Speaker 1: All right, welcome back to Counterpoints. Sam Ryan Grimm of
Speaker 1: The Intercept here with Emily Joshinsky of The Federalist. A
Speaker 1: quick programming note, at some point during this show, I'm
Speaker 1: going to force Emily to define woke. Bryon, not now,
Speaker 1: because you're sort of I wasn't you ready, I've had
Speaker 1: too much coffee. Anyway, you guys should google that one
Speaker 1: if you haven't seen this viral clip going around. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I will get her on this. I don't think I
Speaker 1: don't think she knows what it is, right, I've never
Speaker 1: heard of it. Actually, how would you define woke if
Speaker 1: you had to, if you were like put on the spot,
Speaker 1: if someone was like, define wokeness, Yeah, I would say that.
Speaker 1: It's unfortunately a nebulous definition because we don't we have
Speaker 1: no consensus on what it means. It meant something very
Speaker 1: specific to the left at a point in time. It
Speaker 1: was then co opted by the right and has basically
Speaker 1: become a catch all for political correctness. I mean, that's
Speaker 1: essentially I think the correct definition is it's a stand
Speaker 1: in for all the things that annoy me. It's a
Speaker 1: stand in for everything that people find annoying about the left.
Speaker 1: Now we need a version of woke to describe the
Speaker 1: excesses of the American right. We need it, We need
Speaker 1: a parallel broke. I think they go with woke. Like
Speaker 1: a bunch of right wing organizations are calling each other woke. Now.
Speaker 1: I know, like if they do, if they do anything
Speaker 1: that isn't just like completely supportive of like a patriarchy,
Speaker 1: you'll have people in these right wing organizations who are like,
Speaker 1: I see wokeness, right, Wokeness is creeping in right. I
Speaker 1: mean essentially though it's just a it's a one syllable
Speaker 1: word for political correctness. Political correctness has always been clunky,
Speaker 1: and people mean ESG, they mean DEI when they say wokeness.
Speaker 1: But essentially it's coming from this place that like we
Speaker 1: do need to reevaluate language, and people even use it
Speaker 1: to mean cancel culture, which you can say is also
Speaker 1: rooted in that question of political correctness. But I think
Speaker 1: that's part of the problem with the word is that
Speaker 1: it's just it means what it needs to mean to
Speaker 1: the person at the time they use it, right, And
Speaker 1: it's actually supposed to mean basically like a wake two injustice, right,
Speaker 1: And that's what it was originally coined. To describe. It's
Speaker 1: a very very annoying term. It can be sometimes a
Speaker 1: helpful stand in when you are when I only at
Speaker 1: least I use it sometimes for political correctness, because political
Speaker 1: correctness is often just very clunk. It doesn't roll right
Speaker 1: off the top too. But we do have an actual
Speaker 1: programming note that's people noticed last week we only posted
Speaker 1: a few episodes of this show directly to YouTube clips
Speaker 1: on Wednesday, a couple of clips. If you want to
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Speaker 1: But now you can also watch it on Spotify, right,
Speaker 1: and I love the Spotify video feature. Have you used that? No,
Speaker 1: I don't have Premium Spotify. Oh my god, I just
Speaker 1: have that ad one. Oh yes, I love Premier Spotify.
Speaker 1: But the video function is fantastic. I actually pay for
Speaker 1: Breaking Points, so I should. I'm going to do this.
Speaker 1: Why do I do that? I mean, I do support
Speaker 1: it generally. I didn't want to, like feel like I
Speaker 1: was mooching off of it. I like, genuinely like I
Speaker 1: like the idea of something that is funded by a
Speaker 1: lot of different people who have different viewpoints, right, so
Speaker 1: that you can, you know, tick people off, and then
Speaker 1: if some people on subscribe, it's like okay, fine, Soccer
Speaker 1: and Crystal. If if you're listening, Ryan and I would
Speaker 1: like ten extra dollars a month, Well, we have a
Speaker 1: really big show. Obviously. We're going to start with more
Speaker 1: news out of Ukraine. We're going to talk about Tucker's
Speaker 1: Q and A with all the Republican candidates for president
Speaker 1: twenty twenty four, some of whom are announced, some of
Speaker 1: whom are not. On their positions of Ukraine. We're talking
Speaker 1: about developments in Silicon Valley Bank we have Ken Clippenstein,
Speaker 1: Ryan's colleague from The Intercept, here to break down some
Speaker 1: truly truly interesting reporting about Gavin Newsom's relationship with Silicon
Speaker 1: Valley Bank. We're going to be talking about potential lablink,
Speaker 1: We're going to be talking about artificial intelligence generative AI.
Speaker 1: So it is a huge show today. We hope that
Speaker 1: you take that step and link your premium subscription to
Speaker 1: your Spotify account. All right's so let's get into the show. Ryan,
Speaker 1: talk to us about this Russian fighter jet down a
Speaker 1: United States drone operating over the Black Sea on Tuesday.
Speaker 1: According to US European Command, it was an MQ nine aircraft. Ryan,
Speaker 1: you had a pretty funny reaction to the US statement. God, great,
Speaker 1: we're not at World War three yet, so we can
Speaker 1: laugh about it. But yees. So, basically two Russian jets,
Speaker 1: you know, basically intercepted a drone over the Black Sea.
Speaker 1: This happens fairly frequently around the world over the decades.
Speaker 1: And also while we're at war or well technically we
Speaker 1: are not at where we are supporting a party with
Speaker 1: weapons that is at war with Russia. Right, We're hoping
Speaker 1: we don't actually get into a hot war with Russia,
Speaker 1: and so apparently these two Russian jets had a lot
Speaker 1: of fun with this drone. The military called it deeply
Speaker 1: unprofessional behavior. So I'm just picturing top gun style stuff
Speaker 1: like they were watching Maverick and maybe they flipped off
Speaker 1: this drone, which is funny. I guess you'd have to
Speaker 1: find the camera because you can't flip off the pilot,
Speaker 1: so you can flip off everybody back in Tampa, Tampa,
Speaker 1: who's like running the drone. And then my favorite part
Speaker 1: was they dropped a little jit The Russian jets dropped
Speaker 1: a little jet fuel on the drone, and the military
Speaker 1: complained that it was quote environmentally unsound. This is the military,
Speaker 1: who we know for a fact, produces you know, more
Speaker 1: climb and carbon emissions, I think than what ten you know,
Speaker 1: the ten biggest countries after it combined, dumps its own
Speaker 1: jet fuel in the Honolulu Honolulu water supply and oh also,
Speaker 1: you know, may have had something to do with the
Speaker 1: greatest environmental catastrophe of the last year, which was the
Speaker 1: North Stream pipeline. But yeah, you shouldn't dump jet fuel
Speaker 1: on a drone. That's rude, It's it's environmentally nsound, it's
Speaker 1: an HR matter. It's definitely and it's going to hit
Speaker 1: Rush as Rush of the Russian military ESG score significantly. Well,
Speaker 1: my favorite part of the statement is that I really
Speaker 1: think they're devious enough to know this might work with
Speaker 1: like the slice of you people with Ukraine flags on
Speaker 1: the back of the preuses there they dump jet fuel
Speaker 1: on the drone like now, I really hate putin. The
Speaker 1: drone did end up crashing, which is also environmentally on
Speaker 1: sound because now you've got a big drone pile of
Speaker 1: junk at the bottom of the Black Sea and the
Speaker 1: Russian one of the Russian fighter jets which apparently collided
Speaker 1: with the drone had to basically make emergency landing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this is so according to General US Air Force
Speaker 1: General James Hacker, he's the command of US Air Forces
Speaker 1: in Europe and Air Forces in Africa. He said that
Speaker 1: before the collision, the Russian aircraft to Russian aircraft, including
Speaker 1: the one that was involved in the collision, had been
Speaker 1: harassing the US drone. So going back and forth it
Speaker 1: ends up in a collision. And that's a good example
Speaker 1: which we've had several from the first year of this
Speaker 1: awful war of how fragile the balances and how quickly
Speaker 1: things can escalate. You know, this is another another sort
Speaker 1: of catastrophe that we have to really worry about, these
Speaker 1: kinds of things where something starts as harassment ends in
Speaker 1: an accident, and before people realize what's happened, things can escalate.
Speaker 1: And so the United States is summoning the Russian ambassador
Speaker 1: to have a conversation about this. Hopefully it's just a
Speaker 1: little talking to, you know, be more professional and an
Speaker 1: environmentally sound in your harassment of our drones. We need
Speaker 1: to deconflict better so we don't have World War three
Speaker 1: and hopefully none of us ends up dying as a
Speaker 1: result of this. But that's the problem with prolonging this
Speaker 1: war that you'd never know what type of incident is
Speaker 1: going to trigger some type of escalation that nobody saw coming.
Speaker 1: You know, people feel like they have control of events
Speaker 1: in a way that history shows that they just don't.
Speaker 1: If you look back at almost any war, you see
Speaker 1: that events kind of get out of the control of
Speaker 1: the men and women who are who think that they're
Speaker 1: the ones who are actually directing it. Yeah, no, absolutely,
Speaker 1: And you're right on your point about the longer this
Speaker 1: goes on the higher the chances become, the more time
Speaker 1: it's possible for something to just go extremely wrong. You
Speaker 1: remember the what was the situation in a couple of
Speaker 1: months back with the missile right, and there immediately he
Speaker 1: reported Russian missile strikes Poland, right, and you have all
Speaker 1: kinds of completely reckless reactions. And you know, by the
Speaker 1: time it was pretty immediately clear that people were jumping
Speaker 1: to conclusions and having reckless reactions. And now there's more transparency.
Speaker 1: Oddly enough, on Twitter, you can sort of see how,
Speaker 1: you know, the people in the Polish government are reacting,
Speaker 1: you can see how people in the United States government
Speaker 1: are reacting or in the media are reacting. And maybe
Speaker 1: that's all to all of our benefit. I'm generally pretty
Speaker 1: skeptical of that. But maybe when you have the public
Speaker 1: watching you really closely and saying poking holes in your
Speaker 1: theory of the case before you can do something extremely
Speaker 1: stupid because you're trigger happy. You know, maybe that's a
Speaker 1: good thing, But at the same time, it's extremely hard
Speaker 1: to believe because to your point, Ryan, the longer that
Speaker 1: we're in this conflict, the longer there is or the
Speaker 1: more chance there is that something goes very very wrong
Speaker 1: for whatever reason, we can't know what it is yet,
Speaker 1: And the rhetoric out of the the Pentagon has actually
Speaker 1: been comforting in this sense. On this occasion, they're calling
Speaker 1: the Russian pilots amateurs, just you know, the idea that
Speaker 1: they would make their criticism that it's environmentally on sound
Speaker 1: at least, that's so trivial that it makes it less likely.
Speaker 1: How dare you? Like, how dare you? And then we're like, oh,
Speaker 1: how dare you? Okay, we're going to have a duel now,
Speaker 1: and we're going to be you know, missiles are going
Speaker 1: to be pointing at each other. So this this kind
Speaker 1: of stuff, calling each other amateurs and saying that they
Speaker 1: behaved unprofessionally is actually, paradoxically a little bit comforting. Yeah.
Speaker 1: A new way to duel, though, actually might be dumping
Speaker 1: fuel on each other. Must feel the fast. So I
Speaker 1: feel like that somebody was saying that that's kind of common,
Speaker 1: common way to harass each other up up in the sky.
Speaker 1: I'm sure that you can dump a little bit of
Speaker 1: fuel on somebody if anyone wants to take Rhyan and
Speaker 1: me for a ride along, I don't know, not anywhere
Speaker 1: near the Black State. Yeah, well, thank you very much.
Speaker 1: I'll go to Tampa and like it happened. Yeah, Tampa
Speaker 1: is nice. Right before Happy hour. So, speaking of Ukraine,
Speaker 1: let's move on to Tucker Carlson's Q and A with
Speaker 1: every Republican, every possible Republican presidential candidate. Some did not respond,
Speaker 1: of course, over at Ukraine. It was almost like a
Speaker 1: litmus test. He sent the same set of questions to
Speaker 1: every presidential candidate, and again some folks who have not announced,
Speaker 1: people like Christy nom people like Mike Pompeo who did
Speaker 1: not respond and got I think some really interesting responses
Speaker 1: that ended up roiling definitely conservative Twitter yesterday, but the
Speaker 1: Internet in general had a lot of reactions to what
Speaker 1: people were saying to Tucker. The neo conservative branch of
Speaker 1: the Republican Party, which is under more scrutiny and more
Speaker 1: threats than ever before, even if they still have a
Speaker 1: lot of power, they're even getting backlash from establishment folks
Speaker 1: like Kevin McCarthy. They were really upset about what Ron
Speaker 1: DeSantis had to say, and Tucker himself said Ron de
Speaker 1: Santis's response to his questions was really the most newsy.
Speaker 1: So we're going to start right and I are going
Speaker 1: to do kind of a rapid fire going through a
Speaker 1: bunch of these different responses. What do you want to
Speaker 1: start with, Well, let's start with I think we have
Speaker 1: Donald Trump. Yeah, let's see that one, all right, So
Speaker 1: if you look at your screen, you can see this
Speaker 1: here on the screen, but we'll read it for everyone else.
Speaker 1: Trump goes in and gives a very trumpy answer, most
Speaker 1: of which I would say is accurate. In Ukraine, There's
Speaker 1: not a ton to pick at here. He's very clear
Speaker 1: that this is okay. So he says, the sad fact
Speaker 1: is that due to a new lack of respect for
Speaker 1: the US cause, at least partially buyer and competently handled,
Speaker 1: pulled out from Afghanistan. In a very poor choice of
Speaker 1: words by Biden and explaining US requests and intentions, Biden's
Speaker 1: first statement was that Russia could have some of Ukraine.
Speaker 1: No problem. I can't really channel Trump very well here.
Speaker 1: I don't remember Biden saying exactly that. I don't either,
Speaker 1: so maybe that is one of the things to pick up.
Speaker 1: But overall he says of Ukraine, he's saying, at a
Speaker 1: staggering one hundred and twenty five billion dollars, we're paying
Speaker 1: four to five times more, and this fight is far
Speaker 1: more important for Europe than it is for the US.
Speaker 1: Next tell Ukraine that there will be little money coming
Speaker 1: from us. We've heard him say something to that except before. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we did, that's right in a little phone call. But
Speaker 1: he ends up by saying this can be easily done
Speaker 1: if conducted by the right president. Both sides are weary
Speaker 1: and ready to make a deal. The meeting should start immediately.
Speaker 1: There's no time to spare. The death and destruction must
Speaker 1: end now. Properly executed, this terrible and tragic war, war
Speaker 1: that never should have started in the first place, will
Speaker 1: come to a speedy end. That's the part I think
Speaker 1: more Republican candidates, more Republicans in general, should zero in
Speaker 1: on this part where he says the meeting should start immediately,
Speaker 1: there's no time to spare. The death and destruction must
Speaker 1: end now. That's perfectly put and to me, the rationale
Speaker 1: behind Trump here is kind of populism at its worst.
Speaker 1: If you think of Bernie as defined by is kind
Speaker 1: of not me us. Trump's like, no, there are no
Speaker 1: problems structurally and materially with the world that I just
Speaker 1: can't fix on my own the problem. The problem is
Speaker 1: just that you don't have meat. So the problem is
Speaker 1: not that this war's going honest, that's being waged poorly,
Speaker 1: and it would be waged better by me, and it
Speaker 1: would be paid for by Europe if I were in there.
Speaker 1: And he even says he's going to charge them kind
Speaker 1: of back rent for all of the money that we've
Speaker 1: spent up up until now. So basically he's just saying,
Speaker 1: trust me, I got this. Like and he says he's
Speaker 1: going to meet with Putin, then he's gonna meet with Zelenski,
Speaker 1: then he's going to get him in the room because
Speaker 1: he's such a good deal maker. I don't know if
Speaker 1: anybody still believes this about Trump, that he's this incredible
Speaker 1: deal maker, but that's basically that's basically his shtick, which
Speaker 1: is not saying that I would force an end to
Speaker 1: this war. Yeah, I think that's a good point. We
Speaker 1: have talked in the past about the theory of the
Speaker 1: mad man what's Donald Trump? And there's actually some good
Speaker 1: reason to believe that other world leaders bought into that
Speaker 1: they is so unpredictable that maybe let's Yeah, when he's
Speaker 1: tweeting about the size of Kim Jongen's button on a
Speaker 1: Saturday night at eight pm. Who knows what the hell
Speaker 1: this guy is going to do, So I think there
Speaker 1: is something to that. I don't think that's what he's
Speaker 1: necessarily doing intentionally, but I do think there's something to
Speaker 1: do that. When Tucker asked him, what specifically is our
Speaker 1: objective in Ukraine and how will we know when we've
Speaker 1: achieved it, he says, our objective in Ukraine is to
Speaker 1: help and secure Europe, but Europe isn't helping himself. Basically,
Speaker 1: there's there's like five more questions here. Do you believe
Speaker 1: the US faces the risk of nuclear war with Russia?
Speaker 1: And to your point, Ryan, he says, it depends on
Speaker 1: who the President of the United States is. And then
Speaker 1: Tucker asked, given that Russia's economy and currency are stronger
Speaker 1: than before the war, do you believe the US sanctions
Speaker 1: have been effective? No, they have not been effective, just
Speaker 1: the opposite. Should the US support regime change in Russia? No? Again,
Speaker 1: you can definitely quibble with the language, and I think
Speaker 1: your point is a very good one. At the same time,
Speaker 1: there's also some really good stuff in this response that
Speaker 1: probably sets the tone for the less the rest of
Speaker 1: the Republican Party going forward. The neo Conservatives don't get
Speaker 1: upset about Trump anymore because they sort of expect some
Speaker 1: of this from him. You know, their friend John Bolton
Speaker 1: has told them about all of the meetings in the
Speaker 1: White House. But Desantas seem to really get under people's skins.
Speaker 1: So why don't we go ahead and pop that Before
Speaker 1: we do? Let me just quibble briefly with Tucker's question here,
Speaker 1: where he says, given that Russia's economy and currency are
Speaker 1: stronger than before the war, do you believe that US
Speaker 1: sanctions have been effective? Problem of that question is that's
Speaker 1: not a given. Russia's economy is significantly worse off today
Speaker 1: than it was a year ago. The currency happens to
Speaker 1: be actually roughly where it was one year ago, after
Speaker 1: you know, wild fluctuations. It's it's kind of the currency
Speaker 1: has stabilized, but that's in the in the face of
Speaker 1: inflation that makes ours look mild. So well, and it is.
Speaker 1: It doesn't mean that the sanctions are are a good thing.
Speaker 1: It doesn't mean that like driving Iran, Russian and China
Speaker 1: into a closer trading block is a good thing. But
Speaker 1: the premise of his question is just factually off. The
Speaker 1: Russia's economy actually is not stronger. So for the war. Now,
Speaker 1: maybe you could argue it is more resilient in the
Speaker 1: sense that it's building tighter networks with our adversaries, but
Speaker 1: it's not stronger. So let's actually that's that's one of
Speaker 1: the answers that Christy Nome and Christy Nome had a
Speaker 1: surprisingly good and substantive answer on these questions. But she
Speaker 1: writes it's counterfactual to say that Russia's economy is stronger
Speaker 1: in the wake of the war. Team Nome right here there, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Team Nome. Ryan Gram is all board the Gnome train.
Speaker 1: Let's go to the Dysantis element. That's the next one.
Speaker 1: So this is what really I think had a lot
Speaker 1: of people upset because you know, they just they expected
Speaker 1: better of Ron DeSantis in the neo conservative camp. Well,
Speaker 1: what did they expect of him? I was surprised they
Speaker 1: were upset by this because this, to me doesn't feel
Speaker 1: much different than what Biden. I'd say, except for some
Speaker 1: of the rhetoric. But why did this bother the right
Speaker 1: so much? There's one right, yeah, the neocon right. I
Speaker 1: think a lot of other people were very happy with
Speaker 1: this answer. Tucker seemed to be very happy with this answer.
Speaker 1: But there's one phrase in here that's set off the
Speaker 1: kind of national review crowd, and that is territorial dispute.
Speaker 1: So DeSantis said, well, the US has many vital national interests.
Speaker 1: Securing our borders, addressing the crisis of readiness within our military,
Speaker 1: achieving energy security and independence, and checking the economic, cultural
Speaker 1: military power of the CCP. Becoming further entangled in a
Speaker 1: territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them.
Speaker 1: So this was that that phrase territorial dispute fell to
Speaker 1: the neoconservatives as though Ron de Santis was minimizing the
Speaker 1: conflict and minimizing its sort of global implications, of historic implications,
Speaker 1: and minimizing Putin's ultimate goal. My response to that, and
Speaker 1: I think you'd probably have a similar one, which is
Speaker 1: that we actually have plenty of evidence at this point
Speaker 1: that Putin would be willing to have conversations about territory. Right.
Speaker 1: He may have wanted to take Keev and I think
Speaker 1: at some point he probably thought he could, He thought
Speaker 1: he had it. It's perfectly clear now that he didn't.
Speaker 1: It's perfectly clear that now that he's not going to
Speaker 1: and he knows that, and that's why he has in
Speaker 1: the past, we've we've heard about scuttled negotiations, been willing
Speaker 1: to talk precisely about territory. At this point, I think
Speaker 1: it's perfectly accurate to call it a territorial dispute. And
Speaker 1: I think again gets to the delusions of the NA
Speaker 1: consect that this set them off. Yeah, what I found
Speaker 1: most interesting about this is that to me, it actually
Speaker 1: you hear the you've been hearing the phrase uniparty a
Speaker 1: bunch lately. To me, it actually revealed how much there
Speaker 1: is a uniparty when it comes to foreign policy, because
Speaker 1: I see why that could trigger a kind of internescing
Speaker 1: battle on the right, you know, because it's a question
Speaker 1: of whether or not you're you're giving enough, you know,
Speaker 1: you're you're giving enough kind of weight to the struggle.
Speaker 1: But if you if you look close at what he's saying,
Speaker 1: it is very hard to distinguish from the current Biden policy. Well,
Speaker 1: he says no regime change, which so Biden. Now, okay,
Speaker 1: I shouldn't say Biden policy, I should say American policy.
Speaker 1: Because Biden has said all sorts of things and then
Speaker 1: they go back to his advisors and they're like, well,
Speaker 1: no, no no, no, we don't mean regime change. So I
Speaker 1: don't think that the current American policy is actually regime change.
Speaker 1: I think Biden might say that because he just says
Speaker 1: whatever pops into his mind and it slips right out.
Speaker 1: Although I think you do hear that from other members
Speaker 1: of the uniparty and media. You know, you're a apple
Speaker 1: bombs and certainly Apple apple bomb world for sure, but
Speaker 1: beyond that, so many while the US has many vital
Speaker 1: national interests and he names them, becoming further than tagled
Speaker 1: in this dispute is not one of them. This is
Speaker 1: territorial dispute, is not one of them. That actually mirrors
Speaker 1: the way that the Biden administration says that this is
Speaker 1: not a you know, critical national interest which requires US
Speaker 1: troops or US direct US engagement like that is how
Speaker 1: that is specifically how Biden has rejected the calls from
Speaker 1: the more hawkish elements of both parties to get more
Speaker 1: aggressively involved, to give offensive weapons to Ukraine, because he
Speaker 1: says it's not a national interest to that degree, which
Speaker 1: goes to exactly what DeSantis talks about, which is he says,
Speaker 1: we don't want to give kind of long range offensive
Speaker 1: weapons to Ukraine. Elsewhere he tries he's critical without saying
Speaker 1: what he would do differently, Like he says he's against
Speaker 1: a blank check. It's like, okay, well, we'll kind of
Speaker 1: check you for because a president of SANTUS with a
Speaker 1: leader McConnell and a speaker McCarthy would probably be showering
Speaker 1: just as much money on the war effort as Biden.
Speaker 1: Maybe there would be some more, some more efforts to like, actually,
Speaker 1: you know, monitor where the money is going, but that's
Speaker 1: trivial compared to the size of the and scope of
Speaker 1: the effort. Yeah, I don't know about that. Because Kevin
Speaker 1: McCarthy signaling was a good example that Republicans in Washington,
Speaker 1: d C. With future interests, with electoral interests, are pretty
Speaker 1: terrified of the base and understand where the base is.
Speaker 1: If you look at public polling and where the Republican
Speaker 1: Party and Republican voters are on the money to Ukraine.
Speaker 1: I think you see a trend in almost all of
Speaker 1: these answers, except for some of the predictable ones. Chris
Speaker 1: Christie's where you're getting to something here, Lindsey Graham, we
Speaker 1: have this next element. He actually compared what Desantas said,
Speaker 1: what Ron Desantas said to Neville Chamberlain. He said, the
Speaker 1: Neville Chamberlain approach to aggression never ends. Well, I mean
Speaker 1: it just no, there's no winning if you stop short
Speaker 1: of regime change to them. And I saw somebody make
Speaker 1: this make the point on In response to that, he said, like,
Speaker 1: actually not an unpopular response here, but the Nevill Chamberlain
Speaker 1: project actually does often work. Like it it didn't work
Speaker 1: against Hitler, Like that's true, but like negotiation to end
Speaker 1: a conflict does actually have a not that bad track
Speaker 1: record over the last you know, three hundred years when
Speaker 1: it comes to wars, Like that's that's how aggression and
Speaker 1: wars end is through negotiation. Sometimes you're going to have
Speaker 1: the most evil megalomaniac who's ever like walked the face
Speaker 1: of the earth, and that it's not going to work
Speaker 1: against him. But the idea that negotiations don't work, yeah, Now,
Speaker 1: one man's negotiations is another man's appeasement. But that's that's
Speaker 1: what makes a negotiation. You're never going to come out
Speaker 1: of it with a complete victory, complete victory. That's that's
Speaker 1: total war right right exactly, And when people in the
Speaker 1: neo conservative can't use the word appeasement, it is absolutely
Speaker 1: infuriating because there's then you're just talking about, like you said, Ryan,
Speaker 1: total war, and that's that's your other choice. So just
Speaker 1: say that we'll do rapid fire here through some of
Speaker 1: the rest of them. There there are some more interesting
Speaker 1: Tim scottline was hilarious. If we have this, I think
Speaker 1: we do so. Mike Pence gives a very what I
Speaker 1: would argue is a fairly near conservative Pence. He's carrying
Speaker 1: the standard. He invokes, Yeah, he invokes the Reagan doctrine
Speaker 1: and says we support those who fight our enemies on
Speaker 1: their shores, so we will not have to fight them ourselves,
Speaker 1: and then goes on offense and says there is no
Speaker 1: room for putin apologists in the Republican Party. Tucker interpreted
Speaker 1: that as a barb at him in his reading of
Speaker 1: the Pence tweet. There's some other ones. Vekram Oswami basically
Speaker 1: answered with an essay like really really long post. You
Speaker 1: can you can read all of this on Tucker's Twitter.
Speaker 1: By the way, I don't know what would you make
Speaker 1: what do you make of Pence's entire kamikaze kind of
Speaker 1: campaign that he's running. I mean, I enjoy watching It.
Speaker 1: Doesn't mean I'm a neo khon all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: but it is kind of fun to watch him. Just yeah,
Speaker 1: Kamakazi seems the best word, because it feels like this
Speaker 1: is not a path to victory for him, but he's
Speaker 1: gonna do some damage along the way. It almost feels
Speaker 1: like when Bernie decided to run in twenty fifteen. It's
Speaker 1: like somebody e didn't think he was going to win.
Speaker 1: It's like, but somebody needs to get the message out
Speaker 1: there and have a debate over these issues. Almost feels
Speaker 1: like he feels like somebody has to like stand up
Speaker 1: for the ghost of Reagan. I think he really sees
Speaker 1: a path for himself, which is that when you have
Speaker 1: a very splintered, potentially a very splintered primary, we don't know.
Speaker 1: One of the interesting things about this Q and A
Speaker 1: is we don't know how many people are actually running.
Speaker 1: These are people who are seriously exploring a bid, but
Speaker 1: we don't know how many of them actually end up
Speaker 1: on the debate stage, actually end up mounting campaigns and
Speaker 1: traveling and making a real effort, but it does look
Speaker 1: like a lot of people are flirting with a run.
Speaker 1: And if that's the case, you have the Trump vote,
Speaker 1: you know, some thirty percent of the Republican base roughly,
Speaker 1: and then everybody else is split into these different camps,
Speaker 1: which is essentially how Donald Trump won the Republican primary
Speaker 1: in twenty sixteen, because you were either voting for Donald
Speaker 1: Trump or for one or the other against him. He's
Speaker 1: trying to he's trying to be that guy he's going
Speaker 1: to like stay in it long enough with that integrity,
Speaker 1: and he's going to carry Reagan's mantle. You could see
Speaker 1: the sort of suburban Republican voter who's uncomfortable with DeSantis,
Speaker 1: maybe because he thinks that the Ukraine conflict is quote
Speaker 1: a territorial dispute, and you have Mike Pence, you know,
Speaker 1: arguing sort of against that. Then yeah, I think they
Speaker 1: think there's enough room. If everyone's voting against Trump, it
Speaker 1: just needs to pick another flavor. Then maybe, now that
Speaker 1: Trump's support is down to you know, something around twenty
Speaker 1: five thirty percent, if another person can just beat that,
Speaker 1: that's their lane. So that's what I would make of
Speaker 1: Mike Pence's is he competing for that lane with Chris Christy,
Speaker 1: and should we finish with him. Yeah, let's throw Chris
Speaker 1: Christie's answer up on here the last element. He's the
Speaker 1: last element. We'll just go straight to that one. I
Speaker 1: have no idea. I didn't even think there was a
Speaker 1: chance that Chris Christie would mount a bid at all.
Speaker 1: I guess Tucker has reason to think Chris Christie is
Speaker 1: on I guess Chris Christy's on Tucker's radar for some reason.
Speaker 1: And he answered the question the full throated kind of
Speaker 1: George W. Bush throwback kind of rhetoric completely, as though
Speaker 1: the Trump administration never happened. Yeah, Russia, Russia's aggression against
Speaker 1: Ukraine is a national security issue that threatens our alliances
Speaker 1: and are standing in the world. Our objective is to
Speaker 1: assist Ukraine sufficiently to enable him to defeat Russian forces
Speaker 1: and restore their soverearty. If we do not, this aggression
Speaker 1: will spread, and the void we leave will be filled
Speaker 1: by authoritarian regimes like China around North Korea and an
Speaker 1: empowered Russia if they triumph over Ukraine, which Tucker kind
Speaker 1: of paraphrased on his show as if we don't beat
Speaker 1: if we don't beat Russia in Ukraine with Korean and
Speaker 1: Iron will take over the world. And the other thing.
Speaker 1: The other point to make is Tim Scott, Christy Noman
Speaker 1: particular and Vivek Ramaswami in particular all invoked China and
Speaker 1: made this argument that our focus on Ukraine financially and
Speaker 1: just militarily is distracting us and weakening us in the
Speaker 1: the with the potential urgent threat of a fight in
Speaker 1: the South China Sea mounting that that was one of
Speaker 1: the lines that they brought into the conversations with Tucker.
Speaker 1: Speaking of Tucker, indeed, speaking of Tucker, we have more
Speaker 1: Tucker to talk about, because actually this whole exercise where
Speaker 1: Tucker Pepper the potential Republican candidates with questions was a
Speaker 1: really interesting one. Some of them gave short responses, some
Speaker 1: of them gave long responses to every individual question. They
Speaker 1: came in all kinds of different formats. But he also
Speaker 1: went on full send to talk. I saw him talk
Speaker 1: about nicotine. He's always you know, got a dip in
Speaker 1: longtime smoker. That a fairly enjoyable part of the conversation
Speaker 1: because he talked about how nicotine has his health benefits
Speaker 1: it's not a carcinogen. I tend to agree with him
Speaker 1: on that point, but he also called it's it's a
Speaker 1: nicotine dip, like a oh man, you're about to learn
Speaker 1: about a whole new world. But it's not like old
Speaker 1: school dip. No. Yeah, it's it's like like what vaping
Speaker 1: is before. Oh okay, wow, I didn't know that there
Speaker 1: was like vaping. But for dip, well, it's it's it's
Speaker 1: an artificial type, but it's it's not packed with Yeah.
Speaker 1: So he also now that we Ryan's going to do
Speaker 1: the next day, Yeah, show what that so. But he
Speaker 1: also called former President Trump quote a little bit autistic
Speaker 1: and dismissed this is media writing. Dismissed Trump's claim he
Speaker 1: would end the war in Ukraine. In a lengthy and
Speaker 1: candid interview on the Full Send podcast. At one point
Speaker 1: during the discussion on the topic of Russia's invasion, came up, quote,
Speaker 1: I saw Trump said he could close that in twenty
Speaker 1: four hours if he wanted to. Kyle asked, quote, do
Speaker 1: you think he could? Carlson responds, I have no idea.
Speaker 1: I mean, he couldn't build a border wall in four years,
Speaker 1: so you know there's a gap. Between promises and delivery
Speaker 1: with all politicians, very much, including him. I will say,
Speaker 1: in Trump's defense, and maybe because he's a little bit autistic,
Speaker 1: he saw the stakes of this like at the very beginning.
Speaker 1: And this is what I do love about Trump, particularly
Speaker 1: in foreign policy. I think we have a clip of
Speaker 1: Tucker's response here as well. Trump said he could close
Speaker 1: that in twenty four hours if he wanted to. Do
Speaker 1: you think he could? I have no idea. I mean,
Speaker 1: he couldn't build a border wall in four years. So
Speaker 1: you know, there is a gap between promises and delivery
Speaker 1: with all politicians, very much including him. But I will say,
Speaker 1: in Trump's defense, and maybe because he's a little bit autistic,
Speaker 1: he saw the stakes of this like at the very beginning.
Speaker 1: He's like, you don't want And this is what I
Speaker 1: do love about Trump, particularly in foreign policy. He sees
Speaker 1: the big stuff. He's like, wait, you've got Russia in China.
Speaker 1: They don't don't trust each other. We can't let them
Speaker 1: get together. They'll kick our acts and we'll be We're
Speaker 1: not going to fight a war against them, one hopes,
Speaker 1: but we'll definitely be taking orders from them. Definitely. No.
Speaker 1: And he said that five years ago when everyone's like,
Speaker 1: shut up, racist. Okay, he's a racist, but is he wrong?
Speaker 1: So diagnosis aside his point about how Trump sees the
Speaker 1: big picture that from his perspective, that Donald Trump comes
Speaker 1: in has this sort of business mentality, looks at these
Speaker 1: conflicts from an almost like cartoonish perspective and says, well,
Speaker 1: because I'm not mired in the theory and the details
Speaker 1: and you know all of that, I can say, what's
Speaker 1: wrong with all of you very smart people. Can't you
Speaker 1: see the bigger problem going on? You're you're not seeing
Speaker 1: the forest for the trees. That's an interesting point. What
Speaker 1: did you make of it? Well? I think that American
Speaker 1: foreign policy makers also have a cartoonish view of American
Speaker 1: foreign policy, and that it clouds their judgment, whereas it
Speaker 1: might actually make Trump to see things a little bit
Speaker 1: more clearly, at least in that in that particular sense.
Speaker 1: In other words, if you're an American, you're guiding foreign
Speaker 1: policy and you are constantly drinking your own kool aid
Speaker 1: about how we are spreading democracy and how we are
Speaker 1: a we are a force for good, that we're the
Speaker 1: only country out there that doesn't engage in great power politics.
Speaker 1: What we're out here doing is just policing the world
Speaker 1: and making it a better place. Like that, That's that's
Speaker 1: all we're doing. Everybody wants to be a Madisonian democracy
Speaker 1: if we can just kind of nudge them in that
Speaker 1: direction with our m sixteens and maybe potential security guarantees,
Speaker 1: and if not, then cups of their bad governments. So
Speaker 1: if you're driven by this belief in your own worthiness,
Speaker 1: your own your own morality, then you might be blinded
Speaker 1: to the way that your actions are going to be
Speaker 1: perceived and counteracted by other tries. You might not see,
Speaker 1: Oh wait, if we do this, not only are we
Speaker 1: going to have Russia and China who do hate each other,
Speaker 1: but now all of a sudden, you know, find out
Speaker 1: of necessity a reason to work together. You have Iran
Speaker 1: working with him clothes. You might even get countries like Brazil,
Speaker 1: El Salvador, uh Venezuela, like all of these other countries
Speaker 1: that we could have, you know, very good relations with
Speaker 1: all of a sudden start to feel threatened and don't
Speaker 1: see from their perspective, this is kind of warm hearted
Speaker 1: sharing of democratic values. What they what they see is
Speaker 1: a global hedgemon just trying to and enforce its will.
Speaker 1: And so for Trump, who is you know has you
Speaker 1: know has is completely a moral only sees kind of
Speaker 1: transactions and power plays. He's able transactual morality, right, He's able.
Speaker 1: He's able to see from their perspective much more or
Speaker 1: easily how they're going to respond to what the United
Speaker 1: States is doing because he doesn't really have any buy
Speaker 1: in into the kind of the mythos around the US
Speaker 1: spreading democracy around the world. Yeah, he's completely changed the tone,
Speaker 1: at least in the Republican Party. And that's what this
Speaker 1: questionnaire we talked about it in the last block, I mean,
Speaker 1: one of the big Obviously, it's an open question as
Speaker 1: to whether you believe that Ron DeSantis sees this as
Speaker 1: quote a territorial dispute in the way that absolutely angered
Speaker 1: so many of the old Conservatives who are trying to
Speaker 1: cling to power but are keeping it much less. They're
Speaker 1: much less powerful than they wish that they could be.
Speaker 1: Precisely because you're getting answers like Ron DeSantis christinome things
Speaker 1: that you would not have had Republicans talking about pre Trump.
Speaker 1: And we know that, by the way, because they were
Speaker 1: talking about Ukraine a little bit differently during the Obama administration,
Speaker 1: both for political reasons and because Trump hadn't disrupted the
Speaker 1: party yet. I think there's an argument for that sort
Speaker 1: of reg and I peace through Strength not being full
Speaker 1: contradictory with where they are now. But at the same time,
Speaker 1: there was a lot more I think eagerness to criticize
Speaker 1: the Obama administrations what they perceived as weakness for not
Speaker 1: equipping Ukraine in some cases with offensive weapons to do
Speaker 1: what it needed to do around the annexation of Crimea.
Speaker 1: So all of that is to say he completely fundamentally
Speaker 1: at least changed the way Republican politicians talk about it.
Speaker 1: But we have not yet tested how a post Trump
Speaker 1: Republican Party deals with in office these questions. We obviously
Speaker 1: have Kevin McCarthy saying he doesn't want the blank check,
Speaker 1: but he's only been Speaker of the House for a
Speaker 1: little bit and Republicans have only had the House for
Speaker 1: just a couple of months now at this point, so
Speaker 1: we don't really know what the Republican Party post Trump
Speaker 1: looks like on foreign policy. We do, however, know what
Speaker 1: they want to talk about, and we do know what
Speaker 1: they believe the rhetoric should look like, and that is
Speaker 1: a change. What do they think it should what do
Speaker 1: they think the rhetic should be the more isolationist leaning,
Speaker 1: more realist, say, less near a conservative and more realist
Speaker 1: the whole like going going to Iraq to build a
Speaker 1: democracy like that's gone kind of thing. Yeah, And Tucker's
Speaker 1: talked about himself, how that's his perspective on this has changed.
Speaker 1: And it would be hard to be And I think
Speaker 1: this is where the Republican base has shifted too. It
Speaker 1: would be hard to be an American who looks at
Speaker 1: what our foreign policy establishment over the last twenty years,
Speaker 1: over the last fifty years and says, you know, great job,
Speaker 1: great work. I trust you to continue doing this. You
Speaker 1: clearly know exactly what you're doing and need no disruption whatsoever.
Speaker 1: Was it what finally brought the right back around? Was
Speaker 1: it the disastrous occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, like the
Speaker 1: combination of those two after Vietnam and basically like sixty
Speaker 1: years of having nothing to show for these adventures. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it's that. I think it's the class element too.
Speaker 1: And you know, just proportionately people who vote Republican were
Speaker 1: affected by sending their kids to war in Iraq and Afghanistan,
Speaker 1: and especially you know now feel as though that was
Speaker 1: a sacrifice they made while people in Washington were sort
Speaker 1: of using their children as pawns in this like great
Speaker 1: global chess game and doing it really poorly. So I
Speaker 1: definitely think the class element is there. But yeah, it's
Speaker 1: hard to look at this and not see failure after
Speaker 1: failure after failure, and so I think at least the
Speaker 1: candidates and Trump picked up on that. People forget how
Speaker 1: central that was to his campaign in the Republican primary
Speaker 1: back in twenty fifteen and twenty sixteen. When he was
Speaker 1: talking about in terms of Iraq and Afghanistan was completely
Speaker 1: different than basically any other Republican candidate before him. And
Speaker 1: now we're almost ten years from the escalator that he
Speaker 1: descended down to announce his candidacy in the Republican Party,
Speaker 1: at least as talking about these things in a totally
Speaker 1: different way, because I think they saw the response and
Speaker 1: that totally changed. I do remember that incredible moment in
Speaker 1: the Republican debate where Trump told Jeb Bush, like, you know,
Speaker 1: your brother, you know, was there for nine to eleven
Speaker 1: and then he botched the Iraq War, and we never
Speaker 1: should have done that. Now, Trump, if I remember, was
Speaker 1: supportive of the Iraq War at the time. But that's fine.
Speaker 1: He's a politician. He can swing all over the place
Speaker 1: if he wants. He was probably all over the place
Speaker 1: on the Iraq War. Yeah, he's gonna say, right, like,
Speaker 1: as long as we can get the oil, then we
Speaker 1: should do it. She probably wasn't for building democracy, since
Speaker 1: he's not necessarily even for democracy here. But to see
Speaker 1: him eviscerating the kind of pro war mentality that was
Speaker 1: dominant in twenty fifteen still by twenty fifteen in the
Speaker 1: Republican Party, and to see it land on Jeb and
Speaker 1: just crush him was delightful to watch the front runner
Speaker 1: at the time. I mean, again, it's ridiculous to think
Speaker 1: about that, but he Jeb Bush was the front runner.
Speaker 1: Was Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton, but it was on
Speaker 1: the Republican side. It was Jeb's year. Trump's told Howard Stern,
Speaker 1: and this was in two thousand and two, about six
Speaker 1: months before the war. Yeah, I guess so when he
Speaker 1: was asked if he supported going to war, but then yeah,
Speaker 1: sure he did. By two thousand and four, he was
Speaker 1: completely in opposition to the war basically, so he's turned
Speaker 1: around quicker than other people. He was definitely ahead of
Speaker 1: the Republican Party on that question in two thousand and
Speaker 1: four by then, like Abu Graves two thousand and four, like,
Speaker 1: but it's still faster than a lot of the Republican Party,
Speaker 1: for sure. It took the two thousand and six midterm
Speaker 1: wipeout right for a lot of them to be like,
Speaker 1: all right, yeah, we'll eventually end this war fifteen years
Speaker 1: from now, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Well, let's go
Speaker 1: to the Silicon Valley Bank developments, because there's more to
Speaker 1: talk about every single day. By the hour, it feels
Speaker 1: like there's more to talk about every single day. Let's
Speaker 1: start though, Actually, Ryan with yourself, you were on Russell
Speaker 1: Brand Show yesterday. We had just I'll tee this up
Speaker 1: very briefly. I went We talked about the Department of
Speaker 1: Justice announcing that it's going to be probing Silicon Valley Bank.
Speaker 1: The New York Times reported that experts were saying that
Speaker 1: they're going to be looking at the bonuses that executives
Speaker 1: in the stock sale, the bonuses paid out to the
Speaker 1: executives and the stock sales done by executives. That's great,
Speaker 1: they should definitely look at that. What I hope and
Speaker 1: also suspect a little bit that they would also look
Speaker 1: out look at would be this text chain. We'll talk
Speaker 1: about it a little bit later, a bunch of text
Speaker 1: chains and slack groups among these VCS founders the Silicon
Speaker 1: Valley tech world that very early started saying, hey, guys,
Speaker 1: why don't we all get our money out? And so
Speaker 1: then the question becomes were you, why were you? Why
Speaker 1: were you making these suggestions to this group rather than
Speaker 1: if you really had concerns, just pull your money out,
Speaker 1: like you wouldn't like yell, like if the theater is
Speaker 1: really on fire, just get out rather than start a stampede.
Speaker 1: So anyway, so we talked briefly about some of that
Speaker 1: so of a dialogue being potentially I know, you know,
Speaker 1: not Nottro Damus or whatever or some sort of soothsayer,
Speaker 1: but but potentially this is part of a kind of
Speaker 1: dialogue taking place between the state treasury and the banking
Speaker 1: system that's letting them know that there are ways of
Speaker 1: precipitating financial disaster unless there's compliance and favorable legislation and regulation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: nice little economy you've got going here. Shame if there
Speaker 1: is a bank run and a bunch of contagion that
Speaker 1: just wiped it out. So yeah, So now the New
Speaker 1: York Times reporting just now that the FBI, Department Justice
Speaker 1: are going to look into, you know, the causes of
Speaker 1: this meltdown and the twenty eighteen rollback. The executives who
Speaker 1: catched out a bunch of bonuses like those, that's all
Speaker 1: going to get looked at. You know. They to me
Speaker 1: they ought to actually look at that text chain. You
Speaker 1: got two hundred people, you got two hundred phone numbers.
Speaker 1: Call those folks in. Maybe it was completely innocent, ask them,
Speaker 1: you know why, you know, why did you tell Why
Speaker 1: did you tell your closest two hundred friends to take
Speaker 1: the money out of here? Why didn't you just take
Speaker 1: your own money out? At the same time, Peter Thiel's
Speaker 1: what's it called his founder's firm, they did a call
Speaker 1: on that day where they they called money in like
Speaker 1: on that very day. That required and then a bunch
Speaker 1: of their partners or urge a bunch of their partners
Speaker 1: to pull money out as well. Why'd you do this?
Speaker 1: Just total coincidence? What did this happen? Anything to do
Speaker 1: with this? I think these are reasonable questions that investigators,
Speaker 1: you know, ought to be asking because the because it's
Speaker 1: just the other explanations just don't make a lot of sense.
Speaker 1: It's extraordinary that you say that, so is unlikely that
Speaker 1: the investigation will look into these aspects of the case.
Speaker 1: What about Biden's public claim overt obvious and playing the
Speaker 1: consequences of a failed capitalist venture are bankruptcy, Like you said,
Speaker 1: the bank is involved are unlikely to face bankruptcy. You
Speaker 1: said that should be the first step and the consequences
Speaker 1: of those actions should be felt. So the question then
Speaker 1: would be, well, why, like why would a bunch of
Speaker 1: tech bros blow up their own bank? And the speculation
Speaker 1: that is out there is that it is a shot
Speaker 1: across the bow at the Fed that the entire tech
Speaker 1: industry that these guys have made so much money off of,
Speaker 1: requires quantitative easing at a global scale to get the
Speaker 1: get the cheap, get the free money flowing out the
Speaker 1: Silicon Valley that they run through Silicon Valley Bank and
Speaker 1: then runs to all of these different startups. Some of
Speaker 1: them hit and some of them don't. But if you're
Speaker 1: if you're at four or five six percent interest rates,
Speaker 1: you can't make all of the different bets that you
Speaker 1: can make at basically zero percent interest rates. This the
Speaker 1: bubble can just go on forever. So the idea would be,
Speaker 1: how do you how do you make it clear to
Speaker 1: the Federal Reserve that they need to stop ratching up
Speaker 1: interest rates, that they need to stop tightening monetary policy.
Speaker 1: You tank Silicon Valley Bank, you take Silicon Valley Bank.
Speaker 1: So that would be the that's this, that's the speculation,
Speaker 1: which speculation ran literally just did. Many people are saying
Speaker 1: conspiracy that out there. It's many people are saying, well,
Speaker 1: it also makes more sense than the alternative, because here's
Speaker 1: the thing. If you really do feel like because of
Speaker 1: the news that came out Wednesday night that your money
Speaker 1: is at risk, you have two things you can do.
Speaker 1: You can either go to your bank calmly while there's
Speaker 1: not a bank run, and pull your money out of
Speaker 1: that bank, like that would be the rational thing to
Speaker 1: do if you're trying to protect your wealth. Or you
Speaker 1: can text two hundred of the richest people in the
Speaker 1: world who all have money at Silicon Valley Bank and
Speaker 1: encourage them to take their money out, and then you
Speaker 1: can do a call to other investors to have them
Speaker 1: pull their money out, like, those are your two options,
Speaker 1: Which one of those is going to have you more
Speaker 1: likely to be made whole by the end of the day,
Speaker 1: and which one of those is more likely to cause
Speaker 1: a bank run, which then risks your ability to get
Speaker 1: your money out. And if your real goal is to
Speaker 1: just to get your money out, you know, spreading sewing
Speaker 1: fear and panic doesn't do that. I've heard anecdotes about
Speaker 1: smaller businesses, startups that had you know, their assets in SVB.
Speaker 1: I also, though, think there is an alternative possibly, which
Speaker 1: is that a lot of these other people basically have
Speaker 1: been playing with monopoly money for the last twenty years.
Speaker 1: They have so much money that they're investing in different
Speaker 1: places and playing around with that. Their fear of being
Speaker 1: made whole is not necessarily like understandable or comprehensible from
Speaker 1: the perspective of people who haven't just been playing with
Speaker 1: millions and billions for a really long time. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think that's to the question about why
Speaker 1: they would be chatting in their signal groups instead of
Speaker 1: yanking immediately and taking action. Maybe it's it's simply well,
Speaker 1: first of all, incompetence, but secondly it seems possible to
Speaker 1: me that they just have been playing with this glut
Speaker 1: of money like it's monopoly, Like it's those fake gold
Speaker 1: chocolate coins that you just toss around at a birthday
Speaker 1: like his birthday party, for so long. It's not as
Speaker 1: pressing as it would be otherwise it could be. And
Speaker 1: the nice thing about this conspiracy theory is that can
Speaker 1: be tested, Like investigators can literally call these people in
Speaker 1: and they all of their communication is done by text, yeah,
Speaker 1: by slack. Let's hope they don't have disappearing messages on
Speaker 1: signal and just say, look, we want to see what
Speaker 1: you guys talked about Wednesday night and what you guys
Speaker 1: talked about Thursday morning. Did any of you say like, hey,
Speaker 1: you know what, the FED is out of control. You
Speaker 1: know what they need? They need to be scared. Like
Speaker 1: if you find some messages like that right, then you
Speaker 1: got them. If you don't, then maybe this is just
Speaker 1: organic idiocy. Well we have The New York Times is
Speaker 1: reporting that there's a United States is reportedly opening an
Speaker 1: investigation into collapse of SVB. There's actually also I believe
Speaker 1: a class action lawsuit that has been filed on Tuesday nights.
Speaker 1: So the shareholders, right, Yeah, So there's a lot of
Speaker 1: opportunity for discovery here. There's a lot of opportunity for
Speaker 1: evidence to emerge, whether they wanted to, whether the investors
Speaker 1: wanted to or not. Is there anything particular you expect
Speaker 1: from the early days of these investigators, Well, not necessarily
Speaker 1: from the early days. But what's nice is that when
Speaker 1: you have powerful entities in a legal fight, then you
Speaker 1: are more likely to get to the bottom of at
Speaker 1: least messages, Like the reason we have all those Fox
Speaker 1: News messages is because Dominion was able to get them right.
Speaker 1: So the executives at Silicon Valley Bank are very much
Speaker 1: motivated to point fingers in other directions. It wasn't us,
Speaker 1: wasn't our, wasn't our risky business model? Wasn't our lobbying
Speaker 1: Congress in twenty eighteen to roll back rules so that
Speaker 1: we could operate in a riskier fashion, which we then
Speaker 1: exploited to blow ourselves up, Like wasn't us? Wasn't wasn't us,
Speaker 1: like extracting our bonuses and selling stock at the end,
Speaker 1: it was actually these tech pros who prompted a run
Speaker 1: on our bank. Like that, they're motivated to make that claim,
Speaker 1: so their attorneys are then going to be motivated to
Speaker 1: try through the discovery process to get access to some
Speaker 1: of these messages to see if there actually is anything
Speaker 1: that points to and you know, some of these pros
Speaker 1: might be dumb enough to have like typed that up.
Speaker 1: You know, we'll see you wouldn't think that you'd have,
Speaker 1: you know, Fox anchors saying like none of this was true.
Speaker 1: All right, more than eleven, but there you go. Well
Speaker 1: for more on this. Ken clippen Stein is actually here,
Speaker 1: so we're going to pause and bring Ken in right now.
Speaker 1: One of the most vocal cheerleaders of the Silicon Valley
Speaker 1: bank bailout was none other than California Governor Gavin Newsom.
Speaker 1: Ken Klippenstein from the Intercept joins us to talk about
Speaker 1: some of his new reporting about some potential conflicts that
Speaker 1: Governor Newsom may have had that he that he neglected
Speaker 1: to mention. Ken. Thanks for joining us. Good to be
Speaker 1: with you, guys. I have to say, when you tuned
Speaker 1: up this segment, I thought you were going to say
Speaker 1: one of the most vocal cheerleaders, the best baby who
Speaker 1: happened to have some of his startup capital lodged in
Speaker 1: that bank. Ken a lot of people don't know this
Speaker 1: has a winery like Gavin Newsom, and he was banking
Speaker 1: with SBB. Well, congratulations, I'm glad that everything worked out
Speaker 1: for you know me. I like to support the innovators.
Speaker 1: That's right, Yes, so, so Gavin Newsom loves to support
Speaker 1: the innovators as well. Tell us a little bit about
Speaker 1: his entanglements with Silicon Valley Bank, what we know of them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So it turns out he has three wineries. He was
Speaker 1: a businessman before becoming governor, owns a bunch of companies
Speaker 1: in the hospitality industry, and three of those wineries appeared
Speaker 1: in the bank's winery division. That's a thing for the
Speaker 1: for the bank, and it's it's listed on the website.
Speaker 1: And so it turns out he uses Silicon Valley Bank
Speaker 1: for those three companies. In addition to that, a long
Speaker 1: time former employee of Newsom's told me that he also
Speaker 1: uses it for his personal his multiple personal accounts with
Speaker 1: the bank as well. And then third angled all of
Speaker 1: this is that his wife runs a nonprofit and on
Speaker 1: the board of directors is a president of a Silicon
Speaker 1: Valley bank, and that nonprofit received one hundred thousand dollars
Speaker 1: from SVB over the last several years, so a number
Speaker 1: of different points of connection and ties between Governor Newsom
Speaker 1: in that bank. And I want to get your thoughts
Speaker 1: ken on the response from Newsom's camp to your reporting.
Speaker 1: They claim, right that he has his holdings, all of
Speaker 1: his financial holdings are in a blind trust. What do
Speaker 1: we know about the potential conflicts there and how much
Speaker 1: that would matter if, for instance, you know, his wife
Speaker 1: has this connection on the board with SVB. Right, So
Speaker 1: the problem with this blind trust is that it's not
Speaker 1: meaningfully blind. If you look at what some of the
Speaker 1: ethics experts have said, and what this case is really
Speaker 1: reminiscent of was President Trump in his attempt to put
Speaker 1: his companies into a blind trust, which he then allowed
Speaker 1: his son to run. And then in this case sort
Speaker 1: of in parallel to that, Governor Newsom's sister runs his
Speaker 1: blind trust. And so the critique of that is, and
Speaker 1: it's not meaningfully blind because A, he already knows all
Speaker 1: the companies that's in it, because he's run them for
Speaker 1: a number of years. And b you know it's his
Speaker 1: blood relative that's running this thing. So what kind of
Speaker 1: wall is that to put between him and these firms
Speaker 1: and occurred to me. Another good one is Joe Manchin,
Speaker 1: who has who he and his wife have a coal
Speaker 1: company and they put it in the name. They put
Speaker 1: it in a blind trust, but his son runs it.
Speaker 1: But he still knows it's a coal company, right, he
Speaker 1: knows what it does. Right. And now Newsome might only
Speaker 1: be able to assume at this point that the winery
Speaker 1: still has accounts with Silicon Valley Bank. But you don't typically,
Speaker 1: you know, move your know, major banking operations for no
Speaker 1: reason unless you're a tech bro kind of spark trying
Speaker 1: to spark a panic or your panic. I was actually
Speaker 1: just looking up his wine. Plump Jack. It's one of
Speaker 1: his wineries. Apparently it specializes. It's a boutique like Northern
Speaker 1: California Cabernet. It's one hundred dollars a bottle for their
Speaker 1: twenty eighteen plump Jack. You ever had plump Jack Cabernet on?
Speaker 1: Never heard of it? Have you ever heard of it? No? Anyway,
Speaker 1: But you know I'm not a big Cabernet person. And
Speaker 1: so did you get any reaction from either the California
Speaker 1: Press or the Governor's office in the story what'd you hear. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the California press is actually following up on it, and
Speaker 1: I'm glad that it hasn't just become a partisan football
Speaker 1: because this is really, as I said with the Trump case,
Speaker 1: this is an ethics question that is a serious one
Speaker 1: and has been a serious one in the local press.
Speaker 1: They had looked at these problems, not specifically the wine
Speaker 1: companies in the in the bank, but all of his holdings.
Speaker 1: And this is something that comes up any time you
Speaker 1: have one of these business moguls that that you know
Speaker 1: has a high net worth, as as Governor Newsom does.
Speaker 1: There are all these questions of conflicts of interest, and
Speaker 1: so there's been some very good reporting in the local
Speaker 1: press around what's called behested giving. So there are strict
Speaker 1: limits on what California politicians can take in terms of
Speaker 1: gifts generally, but there's one exception, and that is what's
Speaker 1: called giving, where the politician directs giving to something, and
Speaker 1: in this case, Newsom is known to have directed giving
Speaker 1: to his wife's nonprofit, and so it's not it's not
Speaker 1: regulated in the same fashion that other gifts are, and
Speaker 1: that's something that the local prece has been focusing on
Speaker 1: for a number of years now, and Ken you just
Speaker 1: said something important, which is that you didn't want it
Speaker 1: to become sort of a partisan football. The report you
Speaker 1: had just before this one was about entanglements in the
Speaker 1: office of Kevin McCarthy with Silicon Valley Bank. Tell us
Speaker 1: about what you found there. Yeah, what was interesting about
Speaker 1: that is that two of the House Speaker McCarthy's senior
Speaker 1: staffers for a number of years ended up becoming a
Speaker 1: registered lobbyist for Silicon Valley Bank. And not just that.
Speaker 1: When I looked at what specifically they lobbied on, it's
Speaker 1: directly related to all the stuff that's happening now, which
Speaker 1: is the twenty eighteen Dodd Frank partial rollback specifically pushed
Speaker 1: on that lobby the FDIC, which is what's ensuring the
Speaker 1: depositors at this point and guaranteeing making whole of the
Speaker 1: people that had money in that bank. So it's directly
Speaker 1: connected to all this. What's sort of funny about that
Speaker 1: is when I have this Newsom piece, come on, some
Speaker 1: Democrats are very angle agree saying, you know, oh, you're
Speaker 1: a Republican disguise. It's like, well, it's funny, you missed
Speaker 1: my last story it's literally about the other I'm not
Speaker 1: looking for Addy specific, I'm just looking at the bank
Speaker 1: and trying to see where the nexus is with politicians,
Speaker 1: and whatever pops up is what I'm going to write about.
Speaker 1: So I don't I don't know what the ULL people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's really in that rule writing and in the
Speaker 1: regulatory side where the public is at the most disadvantage.
Speaker 1: So in Congress at least it's happening somewhat in public view,
Speaker 1: so people can weigh in when it's an obscure kind
Speaker 1: of rollback. Unless you're reading the intercept the American Prospect,
Speaker 1: you're not going to follow like those you know, those
Speaker 1: those repeal efforts through Congress, but you can if you
Speaker 1: want to. By the time it gets into the FDICE,
Speaker 1: it's really like former McCarthy aids, former Mansion aids, you know,
Speaker 1: former House Financial Services Committee aids, who are going directly
Speaker 1: to the FDIC saying, all right, so here is what
Speaker 1: was written into law. Now here's how we can weaken
Speaker 1: it even further. Because the FDIIC, you know, aside from
Speaker 1: insuring deposits, also wrote a lot of the rules around
Speaker 1: Dodd Frank about out, how are we going to implement
Speaker 1: the law. What does it mean when we're going to
Speaker 1: stress tests you. How often are we going to look
Speaker 1: at your books? What do we feel like is a
Speaker 1: reasonable amount of exposure? What is not a reasonable amount
Speaker 1: of exposure? Because what I think a lot of people
Speaker 1: might not understand is a direct link between the twenty
Speaker 1: eighteen rollback and this blow up. The link would be
Speaker 1: if if there were tighter inspections and stress tests of
Speaker 1: the bank, you might have had regulators come in and
Speaker 1: say all of these bond holdings is mortgage backed securities.
Speaker 1: I've been hearing a lot on the news about potential
Speaker 1: coming interest rate hikes. I'm not sure that if that
Speaker 1: stressor hits you that you're going to be able to
Speaker 1: survive that. So one of two things happens. They make
Speaker 1: them unwind those or knowing that they're going to get
Speaker 1: that pressure from regulators, the risk managers don't do it.
Speaker 1: They say, you know what, we need shorter term bonds here,
Speaker 1: or we just need to stay in treasuries, or or
Speaker 1: we need to we need to make sure we're tightly
Speaker 1: hedged in the case of some type of shock from
Speaker 1: interest rates. And this idea that nobody could see these
Speaker 1: interest strikes, Nike's coming, Are you kidding me? I'm not, like,
Speaker 1: I'm not a risk manager at a bank. I knew
Speaker 1: they were going to raise interest rates. I talked to
Speaker 1: an employee of SB Bank who himself was frustrated about
Speaker 1: exactly what you're saying, which is that of course they
Speaker 1: were going to raise they were saying it, and so
Speaker 1: it's amazing. I interviewed an economist recently about all this
Speaker 1: and said, why are these banks so adamant about rolling
Speaker 1: back regulations, because doesn't that end up hurting them in
Speaker 1: the mid to long term? And he's like, well, you're
Speaker 1: assuming that they're looking at the mid to long term,
Speaker 1: you know, because again I'm talking to his employee would
Speaker 1: have been happy to have the stress tests happened because
Speaker 1: he wouldn't have to worry about all this stuff now
Speaker 1: that he's having to brief investors and things on and
Speaker 1: you know, hope for his job to still exist in
Speaker 1: a year. And so it's kind of interesting how much
Speaker 1: ends up hurting basically everyone except people at the very
Speaker 1: top C suite level, these kind of derregulations. Well, and
Speaker 1: you quote at the very end, you have you really
Speaker 1: stick the land again. You say, perhaps no one embodied
Speaker 1: this contradiction more than Larry Summers, who said this is
Speaker 1: not the time for moral hazard elections, or for lectures,
Speaker 1: or for lessons administering, or for alarm about the political
Speaker 1: consequences of bailouts from a tweet on Sunday. And when
Speaker 1: you have to your point about the people in the
Speaker 1: C suites never ending up getting hurt, well maybe that's
Speaker 1: partially why. Yeah, coming from the guy that for the
Speaker 1: last two years has been endlessly talking about how we
Speaker 1: can't have student loan debt because the moral hazard. And
Speaker 1: now we don't have to worry about moral hazard. This
Speaker 1: is a very serious issue right now. All those people,
Speaker 1: why people, that's the other thing he said, we need
Speaker 1: He said, we need more ars. What happened to that, Well,
Speaker 1: here's your chance, right, not like the wrong the wrong people.
Speaker 1: We don't want them to be on Come on, now
Speaker 1: that's a little bit. Those guys I know them, reference, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they need good people. You know, haveies. That's how you
Speaker 1: know somebody has lost an argument when they just say
Speaker 1: now is not the time. Yeah, now, okay, right, you
Speaker 1: might be right. I just don't want to hear it, right, Kay,
Speaker 1: great reporting. Thanks so much, thanks guys. Biden administration this
Speaker 1: week gave the green light to a controversial drilling project
Speaker 1: in Alaska, approving a Connico Phillips plan to despoil or
Speaker 1: be spoil ruin an extraordinary amount of wilderness in Alaska,
Speaker 1: going after one of the you know, huge untapped uh
Speaker 1: stores of fossil fuel resources in Alaska. The the left
Speaker 1: quite quite fairly lost its mind, uh in reaction to this,
Speaker 1: with a like what with a what are you? What
Speaker 1: are you doing? What could you possibly be thinking at
Speaker 1: a time when we're you know, in the midst of
Speaker 1: climate apocalypse and you're saying that you're going to be
Speaker 1: uh some type of apocalypse may be overstating it slightly,
Speaker 1: climate crisis. You say that you're going to be you know,
Speaker 1: the best, the best climate president in history, and you're
Speaker 1: going to improve one of the biggest oil drilling projects ever.
Speaker 1: And the idea to me that you're going to get
Speaker 1: any credit from Republicans or from the right for this,
Speaker 1: that all of a sudden you're going to start seeing
Speaker 1: Republicans say, well, you know what, the Biden administration, you know,
Speaker 1: they really are quite reasonable when it comes to comes
Speaker 1: to their energy policy. So we're we're not going to
Speaker 1: continue to call them kind of Marxist who are trying
Speaker 1: to shut down every every gas station and drilling project
Speaker 1: in the country. Right, I mean, is anybody is am
Speaker 1: I wrong? Or is there some amount of drilling that
Speaker 1: Biden can do where Republicans will say, you know what,
Speaker 1: nice drilling, baby, He didn't he drilled, baby, drilled. No. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: that's that's really why. And he coupled it, interestingly enough
Speaker 1: with his announcement that the Interior Department is has new
Speaker 1: regulations that will cut off two point eight million acres
Speaker 1: of the Arctics Beaufort See than thirteen million acres within
Speaker 1: the National Petroleum Reserve from new leases. So I think
Speaker 1: it's it's that was described by an administration official in
Speaker 1: the New York Times as quote a firewall against new drilling.
Speaker 1: So I think he's coupling it in a way where
Speaker 1: he is trying, to your point, maybe not to make
Speaker 1: amends with the right or to impress the right or
Speaker 1: to neutralize any of their criticisms, so much as he's
Speaker 1: trying to say this is to twenty five hundred new jobs,
Speaker 1: potentially three hundred of those would be permanent positions. It's
Speaker 1: an eight billion dollar project, whole jobs right, wow, yeah,
Speaker 1: one hundred that we should burn the world down. Yes,
Speaker 1: one hundred and eighty thousand barrels of oil down the
Speaker 1: Trans Alaska pipeline daily. So I think it might not
Speaker 1: be amends with Republican voters so much as it is
Speaker 1: anything steps to do anything about gas prices and reliance
Speaker 1: right now with a very tenuar situation in the Middle East. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the Biden administration's defense of itself was there were
Speaker 1: five drill sites that Kinaco Phillips wont Yeah, only they
Speaker 1: only game three, right, And I mean again, like for
Speaker 1: the Biden administration, with gas prices where they are depending
Speaker 1: on where you are in the country, By the way,
Speaker 1: your gas prices are very different. In some places they're
Speaker 1: extremely high still, like California for various reasons. But if
Speaker 1: you're the Biden administration and Conco Phillips is coming at
Speaker 1: you hard trying to get five new it does feel
Speaker 1: like if you're in the White House right now, three
Speaker 1: is quite a compromise. I see why they're happy with it,
Speaker 1: but I also see why they coupled it with that
Speaker 1: quote firewall they described to the New York Times cutting
Speaker 1: off all of those, cutting off that part of the
Speaker 1: National Petroleum Reserve thirteen million acres and then two point
Speaker 1: eight million in the Arctic Sea. Yeah, but none of
Speaker 1: it's going to come online in time to you know,
Speaker 1: practically while Bind's alive, and it's certainly not in time
Speaker 1: for his not in time for his election, like you're
Speaker 1: going to you're not going to see it affect gas prices,
Speaker 1: which was the absurd thing about how they slowed down.
Speaker 1: They stopped the Keystone Excel pipeline, which by the way,
Speaker 1: means export. It was going to export gas. But Republicans
Speaker 1: kept using the fact that they had stopped the Keystone
Speaker 1: XL pipeline to say, well, that's why you're paying high
Speaker 1: gas praises right right now, which just was completely untrue
Speaker 1: and just made no sense. It gives him, it definitely
Speaker 1: gives him a talking point in re election to be
Speaker 1: able to say it's not true what Republicans destroying all
Speaker 1: this wilderness up in Alaska right and to say it's
Speaker 1: it's not true that these claims are false. We started
Speaker 1: this project, an eight billion dollar project up in Alaska.
Speaker 1: I am not anti drilling, et cetera. Et cetera. And
Speaker 1: then he can say to the left, well, I cut
Speaker 1: off all of these acres. It's just for a president
Speaker 1: like Joe Biden, he's straddling the fence between I think
Speaker 1: one generation of Democratic voters and another. It is a
Speaker 1: very difficult political question for him, to be sure. And
Speaker 1: there Lisa Murkowski, Republican from Alaska who's been pushing for
Speaker 1: this for her entire life, basically put out a statement
Speaker 1: in which she said she could quote feel Alaska's future brightening. No,
Speaker 1: those are the that's the greenhouse effect that you're feeling.
Speaker 1: It's getting warmer in Alaska, Like the climate that has
Speaker 1: existed in Alaska for hundreds and hundreds of years is
Speaker 1: radically changing in ways that are fundamentally undermining the way
Speaker 1: of life up there. But they'll get to drill. So
Speaker 1: congratulations to Senator Lisa Markowski. Feel you feel that future brightening? Congrats?
Speaker 1: All right? Brightening is an interesting choice. A little more
Speaker 1: SPF up there. Yeah, maybe she used that intentionally to
Speaker 1: upset the Ryan Grims. It worked, she got me. Well,
Speaker 1: let's move on. In more terrifying news to rapid advancements
Speaker 1: in generative AI technology. Yesterday, Open AI released GPT four.
Speaker 1: This is generative a AI that's really quickly getting really
Speaker 1: really powerful. This is happening essentially at an exponential rate.
Speaker 1: If you talk to experts on AI, they say it
Speaker 1: feeds on itself and grows exponentially because of that, especially
Speaker 1: in this open source context. So according to Axios, the
Speaker 1: new version can accept and generate longer entries up to
Speaker 1: twenty five thousand words. It can generate captions and other
Speaker 1: information using an image, using an image as a starting point.
Speaker 1: Now chat GPT, as people have noted and Actios notes
Speaker 1: here can score it in the tenth percent tile on
Speaker 1: a bar exam. Open AI says that GPT four can
Speaker 1: score in the ninetieth percent tile. It can pass most
Speaker 1: ap exams and then on the safety side, according to
Speaker 1: according to AI, GPT four is quote eighty two percent
Speaker 1: less likely than GPT three point five to respond when
Speaker 1: asked for content. Its rules don't allow. This is a
Speaker 1: rule abiding AI. And yeah, it's but who makes the rules?
Speaker 1: What if what happens when it starts making the rules? Well, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: I mean, this is what's really terrifying that rules can
Speaker 1: be changed when we're referring to these things as And
Speaker 1: by the way, GPT four is one of you have
Speaker 1: to pay to access it. You have to have GPT plus,
Speaker 1: I think, to access it, and then if you don't,
Speaker 1: you get on a wait list. Developers can sign up
Speaker 1: on a waitlist. But I think it's really really important
Speaker 1: to note that this is we're talking GPT four, this
Speaker 1: is very new technology, and already we're up to twenty
Speaker 1: five thousand words. Already we're making these rapid leaps in
Speaker 1: a matter of months. Every single week, AI is taking
Speaker 1: a new step forward that is dramatically further than it
Speaker 1: was just the week before. And this open source way
Speaker 1: of collaborating on AI sounds really nice, but I think
Speaker 1: it's actually absolutely terrifying, not because it's democratized, but because
Speaker 1: we're putting really powerful weapons in the hands of people
Speaker 1: who could potentially be bad actors. Now, there are all
Speaker 1: kinds of benevolent hackers in the world, there are all
Speaker 1: kinds of doing really interesting like democratized benevolent hacking, but
Speaker 1: there are a lot of really bad people in the world.
Speaker 1: Then we are giving these tools more tools just from
Speaker 1: our own use of them, every single week, and we
Speaker 1: cannot fathom, truly, we cannot fathom where this goes in
Speaker 1: three months, let alone a year, let alone three years.
Speaker 1: I also wonder if we're sort of the last generation
Speaker 1: of writers that can kind of trace their lineage in US.
Speaker 1: I mean, everyone who can trace their kind of lineage
Speaker 1: back to like the poets in Babylon, like writing has
Speaker 1: been basically the same since then, your poetry, fiction, non nonfiction.
Speaker 1: People have written in different forms and obviously written different
Speaker 1: content and substance, but it's been the same product. But
Speaker 1: it's been the same thing. You go from a quill
Speaker 1: pen to a regular pen, to a typewriter to a laptop,
Speaker 1: but fundamentally it's it's just putting. It's putting words from
Speaker 1: a human mind down onto onto paper that are then
Speaker 1: read by other people, and that that produces some type
Speaker 1: of experience with with AI being able to produce, you know,
Speaker 1: poetry and fiction and nonfiction, I would suspect that people
Speaker 1: that are growing up today are going to kind of
Speaker 1: write along with that crutch the entire time, because you
Speaker 1: already see, you know, if you write in Google Docs,
Speaker 1: you'll see you see it start to make suggestions about
Speaker 1: your grammar or your spelling, and that that crush alone
Speaker 1: is new like that that that is a break from
Speaker 1: the way that you know Voltaire would have written. But
Speaker 1: if you have another artificially intelligent being who's throwing up
Speaker 1: sentences in front of you like you're you're you're not
Speaker 1: engaged in the same art that that humans have been
Speaker 1: engaged and for thousands of years. Well, and it also
Speaker 1: then destroys trust for people in public spaces in ways
Speaker 1: that again we haven't really thought about. We had what
Speaker 1: a very short period of time to acclimate to Facebook
Speaker 1: and Twitter, but that's about ten years, right, We've had
Speaker 1: those for more than ten years now. But by the
Speaker 1: time we sort of got used to the technology and
Speaker 1: to the platforms, that happened roughly over the course of
Speaker 1: a decade. Chat GPT has outpaced those platforms in terms
Speaker 1: of gaining users really really quickly. It went. If you
Speaker 1: look at the chart, it's like Chat GPT is straight
Speaker 1: up here, and then you see really rapid sort of
Speaker 1: snowballing with Twitter and Facebook. But it was over a
Speaker 1: much longer period of time, whereas GPT is just going
Speaker 1: straight up. And so think about to your point about
Speaker 1: writing and art, well, think also about law, think about contracts,
Speaker 1: think about Wills. I mean, there are just really all
Speaker 1: of these things. It seeps into all of the cracks
Speaker 1: of human life and we can't possibly conceive of them
Speaker 1: and think of them right now now think of how
Speaker 1: it can exploit code. I mean, these things are really terrifying,
Speaker 1: and we are feeding into it as we sort of
Speaker 1: mess around with it on a daily basis. Biological automative possibilities.
Speaker 1: It can you know, we a B test, now, this
Speaker 1: can a Z test really quickly. Absolutely everything. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's just the art point is a really good one.
Speaker 1: But also the way that it will artificially sort of
Speaker 1: fabricate art or writing completely will destroy trust between humans.
Speaker 1: It has the potential to completely destroy trust between humans.
Speaker 1: And imagine when AI is linked up with imagine when
Speaker 1: that kind of AI is linked up with brain wave scans.
Speaker 1: You are getting into the area of what Nita Forrahani,
Speaker 1: who has a great book out now called Battle for
Speaker 1: Your Brain. She calls it cognitive liberty. And this is
Speaker 1: a very urgent threat to cognitive liberty happening on a
Speaker 1: daily basis. At what point are you looking at today, Well,
Speaker 1: a chart from Axios caught my attention this week. You
Speaker 1: can see it here with the headline quote women rule
Speaker 1: employee rebound quote. The number of women in the workforce
Speaker 1: in February was higher than pre pandemic levels for the
Speaker 1: first time, Axios reported, adding the strength of women's return
Speaker 1: to work was faster than anyone could have imagined just
Speaker 1: a few years ago, when dire predictions about a SHES
Speaker 1: session flooded the news. That may seem like welcome news
Speaker 1: to elite women in C suites and corporate media, but
Speaker 1: they don't represent the rest of women in America. And
Speaker 1: here's why. Time and again, when women are actually pulled,
Speaker 1: a majority prepare part time worker staying home full time
Speaker 1: with their children. This is uncomfortable for the left, and
Speaker 1: it's uncomfortable for the political establishment, but it's true and
Speaker 1: those who want to serve women best must understand it.
Speaker 1: As Scott Jenner wrote back in twenty nineteen, quote, most
Speaker 1: women with dependent children don't want full time work, nor
Speaker 1: do they want to grind out a path to the
Speaker 1: upper reaches of corporate or political power. In recent years,
Speaker 1: Pew and Gallop poles have shown that fewer women, under
Speaker 1: the best of circumstances, prefer full time work. Married female
Speaker 1: MBAs from elite schools are thirty percent more likely to
Speaker 1: work part time than married female MBAs from less prestigious schools.
Speaker 1: And that's a really interesting little fact. Let's start, though,
Speaker 1: with the Pew pole that was referenced there, which found
Speaker 1: from twenty seven to twenty twelve, the share of mothers
Speaker 1: saying that full time work would be ideal for them
Speaker 1: rose sharply from twenty percent to thirty two percent, while
Speaker 1: the share saying they would prefer not to work at
Speaker 1: all fell from twenty nine percent to twenty percent. So
Speaker 1: even with that increase, the poll found only thirty percent
Speaker 1: of working mothers said their ideal situation would be to
Speaker 1: work full time. Think about that, more women coming out
Speaker 1: of a recession suddenly wanted full time work. Does that
Speaker 1: mean women got sixteen percent more girl bossy. No, it
Speaker 1: means they were anxious about feeding themselves and their children,
Speaker 1: about health care, student debt and taxes and everything else.
Speaker 1: More recent Pew data from early in the pandemic, when
Speaker 1: government checks had gone out, found a decline, but still
Speaker 1: that only forty four percent of mothers with kids under
Speaker 1: eighteen said it would be best for them personally to
Speaker 1: work full time. Right before the pandemic. Gallup found roughly
Speaker 1: fifty six percent of all women, a thirty year high,
Speaker 1: said they prefer to work rather than serving in a
Speaker 1: homemaker role if they were free to do either, although
Speaker 1: that number is slightly less useful because it doesn't break
Speaker 1: down the options by full time work and part time work.
Speaker 1: When it comes to just last year, the Center for
Speaker 1: American Progress reported nine hundred and ninety three thousand more
Speaker 1: mothers were working in December twenty twenty two than one
Speaker 1: year prior, crediting Biden's American Rescue Plan in part for
Speaker 1: this so called improvement. Well, let's look at the BLS data. Quote.
Speaker 1: In twenty twenty one, eighty one point two percent of
Speaker 1: employed mothers with children ages six to seventeen worked full time,
Speaker 1: the Bureau reported. Remember that Pew found within a year
Speaker 1: of this BLS research, only forty four percent of mothers
Speaker 1: with kids under eighteen said it was best personally for
Speaker 1: them to work full time. That is not a perfect
Speaker 1: apples to apples, but it does reveal an enormous, enormous
Speaker 1: mismatch between what women want and what women do. It
Speaker 1: also fits with research like the paper from Swedish academics
Speaker 1: in twenty eighteen that found quote, sex differences in personality
Speaker 1: have been shown to be larger in more gender equal countries.
Speaker 1: As that paper speculated, as gender equality increases, both men
Speaker 1: and women gravitate towards their traditional gender roles. In other words,
Speaker 1: more women in good economies choose to stay home and
Speaker 1: work part time. The more freedom women have, the more
Speaker 1: they can live in accordance with their preferences, and the
Speaker 1: more they choose to work part time or not at all.
Speaker 1: And that is okay. This brings us back to the
Speaker 1: Axios blurb and general celebration of women's workforce participation. It
Speaker 1: may look like progress on its face, but what it
Speaker 1: probably means is that more mothers are entering the workforce
Speaker 1: or working full time against their wishes because they have to.
Speaker 1: And by the way, those wishes are totally fine. Working
Speaker 1: women owe a lot too. Second wave feminists, who liberated
Speaker 1: us from awful cycles of dependency, got us in academia,
Speaker 1: and fought for many classically liberal protections. A whole lot
Speaker 1: of women, myself included, are content to be in the
Speaker 1: workforce and find purpose and meaning in their professional lives.
Speaker 1: A whole lot of women, though, would rather be raising
Speaker 1: kids and doing the hard work of supporting healthy families
Speaker 1: and communities, and that is awesome. There are all kinds
Speaker 1: of different numbers that can be crunched here. The research
Speaker 1: on stay at home parenting can be mixed. Childcare is
Speaker 1: incredibly expensive. Women got hit hard by the pandemic layoffs.
Speaker 1: My mom worked a ton and I loved it. She's
Speaker 1: the most impressive woman I know. But if she's forty
Speaker 1: percent of the population, that's okay. All this is to say,
Speaker 1: when groups like the Center for American Progress celebrate women's
Speaker 1: and mother's labor force participation rates as quote improvements, they
Speaker 1: may be speaking more for themselves than for women in general. And,
Speaker 1: as Blake Master's campaigned on back in twenty twenty two,
Speaker 1: politicians should be helping families who'd rather have a mom
Speaker 1: stay home with their kids supporting their household on one income,
Speaker 1: rather than taking the corporate bait and pushing more moms
Speaker 1: into the workforce against their wishes. There's also always been
Speaker 1: a dark side, we don't talk about it a lot
Speaker 1: to the corporate class's enthusiasm for women in the workforce.
Speaker 1: Christopher Caldwell noted this an age of entitlement, writing quote
Speaker 1: feminism offered corporations an excuse for breaking the implicit contract
Speaker 1: to pay any full time worker a wage he could
Speaker 1: raise a family on. It was feminism that provided, under
Speaker 1: pressure of the recessions of the nineteen seventies, a pretext
Speaker 1: for repurposing household and national budgets. Instead of being used
Speaker 1: for reproduction, those budgets would now be consumed. The increment
Speaker 1: in the family wage that had been meant for the
Speaker 1: raising of children was withdrawn. Families were no longer entitled
Speaker 1: to it. Mothers would have to enter the workplace to
Speaker 1: claim it, but they wound up getting only a small
Speaker 1: part of it, and their competition drove down their husband's
Speaker 1: wages into the bargain. Earlier iterations of feminism celebrated womanhood
Speaker 1: rather than trying to reshape women into men. We're different
Speaker 1: on average and in some really great ways, even as
Speaker 1: wealthy and educated elite woman push our culture ironically more
Speaker 1: towards a masculinized world. In the meantime, Ryan, what's your
Speaker 1: point today? So when people think lab leak for obvious reasons,
Speaker 1: they think wuhan. But there's been another outbreak that's been
Speaker 1: getting a second look over the years and that's the
Speaker 1: ebola outbreak in West Africa from twenty fourteen to twenty sixteen.
Speaker 1: The origin of that one was said to be a
Speaker 1: boy who was playing with bats, except the media made
Speaker 1: a critical mistake. It turned out the boy was not
Speaker 1: two years old as it was reported. He was eighteen
Speaker 1: months old. And that matters because if you've hung out
Speaker 1: with an eighteen month old lately, you know, it's not
Speaker 1: likely they'd be off playing by themselves in a hollow
Speaker 1: tree or a bush, which is what the story said
Speaker 1: at the time, and that's exactly it turns out what
Speaker 1: his father later told a journalist for Reuter's. He said, quote,
Speaker 1: it wasn't a meal that started it. Emil was too
Speaker 1: young to eat bats, and he was too small to
Speaker 1: be playing in the bush all on his own. He
Speaker 1: was always with his mother. So in an investigation published
Speaker 1: last fall by Independent Science News journalist Sam Husseini and
Speaker 1: virologist Jonathan Latham address other problems with the bat theory.
Speaker 1: For one, no bats or any other wildlife were found
Speaker 1: with that strain of a bola, and the species itself,
Speaker 1: the the zayeer ebolavirus comes from thousands of miles away
Speaker 1: and there's no explanation for how it traveled to West
Speaker 1: Africa without infecting anybody along the way. The dates also
Speaker 1: don't match up. The boy was first said to have
Speaker 1: died in early December, but that was then adjusted to
Speaker 1: late December, but that still leaves a huge gap between
Speaker 1: that and the first confirmed cases In March. Nobody from
Speaker 1: Emil's family, including a Meal, was tested for a bola
Speaker 1: and the symptoms that he had also match other diseases
Speaker 1: prevalent in Sub Saharan Africa. So the boy in the
Speaker 1: bat is one theory. The other theory focuses on a
Speaker 1: lab run by the US based Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Consortium
Speaker 1: in Cannami, Sierra Leone, near the border with Libya with
Speaker 1: Liberia in Guinea. Now, over the years, there's been a
Speaker 1: lot of speculation, now some of it backed up by
Speaker 1: strong evidence that ebola research was going on inside that lab,
Speaker 1: but there have also been strong denials that that was
Speaker 1: the case. Now one of the lead researchers there, Christian Anderson,
Speaker 1: has finally confirmed that yes, there was indeed a Bola
Speaker 1: research going on there. Take a listen. The problem is
Speaker 1: that people see these coincidences. One of the new ones
Speaker 1: is the Ebola lab Leaku, which also is being blamed
Speaker 1: on us because we have been studying ebola in Canama
Speaker 1: and Sierra Leone and Lo and behold, the Ebola emerged
Speaker 1: just a few miles from there in twenty fourteen, right
Speaker 1: obviously across the border in Guinea, but it's maybe one
Speaker 1: hundred miles or so away. And people then put that
Speaker 1: together and saying, oh, so that Ebola must have been
Speaker 1: aliab League too, and it was Robert Gary and Christian
Speaker 1: Andersen again. And the reason why these names keep coming up,
Speaker 1: and the reason why we get grant money to study
Speaker 1: infectious diseases is because we study infectious diseases and have
Speaker 1: done so for many, many decades. And that's why the
Speaker 1: names keep coming up again. Right, It's not because there's
Speaker 1: some major conspiracy theory here where all of us have
Speaker 1: been sort of fiddling with the fields well prior to
Speaker 1: the pandemic. And so what's actually remarkable about Anderson's admission
Speaker 1: there is that his colleague at the lab, Bob Gary,
Speaker 1: just recently denied that there was any Ebola research going
Speaker 1: on there, writing in a recent paper quote, in reality,
Speaker 1: we did not have ebov in our laboratory and therefore
Speaker 1: could not have released or engineered it. I reached out
Speaker 1: to Gary and Anderson, and I'll report back when they respond.
Speaker 1: Both of them have been among the most outspoken opponents
Speaker 1: of the COVID lableik theory, and both were part of
Speaker 1: the early brain Trust Anthony Fauci assembled in February twenty twenty.
Speaker 1: That group initially expressed openness to the idea of a lableak,
Speaker 1: but then days later ruled it out and organized the
Speaker 1: public letter dismissing the idea as a conspiracy theory. That
Speaker 1: proximal origins letter was published in March and suppressed debate
Speaker 1: over the origin of COVID for the next year at least.
Speaker 1: So what I also found revealing potentially revealing about doctor
Speaker 1: Anderson's answer there is he said, he said, and and
Speaker 1: then there was an outbreak a few miles away. And
Speaker 1: then he paused and corrected himself and said, well, it
Speaker 1: was over the border in Guinea, and it was about
Speaker 1: one hundred miles away. Because and I would encourage everybody
Speaker 1: to read the Lathaman Who's saying the article that that
Speaker 1: dives into the actual origin of the pandemic, because the
Speaker 1: conventional wisdom is that it was that it started in
Speaker 1: Guinea with this this with his kid eating bats in
Speaker 1: a bush, and then it spread from there to Liberia
Speaker 1: and Sierra Leone. There there is a lot of evidence
Speaker 1: that in fact it started in Sierra Leone, so and
Speaker 1: and and Doctors Without Borders, which is operating in Sierra
Speaker 1: Leone U produced a report that was extraordinarily critical of
Speaker 1: this particular lab which was right near h where this
Speaker 1: uh where where MSF discovered this outbreak. And by the
Speaker 1: time they started testing for ebola in Sierra Leone, they
Speaker 1: were the first say like six cases had some had
Speaker 1: six uh you know, six different variations, and each of
Speaker 1: the mutations were like six degrees off. Like it just
Speaker 1: didn't make any sense that that it had just gotten there,
Speaker 1: Like it very much seemed to everybody there that it
Speaker 1: had been there for a couple of months and just
Speaker 1: hadn't and it just hadn't been getting picked up. It
Speaker 1: was that it was a Kinema lab that was doing
Speaker 1: that was doing a lot of the testing, and the
Speaker 1: w h O MSF have both accused that lab of
Speaker 1: of screwing up all the testing, of standing in the
Speaker 1: way of the of the testing at the time, So
Speaker 1: for him to say that the outbreak happened right near
Speaker 1: their lab and then correct himself say well, actually it
Speaker 1: happened one hundred miles away in Guiney. I think to
Speaker 1: a lot of people who've watched as close you will
Speaker 1: be revealing because they'll say, you're actually it did start
Speaker 1: right near your lap and then it went from there
Speaker 1: into Guinea, and it was suppressed first in Guinea because
Speaker 1: there wasn't enough testing going on in Sierra Leone, and
Speaker 1: so it kind of exploded there for a while. You
Speaker 1: zoom out to thirty thousand feet. I think a big
Speaker 1: takeaway from everything you just laid out is how much
Speaker 1: that this sort of the medical community, the medical establishment
Speaker 1: can get away with because other people cannot possibly follow
Speaker 1: the granularity of these conversations. The media can't do it,
Speaker 1: the public can't do it. Now obviously we can. You
Speaker 1: can raise questions exactly like the ones that you just raised,
Speaker 1: but these questions have been raised really in the background
Speaker 1: of our political discourse because they're actually pretty abstruse, like
Speaker 1: they're not that easy a lot onto and to follow,
Speaker 1: and so in that with the benefit of their expertise,
Speaker 1: which is in some ways held by a small group
Speaker 1: of people. You really escape a lot of judgment because
Speaker 1: of that, and God knows what you can get away
Speaker 1: with because of that. Yeah, and when you when you
Speaker 1: go back and look at the explanation that the major
Speaker 1: media gave for the start of the a bola outbreak,
Speaker 1: this this kid a meal and either what and it's bizarre,
Speaker 1: Like first it was reported December sixth, then it was
Speaker 1: then it was like, well, actually it was December twenty eighth,
Speaker 1: and then you have the major outbreak in March, and
Speaker 1: then you and then you dig further and you say, well,
Speaker 1: what what's the evidence that the scientif that these scientific
Speaker 1: investigators came up with to determine that it was this
Speaker 1: kid playing with these beats And you peel layer and
Speaker 1: layer and layer back and you're like, oh, there, there
Speaker 1: actually isn't any evidence here, Like the only evidence is
Speaker 1: that they say that the symptoms kind of align with
Speaker 1: the bola, right, But a bola has a lot of
Speaker 1: different symptoms and it hits people in a lot of
Speaker 1: different ways, and it you know, you know, conventionally people's
Speaker 1: doctors will say it's very difficult to diagnose a bullet
Speaker 1: just based on symptoms like you you actually have to
Speaker 1: do in a bullet test because there's there are so
Speaker 1: many other diseases that have those very similar symptoms. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so then you then you ask, well, how how
Speaker 1: is it that this explanation, which turned out not to
Speaker 1: be based on you know, anything concrete, like no, no
Speaker 1: test was done, was most smoking gun and said, well, yep,
Speaker 1: all right, we found we found the bat uh we
Speaker 1: test or or even we tested anyone in his family
Speaker 1: or in the village in the in the days around
Speaker 1: that and confirmed that yes, this was a bowl of Uh.
Speaker 1: You're like, how how did that just become Okay, that's it,
Speaker 1: open and shut. We're gonna we're gonna move We're gonna
Speaker 1: move on from that. And then you start just and
Speaker 1: then you say, oh wait, there was so actually right
Speaker 1: over here there was this lab that was working working
Speaker 1: on hemorrhagic pathogens, which doesn't that include ebola. And then
Speaker 1: if you look a lot of the scientists working in
Speaker 1: that lab have backgrounds in abola. A lot of published
Speaker 1: work related to abola out of that lab. But you
Speaker 1: never really could you know, there was still denials that
Speaker 1: anything even recently gary. But then so to have Anderson.
Speaker 1: I'm curious to see how he'll respond because I don't
Speaker 1: think he meant to necessarily kind of confirm that they
Speaker 1: were doing that work in that lab. So this is
Speaker 1: just one piece of our reporting on this. None of
Speaker 1: this is to say that it definitely leaked from this lab.
Speaker 1: Will continue to follow this up and be great to
Speaker 1: get Sam Musani and Jonathan Latham have done great work
Speaker 1: on this on later and we can probe a lot
Speaker 1: of the different points because I think it is really important.
Speaker 1: And also last point here, so do you remember that
Speaker 1: Ron Klaine was the one who was brought in to
Speaker 1: do the Ebola response in twenty fourteen, and Harold, like
Speaker 1: everybody involved, was like he did a tremendous job. Like
Speaker 1: the heck of a job. Bread have a job, Ron,
Speaker 1: like he when he after he came in, things started
Speaker 1: moving properly and they did contain the the Ebola epidemic,
Speaker 1: which thank god, because absolutely horrifying disease if it ever
Speaker 1: does break out and become kind of endemic. Uh. The
Speaker 1: day that he was appointed UH to be the thear
Speaker 1: the Ebola z are, that's when the Obama administration introduced
Speaker 1: its pause into Gain of Function research they also did
Speaker 1: not renew funding for this lab. That is a very
Speaker 1: interesting point in the timeline. Yeah, that's very very interesting.
Speaker 1: And now at the same time, there were some lab
Speaker 1: accidents that had happened in the United States that might
Speaker 1: have been the trigger for the gain of function pause,
Speaker 1: But also why did they why did they pull the
Speaker 1: funding from the lab? And then at the same time,
Speaker 1: you know what, what did what did they know? What did?
Speaker 1: In investigators? No, if you talk about this in Africa,
Speaker 1: it's almost taken as a granted like in Sieria Leone. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I came from that lap. Yeah, I mean to the
Speaker 1: extent their silver linings from the pandemic. One of them
Speaker 1: might be knowing the right questions to ask about some
Speaker 1: of the stuff. And also I think taking whistleblowers and
Speaker 1: people in the medical community who are raising questions and
Speaker 1: asking those questions seriously and giving them space in the
Speaker 1: press the extent that you can to air those opinions
Speaker 1: out and raise those questions. Well, that's the end of
Speaker 1: our show today here in conference Wednesday. We will be
Speaker 1: back next week, of course, Ryan, any any parting shots,
Speaker 1: any final thoughts here, That's all I got. That's all
Speaker 1: you got. Everything I had on the field. I heard
Speaker 1: that you wrote you asked chat Gpt to write a
Speaker 1: Phish song about Oh. Yes, well it was so fast.
Speaker 1: I just haven't close because I don't know what to
Speaker 1: deal with it. I write a song in the style
Speaker 1: of the band Fish about the soul of a lizard.
Speaker 1: Wanted to give it a little prompt, give us a taste.
Speaker 1: Let's say the chorus, Oh the soul of a lizard,
Speaker 1: so cool and calm, living life in its own rhythm
Speaker 1: and psalm. It works so well, Oh the soul of
Speaker 1: a lizard, so cool and calm, And shake a lesson
Speaker 1: from the lizard's soul, and find your way to be
Speaker 1: whole in this world that moves so fast. Slow down
Speaker 1: and find your own rhythm to last. That's a little
Speaker 1: bit preachier than you might get from Fish, But your
Speaker 1: prompt is a little I mean, of course, when you
Speaker 1: think about the soul of a lizard, you can't help
Speaker 1: but fall into preachiness. Yeah, it's true. I should not
Speaker 1: be laughing at this us. This technology is absolutely terrifying,
Speaker 1: but it is great work. Ran, you got it. We'll
Speaker 1: see you back here at Counterpoints Wednesday. Next Wednesday,