Speaker 1: Hey, guys, ready or not, twenty twenty four is here
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Speaker 3: Good morning, everybody, Happy Tuesday. We have an amazing show
Speaker 3: for everybody today. What do we have?
Speaker 4: Firstall, indeed we do.
Speaker 1: We have breaking news this morning with regards to the
Speaker 1: debt ceiling. We will break down those developments for you
Speaker 1: as a deadline approaches incredibly quickly, more quickly than we
Speaker 1: were really expecting. Also, some new quite troubling warnings about
Speaker 1: AI from people who have worked on it, who know
Speaker 1: a lot about it, so we will break all of
Speaker 1: that down for you.
Speaker 4: We're going to review.
Speaker 1: DeSantis's international struggles and the way that was covered by
Speaker 1: the media as his fight with Disney seems to escalate.
Speaker 1: We've got fallout from what we covered yesterday, the second
Speaker 1: largest bank failure in history. What is that going to
Speaker 1: mean going forward, We've got new numbers on trust in
Speaker 1: the media.
Speaker 4: You will not be shocked.
Speaker 1: And my personal favorite block today some leaked audio from
Speaker 1: Tucker Carlson before he left Fox News, which is rather
Speaker 1: entertaining and revealing and all of those good things.
Speaker 2: Also the collapse of Ice can't talk about can't forget
Speaker 2: about that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right, which is pretty wild. I mean, wece
Speaker 1: was like the news outlet to be between them and
Speaker 1: BuzzFeed News collapsing.
Speaker 4: I know it is wild.
Speaker 1: And also I know Soccer is very excited to talk
Speaker 1: to James Fox, who is a filmmaker behind a Moment
Speaker 1: of Contact which I watched last night and you watched
Speaker 1: previously and is very interesting, So excited to talk to
Speaker 1: him as well. But we did want to start with
Speaker 1: that big breaking news with regards to the dead ceiling.
Speaker 2: Yeah that's right, let's go and put it up there
Speaker 2: on the screen. Guys, this is just a very important
Speaker 2: update for everybody. The President actually called Speaker McCarthy yesterday
Speaker 2: while he was traveling abroad in Israel, and President Biden
Speaker 2: asked McCarthy to meet the date of the meeting has
Speaker 2: been set now for May ninth. Now The reason that
Speaker 2: that call is so important is because it came just
Speaker 2: basically about twenty or thirty minutes after the Treasury Department
Speaker 2: officially advised all of us on the day that the
Speaker 2: actual debt limit will be hit.
Speaker 3: Let's go and put this up there on the screen.
Speaker 2: Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen saying that the US
Speaker 2: could hit the debt ceiling by June one. That is
Speaker 2: a lot earlier than a lot of initial projections. If
Speaker 2: we parse her letter crystal something that she said that
Speaker 2: it could be basically plus or minus a few weeks
Speaker 2: if they don't exhaust so called extraordinary measures, but saying
Speaker 2: that that is basically the deadline as to when the
Speaker 2: US would likely default on instead. It also just because
Speaker 2: so much of this, While we may not technically default
Speaker 2: or not, there is an expectations game where if the
Speaker 2: Secretary of the Treasury says it's June first, then Wall
Speaker 2: Street will act like it's June first. So even if
Speaker 2: you technically have a day or two left like that's
Speaker 2: the day, though, that the market will likely crash got
Speaker 2: and that could mean then disaster.
Speaker 3: So what does that mean for everybody?
Speaker 2: Obviously, Biden blinked he kept saying, I'm not going to negotiate.
Speaker 2: I'm not going to negotiate. It's like, okay, well you
Speaker 2: call it, Speaker McCarthy.
Speaker 3: Now we're negotiating.
Speaker 2: He has called in all four congressional leaders, so Mitch
Speaker 2: McConnell will be there, Chuck Schumer will be there, and
Speaker 2: jakeem Jeffries will be there as well. They're going to
Speaker 2: try and strike some sort of bargain. Reporting currently indicating
Speaker 2: Crystal that Mitch McConnell wants to stay out of it.
Speaker 2: I don't really believe that for a second. There's got
Speaker 2: to be some sort of Jekyll and Hyde situation going
Speaker 2: on behind the scenes. But almost certainly a deal of
Speaker 2: some kind is going to get struck. At least that's
Speaker 2: what I think, just because Biden kept saying it would negotiation.
Speaker 3: And you know, this is kind of what I was
Speaker 3: saying earlier too. It's so stupid.
Speaker 2: It's like, look, obviously we're all going to negotiate, so
Speaker 2: let's just start negotiating. We will see now though, where
Speaker 2: that goes. Here's part of the issue. Scheduling wise, we
Speaker 2: got a month, okay, but President Biden's gonna be gone
Speaker 2: for a week, he's leaving the country for almost nine days.
Speaker 4: It's going to be it works like three hours away
Speaker 4: three hours a day, and.
Speaker 3: He's going to Japan and Australia, so he's going to
Speaker 3: be tired. Yeah, so we could add that in there.
Speaker 2: So really we've got like twenty days to actually get
Speaker 2: this done. And not only do we need a bargain,
Speaker 2: we need to not only have the negotiation. It's going
Speaker 2: to pass the House and then pass the Senate and
Speaker 2: then get signed by the President.
Speaker 3: What are we going to do?
Speaker 1: I think the President has played this extremely poorly. Yes,
Speaker 1: if you say you're not going to negotiate, then don't
Speaker 1: negotiate with terrorists, I mean, and that's what they are.
Speaker 1: Holding the economy hostage at a time that things are
Speaker 1: very precarious. I mean, we just literally had the largest
Speaker 1: bank failure, second largest bank failure in history. When you
Speaker 1: add together these three bank failures that we've had in
Speaker 1: a very short period of time, is actually larger by
Speaker 1: dollar amount than what we had in two thousand and eight.
Speaker 1: So that's just to underscore the procarity.
Speaker 4: Of the economy.
Speaker 1: As the FED continues raising interest rates and you want
Speaker 1: to play games with the stats dealing. This is where
Speaker 1: the fact that Biden is this like norm abiding institutionalist
Speaker 1: becomes a disaster, becomes a potential global disaster, becomes a
Speaker 1: disaster for regular people, becomes a disaster for the economy.
Speaker 1: He shouldn't negotiate, He should stick to his guns. He
Speaker 1: should take one of the extraordinary measures. He at least
Speaker 1: should not take those off the table, because that's the
Speaker 1: only thing he has to put pressure on the Republicans
Speaker 1: who are taking, in my opinion, in an unconscionable position here.
Speaker 1: And so you know, I think he blinked. I think
Speaker 1: it shows incredible weakness. And I also think it's part
Speaker 1: and parcel with the fact that with Ron playing out
Speaker 1: as chief of staff and with Jeff resigns in, Biden
Speaker 1: has made this very clear like pivot towards the center
Speaker 1: or towards the right. I would say that this is,
Speaker 1: you know, part of that, the idea that we're going
Speaker 1: back to the Obama days and we're going to have
Speaker 1: some kind of grand bargain or sequestration or whatever. I
Speaker 1: just think it's incredibly weak and that he's really mishandled it.
Speaker 3: I think it is mishandled it. In two ways.
Speaker 2: As you said, you know, you're either going to do
Speaker 2: the extraordinary measures to say screw you, or you should
Speaker 2: have been negotiated now for months and not even let
Speaker 2: the turmoil happened. But we're almost trying to have it
Speaker 2: both ways by trying to appear tough but then also buckling.
Speaker 2: So it's like, dude, you got to choose one. You
Speaker 2: know which way are we going down here? So look, well,
Speaker 2: all see, we'll keep you guys updated. It matters for
Speaker 2: all of us, our the US economy, stock portfolios and
Speaker 2: all of that, so make sure that you keep that
Speaker 2: in mind. And we just wanted to give everybody a
Speaker 2: quick update on what, unbelievably is the biggest news. Also,
Speaker 2: we did want to say to all of you, thank
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Speaker 2: Let's get to the news here on artificial intelligence, absolutely
Speaker 2: extraordinary development yesterday. Let's put this up there on the screen,
Speaker 2: The quote unquote godfather of AI has left Google and
Speaker 2: is now warning of dangers ahead. The so called godfather
Speaker 2: of AI's name is Jeffrey Hinton. He's actually a scientist
Speaker 2: in his seventies who has been working in the AI.
Speaker 3: Field since the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 2: Crystal his company, was actually bought by and acquired by
Speaker 2: Google in twenty twelve, and he's been at the forefront
Speaker 2: of AI development now for decades. He actually won the
Speaker 2: Turing Award along with some colleagues.
Speaker 3: And has which is basically.
Speaker 2: Considered the Nobel Prize of computing. Now, within that, what
Speaker 2: is doctor Hinton saying. Doctor Hinton is warning that bad
Speaker 2: actors could use AI to supplant humanity. Possibly, he is
Speaker 2: warning that the previous idea, which he thought was far fetched,
Speaker 2: which is that AI could at one point match human
Speaker 2: intelligence and even go beyond, is much closer than is
Speaker 2: previously known. He quit Google specifically because he wanted the
Speaker 2: ability to speak out not just against the company, but
Speaker 2: against AI development and call for better regulation around it.
Speaker 2: But really what opened my eyes was he sees this
Speaker 2: as a race to the bottom because he believed while
Speaker 2: working at Google that they were taking their best steps
Speaker 2: to responsibly develop this products. But then what changed everything
Speaker 2: Microsoft's partnership with open Ai and the integration of chat
Speaker 2: GPT into the bing search system. That has lit a
Speaker 2: fire inside of Google for the first competition really that
Speaker 2: they have faced in what decades, you know, in the
Speaker 2: history of the entire company BA basically ever since they've
Speaker 2: created AdWords, they've been printed money over there, and they've
Speaker 2: always enjoyed basically a monopoly on search. For the very
Speaker 2: first time, they believe that they have an existential threat
Speaker 2: to their business, which means they are much more likely
Speaker 2: to discard any safeguards that they might have in place
Speaker 2: and go forward and developing technology which can't you can't
Speaker 2: take it away. Once you go forward, it's in the system,
Speaker 2: and it's out in the in the sphere, and then
Speaker 2: other countries could use it. He's also especially concerned Crystal
Speaker 2: about the use of AI robots in combat, something that
Speaker 2: he currently sees is inevitable.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: In fact, he's spent his career avoiding He actually took
Speaker 1: you went and worked in Canada for a part of
Speaker 1: his career because he wanted to avoid taking any Pentagon
Speaker 1: funding for AI, because he's very opposed to these systems
Speaker 1: being used on the battlefield, Which shows you this is
Speaker 1: I think a principled person Number one. Number two, I
Speaker 1: really recommend people read through not just this one, but
Speaker 1: we're going to highlight a few warnings from other people
Speaker 1: who are serious, thoughtful experts in the subject. And even
Speaker 1: if you think what doctor Hinton is saying and what
Speaker 1: some of the others are saying is overwrought, if there
Speaker 1: is a one percent chance that they are correct, we
Speaker 1: have to take dramatic action. I mean, some of these
Speaker 1: experts are warning this could literally be the end of humanity.
Speaker 4: Now, is that like guaranteed?
Speaker 1: No, do I have any way really of assessing whether
Speaker 1: that's overwrought or not. I don't know if there's even
Speaker 1: a one peron there's even one point one percent chance
Speaker 1: that they're correct, we should be taking dramatic action. So
Speaker 1: that's the frame with in which I'm you know, viewing
Speaker 1: all of these comments and all of this analysis me
Speaker 1: read you a few of his words just to give
Speaker 1: you a sense of him and what he's arguing. Specifically,
Speaker 1: he says that he consoles himself for his involvement in
Speaker 1: developing this AI, with the normal excuse if I hadn't
Speaker 1: done it, somebody else would have. It is hard to
Speaker 1: see how you can prevent the bad actors from using
Speaker 1: it for bad things. Maybe what's going on in these systems,
Speaker 1: he goes on to say, is actually better than what
Speaker 1: is going on in the brain. The idea that this
Speaker 1: stuff could get smarter than people. A few people believe that,
Speaker 1: but most people thought it was way off. I thought
Speaker 1: it was way off. I thought it was thirty to
Speaker 1: fifty years or even longer away. Obviously I no longer
Speaker 1: think that. He compares the development of the say to
Speaker 1: basically a nuclear arms race and says it should be
Speaker 1: handled in at least as a gross of a manner,
Speaker 1: but also points out that it's actually more difficult to
Speaker 1: deal with than that, because you know, there are telltale
Speaker 1: signs when country like you know, North Korea or on whoever,
Speaker 1: is developing a nuclear there are ways for us to see.
Speaker 1: This would be a lot easier to hide. So even
Speaker 1: if you have some sort of a global agreement to
Speaker 1: shut down the development of the AI until we can
Speaker 1: wrap our hands around it, at the very least to
Speaker 1: be able to police that would be.
Speaker 4: Extraordinarily, extraordinarily difficult.
Speaker 1: They say, Unlike with nuclear weapons, there's no way of
Speaker 1: knowing whether companies or countries are working on the technology
Speaker 1: and secret. The best hope is the world's leading scientists
Speaker 1: to collaborate on ways of controlling the technology. He goes
Speaker 1: on to say, I don't think they should scale this
Speaker 1: up more until they have understood whether they can control it.
Speaker 1: And that's one of the key pieces here is with
Speaker 1: these large language models, even the people who you know
Speaker 1: are developing the technology don't really fully understand what's going
Speaker 1: on under the hood, because you sort of turn this
Speaker 1: thing loose and feed it all of this information from
Speaker 1: you know, the web and other sources, and then you
Speaker 1: let it go and do its thing. And so that's
Speaker 1: why you end up with Sydney, the the big chatbot,
Speaker 1: sort of go and rogue and professing her quote unquote
Speaker 1: love to Kevin Russ, this New York Times reporter.
Speaker 4: These are not.
Speaker 1: Behaviors that the people who designed this AI expected Sydney
Speaker 1: to engage in. So it just shows you that even
Speaker 1: the people who are the experts in the field, who
Speaker 1: are developing the technology right now, even they don't really
Speaker 1: know what's going on under the surface and what sort
Speaker 1: of results it could ultimately lead to.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's a really important point. And it's
Speaker 2: also there are several canaries in the coal mine who
Speaker 2: now look a lot better and were treated than at
Speaker 2: the time. One of them is Blake Lemoyn. Let's put
Speaker 2: this up there on the screen. He's that former Google
Speaker 2: engineer who actually went viral about a year ago whenever
Speaker 2: he went on the record with the Washington Post to
Speaker 2: warn that Google's language system had come to life and
Speaker 2: achieved sentience.
Speaker 3: He was actually widely mocked at.
Speaker 2: The time, not going to deny, and definitely has some
Speaker 2: interesting personal beliefs religious but hey, it's a free country.
Speaker 2: And one of the things that that he says is
Speaker 2: he worked on you know, so called AI ethics. He's
Speaker 2: a long time engineer, and he was absolutely convinced that
Speaker 2: sentience and some sort of feeling had been achieved by
Speaker 2: the system and that it was being hidden by Google.
Speaker 3: And now here's the thing. At the time, everybody thought
Speaker 3: he was kind.
Speaker 2: Of crazy, as I said, alluding to his own personal
Speaker 2: religious issues. But the point is that now if the
Speaker 2: so called godfather of Ai, the Nobel Prize winning in computing,
Speaker 2: a decades long Google employee in one of the heads
Speaker 2: of the program, is now coming out and vindicating at
Speaker 2: least somewhat what Blake Lemoinne was saying in that article,
Speaker 2: I think we had to take it a lot more seriously, Crystal.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know, gets into these technical discussions about Okay,
Speaker 1: what is sentience technically and how would you test it?
Speaker 1: I mean the old test used to be could you
Speaker 1: have a conversation with this thing and not know that
Speaker 1: it wasn't human? Well, you know, we've clearly like we've
Speaker 1: flown by that. And he argues that in a sense,
Speaker 1: the question of sentience is kind of a distract because
Speaker 1: whether or not it has self awareness may not be
Speaker 1: the most relevant question in terms of what it means
Speaker 1: for humanity and what it means for the world and
Speaker 1: how it behaves in the world. So he says, I
Speaker 1: don't like playing those word games with regards to whether
Speaker 1: or not it's sentient, But if it makes some people
Speaker 1: feel better, use the right vocabulary. Okay, fine, whatever flows
Speaker 1: your vote. What it comes down to is that we
Speaker 1: aren't spending enough time on transparency or model understandability. I'm
Speaker 1: of the opinion that we could be using the scientific
Speaker 1: investigative tools that psychology has come up with to understand
Speaker 1: human cognition, both to understand existing AI systems and to
Speaker 1: develop ones that are more easily controllable and understandable. That
Speaker 1: gets to what I was saying before about how even
Speaker 1: the people that are developing these things don't really understand
Speaker 1: what's going on underneath the hood and what sort of
Speaker 1: results that will end up with the AI achieving. He
Speaker 1: also talks about the fact, and I think this is
Speaker 1: really important that what we have seen as a public
Speaker 1: that is not the furthest bleeding edge of where this
Speaker 1: technology is. So he says, by this time the public
Speaker 1: learns about an AI product, the companies who built it,
Speaker 1: they've vetted their pr story, they've consulted with their lawyers,
Speaker 1: they've potentially lobbied regulators to get preferential legislation passed. Says
Speaker 1: that's one of the things I always dislike. Tech companies
Speaker 1: will try to get legislation paths that will govern technology
Speaker 1: that regulators do not yet know even exist. So that's
Speaker 1: the game that they're playing in Washington. He goes on
Speaker 1: to say, they still have far more advanced tech that
Speaker 1: they have not made publicly available. The system he was
Speaker 1: playing with when he came to the conclusion this thing
Speaker 1: has some sort of sentient awareness. He describes it as
Speaker 1: heavily multimodal, not just incorporating images, but incorporating sounds, giving
Speaker 1: it access to the Google Books API that stands for
Speaker 1: Application Programming Index, giving it access to essentially every API
Speaker 1: back and the Google had, and allowing it to just
Speaker 1: gain an understanding of it all. That's the one that
Speaker 1: I was like, you know, this thing, this thing's awake,
Speaker 1: and they haven't.
Speaker 4: Let the public play with that one.
Speaker 1: But Barred, which is the Google AI, is kind of
Speaker 1: a simplified version of that. So it still has a
Speaker 1: lot of the kind of liveliness of that model. So
Speaker 1: as much as what we've seen publicly is sort of
Speaker 1: mind blowing and a little bit terrifying, what these companies
Speaker 1: have that they haven't turned loose to the public is,
Speaker 1: you know, orders of magnitude more advanced. So what's going
Speaker 1: on there? You know, what's going on underneath the hood there?
Speaker 1: What are the implications of that. I don't think there's
Speaker 1: a person on the planet who can really say with certainty.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think you're absolutely correct. There's another important point.
Speaker 2: It's kind of like with computers, by the time it's
Speaker 2: off the assembly line, it's completely obsolete relative to what
Speaker 2: they're developing. And let's say Apple Labs or inside of
Speaker 2: Microsoft or any of these other places, it's probably two
Speaker 2: to three years out of date. That's the case with
Speaker 2: any mass consumable technology, and especially in the realm of software,
Speaker 2: what is completely experimental versus what is being shipped is huge,
Speaker 2: like massively apart. And anyway, I think we should really
Speaker 2: heed his words, the godfather of AI, and I think
Speaker 2: this is you know, this world remain one of the
Speaker 2: biggest stories in the world now. Also in terms of politics,
Speaker 2: it has already come into the political system. You know,
Speaker 2: a lot of people didn't notice, but the GOP's Republican
Speaker 2: response to President Biden's reelection was actually done with AI
Speaker 2: generated images, and we have.
Speaker 3: Some of that we can play for you. Let's take
Speaker 3: a listen this just.
Speaker 2: In we can now call the twenty twenty four presidential
Speaker 2: race for Joe Biden.
Speaker 1: Montro this morning and in Bolton, China invades Taiwan.
Speaker 2: Financial markets are in free fall as five hundred regional
Speaker 2: banks have shuttered their doors. Border agents were overrun by
Speaker 2: a surge of eighty thousand illegals yesterday. Evening Shells closed
Speaker 2: the city of San Francisco this morning, signing the escalating
Speaker 2: crime and fentonal crisis.
Speaker 5: Who's in charge?
Speaker 4: You?
Speaker 2: It feels like the train is coming off the trend.
Speaker 2: So that was an AI generated ad. Let's go and
Speaker 2: put this up there on the screen, guys. These were
Speaker 2: AI created images that showed Biden and Kamala Harris celebrating
Speaker 2: at the election day party reports about international domestic crises.
Speaker 2: These images were actually used through both I think either
Speaker 2: mid Journey or Dolly two. Now, these are obviously things
Speaker 2: that we have seen be used in the creative system.
Speaker 2: But this is the thing about this type of technology.
Speaker 2: Anybody can use it, and it was done exactly so
Speaker 2: that they could have a rapid response ad almost immediately
Speaker 2: after it was.
Speaker 3: Done, and like who can deny? Look like those?
Speaker 2: It was quicker than photoshop and you know, put the
Speaker 2: merits or whatever of the ad aside. It makes it
Speaker 2: come to life more when you have that type of
Speaker 2: imagery that you can look at and that you connect
Speaker 2: with and that you can bring into like into reality
Speaker 2: more rather than just a photoshopped image or a past
Speaker 2: getty image that somebody is usually using.
Speaker 1: And this technology to me seems to have really developed quickly,
Speaker 1: I mean from when we were first playing with Dolly
Speaker 1: and then you get these like weird images like healthscape
Speaker 1: dystopian images that you could tell right away were you know,
Speaker 1: created by AI. These If you pause the video you
Speaker 1: can see some of those telltale signs. I saw people
Speaker 1: pointing out like one of AI has some trouble with
Speaker 1: human hands, in particular in that first scene. I think
Speaker 1: it's Biden at like the inauguration, where you can tell
Speaker 1: his hands or like a little freaky if.
Speaker 4: You look at it.
Speaker 1: And then the other thing, it's it can't do teeth properly,
Speaker 1: like puts way too many teeth in people's mouths. And
Speaker 1: there's an image of him and Kamala Harris where both
Speaker 1: of them have like way too many teeth, which actually
Speaker 1: serves to make them look more sort of like villainous
Speaker 1: and evil in the ad in my opinion, yeah, it
Speaker 1: makes them.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's sort of like caricaturish.
Speaker 1: But if what it made me realize is when you
Speaker 1: string all of these image images together in sequence, you
Speaker 1: don't have time to really process what exactly about it
Speaker 1: is off, So you don't really have time to immediately
Speaker 1: have that trigger of oh.
Speaker 4: This was AI generated.
Speaker 1: So that was a revelatory for me, but also the
Speaker 1: fact that yeah, this is already, this isn't We're not
Speaker 1: talking about something that's far off in the future. We're
Speaker 1: talking about something that is here right now. And we
Speaker 1: have a couple other stories that you know, serve to
Speaker 1: make that point as well.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I mean, look, I just think it's important
Speaker 2: for people to see like, it's here now, it's over,
Speaker 2: Like the twenty twenty four election is now going to be,
Speaker 2: at least in part, the AI election, and that's going
Speaker 2: to change a lot of things.
Speaker 3: And speaking of change, we're going to get.
Speaker 2: To one now of my favorite stories, which does make
Speaker 2: me very hopeful about AI. So when I was in college,
Speaker 2: there was this book company called cheg where you could
Speaker 2: rent your textbooks, and everybody was doing it because at
Speaker 2: least it was cheaper than the goddamn bookstore. However, cheg
Speaker 2: since then has expanded almost dramatically. I guess I don't
Speaker 2: want to get sued by anybody here. Let's just say
Speaker 2: that they have internal products which help students on quizz
Speaker 2: exams and other things for standard curricula.
Speaker 3: Some people have called it cheating.
Speaker 2: Some people educators have called it a place which is
Speaker 2: basically legalized cheating. And they have been printing money ever since.
Speaker 2: Their stock has been a longtime profitable company. Well, in
Speaker 2: a fascinating new filing, let's go ahead and put this
Speaker 2: up there on the screen, guys, they say this quote.
Speaker 2: In the first part of the year, we saw no
Speaker 2: noticeable impact from chat GPT on our new account growth,
Speaker 2: and we were meeting expectations on new signups. However, since March,
Speaker 2: we have seen a significant spike in student interest in
Speaker 2: chat GPT, and we now believe it is having an
Speaker 2: impact on our new customer growth rate.
Speaker 3: That line alone.
Speaker 2: Sent the stock tumbling thirty seven percent, Crystal thirty seven percent. Now,
Speaker 2: keep in mind, check is a twelve billion dollar company.
Speaker 2: It was literally actually on the cover of Forbes magazine
Speaker 2: in twenty twenty one. The cover said this, this twelve
Speaker 2: billion dollar company is getting rich off students cheating their
Speaker 2: way through COVID.
Speaker 3: No, once again they said it not me.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 2: What they say is that the cheg Study program, which
Speaker 2: was fifteen dollars a month that you can buy from
Speaker 2: cheg was one of those that you could subscribe to.
Speaker 2: Is basically a subscription product which you know, you could
Speaker 2: get essay prompts and other standardized curricula and students and
Speaker 2: others who had either filled out prompts for and in
Speaker 2: some cases people who work at check basically helping you know,
Speaker 2: richer kids or at least kids with money easily more
Speaker 2: make their way through college. Well what do we know now, though,
Speaker 2: which is that chatchept has disrupted so much, not only
Speaker 2: of the way that kids cheat, but of the way
Speaker 2: that educators are working their way around cheating as And
Speaker 2: that's why I actually still believe chat gipt could save education,
Speaker 2: wrote stupid. Busy work has always been the bane of
Speaker 2: these It was only created because of bureaucracy and the
Speaker 2: need to box check and all that. Now we have
Speaker 2: to get back to a place of in person essays,
Speaker 2: which requires spontaneity and thinking, which you can't you know
Speaker 2: handwritten you can't use a computer.
Speaker 3: By the way, there's a lot of evidence.
Speaker 2: You can go listen to doctor Andrew Huberman's podcast about
Speaker 2: why handwriting something out is much better for you than typing.
Speaker 2: Take it from a guy who probably has terrible handwriting
Speaker 2: and actually doesn't.
Speaker 3: Write anything down.
Speaker 2: I still do think that there's a big role for that,
Speaker 2: especially whenever you're trying to learn and absorb information. But second,
Speaker 2: and probably most important, is it's bringing back in person
Speaker 2: discussion inside of classes. I remember, I'm sure you do
Speaker 2: as well, being some of those gen ED classes with
Speaker 2: four or five hundred people, It's like, what are we
Speaker 2: doing here?
Speaker 3: This is you know, we're all to box checking some
Speaker 3: BS gen ED requirement.
Speaker 2: The guy doesn't want to be here, he's like some
Speaker 2: adjunct getting paid like one thousand dollars a semester, eating
Speaker 2: Ramen in his apartment. Everybody in the class doesn't want
Speaker 2: to be here. Everyone is just fake doing the reading.
Speaker 2: It's all BS, except everybody in the room is taking
Speaker 2: out hundreds of thousand dollars or whatever in student debt.
Speaker 2: So let's get away from it, let's actually learn something,
Speaker 2: Let's have a discussion.
Speaker 3: And I think everybody, especially me.
Speaker 2: I can think back to the classes where I learned
Speaker 2: the most were ones where we did almost no busy work,
Speaker 2: very few essays. We just sit there and talked. And
Speaker 2: so I still think about my favorite professor. Ever, I
Speaker 2: don't remember any of the assessments. All I remember is
Speaker 2: sitting there and having my mind blown by this guy
Speaker 2: who is just lobbing like intellectual bombs at us.
Speaker 3: And man, I've never thought about something like that. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and it still sticks with me, you know, to this day.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean personally, I was like really good at
Speaker 1: the road like memories.
Speaker 3: That's not necessarily a good thing though, I yeah, right,
Speaker 3: But yeah, you're.
Speaker 4: One hundred percent correct. The courses I.
Speaker 1: Remember and the things that I actually like retain from
Speaker 1: college had nothing to do with any of that. And
Speaker 1: I do think that there is a possibility that CHAT,
Speaker 1: GPT and other you know AI sort of forces a
Speaker 1: rethink of education in a way that could be revitalizing
Speaker 1: and could ultimately be beneficial. But this also to me,
Speaker 1: just shows, you know, now, it's disrupting the cheating industry,
Speaker 1: the multi billion dollar cheating industry a parent.
Speaker 4: It shows you how quick the uptake is.
Speaker 1: It shows you how many people have already figured out
Speaker 1: ways to work this into their life to do whatever
Speaker 1: it is that they needed to be done. And you know,
Speaker 1: it's clabboring this CHEG, but that's not the only company
Speaker 1: that is already anticipating that there are going to be
Speaker 1: huge impacts from this technology.
Speaker 4: And that's the other piece of it.
Speaker 1: I mean, we talked about the warnings, some of them
Speaker 1: quite dire, some of them quite terrifying, of what this
Speaker 1: AI could mean for all of humanity.
Speaker 4: There's also a lot of.
Speaker 1: Concern about what it could mean just in terms of
Speaker 1: employment and social disruption and how many millions of jobs
Speaker 1: could potentially be lost. And I know the cope is
Speaker 1: always like, oh, well, people just use AI to help
Speaker 1: enhance the work that they're doing, maybe in some instances,
Speaker 1: but there's no doubt about it that that level of
Speaker 1: intelligent and ability to have automation could crush a lot
Speaker 1: of industries, could crush a lot of white collar work,
Speaker 1: which is ironic because a lot of the concern was
Speaker 1: about more blue collar or even service sector work. Now
Speaker 1: the real threat is in any sort of white collar
Speaker 1: industry where you know, an AI could at least make
Speaker 1: the first pass for paralegals, accountants, all sorts of things
Speaker 1: that could be directly impacted by this. And again not
Speaker 1: in the like long off distant future. I'm talking like
Speaker 1: right now, very very soon, imminent, already happening.
Speaker 2: Yep, keep it in mind, folks, Like just it's just
Speaker 2: so funny too that the very first industry that chat
Speaker 2: GPT appears to have nuked is effectively for the privatized
Speaker 2: cheating program, which, look, you know, you never you never
Speaker 2: know where these disruptions will come. And I think it's
Speaker 2: the first shoe to drop of many personally, Again, I
Speaker 2: think it's a good thing.
Speaker 3: It's not really you know, no offense to check.
Speaker 2: It's more about the system that cheg was architected to
Speaker 2: try and help. It was all crap in the first place.
Speaker 2: So like, let's get to the point where you're just
Speaker 2: learning how to think. That's probably the most important thing
Speaker 2: you can learn in college if you're in liberal arts
Speaker 2: on the mass and engineering. Now quote that's actually completely different.
Speaker 2: But even there a lot of the road memorization quizzes
Speaker 2: and all of that. If you're cheating on it, then
Speaker 2: are you really learning what you're supposed to anyway? There's
Speaker 2: got to be a better way. I've always thought that,
Speaker 2: you know, both my parents and education. A lot of
Speaker 2: people have long been frustrated by curriculum and bureaucracy and
Speaker 2: all of the different ways that we got to where
Speaker 2: we are, and this is their opportunity to just be
Speaker 2: like enough, let's start something new.
Speaker 3: So I really hope that we get there.
Speaker 1: We will keep watching it because I think this is
Speaker 1: one thing that could profoundly impact our entire society and civilization.
Speaker 4: So keep our eye on it closely.
Speaker 1: All right, let's talk about Ronda Santis was traveling overseas.
Speaker 4: We've brought you a little bit of that.
Speaker 1: And you know, it's funny because originally the media was
Speaker 1: really they were very bullish on Rondo Santis. Conservative media
Speaker 1: was really excited about Rondo Santis, really sort of propping
Speaker 1: them up. We know, Rupert Murdoch over at Fox News
Speaker 1: and with his whole empire told Ronda Santis like, we're
Speaker 1: going to be all in for you guys. The trip
Speaker 1: did not appear to go too well for him. Now,
Speaker 1: I want to say these are headlines that were compiled
Speaker 1: by a Trump operative. However, I can confirm from my
Speaker 1: own perusal of the news that the coverage of his
Speaker 1: overseas trip was almost I don't know if I saw
Speaker 1: a single positive report from it. It's hard to think
Speaker 1: of one. So put this up on the screen. This
Speaker 1: is a compilation of some of the headlines that that
Speaker 1: the Trump campaign is flagging about his trip overseas. Politico
Speaker 1: says ron de tedious DeSantis underwhelms Britain's business chiefs. The
Speaker 1: Independent says Ronda Santis critics gloat over brutal reviews of
Speaker 1: his UK trip, horrendous, low wattage board NBC News, I
Speaker 1: think he's in trouble. Growing number of Ronda Santis donors
Speaker 1: and allies hope for a shakeup Newsweek, Ronda Santis presidential
Speaker 1: ambitions endure another bumpy week role call. What is Rond
Speaker 1: de Santis?
Speaker 4: The Doing.
Speaker 1: Intelligencer all of Ronda Santis' crimes against good etiquette. I'm
Speaker 1: sure Sagaid be very interested in that.
Speaker 4: One media I watched Ronda Santis loses his shit yelling
Speaker 4: a reporter over torchgations. We're going to show you that one.
Speaker 1: Rishie Sunak avoids Ronda Santis on his UK visit. The
Speaker 1: list goes on Republican mega donor withdraws support. Watch DeSantis
Speaker 1: does that weird bubblehead thing. Jason Miller to Newsmac DeSantis
Speaker 1: running into a buzzsaw right now. Roonda Santis likes the
Speaker 1: killer spirit. After stumbles at home, he had a broad
Speaker 1: defined his footing. That's probably the most like even handed
Speaker 1: one that was from the New York Times. Ron de
Speaker 1: Santis just lest another donor. Trump toss de Santis by
Speaker 1: forty six points Fox News poll, Trump still top twenty
Speaker 1: twenty four Republican preference. DeSantis is slipping, so not exactly
Speaker 1: what he was hoping for from his big, you know,
Speaker 1: very intentional international trip where he wanted to portray himself
Speaker 1: as a statesman. Many aspiring presidential candidates will do this
Speaker 1: sort of thing. It's the idea is that it's going
Speaker 1: to help voters imagine you in that role as being
Speaker 1: commander in chief and meeting with foreign leaders and dignitaries.
Speaker 4: Et cetera. If that was the goal. I don't think
Speaker 4: that this.
Speaker 2: Worked out for him too well, No, I don't think so.
Speaker 2: I also think it's a stupid custom. You know, people
Speaker 2: always do. Like Romney went to London, remember that, and
Speaker 2: he pissed off the Brits during the London Olympics.
Speaker 4: Oh, I vaguely remember that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Obama went to I think it was Munich or
Speaker 2: Berlin maybe, And anyway, so he went to Berlin and
Speaker 2: everyone's like, oh my, you know, a bunch of Germans
Speaker 2: showed up, and he's.
Speaker 3: Like, wow, the world loves Obama.
Speaker 2: It turns out that that's not actually any important metric
Speaker 2: in terms of being president. The custom probably dates back
Speaker 2: to Nixon, the idea that Nixon was like this elder statesman.
Speaker 2: That's where people get the idea that should come from.
Speaker 2: I personally don't think it really matters at all. I'm
Speaker 2: not saying global experience doesn't matter, but in terms of electability, which.
Speaker 1: Is that, I can imagine a case being made that
Speaker 1: the Obama trip actually did help him, because I mean
Speaker 1: he was, you know, his junior seminary like spent three
Speaker 1: minutes in the Senate, and his whole appeal, especially within
Speaker 1: the Democratic primary but also in the general election, was
Speaker 1: very foreign policy based, you know, criticizing both Hillary Clint
Speaker 1: them then ultimately John McCain for the I Rock War.
Speaker 4: So could I could see in that instance how it.
Speaker 1: May have been beneficial for him, and I'm sure I
Speaker 1: don't remember specifically. I'm sure he got glowing media coverage
Speaker 1: for it as well, so that I can imagine how
Speaker 1: that sort of burnished his credentials. But if that was
Speaker 1: the goal for Ron DeSantis, he he clearly didn't.
Speaker 2: Achieve it absolutely also as a reference, and this is
Speaker 2: the thing I keep coming away with Desantas Desanti's the
Speaker 2: biggest news that he made when he was in Japan
Speaker 2: for his trip was having his bizarre, weird bobblehead response
Speaker 2: whenever he was asked about the polls Visa v.
Speaker 3: Trump.
Speaker 2: What that actually just showed to me is I'm like, dude,
Speaker 2: you don't really seem to do well under pressure. Same
Speaker 2: thing here. So the Guantanamo allegations around DeSantis have been
Speaker 2: flying around for a while. Who knows whether they're true
Speaker 2: or not. You know, like, actually, to Desanta's credit, he's like,
Speaker 2: this is coming from a detainee.
Speaker 3: You think they wouldn't want to make news. Maybe maybe not.
Speaker 2: We know that he served there at least for some time.
Speaker 2: The thing is, though, is wouldn't you be prepared for
Speaker 2: the question? And from what comes in this response, I
Speaker 2: think what you're going to see is I think he's
Speaker 2: been dealing with the C league for a long time,
Speaker 2: and if he were to ever become president, this would
Speaker 2: be the easiest question.
Speaker 3: You would ever get.
Speaker 2: And clearly he gets flustered and he doesn't handle the
Speaker 2: pressure all that.
Speaker 3: Well, let's take a listen to his response.
Speaker 6: No, no, not all that's bs now totally who said that?
Speaker 6: How would they know me? Okay, think about that. Do
Speaker 6: you honestly believe that's credible? So this is twenty two
Speaker 6: thousand and six, I'm a junior officer. Do you honestly
Speaker 6: think that they would have remembered me from Adam?
Speaker 7: Of course not.
Speaker 6: They're just trying to get into the news because they
Speaker 6: know people like you will consume it because it fits
Speaker 6: your preordained narrative that you're trying to spend focus.
Speaker 4: On the fact.
Speaker 2: What do you think, Cristel? I mean, I could see
Speaker 2: how some right wing accounts might have spend.
Speaker 3: That was like yeah, they were like, oh we own
Speaker 3: I didn't see it. I sound to get pretty flustered.
Speaker 2: The thing is with Trump is Trump had a remarkable
Speaker 2: ability to laugh at them, and then if they.
Speaker 3: Were really going to push it, he would be like
Speaker 3: excuse me, excuse me, and really own them.
Speaker 2: I watched it happen several times. It seems insecure just
Speaker 2: to me because I think it comes out guns blazing
Speaker 2: out of the gate. He doesn't never try to disarm
Speaker 2: sometimes with humor, which is really just an underlying confidence issue.
Speaker 3: I think whenever you're dealing.
Speaker 1: With this, Yeah, he's got thin skin and he gets
Speaker 1: ruffled basily, and that's what it looks like to me,
Speaker 1: and you know, never let them see you sweat. And
Speaker 1: clearly on this trip he had two instances at least
Speaker 1: where people with you know, pretty obvious questions things have
Speaker 1: been floating around the press, his poll numbers, in particular,
Speaker 1: where he gets he reacts emotionally, and that's not something
Speaker 1: you ever want to do.
Speaker 4: I mean, really, that's a good lesson.
Speaker 1: Like in life, you want to keep control of your
Speaker 1: emotion so that you are playing on your own ground
Speaker 1: and letting people control you and get under your skin.
Speaker 1: To that regard, I do think the substance here matters though,
Speaker 1: because DeSantis. We will never know exactly what DeSantis was
Speaker 1: involved in the allegation, so that he was involved in
Speaker 1: torture and force feeding in particular of prisoners that he
Speaker 1: was at least there viewing this. There were multiple detainees,
Speaker 1: which I'll remind you the overwhelming majority of Guantanamo Bay
Speaker 1: detainees were never charged with anything. Many of them were
Speaker 1: just swept up deemed enemy combatants, and they never brought
Speaker 1: them to any sort of trial because they couldn't actually
Speaker 1: find charges that would stick. So important to keep that
Speaker 1: in mind in terms of who the detainees are. There
Speaker 1: were quite a large number who said they were called
Speaker 1: his face being present at least while they were being
Speaker 1: force fed, and he was there at a time that
Speaker 1: was really the worst.
Speaker 4: Let's put this up on the screen. From Miami Herald.
Speaker 1: There's been multiple reports about you know what involvement he
Speaker 1: had at Guantanamo.
Speaker 4: This is Miami Harold.
Speaker 1: Their headline is very intimate knowledge what Ron DeSantis saw
Speaker 1: while serving at Guantanamo. One of the things that they
Speaker 1: point out the time period when he was serving there
Speaker 1: was one of the most tumultuous and most truly horrifying
Speaker 1: in the history of Guantama, which is really saying a lot.
Speaker 1: You had deaths of three detainees during that time, You
Speaker 1: had clashes with guards rolling the facility, you had restraint
Speaker 1: chairs introduced during that time, during the height of a
Speaker 1: massive hunger strike, facilitating the force feeding of prisoners. As
Speaker 1: I said, this wasn't just like one detainee, that's how
Speaker 1: they were called him. It was a fairly significant number.
Speaker 1: Nobody has been able to fully confirm that. I don't
Speaker 1: think there's any doubt that he would have been well
Speaker 1: aware of all of these things that were going on
Speaker 1: while he was there as a JAG officer at the facility.
Speaker 1: And then the most important piece is I think he
Speaker 1: came away from that experience, you know, seeing the torture,
Speaker 1: or at least being aware of the torture and the
Speaker 1: deaths and the clashes and the totally you know, unconstitutional
Speaker 1: and unconscionable treatment of these quote unquote enemy combatants, this
Speaker 1: fake designation and all of those horrors, and he came
Speaker 1: away and was a very strong and defender of it.
Speaker 1: I think that's important in terms of who he is,
Speaker 1: what his judgment is, his view of the world, his
Speaker 1: view of our responsibilities internationally in the way that we
Speaker 1: should treat human beings. So regardless of whatever his involvement
Speaker 1: technically was, to me, the most important point is that
Speaker 1: he was there during the height of some of the
Speaker 1: worst abuses, and he came away and was incredibly aggressive
Speaker 1: and strident and defending it well.
Speaker 2: And that's another point about strength, where if you were
Speaker 2: going to answer that question, and if you still believe that,
Speaker 2: you're like, listen, I did my job while I was there.
Speaker 2: I never tortured anybody. This is fake news. Next question.
Speaker 2: It's one of those where again you're just coming at
Speaker 2: it from a position where it seems to me that
Speaker 2: he either appears like he wants to try and always
Speaker 2: like own the person but doesn't necessarily do it, or
Speaker 2: it comes from a position of genuinely being rattled by it.
Speaker 3: Either.
Speaker 2: I think both are lack of self confidence, which is
Speaker 2: very important if you're going to run for Yeah.
Speaker 3: So there you go.
Speaker 1: On seven hundred and eighty individuals that went through Guantanamo
Speaker 1: since it opened, only thirty two remained there. Eleven of
Speaker 1: those have been charged with a crime. I mean, this
Speaker 1: is a stain on America. It's you know, a stain
Speaker 1: on every administration since the Bush administration, including the Bush administration,
Speaker 1: that they have not been able to close down this facility.
Speaker 1: And you know, I find it a real stain on
Speaker 1: his judgment and his career that he continued to defend
Speaker 1: what he saw up close and personal.
Speaker 3: The stupidest thing about Guantanamo. Let me just say this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so, the reason you can't charge these guys with
Speaker 2: the crime, even though in some cases they are dead
Speaker 2: to right s guilty, is because they were tortured and
Speaker 2: we have violated their PRIs If we ever put them
Speaker 2: on trial, they could get off, but we couldn't use
Speaker 2: any of the information that we gleaned against them in
Speaker 2: a court of law, which is what FBI agents who
Speaker 2: were there at the time said. They said, don't do
Speaker 2: this because by doing this, we can't prosecute them.
Speaker 3: And now it's in admissible.
Speaker 2: And now you have a case where you literally have
Speaker 2: the nine to eleven masterminds sitting in a cell and
Speaker 2: you can't charge them in the US Corps and going
Speaker 2: through some BS military tribunal child which doesn't make any sense,
Speaker 2: even though, of course, if you're going to prosecute me,
Speaker 2: he has protections under US law. It was all foreseen
Speaker 2: at the time in two thousand and one. So you
Speaker 2: can thank George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and all
Speaker 2: the other idiots who said that there was clue woke,
Speaker 2: clear and present danger, and it's twenty twenty three and
Speaker 2: we still have a goddamn mess on our hands.
Speaker 3: So thank you, George W.
Speaker 7: Bush.
Speaker 3: That's right for doing this.
Speaker 1: At the same time, we have new developments in terms
Speaker 1: of the fight between ron De Santis and Disney. We
Speaker 1: told you before, so you guys probably remember the backstory here.
Speaker 1: Disney came out against the so called don't say gay
Speaker 1: Bill put on a statement. Ronda Santis and his allies
Speaker 1: reacted against that. This was, you know, him standing up
Speaker 1: to the woke corporation. And I think this thing is
Speaker 1: escalated way beyond what he would have liked. Like the
Speaker 1: rest of the country has moved on, and he's still
Speaker 1: stuck now in this battle against a multinational, gigantic behemoth
Speaker 1: company that happens to be incredibly central to the economy
Speaker 1: in Florida. So he's picked a very large fight here.
Speaker 1: I do want to say though, there was an interesting analysis.
Speaker 1: Disney is now suing DeSantis because they before this ready
Speaker 1: Creak Improvement Board that they had control over before this
Speaker 1: got turned over to Desanta's allies, they really kind of
Speaker 1: worked him over. They put out their notice that they
Speaker 1: were going to have a meeting. They did it twice,
Speaker 1: which is what you're required to do under law. They
Speaker 1: had this meaning and the last act of the board
Speaker 1: before the Desanta's allies took it over, was to hand
Speaker 1: control effectively to Disney and sign this gigantic development deal.
Speaker 1: Now the DeSantis people have come in, they're saying no, no, no,
Speaker 1: we're going to roll back this deal. There's some legislation
Speaker 1: that has involved as well, and so Disney is saying,
Speaker 1: all right, we're going to sue you.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 1: I did an monologue before saying basically, listen between Trump
Speaker 1: attacking DeSantis, DeSantis on this mess that he's created, Disney
Speaker 1: being a gigantic corporation, Like, there's really no one to
Speaker 1: root for here in my personal opinion, But the way
Speaker 1: that Disney crafted this lawsuit is something we should actually
Speaker 1: take a close look at. And some of the reporting
Speaker 1: on is kind of troubling. And you shouldn't if if
Speaker 1: you're you know, on the political left, or if you're
Speaker 1: just concerned about corporate power, you shouldn't necessarily be cheering
Speaker 1: for Disney to succeed in this lawsuit. Put this analysis
Speaker 1: up from Slate, which is a sort of left liberal publication.
Speaker 2: Joseph Stern, he's probably as big a lib as it
Speaker 2: gets on these issues.
Speaker 1: I just want people to know, Yes, it's important to
Speaker 1: know who this person is and the perspective they're coming from.
Speaker 1: And he says why I can't root for Disney's lawsuit
Speaker 1: against Ronda Santis. I'm going to read you some of
Speaker 1: these specifics here, but the TLDR is that they have
Speaker 1: taken this very expansionist view that would hand a lot
Speaker 1: of power to states to quash and to courts to
Speaker 1: quash any sort of like labor law regulations. This is
Speaker 1: going This is a throwback to the one of the
Speaker 1: worst eras of the Supreme Court, if not the worst
Speaker 1: era of the Supreme Court, the Lochner era, where they
Speaker 1: used contract law to try to quash things like minimum
Speaker 1: wage legislation or you know, minimum work day legislation, things
Speaker 1: that were beneficial for labor. They tried to say, no, no, no.
Speaker 1: The contract clause in the Constitution says that you can't
Speaker 1: have any of these sort of regulations coming in to
Speaker 1: protect labor. Now, this was has been left aside in
Speaker 1: terms of jurisprudence for more than one hundred years. That
Speaker 1: Disney is reaching back to, and a lot of other
Speaker 1: plaintiffs are reaching back to because they see the incredibly
Speaker 1: pro corporation right word swing of the court and they
Speaker 1: are hoping to bring back some of this Lochner era jurisprudence.
Speaker 4: So let me read you a little bit of the
Speaker 4: analysis here.
Speaker 1: They say this case is more about contract law than
Speaker 1: free expression, and by invoking the Constitution's contracts clause and
Speaker 1: leaning on it so happily, Disney is playing with fire.
Speaker 1: There's a reason this provisionist at war bond for nearly
Speaker 1: a century. Interpreted broadly, it could give courts immense power
Speaker 1: to help corporations and employers escape regulation. The federal judiciary
Speaker 1: should not be handed another open ended invitation halt progress
Speaker 1: at the behest of the scrupulous and powerful, which free
Speaker 1: speech gestures aside.
Speaker 4: Is what this is.
Speaker 1: Goes on to discuss how this became what he describes
Speaker 1: as a tool of mischief during the Lochner Area era.
Speaker 1: That was a period from the eighteen nineties to the
Speaker 1: thirties when the Supreme Court routinely invalidated health, safety, and
Speaker 1: economic regulations. The clause fit neatly into the Court's conception
Speaker 1: of a constitutional liberty of contract that sharply limited state
Speaker 1: oversight of the marketplace. During this period, For instance, Scotis
Speaker 1: repeatedly used the contract's clause to preserve private monopolies over
Speaker 1: the water supply, preventing local governments from constructing their own waterworks.
Speaker 1: Struck down a Kansas law enacted during a financial panic
Speaker 1: that let mortgage holders state in their homes for several
Speaker 1: months after foreclosure. And as I said before, this is
Speaker 1: now being used, you know, to try to get around
Speaker 1: eviction moratorium, to try to get around rent stabilization laws,
Speaker 1: to try to get around wage increases. They're again arguing
Speaker 1: that this violates the contract's clause, and this Disney suit
Speaker 1: fits into that matrix. This is they're not arguing on
Speaker 1: free speech grounds. They're not even just arguing on like
Speaker 1: you know, this was wrongly rolled back, this development deal
Speaker 1: that we put into place in which was rightfully signed
Speaker 1: to law. They're not arguing any of that. They're going
Speaker 1: for this much larger, much broader, potentially much wider implications
Speaker 1: contracts clause argument.
Speaker 2: That's why though, that it was always important to take
Speaker 2: a step back, and you know, people were like, I
Speaker 2: want to own desantists by supporting Disney and vice versa.
Speaker 2: Yeah again, whatever you think about the merits, here's what
Speaker 2: was happening down there. Disney has was running not just
Speaker 2: a magic kingdom but a literal kingdom in Florida. They
Speaker 2: had the ability to like tax themselves, the police force
Speaker 2: they were literally had almost total control over this town,
Speaker 2: and it was effectively like a sovereign area akin to
Speaker 2: almost like a tribal nation inside the United States, except
Speaker 2: it was a multi billion dollar corporation. Now you need
Speaker 2: to ask yourself, are you okay with that? Because the
Speaker 2: previous times in American history when we had that were
Speaker 2: things like Henry Ford's factory, you know town, which was
Speaker 2: so wonderful because you could pay your rent to Henry
Speaker 2: Ford using your forward bucks.
Speaker 4: And you had mining, yeah, coal.
Speaker 2: Mining towns that then followed the Ford model, and you
Speaker 2: basically had people in quasi you know, indentured servitude and
Speaker 2: or slavery up until really like the nineteen twenties and thirties,
Speaker 2: whenever people rejected this in the height of the Great Depression.
Speaker 2: So the point is, like, do you want some sort
Speaker 2: of legal architecture to be allowed to exist? This also
Speaker 2: comes back to the crux of the Disney lawsuit. In
Speaker 2: the brief, they say Disney's First Amendment rights were violated.
Speaker 2: This comes from you have to take a step back
Speaker 2: and say, well, hold on a second, does Disney do
Speaker 2: Disney employees.
Speaker 3: Have a right to freedom of speech? Absolutely?
Speaker 2: Does Disney the corporation have a right to free speech?
Speaker 3: In my opinion, no, I don't think.
Speaker 2: Any corporation should have a right to free speech. All
Speaker 2: the corporations are people. I don't think that they should
Speaker 2: be treated in any way in the same law. And
Speaker 2: that is actually where the crux of all this comes
Speaker 2: down to. It's about power, and it's about the fact
Speaker 2: that you can even listen. I'd support people's freedom of
Speaker 2: expression and a speech, but I just used a keyword there,
Speaker 2: which is people, not corporation, because then it comes down
Speaker 2: to the idea that we the people can't tell corporations
Speaker 2: what they can and cannot do, which is the very
Speaker 2: basics of how civil governments govern commerce itself.
Speaker 1: Well, there's no doubt the Supreme Court disagrees with you,
Speaker 1: I know that and with me on that. And that's
Speaker 1: one of the ironies here is that the conservative project
Speaker 1: that Ron DeSantis has long been a part of has
Speaker 1: stacked the judiciary with judges who look very favorably on
Speaker 1: Disney and other gigantic corporations having mass amounts of power
Speaker 1: and having you know, complete personhood rights and complete free
Speaker 1: speech rights, et cetera. So that makes it less likely
Speaker 1: that DeSantis is going to succeed here because again, and
Speaker 1: this is the judicial picks have always been sold to
Speaker 1: the conservative base based on social issues.
Speaker 4: But as we've talked about.
Speaker 1: Before, I mean, a lot of the real game is
Speaker 1: about corporate power and about curbing labor power. And so
Speaker 1: that's the court system that this goes into. The last
Speaker 1: piece of this is this is the latest development. There
Speaker 1: is a countersuit now that Red Creek Improvement Board that
Speaker 1: used to be stacked with Disney people and is now
Speaker 1: stacked with Desanti's people. They are countersuing Disney. Put us
Speaker 1: up on the screen from CNN they say DeSantis aligned
Speaker 1: board votes to sue Disney. The chair of this now
Speaker 1: called Central Florida Tourism Oversight District Board of Supervisors that's
Speaker 1: the new name for this thing, says, since Disney sued us, yes,
Speaker 1: we didn't sue Disney. Disney sued us we have no
Speaker 1: choice now but to respond, Yes, we will seek justice
Speaker 1: in our own backyard. So that's the very latest. I
Speaker 1: have no idea how the law will, how this wall
Speaker 1: play out in terms of the legal you know, decisions
Speaker 1: that are likely to come down here, but I think
Speaker 1: these are all important pieces to keep in mind.
Speaker 3: Yes, that's right. So let's talk a little bit about
Speaker 3: First Republic Bank.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so yesterday we brought you the pretty shocking news
Speaker 1: that we were living through the second largest bank failure
Speaker 1: in history. So that's kind of a big deal, and
Speaker 1: we now can bring you some war numbers about just
Speaker 1: how significant the turmoil in the banking sector of these
Speaker 1: past few months has really been. Put this up on
Speaker 1: the screen from the New York Times. They crunched the
Speaker 1: numbers and they found that the failed banks this year
Speaker 1: were actually bigger than twenty five that crumbled back in
Speaker 1: two thousand and eight. And you can see it's pretty
Speaker 1: close if you're looking at this bar chart. They just
Speaker 1: these three banks that just failed just barely, you know,
Speaker 1: managed to surpass the twenty five that failed last time around.
Speaker 1: They said the three banks held a total of five
Speaker 1: hundred and thirty two billion in assets that's more than
Speaker 1: the five hundred and twenty six billion when adjusted for inflation,
Speaker 1: held by the twenty five banks that collapse in two
Speaker 1: thousand and eight at the height of the global financial crisis.
Speaker 1: You will recall the implosion of Washington Mutual that year
Speaker 1: as well as the investment banks Lehman Brothers bear Stearns
Speaker 1: was followed by failers they are on the banking system,
Speaker 1: and between twenty eight and twenty fifteen there were actually
Speaker 1: more than five hundred federally insured banks that failed. Most
Speaker 1: of them were small or mid sized regional banks, and
Speaker 1: most of them were absorbed into other institutions. And Washington
Speaker 1: Mutual itself, which was heavily involved in risky mortgages and
Speaker 1: became the largest bank to fail in history, was sold
Speaker 1: to JP Morgan Chase, just as First Republic has now
Speaker 1: been sold to JP Morgan Chase, which has made this
Speaker 1: bank an absolute giant. It is now by far one
Speaker 1: of the largest banks in the entire world. Jamie Diamond,
Speaker 1: as we discussed yesterday, is like one of the most.
Speaker 4: Powerful people in the world now.
Speaker 1: Ever since we had the two thousand and eight crash,
Speaker 1: banks have only gotten bigger and bigger and bigger. I
Speaker 1: think the number I saw is that JP Morgan Chase
Speaker 1: is now twice a size that it was.
Speaker 4: Before the crash happened.
Speaker 1: So the whole idea of we're going to end too
Speaker 1: big to fail, et cetera didn't work out that.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, too big to fail is now policy. I mean,
Speaker 2: I said this yesterday, but having the numbers is nuts.
Speaker 2: JP Morgan three point two trillion, Bank of America two
Speaker 2: point four two trillion, City Bank one point seven seven trillion,
Speaker 2: Wells Fargo one point seven two trillion. The drop off
Speaker 2: from the big four down to the US bank is
Speaker 2: over a billion dollars from their point you get to
Speaker 2: five hundred billion, then PNC Bank is five hundred billion,
Speaker 2: Trust Bank five forty six, Goldman for eighty seven, Capital
Speaker 2: one four fifty three, and TD Bank three eighty seven.
Speaker 2: So the reality is is exponential the growth whenever it
Speaker 2: comes to the biggest banks in the US. And in fact,
Speaker 2: we really just have four banks, you know, in this
Speaker 2: in this country that can control the vast majority of assets,
Speaker 2: which means that if any one of those four goes down,
Speaker 2: then you know you're you're looking at two thousand and
Speaker 2: eight on steroids and I just think that the headline
Speaker 2: there is something that we should all really internalize. The
Speaker 2: three failed banks bigger than the twenty five that crumbled
Speaker 2: in two thousand and eight. Now we're not saying that
Speaker 2: this is two thousand and eight. It's not the same
Speaker 2: level of contagion, it's not the same level of systemic
Speaker 2: risk to the banking system. It's got not going to
Speaker 2: have the same cascading effects. What we are showing you, though,
Speaker 2: is that the precarity within the economy is probably bigger
Speaker 2: than people think, and that we could just be one
Speaker 2: or two events away from a possible two thousand and
Speaker 2: eight environment. And even if we're not the system that
Speaker 2: we have right now, if eight ever hits again, and
Speaker 2: do you really believe the regulators are totally doing their jobs?
Speaker 2: And if one of these big four goes down, one
Speaker 2: of these you know, the Bank of America's, the JP,
Speaker 2: Morgan Jays, the City Bank, Wells Fargo. We have four
Speaker 2: guys who are charged those which is one of them
Speaker 2: twenty five percent makes a decision one in four chance
Speaker 2: you could crash the entire US economy. You could literally
Speaker 2: and it would be bigger than two thousand in terms
Speaker 2: of the bailouts that would need to be done and
Speaker 2: in terms of the risk that it poses to all
Speaker 2: of us.
Speaker 4: Yeah, no, that's right.
Speaker 1: There were a couple other pieces we wanted to bring
Speaker 1: you here. So part of the issue that we discussed
Speaker 1: extensively in the wake of Silicon Valley Bank collapsing is
Speaker 1: you know, what should be the FDIC and deposit insurance levels?
Speaker 1: Two hundred and fifty K is in theory what it was.
Speaker 1: But when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, instantly the government came
Speaker 1: in and said no, no, no, we're actually going to
Speaker 1: backstop all deposits. So that raised a host of questions about, Okay,
Speaker 1: while you're doing that for everybody, what does that mean?
Speaker 1: Do we need to adjust the system going forward? And
Speaker 1: put this next piece up on the screen. The FDIC
Speaker 1: just issued their own report. This was written up in
Speaker 1: American Banker, a publication I frankly did not know exist
Speaker 1: but do now. They say, FDIC recommends higher deposit insurance
Speaker 1: for business accounts. So they considered three different approaches. One
Speaker 1: is unlimited deposit insurance, basically make what they did at
Speaker 1: Silicon Valley Bank, make that the law of the land,
Speaker 1: and have premium increases to reflect the fact that actually
Speaker 1: now all deposits and all values are going to be
Speaker 1: backstopped by the federal government. They said that particular idea
Speaker 1: could be a bad idea because it could encourage sort
Speaker 1: of risky behavior on the part of banks and depositors,
Speaker 1: et cetera. They were worried about moral hazard there. I'm
Speaker 1: sure also the banks don't really want to pay those
Speaker 1: premiums that would you create a fund large enough to
Speaker 1: be able to backstop the entire deposits of the entire country.
Speaker 1: So that was one idea that they put off the table.
Speaker 1: The other is to keep the status quot two hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty k for everybody, and it is what it is.
Speaker 1: They felt that because of some of the challenges that
Speaker 1: we saw with Silicon Valley Bank, that that doesn't adequately
Speaker 1: address run risk. So they felt that that was not
Speaker 1: the best way to go. So the third way that
Speaker 1: they proposed here is targeting deposit insurance for business accounts,
Speaker 1: so that you could have greater coverage for business accounts
Speaker 1: without all the moral hazard. Unlimited insurance introduces yielding what
Speaker 1: they describe as substantial financial stability benefits relative to their costs.
Speaker 1: So they're trying to say, okay, so for most regular depositors,
Speaker 1: it'll stay at two hundred and fifty K. For business accounts,
Speaker 1: they would presumably have to pay some sort of surcharge
Speaker 1: and they would have a higher level, not unlimited, but
Speaker 1: a higher level of deposit threshold that would be covered.
Speaker 3: Yeah, look, I definitely support that.
Speaker 2: You know what the problem is though, is that when
Speaker 2: you give somebody something for free, then why are they
Speaker 2: going to pay for it?
Speaker 3: So imagine that like we came out and.
Speaker 2: Say it don't want point all I fd I see
Speaker 2: things are benefit and everyone's like okay, cool. So they
Speaker 2: got the benefit and they didn't have to pay for it,
Speaker 2: so why would they pay for it? And even if
Speaker 2: they do pay for it, we will all pay for it.
Speaker 2: They're the ones who are going to raise the rates
Speaker 2: because of their risky behavior. You know, there should be
Speaker 2: a better system that is put in place where the
Speaker 2: cost is not put on to the consumer or the
Speaker 2: small business Crystal somebody like you're in my account instead
Speaker 2: of something like the banks and their profits that they
Speaker 2: are allowed to take in the first place.
Speaker 3: So I think this whole system is totally.
Speaker 2: Backwards for who gets to pay and who doesn't, and
Speaker 2: it's just still highlights to me, like how unfair the
Speaker 2: entire system really is.
Speaker 3: Through all of that. You know.
Speaker 2: Also, though, in terms of the Federal Reserve, at least
Speaker 2: some questions are being asked.
Speaker 3: Put this up there on the screen.
Speaker 2: Jerome Powell actually could face more opposition as these FED
Speaker 2: choices are getting tougher. The Biden administration is set to
Speaker 2: nominate a new person to the Overall Governance Board Crystal,
Speaker 2: And at the very least policymakers are asking questions about
Speaker 2: the interest rates.
Speaker 1: Yeah, now that their banker buddies are interested, so they're
Speaker 1: starting to think.
Speaker 4: Like maybe we've done enough. Great high point.
Speaker 2: Anyway, at least they are doing something. But they're not
Speaker 2: doing something because any of us are suffering. It's because
Speaker 2: they're bank boys, are Yeah.
Speaker 1: And they're still expecting to their meeting this week. The
Speaker 1: expectation is very much they'll move forward with a twenty
Speaker 1: five basis point hike. And then after that you have
Speaker 1: really split views. You have some what's called, you know,
Speaker 1: hawks who want to continue hiking rates at a very
Speaker 1: aggressive clip given the fact that inflation continues to be
Speaker 1: relatively high. Although the pace has come down somewhat, and
Speaker 1: then you have some doves who are like, you know,
Speaker 1: we've already kind of broken some pretty significant things in
Speaker 1: the economy by lifting the rates, because the interest rate
Speaker 1: risk was at the core of the failure of all
Speaker 1: three of these very significant sized banks. So they're saying, listen,
Speaker 1: we already broke some stuff. Maybe we should cool it
Speaker 1: here and wait for things to settle and see how
Speaker 1: it's all going. So that will be a fight that's
Speaker 1: playing out at the FED over the coming months. At
Speaker 1: the same time, you know, I think one of the
Speaker 1: important stories coming out of the handling of First Republic's
Speaker 1: failure is once again JP Morgan Chase getting much much
Speaker 1: larger and becoming an absolute giant. It has been on
Speaker 1: this path for quite some time. This makes Jamie Diamond
Speaker 1: incredibly significantly important. Financial Times had a good report on this.
Speaker 1: They note put this up on the screen. They note
Speaker 1: that all deposits were taken over by JP Morgan. That
Speaker 1: means the US government did not have to declared the
Speaker 1: bank a systemic risk to protect those larger deposits over
Speaker 1: two under fifty k JP Morgan, though, they secured a
Speaker 1: loss sharing agreement, so they capture whatever upside there is,
Speaker 1: but they have some law sharing agreement to avoid the downside.
Speaker 1: They describe that as a crucial sweetener for the buyer.
Speaker 1: And although top Biden administration officials played a less prominent
Speaker 1: role in the negotiations than in the failure of Silicon
Speaker 1: Valley Bank, the deal came together after heated discussions between
Speaker 1: Washington and Wall Street. And they note that Diamond had
Speaker 1: a direct line to Biden through his contacts in Washington,
Speaker 1: and I would wager a guest that Jamie Diamond always
Speaker 1: has a direct line to Joe Biden, because he is
Speaker 1: in some ways as powerful or more so than the
Speaker 1: President of the United States. At this point, they also
Speaker 1: talk They quote Ian Katz at Capital Alpha Partners who
Speaker 1: warns that as the dust settles, there may be increasing
Speaker 1: political opposition to this deal. Why because in ordinary times
Speaker 1: regulators never would have approved JP Morgan Chase buying a
Speaker 1: bank of the size of First Republic because they are
Speaker 1: already over the limit of having more than ten percent
Speaker 1: of all of American deposits residing with their bank. They
Speaker 1: were already over that limit. So if they had just
Speaker 1: come and we're going to buy First Republic regulators would
Speaker 1: have said, no way, you're already over the limit.
Speaker 4: We're not doing it. And so they say they never would.
Speaker 1: Have received regulatory approval to purchase a healthy bank of
Speaker 1: that size. They will now get bigger due to their
Speaker 1: role as savior of last resort. I mean, we have
Speaker 1: effectively made JP Morgan Chase like a quasi governmental institution
Speaker 1: and handing them perks that are involved with them looking
Speaker 1: for them to clean up messes that are made in
Speaker 1: the banking system in other places. And that is an
Speaker 1: extraordinary role that they have been put in. Jamie Diamond
Speaker 1: struck a defiant tone in reaction to all of this.
Speaker 1: They write, he said, we have capabilities to help our clients,
Speaker 1: who happen to be cities, schools, states, hospitals, to governments.
Speaker 1: We bank countries, and we bank the IMF, we bank
Speaker 1: the World Bank. You need large, successful banks, and anyone
Speaker 1: who thinks that would be good for the US to
Speaker 1: not have that should call me directly. I guess we
Speaker 1: need to get his phone number there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, please catch out Jamie. And look, we have
Speaker 2: a visualization. Go ahead and put this up there on
Speaker 2: the screen that people can look at. Just look at this.
Speaker 2: I mean, this is what we're talking about here.
Speaker 4: This is a note.
Speaker 1: This is before this acquisition, which is going to add
Speaker 1: another additional trillion dollars roughly to this number that you
Speaker 1: see here exactly.
Speaker 2: So, now JP Morgan is not only the biggest bank
Speaker 2: in America, it is bigger by orders of magnitude than
Speaker 2: the previous largest bank, which is Bank of America, which
Speaker 2: is already huge at two point four trillion, which is
Speaker 2: also bigger than City Group at one point seven. Like
Speaker 2: I was saying about earlier, put those four together, we're
Speaker 2: talking about the vast majority of the US economy in
Speaker 2: the hands of these four banks.
Speaker 3: It's been a total failure of too big to fail.
Speaker 2: The entire two thousand and eight thesis that the vast
Speaker 2: majority of Americans came away with is We're never going
Speaker 2: to lie this happen again, because we will never be
Speaker 2: forced to have bailouts. And instead, we have actually made
Speaker 2: it more likely that if we ever do face a risk,
Speaker 2: that we will have to go in and bail these banks,
Speaker 2: which is what a what a I think, you know,
Speaker 2: travel back in time fifteen years ago, yeah, and try
Speaker 2: and tell them that that's how everything was going to work.
Speaker 7: Out.
Speaker 3: They would have told you that you were nuts that
Speaker 3: were never going to let that happen.
Speaker 2: But we did let it happen, and we actually made
Speaker 2: it worse, you know, in many many respects, which I
Speaker 2: think is really sad. You know, to consider about how
Speaker 2: much populous energy came out from two thousand and eight
Speaker 2: Occupy Wall Street and so much of that, and you know,
Speaker 2: really what it ended up with is a more precarious
Speaker 2: financial system than ever.
Speaker 1: Just final point to underscore this. Put this last piece
Speaker 1: up on the screen. This was from Forbes. They write,
Speaker 1: with first Republic takeover JP Morgan is America's most globally
Speaker 1: systemically important bank. Their acquisition makes it that it has
Speaker 1: an asset size now of over four point two trillion.
Speaker 1: You know that dwarfs now its next competitor Bank of America.
Speaker 1: It will now rank number five, after four Chinese globally
Speaker 1: systemically important banks, and it's now more than twice the
Speaker 1: size it was in two thousand and six. So you know,
Speaker 1: this author appines clearly the too big to fail problem
Speaker 1: in the US not only alive and well now an
Speaker 1: even bigger problem for the financial industry in the American government.
Speaker 1: Some analysts have stated, the first Republic bank failure is idiosyncratic.
Speaker 1: Three banks have failed in the US in less than
Speaker 1: two months. They are amongst the largest bank failures in
Speaker 1: US history. This is serious. And the last thing that
Speaker 1: I'll say for everybody to reflect on is the fact
Speaker 1: that you know this transaction, which once again makes JP
Speaker 1: Morgan Chase basically a quasi governmental institution, because Lord knows,
Speaker 1: we are not letting that ship go under no way,
Speaker 1: and the US government is backstopping any potential risk and
Speaker 1: losses here of JP Morgan Chase. This is all done
Speaker 1: over a weekend. It's done very quickly. There is no
Speaker 1: public input or democratic ability to dissent. And that's the
Speaker 1: world that we are living in.
Speaker 2: Yeah Morgan, Joe Jamie, I mean, is now basically the
Speaker 2: new Andrew Mellon. If you guys, we don't have enough
Speaker 2: time today for me to go into it, but you
Speaker 2: should go and look him up. He was both one
Speaker 2: of the richest men in the country and the banker
Speaker 2: Secretary of the Treasury of the United States. He eventually
Speaker 2: went to prison, which is kind of inspiring, but an
Speaker 2: accountability well, after the Great Depression, we kind of woke
Speaker 2: up to what was going on there, But in the
Speaker 2: twenties he was basically a god king here in the US,
Speaker 2: almost exactly one hundred years ago, coincidentally, So who knows,
Speaker 2: maybe history will beat itself.
Speaker 1: We also have our eye on tomorrow as World Press
Speaker 1: Freedom Day, and there are some new numbers ount that
Speaker 1: reveal the way the American people feel about our free
Speaker 1: press here.
Speaker 4: In the US.
Speaker 1: And none of these numbers are going to surprise you,
Speaker 1: but it's always interesting to dig into the specifics. Let's
Speaker 1: put this first piece up on the screen. This is
Speaker 1: from the AP and the question here is is the
Speaker 1: news media doing more to increase political divisions in the US?
Speaker 1: Decrease political divisions or does it not have any impact?
Speaker 1: And seventy four percent of America say, of Americans say
Speaker 1: that it increases divisions, I want to meet this six
Speaker 1: percent that those decreases divisions. Eighteen percent say it has
Speaker 1: no impact. So this is an overwhelming indictment of the
Speaker 1: press and of what they're doing. You know, it gets
Speaker 1: to the core of Matt Tayeb's book on this subject
Speaker 1: that effectively, the media's whole job and how they fill
Speaker 1: a twenty four hour news cycle now is to convince
Speaker 1: you that your fellow American is the gravest threat to
Speaker 1: you and your security and your way of life.
Speaker 4: And people obviously hear scenes of the game.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm glad that they do. And we've always known this.
Speaker 2: I say, I've ha told this story before, but I
Speaker 2: met a guy once who made many billions of dollars,
Speaker 2: and he said, always bet on charts. And whenever I
Speaker 2: think about the success of this show, and not just
Speaker 2: this show, so many of the other independent shows that
Speaker 2: are out there, and you put them all together, and
Speaker 2: the viewership is many orders of magnitude, you know, combined.
Speaker 2: Then let's say the total three cable news media. It
Speaker 2: comes back to this chart. You know, always bet on
Speaker 2: trust in the mainstream media. And then the fact is
Speaker 2: is that the vast majority of Americans not only fault,
Speaker 2: not only don't like the news, they actively blame the
Speaker 2: news for dividing the nation. And I think everyone in
Speaker 2: this country can have some sort of personal experience for
Speaker 2: both right and left to think back to think about
Speaker 2: a grandma, one of those people who's got a TV
Speaker 2: installed in the kitchen just so they can watch Fox
Speaker 2: all day.
Speaker 3: I wish I was joking.
Speaker 2: There are a lot more people then you might think,
Speaker 2: who have literally done that, who can recite to you
Speaker 2: almost word for word, you know, what's whatever the scandal
Speaker 2: of the day is. But then also think about, you know,
Speaker 2: somebody screaming in somebody's face over holding up a sign
Speaker 2: for somebody that they don't disagree with, or going out
Speaker 2: of their way to prompt a public confrontation over something
Speaker 2: which again is fueled almost entirely by the news media
Speaker 2: and by social media or any of those things that
Speaker 2: has surfaced up to them, And just think like, is
Speaker 2: any of this necessary?
Speaker 3: Because I don't think it is.
Speaker 2: And one of the things that I think we can
Speaker 2: come away with is that if you do talk to
Speaker 2: one another, most people on a very very basic level,
Speaker 2: are not the caricatures that they see. Most are far
Speaker 2: more multifaceted and nuanced and understanding than anybody would ever
Speaker 2: think than if they watch the news where they currently are.
Speaker 2: And I do think it is at least hardening, even
Speaker 2: though many people are still locked into the system that
Speaker 2: most people do at the very least understand that. Now
Speaker 2: I can understand that. I think most humans can both
Speaker 2: understand that and be victim to it. So try to
Speaker 2: minimize the victimization as much as possible and instead have
Speaker 2: that understanding as you go through your life.
Speaker 1: Well, because I also think there's a real tendency of
Speaker 1: people to see media as a problem, but not their
Speaker 1: particular media.
Speaker 3: Yeah. It's like when people hate Congress, but then they
Speaker 3: like their congressmen.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: So it's like, if you're an MSNBC watcher, you're like, well,
Speaker 1: they're not the problem, you know, Fox News. And if
Speaker 1: you're a Fox News while you're like, well, the soft
Speaker 1: Foxes in the issue. Those morons over it, like, you know,
Speaker 1: the MSNBC. And it also it's always fun to me
Speaker 1: when when they portray themselves as not being mainstream media,
Speaker 1: when it's like, you are the largest cable news network,
Speaker 1: Like whatever you were when you were a scrubby upstar,
Speaker 1: you were not that anymore. You were definitely part of
Speaker 1: the mainstream press of America.
Speaker 4: You won't be surprised to learn.
Speaker 1: Also, Republicans had a less favorable view of the media,
Speaker 1: although there were a lot of negative views of the
Speaker 1: media to be had on all partisan identifications. Put this
Speaker 1: next piece up on the screen. So here the question is,
Speaker 1: is the news media hurting democracy sixty one percent of
Speaker 1: Republicans said yes, twenty three percent of Democrats said yes,
Speaker 1: thirty six percent of independence.
Speaker 4: Now, there has been a.
Speaker 1: I think ever in my entire life, there's always been
Speaker 1: a trend of Republicans being more skeptical of the media
Speaker 1: and feeling like their views and perspectives and cultural values
Speaker 1: weren't reflected in the mainstream press. But I also don't
Speaker 1: think there's any doubt about the fact that that has
Speaker 1: escalated in the Trump years, and that, you know, you
Speaker 1: also now have Democrats that feel similarly frustrated with the press.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of Democrats who've feel like the
Speaker 1: news media propped up Donald Trump for ratings back in
Speaker 1: twenty sixteen. They have all sorts of issues with the
Speaker 1: press as well. So so you do have those numbers
Speaker 1: inching up. You also have overwhelming concern about quote unquote misinformation.
Speaker 1: I suspect that there's a lot of different definitions and
Speaker 1: understandings of what misinformation might be.
Speaker 4: But put this up on.
Speaker 1: The screen, ninety percent saying that misinformation is a problem,
Speaker 1: only ten percent saying that it is not a problem.
Speaker 4: I agree with that ninety percent.
Speaker 1: When you look at you know, you look at Russia
Speaker 1: Gate hoax, for example, you look over at po Definition,
Speaker 1: Yeah it looks so you look over at Fox News.
Speaker 1: That's the way they clearly knew stop the steal was alive,
Speaker 1: but they went forward with like pushing on their network anyway.
Speaker 1: So I agree misinformation is a problem, but I doubt
Speaker 1: that I agree with everything that's that ninety percent defines
Speaker 1: as misinformation would be my guest exactly.
Speaker 2: It's like when you ask Republicans democrats is democracy a problem,
Speaker 2: and you say they they all say yes, and they
Speaker 2: go who's the problem, and they say.
Speaker 4: Democrats pointed to each other.
Speaker 2: A whole lot, we're talking past each other. The next one, too,
Speaker 2: is important. Put this up there around social media. When
Speaker 2: you see a news story on social media, you quote
Speaker 2: expected to be accurate, only sixty six percent say yes,
Speaker 2: thirty three percent say that's inaccurate.
Speaker 3: We got to get that an accurate number up.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure, especially given ai that we've been discussing, like,
Speaker 1: you all need to get a whole lot more skeptical
Speaker 1: immediately right now.
Speaker 2: So look, I think what you can really take away
Speaker 2: is Americans are very unhappy with the news media. They're
Speaker 2: unhappy for variety of different reasons, but on happiness is opportunity.
Speaker 3: For everybody who's involved.
Speaker 2: That's part of what we're trying to do here, That's
Speaker 2: part of what a lot of people are trying to
Speaker 2: do all over the internet, and overall, I think that's
Speaker 2: a good thing because what it does is fill in
Speaker 2: avoid that exists and that has been artificially almost propped up,
Speaker 2: and any other business which wasn't as fake this long
Speaker 2: ago would have died now. Unfortunately, you know, for a
Speaker 2: variety of cultural and economic reasons, it hasn't been. But
Speaker 2: that just makes the fight, I think even more important.
Speaker 2: Considering that the news and large is the medium through
Speaker 2: most which people experience civic life and politics. I don't
Speaker 2: think it should be that way, but it is, and
Speaker 2: so that just makes their importance even higher whenever it
Speaker 2: comes to policy and the way that people interact with
Speaker 2: each other on a day to day basis.
Speaker 3: Sometimes people to see people like.
Speaker 2: In traffic who have bumper stickers, so like, if you're
Speaker 2: a liberal, like, here's the birth and I just want
Speaker 2: to be like, dude, like what compelled you to go
Speaker 2: out and to buy that sticker and to peel it
Speaker 2: off and put it on your car and have some
Speaker 2: smug or you know, vice versa opposite. And I'm always
Speaker 2: just like, what's going on in your life where you
Speaker 2: thought that this is like an appropriate thing to do
Speaker 2: and behave as an adult.
Speaker 3: It's very odd.
Speaker 2: It doesn't come from it's not a natural thing. It's
Speaker 2: one of those where that came from somewhere, and I
Speaker 2: don't think it's a good thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like you're putting a bumper sticker on your car.
Speaker 1: That's like, I hate half of the country, So why
Speaker 1: why are you doing this? Doesn't seem very healthy for you.
Speaker 3: Just drive the.
Speaker 2: Car, man, go to work, you know, drive something and
Speaker 2: you enjoy or you know, or lady, I see, you
Speaker 2: should see some of these woke ladies that I live around.
Speaker 2: Some of the sciences these people have in their windows
Speaker 2: crack you up. Anyway, I think it's important for people
Speaker 2: to know it's not a natural human thing. It comes
Speaker 2: from somewhere, and we can change it. And it hasn't
Speaker 2: always been this way.
Speaker 3: So that's a good thing. Yeah, inspiring. Let's go to
Speaker 3: the next one.
Speaker 2: Two important stories first about Tucker, but also about Vice
Speaker 2: News and some breaking news.
Speaker 3: I guess we can say about what's going on over there.
Speaker 2: So, with respect to Tucker, a video has now come
Speaker 2: out of being leaked to media matter. There's lots of
Speaker 2: speculation around who leaked this video. Was it somebody who
Speaker 2: works at Fox? Most likely was the Fox management to
Speaker 2: try and make him look bad. I find it very humorous. Basically,
Speaker 2: what you're seeing here is a behind the scenes video
Speaker 2: where producers are telling Tucker he has to wear a
Speaker 2: sweater during an interview with Andrew Tait. Tucker doesn't want
Speaker 2: to wear the sweater because it's going to appear on
Speaker 2: his primetime show. And I think this is a great
Speaker 2: view for a couple of things. Christy, you and I
Speaker 2: have worked with such producers and others. This is a
Speaker 2: good view.
Speaker 3: I want everybody to take away from this.
Speaker 2: You can get paid twenty five million dollars, but when
Speaker 2: your check is signed by somebody else, you're still an employee.
Speaker 2: You're like inside of a system. Yeah, you're not the king,
Speaker 2: you know, or even the queen or what. You're not
Speaker 2: in charge in the way that you should be, and
Speaker 2: most people think that you are. You're inside of this apparatus.
Speaker 2: He's dissatisfied in this clip with Fox Nation. He's upset
Speaker 2: about the website. He's upset about, you know, the way
Speaker 2: that they're talking to him.
Speaker 4: And Fox Nation is there like streaming plays.
Speaker 3: They're streaming which form we have good luck to them, right.
Speaker 1: And these streaming platforms there's no transparency around, so you
Speaker 1: have no idea how they're actually faring. And I think
Speaker 1: Tucker sort of gives up the game there.
Speaker 2: He gives up the game on how well it's doing.
Speaker 2: It also really just gives up the game on you
Speaker 2: could be the number one star on cable news media.
Speaker 3: But people are still telling those people what to do.
Speaker 3: Take a listen.
Speaker 8: I don't want to be a slave to Fox Nation,
Speaker 8: which I don't think that if people watch anyway, we're
Speaker 8: gonna uh because I you know, I'm like a representative
Speaker 8: of the American media now speaking to an exile in
Speaker 8: Romania and welcome to him back into the brotherhood of journalists.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it would help us out if he wore though,
Speaker 7: because we.
Speaker 3: Asked him not to wear a suit like he was
Speaker 3: kind of about it.
Speaker 7: So if you don't have to talk, is gonna be
Speaker 7: looking casual? That's is that?
Speaker 9: Okay?
Speaker 8: I I mean this is airing on the nighttime show
Speaker 8: and I wanted to look official.
Speaker 5: I don't want it to be like bro talk and.
Speaker 8: I and I, you know what I mean, give it.
Speaker 7: The majority of it.
Speaker 3: Like if we go like forty five minutes, it's gonna
Speaker 3: be Foxnation.
Speaker 8: But nobody's gonna watch it on Foxination. Nobody watches Fox
Speaker 8: Nation because the site sucks. So I'd really like to
Speaker 8: just put the dump the whole thing on YouTube.
Speaker 5: But anyway, that's just my view.
Speaker 8: Uh, I'm just frustrated with Uh, it's hard to use
Speaker 8: that site.
Speaker 5: I don't know why they're not fixing it.
Speaker 8: It's driving insane and they're like making like lifetime movies,
Speaker 8: but they don't they don't work on the infrastructure of
Speaker 8: the site, like what. It's crazy, and it drives me
Speaker 8: crazy because it's like we're doing all this extra work
Speaker 8: and no one can find it. It's unbelievable. Actually we're
Speaker 8: doing our part. We're like working like the animals to
Speaker 8: produce all this content, and the people in charge of it, whoever,
Speaker 8: that guy's whatever his name is, like they're ignoring the
Speaker 8: fact that the site doesn't work, and it's I think
Speaker 8: it's like a betrayal of our efforts.
Speaker 5: That's how I feel so I of course I resent it.
Speaker 3: Here's the worst part.
Speaker 2: He ended up working, you know, and and that that
Speaker 2: tells you so much. It's like you work. When you
Speaker 2: work for somebody, they're telling you how to dress. Nobody
Speaker 2: tells us what to wear. I wear these suits because
Speaker 2: they like them. You wear what you like because you
Speaker 2: like it, because it's how you feel like it. That
Speaker 2: it's that, and think about that's the number one star
Speaker 2: and Cable. What are they telling the other people because
Speaker 2: that how they talk down to everyone. And the arrogance
Speaker 2: too of that producer about you know, here's the thing
Speaker 2: who gives a shit what you what he wears? Does
Speaker 2: it matter at all? Like in any way, No, it's
Speaker 2: all fake. And the point that he makes too is
Speaker 2: also so great. All right, He's like, yeah, why does
Speaker 2: the site suck? Why are they making these idiot they're
Speaker 2: doing like a Bible study with Ainsley, But the site
Speaker 2: doesn't work.
Speaker 1: And if his stuff isn't getting washed on Fox Nation,
Speaker 1: no one's stuff was getting watched on Fox station. Which
Speaker 1: why there's no way that Foxting has managed like this
Speaker 1: because this is too embarrassing, I think, so yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: they don't want to reveal it and no one watches
Speaker 1: Fox Nation and that the website stucks, and then he's like,
Speaker 1: this is.
Speaker 4: A waste of my time. No one is watching it here.
Speaker 1: There's I think, one point in the conversation where he's like,
Speaker 1: I want to put the thing up on YouTube because
Speaker 1: then people.
Speaker 4: Will actually watch it.
Speaker 1: She's not an idiot, but I mean, yeah, to me,
Speaker 1: the piece that is so revelatory and not surprising having
Speaker 1: been in this industry, is like, yeah, you can be
Speaker 1: the number one rated host, you can you know, be
Speaker 1: world famous, et cetera, et cetera. But if they want
Speaker 1: you to wear a sweater and wear freaking sweater, And
Speaker 1: if you don't think that applies to like putting Tucker aside,
Speaker 1: if you don't think that applies to all of these
Speaker 1: hosts and what they cover and how they cover it,
Speaker 1: and what they look like while they do it, and
Speaker 1: who they're nice to and who they're mean to, Like,
Speaker 1: you're a fool. And at the end of the day,
Speaker 1: they decided, you know, that Tucker was more trouble than
Speaker 1: he's worth. I agree with that assessment, and they decided
Speaker 1: to terf them for a variety of reasons. But yeah,
Speaker 1: it's I guess the last thing to say about this
Speaker 1: is all of these networks know that their numbers are falling,
Speaker 1: they know their business model is fading. They know they've
Speaker 1: got like some sort of limited try. Well, you know,
Speaker 1: it'll drag out for a long time and they'll still
Speaker 1: have cultural relevance for.
Speaker 4: A long time. I don't want to diminish that.
Speaker 1: But they're all trying to figure out how do we
Speaker 1: make some sort of a digital plays so we can
Speaker 1: like get a younger audience and keep this thing going.
Speaker 1: And every single one of these efforts has been a catastrophe. Clearly,
Speaker 1: vhoccination is a catastrophe. Fox CNN Plus is a catastrophe.
Speaker 1: We don't know the numbers at Peacock, but it's obviously
Speaker 1: catastrophe as well because their behem, they don't know how
Speaker 1: to create content that people want to see. They don't
Speaker 1: know how to create a platform that people want to
Speaker 1: engage with, and so they're just like dying a slow
Speaker 1: death by a thousand cuts.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely watch that clip.
Speaker 2: And if you ever want to know why, we will
Speaker 2: never work for these people ever again. Yeah, why really
Speaker 2: a major animating thing. That's how it works behind the scenes,
Speaker 2: guys like they try and tell you what to do
Speaker 2: and some stupid ass segment and you're like, what do
Speaker 2: you do? What's wrong in your brain that you would
Speaker 2: even think that that is real? And that's up and
Speaker 2: down the chain, you know, for the entire industry. Let's
Speaker 2: go to the next one here, which is some stunning news.
Speaker 3: That broke yesterday. Let's put it up there on the screen.
Speaker 2: Vice is supposed said to be headed for bankruptcy. The company,
Speaker 2: once valued at five point seven billion dollars, is struggling
Speaker 2: to find a buyer this year, has an incredible amount
Speaker 2: of debt. The news comes immediately after they fired several
Speaker 2: people in their DC bureau and are cutting costs across
Speaker 2: the board. This is a company which raised money from Disney,
Speaker 2: which raised money from private equity in twenty seventeen, was
Speaker 2: valued at a full five point seven end quote. By
Speaker 2: today most accounts it is worth only a tiny.
Speaker 3: Fraction of that.
Speaker 2: In the event of bankruptcy, their largest debtholder would end
Speaker 2: up controlling the company. They said that they're operating normally
Speaker 2: vices currently and what are trying to run an auction
Speaker 2: to sell the company over the next forty five day period,
Speaker 2: but clearly they are in dire, dire financial straits. So
Speaker 2: there are only two ways of this end. Somebody buys
Speaker 2: it for absolute pennies on the dollar. Very unlikely actually,
Speaker 2: because they have high cost their burn rate is high.
Speaker 2: They've got the building in Williamsburg, They've got all these
Speaker 2: costs in terms of shows and other contracts that they
Speaker 2: signed up for.
Speaker 3: They've got massive salaries or had.
Speaker 2: Them at one point on the books, and this is
Speaker 2: really sad to me on a personal level. BuzzFeed, I'm
Speaker 2: gonna be honest, I thought it was hilarious whenever they
Speaker 2: went down. I thought it was funny with Goker went down.
Speaker 3: Vice was.
Speaker 2: It really inspired me to get into the business. They
Speaker 2: were some of the forefront pioneers on YouTube, developing of
Speaker 2: finding stories, telling them in a way that I and
Speaker 2: many people my age and you know, millions of people
Speaker 2: wanted to consume. I will absolutely never ever forget watching
Speaker 2: the Vice Guide to North Korea. I had never seen
Speaker 2: anything like it. I think that came out in two
Speaker 2: thousand and six or two thousand and seven. And then
Speaker 2: watching you know, some of their Libyan stuff like Buria.
Speaker 4: Right along with Isis.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I remember that one too, the Syrian
Speaker 3: Civil War coverage.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that they did.
Speaker 3: It was incredible.
Speaker 2: And look, I mean there's a lot of mistakes that
Speaker 2: were made there, ideology and business on top.
Speaker 3: But it's sad. It's sad to watch it. But and
Speaker 3: some great stars were born out of vice.
Speaker 1: It's hard to I mean, you can't forget. This thing
Speaker 1: was a giant. It was seen as the like sex
Speaker 1: gy media upstart. Everybody was all the traditional media outlets
Speaker 1: were like, how do we replicate this? What they're doing
Speaker 1: is astonishing, And part of the problem is the things
Speaker 1: that you're talking about that they did or like the
Speaker 1: isis ride along or whatever. No established network would do
Speaker 1: that because it's way too risky and nor should they honestly, because.
Speaker 4: You're like really putting fear of risk.
Speaker 1: And so that's the sort of thing that they couldn't
Speaker 1: really scale. And so yeah, they went down a sort
Speaker 1: of like typical like left liberal, more identity type of
Speaker 1: track in terms of their ideology. They became much less
Speaker 1: unique and I think much less provocative risk taking. And
Speaker 1: you know, it's also part of this broader shift that
Speaker 1: we're seeing where all of these outlets that were giants
Speaker 1: in the twenty tens.
Speaker 4: It's over. It's just totally over. The amount of funding
Speaker 4: and cash that was.
Speaker 1: Being thrown at BuzzFeed and Mike and Weiss and all
Speaker 1: of these companies, the valuations they were able to achieve,
Speaker 1: it was insane.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and now you know.
Speaker 1: The business the ideology has shifted, the business models have shifted,
Speaker 1: and so whatever they were doing at that point, now
Speaker 1: that you have ad revenue specifically right now, has really
Speaker 1: taken a hit. And this is part of the whole
Speaker 1: tech session conversation as well. All of these companies that
Speaker 1: were kind of struggling along that was it for them.
Speaker 2: There's a great documentary. I might do a modeling on this,
Speaker 2: because I've never forgotten it. It came out in twenty eleven.
Speaker 2: I watched it at the time, and I watched it
Speaker 2: probably every few years since then. It's called Page One,
Speaker 2: and it's about the New York Times and specifically their
Speaker 2: media critic David Carr, as they're navigating the Internet at
Speaker 2: the time. This came out again twelve thirteen years ago.
Speaker 2: Now there's a scene where Shane Smith is facing off
Speaker 2: against David Carr, and in it, David Carr was a
Speaker 2: media critic who is now dead, and Shane is basically
Speaker 2: super arrogant. He's like, we're doing what you people have
Speaker 2: never done before, Like we're going to the place we
Speaker 2: are in.
Speaker 3: The new media. You're the old media.
Speaker 2: All this sof and David is like, hey, we've had
Speaker 2: people in Africa since nineteen sixty like, shut up. Basically
Speaker 2: he tells me, shut the f up, actually curses in
Speaker 2: the video, and the arrogance that was exuding was correct
Speaker 2: if you're thinking about it. In the mind of Shane
Speaker 2: Smith at the time, He's like, I'm doing stuff you
Speaker 2: guys are never going to do.
Speaker 3: I'm the new media. I'm taking over the Internet, all
Speaker 3: of this.
Speaker 2: But at the end of the day, you know, twelve
Speaker 2: thirteen years later, the New York Times is frankly more
Speaker 2: profitable than ever before. They actually won, they beat Vice
Speaker 2: because they hired a lot of the people who we
Speaker 2: used to work at Vice who were any good on
Speaker 2: top of Box and others. And now Vice is on
Speaker 2: the verge of bankruptcy. There's a story there to be
Speaker 2: told about what went wrong for so many of these companies.
Speaker 3: Fundamentally, I think it was business.
Speaker 2: I think they got in league with the big, you know,
Speaker 2: the Hbos and all these other people of the world
Speaker 2: that got away from their roots.
Speaker 3: They let ideology seep in.
Speaker 2: They started building large buildings in downtown Brooklyn, which nobody
Speaker 2: asked for, and instead they they never played it safe.
Speaker 2: They tried to do a tech model of get big fast,
Speaker 2: and by doing that, they took on tech risk without
Speaker 2: any of the tech upside. It turns out we're all
Speaker 2: in the same media business, which is a game of inches.
Speaker 2: You have to kind of have to be brutal, you
Speaker 2: kind of have to be very risk averse, and you
Speaker 2: have to think ten fifteen, twenty one hundred years or
Speaker 2: so in the future.
Speaker 1: You can't have a huge overhead of legacy media. That's
Speaker 1: just not going to You're not going to be able
Speaker 1: to do that in the digital age. And many of
Speaker 1: these companies really bet on the social media monetization, many
Speaker 1: of them that are originally on Facebook being huge. I
Speaker 1: mean Facebook has moved away. First of all, Facebook is
Speaker 1: like there's not much left content that does well they're
Speaker 1: at all anymore. When it's it's hard to like, it's
Speaker 1: easy to forget that that used to be the place
Speaker 1: for Upworthy and Mike and all of this, like left
Speaker 1: liberal content was huge on the platform. They're moving away
Speaker 1: from politics all together. They changed their agroithm to really
Speaker 1: like screw you on monetization long ago. That took out
Speaker 1: some of these players, but I think now we're seeing
Speaker 1: also so with you know, Twitter is moribund. It's not
Speaker 1: nearly what it used to be already, and so that
Speaker 1: is changing the underlying business dynamics as well. And Ben Smith,
Speaker 1: formerly a BuzzFeed, was talking to Ryan Over on his.
Speaker 4: Podcast about the fact that.
Speaker 1: You know, some of these it's it's like some of
Speaker 1: these throwback players are coming back. People are looking at
Speaker 1: like building out their homepage again, which is something that
Speaker 1: you know, this has been a long time.
Speaker 4: People are going back.
Speaker 1: To like Drudge Report and these news aggregators because the
Speaker 1: using Twitter to surface the stuff is just not as
Speaker 1: effective anymore. And the newsletter business, obviously with the substack Semaphore,
Speaker 1: which has been Smith's new outlet, Puck News, right that
Speaker 1: newsletter business which is again email Base, it's this legacy
Speaker 1: technology that's been with us for a long time that's
Speaker 1: coming back into play as well. So it's it's pretty
Speaker 1: wild to see the evolution that's happening in right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I really might do that mologue. We're going to
Speaker 2: talk to Ben Smith on Thursday. We'll probably released it
Speaker 2: sometime on the weekend because it's going to be not
Speaker 2: in the main show. But there's a lot to be
Speaker 2: said about his book about that era, so much of
Speaker 2: what went wrong, but also about what we can learn
Speaker 2: from them. People like you and I were on the forefront.
Speaker 2: I don't want to be. I don't want somebody on
Speaker 2: YouTube who's.
Speaker 3: Look at Yeah it's like they got arrogance. Yeah it is,
Speaker 3: and I think about it all the time.
Speaker 2: But I suspect that the chain was not thinking about
Speaker 2: that though whenever he was.
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, yesterday Christals so.
Speaker 1: High flying, all these people getting these billion dollars.
Speaker 2: But yesterday, Crystal, you and I show, our show was
Speaker 2: that's probably the biggest show we've ever done in terms
Speaker 2: of our YouTube and on podcasts together, if you combine it,
Speaker 2: if not the biggest, maybe the second largest biggest.
Speaker 3: But we're still sitting here being like, man, you got
Speaker 3: to take it easy. You gotta be careful. You got
Speaker 3: to make sure that you don't go into crazy debt
Speaker 3: to build a new studio. Everything you want to do
Speaker 3: is cash flow.
Speaker 2: These are not the decisions that they were making then
Speaker 2: at the time.
Speaker 7: Sorry.
Speaker 3: If anything, you know we have learned.
Speaker 4: Something, all right, Tago, what are you looking at?
Speaker 7: Well?
Speaker 2: Last week I did a monologue that many of you appreciated,
Speaker 2: summing up what I hope to be the final monologues
Speaker 2: on lab leak. The evidence is so overwhelming at this
Speaker 2: point for the positive case that COVID lead from the
Speaker 2: Wuhan lab in twenty nineteen that you, in my opinion,
Speaker 2: have to.
Speaker 3: Be adult not to believe it.
Speaker 2: Unsurprisingly, though, many adults include mainstream media and worse, top
Speaker 2: officials in public health. So I just thought it'd be
Speaker 2: fun to just check in on all of them and
Speaker 2: see how they're dealing with this new reality. The first
Speaker 2: is a very quick update about a farce that I
Speaker 2: brought all of you a few weeks ago, when the
Speaker 2: Atlantic mounted a last ditch effort to defend the natural
Speaker 2: origin hypothesis. The latest cope theory was that infected raccoon
Speaker 2: dog meat was the genesis of COVID because an infected
Speaker 2: dog sample was found at the Wuhan wet market. What they,
Speaker 2: of course neglected to tell you is that that sample
Speaker 2: came from early twenty twenty, when COVID was already swamping
Speaker 2: the entire city of Wuhan, and that there isn't a
Speaker 2: scrap of genetic evidences say that the dog is where
Speaker 2: it all began. They also failed to tell you that
Speaker 2: the leading scientists pushing that theory were involved in a
Speaker 2: lab leak themselves and were involved in the original cover
Speaker 2: up of the Labe theory with doctor Fauci in January
Speaker 2: twenty twenty. Interesting how that works? Huh, Well, the funniest
Speaker 2: thing has happened since then. The theory from the Atlantic
Speaker 2: was so flimsy and useless that the scientific study it
Speaker 2: was based on had to issue ameya culpa update that
Speaker 2: even The New York Times is feeling compelled to publish
Speaker 2: headline Scientists revisit data on raccoon, dogs and COVID, stressing
Speaker 2: the unknown subhead. After analyzing genetic data swabbed from a
Speaker 2: Wuhan market in early twenty twenty, a virologist said it
Speaker 2: was unclear if animals for sale there had been infected.
Speaker 2: The new study and the analysis around it is completely
Speaker 2: humiliating for the Atlantic and all of those who clung
Speaker 2: to this last ditch natural origin effort. In fact, the
Speaker 2: findings vindicate those who believe in a lab leak because
Speaker 2: the real.
Speaker 3: Analysis shows this.
Speaker 2: It wasn't just raccoon dog meat that had COVID on it.
Speaker 3: It turns out COVID and.
Speaker 2: Viral samples were all over meat samples everywhere in the
Speaker 2: market in early twenty twenty, indicating COVID did not come
Speaker 2: from the Wuhan wet market, but instead humans were depositing
Speaker 2: viral material over everything they were breathing on. Since the
Speaker 2: wet market is the only real natural origin theory, it
Speaker 2: instead shows that humans brought COVID to the market. If
Speaker 2: humans brought it there, it had to come from somewhere.
Speaker 2: That somewhere is the Wuhan lab a few miles away.
Speaker 2: It really doesn't take a genius to figure all this out,
Speaker 2: As you might be wondering, did the Atlantic issue correction
Speaker 2: at all?
Speaker 4: No.
Speaker 2: Of course, not days after Catherine Who's loser of a scoop,
Speaker 2: she was still touting the raccoon dog theory as some
Speaker 2: sort of slam dunk, and as of this writing, she
Speaker 2: has not yet addressed her embarrassing mishap or apologized spreading
Speaker 2: dangerous misinformation which might have led people to falsely believe
Speaker 2: in the natural origin hypothesis. Catherine Woo, though, isn't the
Speaker 2: only one still clinging to the natural origin theory. Ryan
Speaker 2: and Emily did a great job of looking back at
Speaker 2: doctor Fauci's lives during the pandemic and his pathetic defense
Speaker 2: of them today in The New York Times. But the
Speaker 2: part that actually stuck out to me was his cope
Speaker 2: on lab leak and how he seems to pretend he
Speaker 2: was always open to the idea and in no way
Speaker 2: did anything to make sure that people wouldn't believe it
Speaker 2: during the critical period of early twenty twenty. Throughout the interview,
Speaker 2: Fauci plays several tricks to try and obscure a lab
Speaker 2: leak and the risks that they pose then and in
Speaker 2: the future. For example, he says, quote, it wasn't an
Speaker 2: engineered virus. Somebody went out into the field. Let's say
Speaker 2: they got infected, came back to the lab, and then
Speaker 2: spread it out to other people. That ain't a lab leak.
Speaker 2: Strictly speaking, that's a natural occurrence. Really, is it in
Speaker 2: a natural occurrence? If you pay somebody to go deep
Speaker 2: inside of a cave and they get bitten by a
Speaker 2: bat or some other creature that humans never would have
Speaker 2: encountered naturally, and would then have that person spread said disease.
Speaker 3: Is that really natural?
Speaker 2: And when the interviewer challenges Fauci that obviously that research
Speaker 2: would have been the cause, he pivots and he says, actually,
Speaker 2: the interviewer is wrong for saying that if he were Fauci,
Speaker 2: he would have had trouble sleeping at night over potential
Speaker 2: lab leaks. He replies, quote, I sleep fine. Remember this
Speaker 2: work was done in order to be able to help
Speaker 2: us prepare for the next outbreak. From there, he launches
Speaker 2: into a spirited defense of gain of function research how
Speaker 2: it has made us so much safer. He simultaneously claims
Speaker 2: that we never funded gain of function at the Wuhan Lab,
Speaker 2: and the gain of function research is essential and was
Speaker 2: essential to helping with COVID. His evidence is the mRNA
Speaker 2: COVID vaccine, which the merits of the vaccine and its
Speaker 2: efficacy aside today of which there are our questions with
Speaker 2: respect to how it was even sold to the global public.
Speaker 2: The evidence a gain of function research, especially at the
Speaker 2: lab and others. What contributed to it that is bunked,
Speaker 2: according to people who are in the field themselves. Finally,
Speaker 2: Fauci ends by saying the lesson from COVID is not
Speaker 2: we need better guidelines around gain of function. We need
Speaker 2: billions of dollars more instead, according to him, to be
Speaker 2: spent quote, preparing for the next pandemic. He was never
Speaker 2: once stopping to consider that his so called preparedness is
Speaker 2: what led to all of this in the first place.
Speaker 2: And I know so much of this feels like beating
Speaker 2: a dead horse. But this interview was published as five
Speaker 2: days ago. The raccoon dog theory is recent, is just
Speaker 2: a few weeks ago, the latest research debunking.
Speaker 3: It a few days old.
Speaker 2: I've come to the conclusion that I really don't want
Speaker 2: to let this die, because inquiry into the origin of COVID,
Speaker 2: for me, has turned into an intellectual journaly where we
Speaker 2: have discovered the colossally dangerous network of labs across this
Speaker 2: earth that have likely spawned diseases that may be the
Speaker 2: death of all of us. We already know things like
Speaker 2: lyme disease, ebola, and COVID.
Speaker 3: Those are the ones where there.
Speaker 2: Is at least some evidence that they came from a
Speaker 2: lab but as recent increase have shown, they're not going
Speaker 2: to stop. They keep wanting to do more and more
Speaker 2: and more, And it seems to me that to save humanity,
Speaker 2: we probably need to stop the people who are claiming
Speaker 2: to do research in the name of saving humanity. I've
Speaker 2: been attacked by the scientific community over this, Crystal that
Speaker 2: you don't understand what you're talking about, and it's like.
Speaker 1: Wow, And if you want to hear my reaction to
Speaker 1: Sagres's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at Breakingpoints dot com.
Speaker 3: Crystal, what are you taking a look at?
Speaker 8: Well?
Speaker 1: Guys, Yesterday, in the wake of the second largest bank
Speaker 1: failure in history, we told you that so far the
Speaker 1: collops doesn't appear to be causing a larger contagion, but
Speaker 1: that didn't mean there weren't still warning signs on the horizons. Specifically,
Speaker 1: Warren Buffett's business partner Charlie Munger is sounding the alarm
Speaker 1: over the US.
Speaker 4: Commercial property market.
Speaker 1: A lot of real estate isn't so good anymore, Amonger said,
Speaker 1: we have a lot of troubled office buildings, a lot
Speaker 1: of troubled shopping centers, a lot of troubled other properties.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of agony out there. This was an
Speaker 1: interview with the Financial Times. He went on to say
Speaker 1: American banks were quote full of loans due to the
Speaker 1: decline of that market. That got me wondering just how
Speaker 1: bad could it be? And the answer looks, frankly pretty calamitous.
Speaker 1: In fact, a recent report from Morgan Stanley warns that
Speaker 1: the commercial real estate crash could put the two thousand
Speaker 1: and eight housing crash to shame. That report points to
Speaker 1: three factors that are combining right now to decimate that market. First,
Speaker 1: COVID dramatically accelerated a remote or hybrid work trend, which
Speaker 1: has left many office parks virtual ghost towns.
Speaker 4: In the faraway distant land.
Speaker 1: Of twenty eighteen, less than six percent of the workforce
Speaker 1: was remote. Today that number stands at twenty six percent,
Speaker 1: so more than a quarter of the nation's workers are
Speaker 1: fully remote. What's more, sixty six percent of employees work
Speaker 1: from home at least some of the time.
Speaker 4: This is an extraordinary.
Speaker 1: Change in how we do business, which obviously has dramatic
Speaker 1: repercussions for office needs. What's being described as an office
Speaker 1: apocalypse has meant that less than half of all offices
Speaker 1: are currently occupied, that is compared to ninety five percent
Speaker 1: occupancy rate pre pandemic. Just think of Amazon spiking their
Speaker 1: big plans for HQ two in northern Virginia to do
Speaker 1: the tech downturn and the work remote revolution. Think of
Speaker 1: all those downtowns that have emptied out as office workers
Speaker 1: stay home or put in only a couple of days
Speaker 1: at the office. What is the value of that idle
Speaker 1: vacant office space, which, for logistical and often zoning reasons,
Speaker 1: is not really convertible to anything else.
Speaker 4: At least not easily.
Speaker 1: Second, just as the Fed's interest rate hikes have spiked
Speaker 1: mortgage rates, putting a freeze on the housing market, that
Speaker 1: same dynamic is also spiking rates for commercial real estate
Speaker 1: as well. And this comes at the worst possible time.
Speaker 1: Due to the third factor mentioned in the Morgan Stanley analysis,
Speaker 1: the entire sector is facing what's being described as a
Speaker 1: refinancing wall, where in more than half of the two
Speaker 1: point nine trillion dollar market is set to come due
Speaker 1: by the end of twenty twenty five.
Speaker 4: That is just around the corner when bars, already.
Speaker 1: Hobbled by remote work trends, go to refinance and find
Speaker 1: themselves with multipoint higher mortgage rates, How are they going
Speaker 1: to swing it? Many will not, that is the bottom line,
Speaker 1: and plenty could default before they even get to that point.
Speaker 1: Needless to say, when you're talking about a one point
Speaker 1: five trillion dollar wall of debt, it is no small matter.
Speaker 1: In fact, analysts are predicting that office and retail property
Speaker 1: valuations could plummet by forty percent. And as if looming
Speaker 1: massive defaults and forty percent drop in valuations isn't bad enough,
Speaker 1: seventy percent of that debt is held by banks. So
Speaker 1: going back to Monger's dire warning here about banks holding
Speaker 1: a lot of bad loans, If anything, he understates the case.
Speaker 1: And it's not just any banks that are up to
Speaker 1: their eyeballs and very shaky real estate loans. It's specifically
Speaker 1: small and medium sized banks, which account for some eighty
Speaker 1: percent of this type of lending. These banks have already
Speaker 1: been put on shaky round by the depositor flight to
Speaker 1: giants like JP Morgan Chase. How many will be sent
Speaker 1: over a cliff when we run face first into that
Speaker 1: one point five trillion dollar wall of debt now like
Speaker 1: Signature Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic banks with a
Speaker 1: lot of commercial real estate loans on their books are
Speaker 1: subject to a lot of interest rate risk. So as
Speaker 1: the FED continues to hike rates in what has been
Speaker 1: an extraordinary death march to strangle workers and crush wages,
Speaker 1: they could well be tightening the noose around the necks
Speaker 1: of many more small and medium sized banks will face
Speaker 1: a reckoning over just the next few years. And sure enough,
Speaker 1: the FED is meeting again this week to consider their
Speaker 1: next steps. Now they've already engaged in the most aggressive
Speaker 1: program of rate hikes in four decades ever since the
Speaker 1: Bulgar era, they are expected to continue hiking rates. This time,
Speaker 1: a quarter point rate rise is expected. What happens after
Speaker 1: that meeting is really anyone's guess. Some FED officials believe
Speaker 1: that rate hikes should continue to be hiked, should continue aggressively.
Speaker 1: Consequences to workers into the economy be damned. Others are
Speaker 1: ready to press pods. Meanwhile, two thirds of economists view
Speaker 1: of recession is likely right. Rate hikes have already started
Speaker 1: to break things in the economy and in the banking sector.
Speaker 1: No one should have any confidence that they actually know
Speaker 1: what's going to happen if they continue down this path.
Speaker 1: So that's basically the landscape not very pretty, wall of
Speaker 1: debt made more crushing by rising rates with a new
Speaker 1: post pandemic reality that is not going back anytime soon,
Speaker 1: if ever. And as we approach this reckoning, having watched
Speaker 1: what happened with Silicon Valley Bank, we now know the
Speaker 1: federal government effectively considers all banks too big to fail.
Speaker 1: How many bailouts might we be on the hook for
Speaker 1: as they desperately scramble to sell off the pieces in
Speaker 1: a collapse? How much more gigantic will the big boys,
Speaker 1: and especially J. P. Morgan Chase become. What sort of
Speaker 1: contagion could result from a more widespread banking crisis, And
Speaker 1: how much socialism for the rich is American public really
Speaker 1: willing to accept? As I dug into these numbers, Sager,
Speaker 1: you know, as a little sort of casual comment from
Speaker 1: Charlie Munger.
Speaker 4: It looks really bad.
Speaker 2: And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue,
Speaker 2: become a premium subscriber today at Breakingpoints dot Com. Joining
Speaker 2: us now is filmmaker James Fox. He's got a new
Speaker 2: documentary out, Moment of Contacts, been out for a little while.
Speaker 3: He was on the Joe Rogan.
Speaker 2: Experience, and it details an extraordinary incident in Brazil from
Speaker 2: the nineteen nineties. James, it's very We're very excited to
Speaker 2: have you join our show and to talk to you.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much.
Speaker 7: Thank you guys for having me on. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 4: That's our pleasure.
Speaker 2: Let's put the poster up there on the screen for
Speaker 2: those who are interested, and I do encourage everyone to
Speaker 2: go out and to rent the documentary, to watch the
Speaker 2: documentary wherever it's available. Moments of Contact the Roswell of Brazil, James.
Speaker 2: For those who didn't see you on The Joe Rogan Experience,
Speaker 2: can you just describe a little bit about what you
Speaker 2: find and investigate in the documentary about the so called
Speaker 2: roswell incident in Brazil Virginia.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 9: So it's funny. It's like it's one of those cases
Speaker 9: where people.
Speaker 7: That are familiar with my work.
Speaker 9: I've been on Joe Rogan before with a film I
Speaker 9: did called The Phenomenon.
Speaker 7: I've worked a little bit with former Sentiment.
Speaker 9: JORI leader Harry Reid and Podesta and a handful of others,
Speaker 9: both Republicans and Democrats, and and so I sort of
Speaker 9: developed some a level of credibility that I never as
Speaker 9: a citizen, never had before. So I really went out
Speaker 9: on a limb making this documentary because this is about
Speaker 9: an alleged UFO crash that happened in nineteen ninety six
Speaker 9: in Virginia, Brazil, in the state of Minas de Rece,
Speaker 9: which is about four or five hours to the north
Speaker 9: of South Paolo. And I knew Joe Rogan heard about
Speaker 9: the case, like a number of times, he had some
Speaker 9: of his guests talking about it. We had sent him links.
Speaker 9: The level of skepticism is warranted, and I understand that,
Speaker 9: but all I ask people is that suspend judgment and
Speaker 9: just listen to the evidence of the people that were there,
Speaker 9: the first hand eyewitness testimony from military officers, from firemen,
Speaker 9: from doctors, from civilians, lawyers. It's absolutely mind bending and
Speaker 9: what you're left with is something truly extraordinary took place
Speaker 9: in Virginia, Brazil, January twentieth, January nineteen ninety six.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, Well, I watched the film last night, and
Speaker 1: what was most persuasive to me was the fact that
Speaker 1: you had so many witnesses and these aren't like you know,
Speaker 1: UFO buffs who are deep in the space or it's
Speaker 1: not just like one one off person who could dismiss
Speaker 1: as cook. These are just like regular Brazilian people, families, kids,
Speaker 1: business people, whatever, who are telling you about what they
Speaker 1: saw and experienced on that day. The part that I
Speaker 1: actually find kind of the hardest to believe is the
Speaker 1: fact that the Brazilian military and working conjunction with the
Speaker 1: US military, are able to marshal this response so effectively
Speaker 1: and so quickly and to shut everything down like that
Speaker 1: level of competence and international coordination was actually the part
Speaker 1: that I was that I found the hardest to believe.
Speaker 3: What do you think?
Speaker 7: I don't blame you one bit.
Speaker 9: I actually had people like Leslie Kine, who is one
Speaker 9: of the contributing editors to the New York Times story
Speaker 9: that exposed the secret Pentagon UFO program in December of
Speaker 9: twenty seventeen. It was Helene Cooper, Leslie Kane, and Ralph Blumenthal. Anyway,
Speaker 9: Leslie was like, are you sure you want to report
Speaker 9: on this case? I said, Leslie. I've known Leslie for
Speaker 9: quite some time. I said, Leslie, I think there's a
Speaker 9: lot to it. I really do. And long story short,
Speaker 9: she reached into her deep contacts. She went public with
Speaker 9: this about two weeks ago INTEL contacts off the record,
Speaker 9: and they told her.
Speaker 7: That it happened.
Speaker 9: So the fact that she's come forward and said that,
Speaker 9: and I've talked to other people like Louel Azondo, who's
Speaker 9: also said to me, I learned that this happened during
Speaker 9: my time at a tip.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Let's for those James who aren't familiar with the acronyms
Speaker 2: with Louel A Zondo and all this, and even with Virginia.
Speaker 3: No, no, it's completely fine.
Speaker 2: Let's just describe the timeline of January nineteen ninety six
Speaker 2: about what witnesses report in the film. You don't have
Speaker 2: to give away everything from the film, but the broad contours,
Speaker 2: the Brazilian and the US military response, alleged response, and
Speaker 2: then some of what you've been able to uncover with
Speaker 2: new reporting, which we're going to get to in a
Speaker 2: little bit.
Speaker 9: Yes, So let me just quickly finish what I was
Speaker 9: just saying in terms of the US involvement. I've been
Speaker 9: investigating this case for twelve years. A lot of other
Speaker 9: people that have investigating in Brazil a lot longer than me,
Speaker 9: And during that twelve year investigation, I was going back
Speaker 9: and forth to Brazil countless times a month, a month
Speaker 9: each time, I was completely unaware that there were any
Speaker 9: American involvement. I actually learned that on the last trip,
Speaker 9: just a year and a half, two years ago. So
Speaker 9: we I'll quickly tell you that every military person that
Speaker 9: we met with, and they're all featured in the film
Speaker 9: at some point, particularly in the credits at the end,
Speaker 9: all said the Americans.
Speaker 7: Were involved while we were there. The last time.
Speaker 9: This was really was shocking, was that the flight military
Speaker 9: flight control officer. Now, when you're in the fire department,
Speaker 9: you're also military. When you're in the police department, you're
Speaker 9: also a military. When you're a flight radar control officer
Speaker 9: who monitors airplanes that come in and out of Brazil,
Speaker 9: you're also military. And this guy, Carlos Fedis f E.
Speaker 9: R Ees came forward on the record saying that he
Speaker 9: was in charge that night and saw the United States
Speaker 9: Air Force plane come in without authorization from the Brazilian government.
Speaker 7: It came in and it landed directly. This is on
Speaker 7: the record, you can go and look it up.
Speaker 9: It came in and it landed in Campinas, Campenis, without
Speaker 9: any Brazilian authorization. He kept saying USAF. I was like USAV,
Speaker 9: what's this guy talking about? The United States Air Force?
Speaker 9: So it landed a Campenis and we have testimony from
Speaker 9: the military base as a from people that were that
Speaker 9: were there, that went on the record that said they
Speaker 9: drove these creatures to Campinas on that date. So we
Speaker 9: have testimony for a military personnel on the ground, some
Speaker 9: civilians and doctors, lawyers about this incident. And then we
Speaker 9: have confirmation from the flight control officer who's also part
Speaker 9: of the military, who said he saw the flight come
Speaker 9: in and it's truly extraordinary. So let me say that
Speaker 9: in and around the town of Virginia, Brazil, January nineteen
Speaker 9: ninety six, you.
Speaker 7: Had farmers, you had truckers.
Speaker 9: You had professors, in particular Carlos Sosauza, who's also an
Speaker 9: ultra light pilot, who witnessed a cylindrical sort of cigar
Speaker 9: shaped object about the size a little bigger.
Speaker 7: Than a really big school bus. It was metallic.
Speaker 9: It didn't have any wings, it didn't have any exhaust vents.
Speaker 7: Or visible means of propulsion.
Speaker 9: It was just a cylindrical shape object with a gash
Speaker 9: in the side of it. That looked like it was
Speaker 9: in trouble. We film a number of witnesses that saw
Speaker 9: this in the middle of the night and it was
Speaker 9: just struggling to stay according to the witnesses, struggling. It
Speaker 9: looked like it was going down, but struggling. And then
Speaker 9: eventually there was a witness at a place called Myolini
Speaker 9: Farm on the outskirts of Vargina that saw it impact.
Speaker 9: The ground went up there, the military arrived. He was
Speaker 9: met at gunpoint to leave the area. Never once did
Speaker 9: Carlos de Salaza think that I just witnessed something that
Speaker 9: crashed potentially from another world. He thought it was some
Speaker 9: super secret government craft. He had no idea. A few
Speaker 9: days later there were reports in the town of these
Speaker 9: of these like four feet tall. I know this sounds crazy,
Speaker 9: believe me, I do, but these are very credible. And
Speaker 9: lots of reports coming in about entities that have brown skin,
Speaker 9: no hair, oily, big, big red eyes, ridges on the forehead, spindily, weak,
Speaker 9: frightened and scared, cowering, non threatening, and and these reports
Speaker 9: came in from fire department, from police department, from local civilians.
Speaker 9: I mean, one of the most incredible accounts is from
Speaker 9: three girls in broad daylight that came within eight to
Speaker 9: ten feet of this creature, and it's truly.
Speaker 1: Remarkable and reportedly, you know, what you report on in
Speaker 1: the film is that one individual who was charged with
Speaker 1: capturing these things and you know, actually had it reportedly
Speaker 1: in his arms, he ends up dying in a mysterious way.
Speaker 1: Uh thereafter, can you speak to I understand you've learned
Speaker 1: a little bit more about what might have happened there.
Speaker 9: So this is an ongoing investigation, and just last week
Speaker 9: we got a hold of the two forensic pathologists who
Speaker 9: worked on the deceased military officer doing the autopsy, and
Speaker 9: they're coming forward for the first time now.
Speaker 7: They're providing a very detailed, long.
Speaker 9: Form autosity report that Leslie Kane is actually having translated
Speaker 9: medically professionally because it's very technical. But they gave us
Speaker 9: brief statements that we're gonna share that I've just shared
Speaker 9: with you. I was gonna I was gonna start it
Speaker 9: with with Joe Rogan, but we just forgot we didn't
Speaker 9: get to it, So I'm handing these to you. These
Speaker 9: are brief statements with translations, and you could play them
Speaker 9: directly from the horse's mouth from the from the forensic
Speaker 9: pathologists who did work on the on the deceased military officer.
Speaker 3: Great.
Speaker 2: We have some of those clips here for those who
Speaker 2: are listening. I encourage you to come watch this on
Speaker 2: YouTube because we have subtitles. Let's take a listen.
Speaker 5: We'll see.
Speaker 7: Study is.
Speaker 5: Nice?
Speaker 7: Is she on the aviation?
Speaker 9: Ed? I?
Speaker 1: I will be so.
Speaker 3: Was someone what we're seeing there? James.
Speaker 2: There's a longer video, of course, which I'm sure you'll
Speaker 2: put in a future film.
Speaker 3: But one of the points that.
Speaker 2: It's been taken away is that these pathologists describe a
Speaker 2: bacteria that's never been seen before on Earth and ended
Speaker 2: up killing a person who ended up transporting these creatures,
Speaker 2: and alluding also to et and kind of the light
Speaker 2: at the nfsent. Can you translate some of that for
Speaker 2: us as to.
Speaker 7: I get the chill as.
Speaker 9: I get the chills as someone who's been looking into
Speaker 9: this case for twelve years, and I know that Marko Lea,
Speaker 9: my Brazilian counterpart, has been doing it much longer than
Speaker 9: I have. The fact that we've got these guys, and
Speaker 9: I tell you I literally was doing zoom calls a
Speaker 9: couple of days leading up to going on. Joe rogan
Speaker 9: begging and pleading with these doctors to come forward, and
Speaker 9: one doctor said, hey, if this, if he comes forward,
Speaker 9: I'll come forward with him. Will do it together, power
Speaker 9: and numbers, And then ultimately they did, and they provided
Speaker 9: us with long form but basically what they're saying, in
Speaker 9: their entire career, they've never seen anything like this bacterial
Speaker 9: infection that killed a perfectly healthy twenty three year old
Speaker 9: military police officer. And they said that they threw the
Speaker 9: I even interviewed We even interviewed doctor Cesario who worked
Speaker 9: on him while he was alive. He said, I threw
Speaker 9: the kitchen sink at him and this nothing was working
Speaker 9: and this bacteria, it was just a They did never
Speaker 9: see anything like it. So they took samples, which I
Speaker 9: know that they're going to have more details on about
Speaker 9: this type of bacteria, but those are just the initial
Speaker 9: statements that they're making. And again I have to remind
Speaker 9: your audience this is an ongoing investigation. I'm not going
Speaker 9: to put this in another film. I'm going to put
Speaker 9: it out to the general public immediately because I think
Speaker 9: that this is a story that could prove once and
Speaker 9: for all, could settle the debate once and for all
Speaker 9: whether these things are real or not, because we have
Speaker 9: a case unlike Roswell, that's so recent that the vast
Speaker 9: majority of people and witnesses are still.
Speaker 7: Alive and they're coming forward right now in droves.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, James, My takeaway from this was either
Speaker 2: an alien craft landed in Virginia and Brazil in nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety six, or somebody escaped from some crazy bio lab
Speaker 2: with an unknown strain of bacteria or something that then
Speaker 2: the US government of the Brazilian military hopped in and
Speaker 2: it created some very strange disturbances in the town of
Speaker 2: which many of these people never forget. I mean, you
Speaker 2: can tell from the documentary this is a traumatic experience.
Speaker 2: None of these people wanted to come forward. In many
Speaker 2: cases you describe having to go through and solicit and
Speaker 2: beg people to come forward.
Speaker 3: Can you talk a little bit about that.
Speaker 7: Absolutely.
Speaker 9: Well, while we're on the subject matter of cash material,
Speaker 9: just before we get into this, your audience just has.
Speaker 7: To hear this. Okay, this is the recently passed excuse me.
Speaker 9: While I put my old man glasses on UNAP legislation
Speaker 9: by Senator Jillibrand and Marco Rubio Diego and all also
Speaker 9: contributed to this. But in any case, this just passed
Speaker 9: signed into law, the UFP legislation.
Speaker 7: I'm going to read you one of the.
Speaker 9: Bits of text, and I'm going to ask your audience
Speaker 9: what prompted this? Okay, here we go, any activity or
Speaker 9: program by a department or agency of the Federal government
Speaker 9: or contractor of such a department or agency relating to
Speaker 9: unidentified anomaloist phenomena, including with respect to material retrieval, material analysis,
Speaker 9: reverse engineering, research and development, detection and tracking. They talk
Speaker 9: about crashed MAI, potentially crashed materialists like covered UFOs. The
Speaker 9: legislations right here, you can go read it, and they're
Speaker 9: providing whistleblowers.
Speaker 1: Pretend, James, are you are you hopeful that some of
Speaker 1: these DC based efforts on Capitol Hill will lead to
Speaker 1: increased transparency and information.
Speaker 9: Well, so everybody thinks that there was this sudden epiphany
Speaker 9: by the US government to provide Joe public with far
Speaker 9: more data on the phenomenon, That's not what happened. What
Speaker 9: happened was there are a couple of insiders like Christopher Mellen,
Speaker 9: former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, and lou
Speaker 9: who ran the a TIP program, and a handful of
Speaker 9: others decided, Wow, the level of secrecy is ridiculous. We
Speaker 9: are going to find a loophole, walk some evidence out
Speaker 9: of the Pentagon, which is what happened, and directly onto
Speaker 9: the front page of the New York Times. Now, the
Speaker 9: problem is the government can't put the genie back in
Speaker 9: the bottle, okay, so the intelligence agency. When I met
Speaker 9: with Senator Harry Reid, former Senate Majority of Leader Harry
Speaker 9: Reid about this topic, he said that when he launched
Speaker 9: the UAP Task Force it was called went from as
Speaker 9: APP to a TIP Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification program. He
Speaker 9: said that the intelligence agencies were digging in their heels.
Speaker 9: They were fighting, ticking, catching and biting. They didn't want this,
Speaker 9: and I suspect the same thing as occurring right now.
Speaker 7: However, what I'm doing, and what many others are.
Speaker 9: Doing, We're meeting with the intel folks on the inside
Speaker 9: that have already gone to testify to ERROW, which is
Speaker 9: run by Sean Kirkpatrick. It's the new UAP Task Force,
Speaker 9: and they're going on camera with people like myself, and
Speaker 9: I've gotten a number of them on camera already, and
Speaker 9: they're disclosing not the classified parts, but what they've disclosed
Speaker 9: basically behind closed doors.
Speaker 7: In other words, I'm providing the names of the programs.
Speaker 9: I'm providing the names of the individuals involved with the programs,
Speaker 9: the locations of these programs, and in fact, if you
Speaker 9: get me the classifications.
Speaker 7: I can walk you in the door. So the clearances.
Speaker 9: So if the government is not going to release it,
Speaker 9: we're going to release this to the public so they'll
Speaker 9: know that this is going on. So we're just trying
Speaker 9: to force the government hands. And look, there's a lot
Speaker 9: of elected officials like Senator Jillibrand and Rubio, Mark Warner,
Speaker 9: Diego Gyagher, Andre Carson that are really batting for us,
Speaker 9: that are really there. They need our support, but they
Speaker 9: are They're going to bat They're not trying to cover
Speaker 9: this up. They're trying to actually get this open, but
Speaker 9: the intelligence disease are being very difficult. There's nothing in
Speaker 9: it for them to share what they have. And there's
Speaker 9: a lot of amazing photographic evidence behind just behind that
Speaker 9: wall that I'm that we're talking about as well.
Speaker 2: It's so frustrating, James. I feel the same way that
Speaker 2: you do. I hear the exact same thing. And the
Speaker 2: overwhelming thing that I hear from the inside the intel
Speaker 2: community is they're terrified because they just don't know what's
Speaker 2: going on, and they don't want to admit that to
Speaker 2: all of us.
Speaker 3: They're terrified.
Speaker 9: That's exactly right, So you know these I just talked
Speaker 9: to Christopher Mellen, who's also got to clearances, who's seeing
Speaker 9: the satellite, the satellite data, photographic evidence, and he said, well,
Speaker 9: I'm only talking about it because Ratcliffe talked about it.
Speaker 7: But I'll tell you right now it's amazing.
Speaker 9: And I said, Christopher, please, because I'm friends with christ
Speaker 9: can you give me a little more. He's like, well,
Speaker 9: you imagine like full four K of craft. It's about
Speaker 9: as good as that, and it's just behind that level
Speaker 9: of secrecy. So it's only a matter of time where
Speaker 9: some of that stuff's coming out.
Speaker 7: I'm very confident, it's just a matter of when.
Speaker 3: Wow, we can only help.
Speaker 2: James, is there anything you want to say to the
Speaker 2: audience before we let you get out of here?
Speaker 9: Well, I would say, if you check out moment of
Speaker 9: contact and you still feel nothing. The absolutely extraordinary took
Speaker 9: place in January of nineteen ninety six and Virginia, Brazil
Speaker 9: checking Parmesana dinner on me.
Speaker 3: All right, I love it.
Speaker 2: People can go and watch the documentary. Follow him at
Speaker 2: James Fox. Is it James C.
Speaker 3: Fox on Twitter?
Speaker 7: I believe yeh at James Sea Fox.
Speaker 3: There you go.
Speaker 2: He's a mad man. He just opened up his DMS.
Speaker 2: I don't know why anybody I know. Good luck to you,
Speaker 2: James's Thank you, sir, welcome back any time.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 7: Man.
Speaker 3: I love talking to that guy. Really interesting subject.
Speaker 2: Thank you guys so much us for supporting us for
Speaker 2: all of the monthly year in lifetime members who have
Speaker 2: been helping us with our new studio and have been
Speaker 2: signing up for our mission.
Speaker 3: We're very excited.
Speaker 2: We've been having absolute gangbuster days here over at breaking points,
Speaker 2: which is kind of amazing because it's not even like
Speaker 2: there's some major.
Speaker 1: Tens not under the key to the presidential election. Yeah
Speaker 1: there's no, I mean yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: It's pretty it's pretty awesome. Vice is dying, BuzzFeed is dead.
Speaker 2: Many of the new media companies we're supposed to define
Speaker 2: the twenty tens are literally bankrupt. Meanwhile, things here are
Speaker 2: better than ever. I suspect the same for many of
Speaker 2: our friends in independent media. It's a great time. It's
Speaker 2: a great time to be in this game, and we
Speaker 2: couldn't be in it without all of you.
Speaker 3: We love you. We have a great counterpoint show for
Speaker 2: Everybody tomorrow and we will see you all on Thursday.