of the case in a bit. But let's ask a different question. So, does this case really matter? Let's put it in context. Don't powerful corporations always win? Doesn't big money always carry the day in America? In fact, no. Historically, anti-monopoly has been the pro-business tradition in America, ensuring equality in the marketplace. And to understand what that means, it helps to look at previous antitrust cases involving the biggest corporations in the world at the time that they were held. So there have been a few big ones that are as historically important as the Google case. So there was Standard Oil in the 1890s, Alcoa in the 1940s, IBM in the 1970s, AT&T in the 1980s, Microsoft in the 1990s. And these cases are almost always against high-tech firms that control a key sector in the economy. So oil in the 1890s,

telecommunications in the 1980s, operating systems and office productivity software in the 1990s. Win or lose, they determine what our society looks like going forward. Now, most people think technological progress is due to scientists and engineers figuring stuff out and innovating. And it's sort of true, but it's also due to law. Want to know why we even have the internet? It's sort of true, but it's also due to law. Want to know why we even have the internet?

Well, one reason, and an important one, is that in 1982, a judge named Harold Green ruled to break up AT&T, which had historically tried to control its network tightly and probably would have tried to block things like dial-up modems from being attached to its network. It certainly did block a lot of stuff prior to the 1960s. So you can see a memorial to the AT&T case when you walk into the DC court building, which is the same one where a judge named Amit Mehta is hearing the Google trial. So you can see it. There's a cartoon on display as a man in a robe tangled up in phone courts. That's a cartoon of Harold Green.

He was an extraordinary man. So he was born in Germany in 1923, fled the Nazis, enlisted in the U.S. Army during World War II, and then went to night school after the war. He ended up at the Justice Department where he helped draft the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. And in 1978, Jimmy Carter put him on the court as a district judge. That's where he heard the AT&T case. Now, so Green was no fool, and he was no fan of corporate power. He ruled against AT&T and sought the goal, sought to fulfill the goal of, quote, deconcentrating AT&T's vast economic power. The guy had been up close with the Nazis. He was not intimidated by a large corporation. And the thing about it is, is at the time, there were a lot of people said, oh, this is terrible for the country. It's going to hurt this great corporation that everybody loves, very innovative, Bell Labs.

But in truth, the breakup really delivered. Telephone rates came down for consumers. But far more importantly, there was a massive explosion of innovation, including, in all likelihood, the development of the Internet and mobile telephony. The judge in the Google case is named Judge Mehta. He's pictured here. Let's take a look. Now, Mehta is now in the same position as Judge Green, able to shape a future to all of us or just to Google. But in contrast to Green, Mehta's career tracks very much like most of our technocratic elites. Now, he's an immigrant, but he grew up in a suburb of Maryland,

worked at the big law firm Latham & Watkins for a few years of training, and then he was a public defender in D.C., and then he served as a white-collar defense attorney. Meta doesn't, as far as I can tell, have a strong record of recognizing the threat of concentrated corporate power or an instinctive skepticism of the powerful. And we can already see some problematic choices from Meta. And I'm going to focus on Meta. I'm going to do a few segments on the Google case. I'm going to focus on Meta because judges really go unexamined in our culture, and it's important to change that. They are political actors. So Google executives, including its CEO Sundar Pichai, have been found in multiple cases, including this one, of destroying evidence related to

potential antitrust violations, essentially deleting chat logs. So chat logs involving discussion over antitrust show that, quote, Pichai personally asked whether a chat group's history could be turned off and then attempted to delete that message, end quote. That is a big no-no. Okay, you are not supposed to destroy chat logs and antitrust-related or monopoly-related evidence. You just don't do that. That's illegal. And in California, a judge actually sanctioned Google for this behavior. They levied penalties on Google and its lawyers.

But so far, Judge Mehta has not. Now, I don't want to overstate the problem. The judge has ruled reasonably well in an earlier merger case. He might do something about the document destruction. But that's who he is. So that's the judge. Let's go a little more into the case, which is all about something called defaults, right? That's how Google controls its market power.

At least that's what the government argued. The government says that Google's monopoly in search is illegal, and it has maintained this monopoly not by making a better product. If you notice, there's a lot more ads in Google search today, but by locking down everywhere that consumers might be able to find a different search engine option and making sure that they only see Google instead. So here's a slide that the Department of Justice included in its complaint in 2020. So it is the default search engine, Google, whenever you open your phone or whenever you open most browsers. As a result, when you use Google, you are giving Google some data, which it can use to improve its search engines and which it's more importantly, its competitors cannot. Now, the basic claim is that Google has essentially bought up all the shelf

space where people might find a different search engine. It pays $45 billion a year to have distributors refuse to carry its competitors' products, signing deals with Apple, Motorola, Samsung, major US wireless carriers like AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, browser developers like Mozilla, Opera, UC Web to secure default status for its general search engine, T-Mobile, Verizon, browser developers like Mozilla, Opera, UC Web to secure default status for its general search engine, and in many cases, to specifically prohibit Google's counterparties from dealing with Google's competitors. So that's the case. And the big partner here for Google is Apple, which receives something like $10 to $15 billion a year for placing Google as the default search engine on

the iPhone and the Mac. And this revenue is really important to Apple. It's basically Apple and Google sharing monopoly profits. Apple's fantastically profitable. But still, $15 billion is a lot of money, and that's just in the US. Now, here's a story that came out in the Financial Times in 2020 when the Apple case was filed. Apple is in fact preparing its own search engine in case its deal with Google falls apart due to this case. In other words, if the government succeeds, we'll have more search engines and competition in this market, because at least Apple will enter. Now, it should be a slam-dunk case. And not just because Google's search has become much worse over the last 5 to 10 years,

packed increasingly with ads and poor results. To understand why this case makes sense, look no further than the experience of Neva, a search engine whose quality was as high or higher than that of Google, but died a few months ago because it just couldn't get access to customers. Neva, according to David Pierce in The Verge, was running an AI product, so that's the most innovative of artificial intelligence, a full stack search engine, and a privacy-first browser. If people went through all the bother of switching, they became converts, Pierce wrote. The problem was that very few of them managed to make it past the thicket of default settings and redirections.

Now, I actually used Neva, and it was a good search engine. But as all defaults are set to Google, there are an endless number of screens encouraging people to set their search engine to that of the search giant. So Neva, despite its quality, despite its differentiated lack of ads, could not get in front of potential customers, and it died. These default settings and redirections are what's on trial because that's what killed Neva and that's what prevents anyone else from investing in the next search competitor. If Google is found guilty and disciplined reasonably by being broken apart or having a choice screen imposed or some other set of remedies, then the new technologies of

machine learning AI will actually be deployed in a competitive marketplace. That's new rival search engines can try different things and will see immense possibilities open up, similar to those after the AT&T breakup. The future of telecommunications was not obvious in 1982 when that breakup happened. It only happened because of the breakup. There's actually a good amount of evidence on that as well. And that's true historically with all of these old antitrust cases. Okay, so far I've laid out the arguments in the case and the historical context. But what about Google? What do they say about the allegations? Google has a case. Google's essential argument is that search is about economies of scale, and that it

owns the whole market, not because it's a predator, but because consumers simply prefer its search engines to rivals. Let's go back to the Department of Justice slide on defaults, because this argument works both ways. Now, Google would say that it might engage in behavior to exclude competitors, but it needs to do so to get the data to improve its search engine. Fundamentally, Google argues, its ability to exclude others is a good deal for America. The exclusion is the price of this great search engine. In other words, consumers love Google. They love the search just so much that its monopoly is legal. That's Google's argument. Now, my view is that Google's search is not as good as it used to be.

It's not as good as it would be if it were disciplined by competition. Google is coasting, essentially. It produces an increasingly shoddy product. There's an economist in the 60s who said a great line. She said, the best reward for a monopolist is a quiet life. That's what Google is at this point. So as one Googler who left the company recently put it, quote, Google has 175,000 plus capable and well-compensated employees who get very little done, end quote. Google used to be magic, but that was 10 years ago. Today's search is full of too many ads, crappy results paddled with Google's because of

Google's own self-interest. So here is what the Washington Post noted in 2020. The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine stored some Google search results over the years. When we look back, a picture emerges of how Google increasingly fails us. There's more space dedicated to ads that look like search results. More results start with answer snippets, sometimes incorrect, ripped from other sites. And increasingly, results point you back to with answer snippets, sometimes incorrect, ripped from other sites. And increasingly, results point you back to Google's own properties, such as Maps and YouTube, where it can show more ads and gather more of your data. Many judges believe what executives say. And so Judge Mehta is likely to hear from Google's CEO that economies of scale are all that drives

product quality. And he may buy that. The judge may believe that. And I actually think Google executives believe it as well. Still, such an argument isn't really any different from what every monopolist has always argued. Standard Oil discussed how it brought cheap kerosene to the masses. AT&T stressed its awesome quality and universal service. Alcoa said that its control over aluminum was a result of its focus and dedication to America. IBM talked about how much it innovated and developed the computing industry. Monopolists always believe they are serving humanity. But Congress made it clear by passing antitrust laws that monopolies, whatever they may say or think, are not actually doing that.

And the evidence from Standard Oil's breakup leading to the development of gasoline to the lawsuit, the antitrust lawsuit in the 60s against IBM creating the modern software industry suggests that Congress was right. Depending on what happens, there may be additional time spent on a remedy or the case may go on appeal. Indeed, Judge Mehta is not the only person who matters here. He does decide whether Google is guilty initially. He decides the remedy initially. But the case is likely to be appealed, probably all the way to the Supreme Court. And if the Supreme Court, Judge Mehta, the D.C. Circuit, the Supreme Court, erodes antitrust case law against Google so much that this giant search monopoly, that's obviously a monopoly, everyone knows it's a

monopoly. If they say, well, this is not, the monopolization laws don't apply to this monopoly, even though it's giant, controls all this information, controls society in many ways, then Congress will be confronted with the reality that it is hard to use the existing antitrust laws to address dominant corporate power, which is what they were written originally to address. As witnesses testify, from Google executives to rivals, we're about to learn an enormous amount about how the internet developed, how advertising is sold, and why decisions about what we search for happen the way that they do. It's pretty disconcerting that so much key evidence was destroyed by Google and the judge hasn't done anything yet, but this case will still be a massively educational experience for the public,

for the industry, and for Congress. Indeed, a tidbit that came out on a hearing last Friday is that Google is actually opposing having a public feed in the courtroom, whereas the government actually does want a public feed. Apparently, the search giant doesn't want the public to be able to hear the arguments and evidence at hand. I guess that sometimes Google is concerned about privacy. Well, the thing is, is that if I were Google, if I were Google executive,

and I wanted to maintain google's monopoly i i wouldn't want this information to come out either i mean i wouldn't want i would want the public to know as little as possible about my business but that is in many ways what these antitrust cases are for um the the to learn about how our markets work to learn about whether firms are using coercive market power or whether they are competing on the merits. Whatever happens, reviving laws to constrain corporate power does take time as people within many institutions have to change their mind and come to grips with the choice of living in a free society or one that is dominated by monopolies and is much more

authoritarian in its commercial structure. Unfortunately, that change is happening. In September and October, so that is this month starting on Tuesday, we're gonna start to see some of the fruits of that change. And hopefully Judge Mehta will live up to the legacy of the DCG District Court set 41 years ago by the courage of one Judge Harold Green. Thanks for watching this big breakdown on the Breaking Points channel. If you'd like to know more about big business and how our economy really works, you can sign up by going to the link

in the description below for my market power focused newsletter, Big. Thanks and have a good one. Axios is out with a new survey, if we can put this element up, saying they polled, what, 213 computer science experts from 65 different universities and asked them a number of questions.

But number one, who would be the best to regulate artificial intelligence going forward? Also asked questions around whether or not or when AI might escape human control and what the best way we can foreclose or stall that event is. So as you can see here, the number one recommendation from these computer science experts, Emily, is basically a department of AI or some type of agency underneath a department of AI like the AI Protection Board, something along those lines that doesn't require Congress coming in whenever there needs to be some kind of nimble movement. Rather the agency would be able to respond and also would be able to say regulate companies that

are engaged in AI would be able to kind of examine you know what they're up to, why, what its potential implications are for you know human civilization. What do you make of this idea from computer science that we need the regulation we need is a new federal agency? You know, there's so much disagreement in AI world. There are experts who say this is only going to be for the benefit of humanity. There will be some downstream costs, but in the net, it's going to be to the benefit. All of the fears are overblown. And then you have experts, I mean, people who have worked intimately on this technology who say it terrifies me and it is already kind of out of the box.

There's really nothing, even in regulation at this point, basically like game is already lost. It's a matter of time. We can try our best to do what we can do, but like the game is already lost. And I think this also reflects that level of disagreement. I think we're going to see that level of disagreement come out in really important sort of forums that Chuck Schumer, who, by the way, is himself like very deep into tech world just based on his own connections. He's very much sort of connected by family. I think his daughters are both in the tech sector. So what his motivations are, whether he has incentives to do the right thing on tech, I think is an open question. But he at least has been having people who are sort of familiar with the technology chirping in his ear saying, you need to take this seriously. I feel like we're going to see those

disagreements come out just next week when he has all of these tech experts here in Washington, D.C. to give their own sort of takes on AI. One of the things that really stood out to me with the survey is that respondents from Axios, they say, expressed greater worry about discrimination and bias resulting from AI, so 42 percent, than about the risk of mass unemployment. That only bothered 22 percent of people. I think, you know, there's serious concerns about both of those issues. But, I mean, come on on that you have that level of disparity 22% only worried about employment versus discrimination and bias up at 42% I don't even know what to like

I don't even have trust in the AI experts to be worried about the right things and the level of disagreement I think in this survey and in others about how serious the problem is It fuels that. Right. These guys are useful and they're mostly guys in the sense that they have some understanding of the way that it works. But when it comes to their ideas about how it ought to be handled and what its implications are and where it fits into the kind of human and civilizational experience those those those contributions aren't particularly I think useful right that that's that's more in the realm of you know a Democratic control that you know that currently operates through our politicians, right? but you know ultimately is supposed to come, you know, the people who are then able to then, you know, enforce their will over these over these machines.

The one area that I feel like the alarmists are missing is that there's more to AI than just lines of code. Like behind those lines of code are You need energy, but you need like they have to run on something. Yeah, and that requires material resources from around the world To create the energy the batteries the other The other things that you need to make the cloud run make tech make make the run. Make the Teslas run. Yeah, I think some of these, a lot of these computer scientists, they show up for work. They flick the lights on. The internet's working. They're not thinking about the way that there are actual massive servers relying on enormous amounts of energy and just human production that is not necessarily infinite.

Which then means that there are limits to what the machines are capable of outside of a relationship with humanity and also with resource allocation and resources that exist in the world. So I think they are getting a little ahead of themselves in the sense that they can't, I don't quite see how machines can do all of that if there isn't the raw materials out there to make it hum. Yeah.

Well, and so another thing that stands out to me from this is 3% of respondents responded that the private sector is the best entity to regulate AI. The 3%,. The 3%. 3%. And that, I think, is a big thing carrying into, and especially for conservatives, libertarians, who have very good arguments, by the way, about hampering development when China is currently working really hard to develop all of these different advanced LLMs.

Whether or not they're capable of that is a different question, but that's a legitimate concern, especially if they start exporting it to the developing world and other places like that. I get it. I understand it. At the same time, however, when you have only 3% of these experts saying the private sector is the best entity to regulate AI, that tells me when this comes to the desk of Capitol Hill next week, it should be a pretty glaring signal that some regulation, which we have essentially none of now, there are some laws on the books that can be applied through the legal system, through challenges, could set precedent for how we deal with AI. That's true. There's patents, there's all kinds of different things that could be applied to this. I get it. But at

the same time, we have virtually no regulation of AI right now. It's a consortium of people who have been coming in and out of the White House industry that has a close relationship with the government saying, we're working on this right now. Of course, big industry loves to be regulated because it hurts their competitors sometimes. So we'll see some of that coming into play, the good old bootleggers and what's the phrase? Bootleggers and you know what I'm talking about. Which is a legitimate thing. Some of that's going to happen.

But when this comes to Congress, they should know they have to do something. Something needs to happen. There has to be some basic framework that isn't going to kill us in comparison to China, but isn't also going to literally kill us. Right. Which then hopefully can lead the rest of the world. Yeah. Say, all right, the U.S. is doing this. Like, let's do this too. They don't want to

blow themselves up either. Well, it's the other thing where it's like we actually have to all, it's the thing where you have, you know, Winston Churchill talking about the framework for the United Nations after nuclear technology, atomic weaponry is developed and saying there has to be something, something, some level of international cooperation on these questions because like the climate for instance what happens in China Affects what happens in the US in a way that is inextricably intertwined. There's no way we can take those two things out It's the same thing with atomic weapons. So yeah and with nuclear weapons, so when you're looking at AI There has to be some level of global global cooperation too because if people in China can use AI to hack American websites, we can do everything we can in the United States and only prevent that to an extent. Right. mimicry is yeah is expanding exponentially You used to think well my bank accounts safe because you can't I got two-factor and you can't change

You know my password that way now, you know if people can call and fake your voice Like then all bets are off right? So and if and if on if there's artificial intelligence answering the phone on the other side as well Then it's just robots against robots. That is the future, basically. That is the future. We'll just be in our Matrix pods. That's right.

The rest of us, like, we'll just be in. That's where the resources come from. At least the Matrix dealt with that question. Like, where do the actual resources come from? Right. And their answer was from the people. This is a problem with Bitcoin mining, too I mean these like Bitcoin Bitcoin mines were like using a crazy amount of energy to mine the crypto. Yeah You know, there's always a once you think you've solved a problem. You've only created more problems

There you go Russian nesting dolls all the way down indeed Indeed.