1/19/23: Trump Returns to Social Media, Twitter Loses 40% Revenue, Tesla Engineer Calls Out Self Driving, Tech Layoffs Continue, Zelensky at Davos, CNN on Covid Deaths, China's Birth Rate, Tax the Rich Legislation, Ken Roth on Harvard Blocked Fellowship

Breakingpoints dot com. Good morning, everybody, Happy Thursday. We have an amazing show for everybody today where we have Chrystal. Indeed, we do all kinds of interesting things to get into this morning. So we may have the return of former President Trump to Twitter and possibly also to Facebook or Meta or whatever we're calling it now. We'll get into that. He's also calling out Ron DeSantis in new commentary. We'll

have to dig into that. We got also some elon news both at Twitter and Tesla and engineer revealing that the initial Tesla's self driving video was completely staged and that was not advertised at all. And of course there's been a number of crashes, some of them fatal, and lawsuits that their facings will get into that, and also big interest payment due over at Twitter, how will they

be able to pay those bills? Also on the tech sector, new layoffs at Microsoft, ten thousand workers being laid off over there, as a trend of just total bloodbath continues over in the tech sector. We also have some new comments from Davos, both from Senator Chris Coons, who's one of Joe Biden's top allies closest allies in the Senate, revealing comments there, and also Vladimir Zelinski making comments that are quite interesting too in context of what we are

preparing to do with regards to Ukraine. We also have a moment on CNN where they are now allowing questioning of the COVID detal and whether or not those debts are overcounted and who it is coming from is also very intriguing. Sager is looking at the Chinese birth rate. I am looking at a very interesting moment over on Bloomberg News. They're very upset about some proposals to tax the rich, and we have Ken Roth on I don't

know if you guys followed this story. So he ran Human Rights Watch and he looked like he was in line to get a fellowship over at Harvard. That fellowship was blocked apparently because of his criticism of the state of Israel. So he's going to join us and tell us what he knows about that. But let's go ahead and start with the former president Donald Trump, looking to get back on Twitter and back on Meta as he ramps up his presidential campaign. Let's go and throw this

up on the screen. This is reporting from NBC News. The headline here is Donald Trump prepares for his return to Facebook and Twitter. Trump's presidential campaign formally petitioned Facebook's parent company Tuesday to unblock his account, according to a letter reviewed by NBC News. Go ahead and put this next piece up on the screen because this has some of the key scoops that are in this NBC News reporting. So first of all, you've got Trump campaign advisors workshopping

ideas for his first tweet. Of course, once Elon took over Twitter, eventually he allowed Trump back on the platform. But Trump has stuck to true social thus far, claiming he's going to stay there, that he's not interested in coming back in Twitter. I think we all knew that was going to be short lived. Now that he's getting back into campaign mode. Apparently he is workshopping ideas for the grand return to Twitter. The next piece was campaign

is formally petitioning Facebook to unblock his account. So there had been some speculation that they might actually sue Meta slash Facebook in order to enable his return. Instead, they have just written a letter saying, hey, this is really screwing up our political process here, which I think is

frankly a very fair point. And they also say the campaign is prepared to engage with the House GOP to advocate on his behalf with metas the fact that you've got the Republicans in control of the House now they also seen as a sort of feather in their cap or a point in their favor in order to try to get his account reinstated on Facebook. Because remember, we have two different dynamics here. Twitter, he's allowed back on,

but just hasn't chosen to return Meta. He still is technically banned and is pushing to be allowed back on. I mean, I would guess that they're going to let him back on, and it's kind of hard to keep yeah when you've got I mean, he's running for president again. He is very much likely to be the Republican nominee. You can't just keep this guy off of Facebook forever. And they also serve two very different purposes Soga. I mean,

Twitter is very much the elite conversation. This is what he would always use to needle the news media and be able to sort of dominate and drive news cycles. And he was very effective at that. Fantastic poster of like morality and everything else aside. Meta is actually very important for him for fundraising, especially since there are a number of big donors who have said they're staying out this time. We'll see also if that holds. But Facebook has always been key for him in terms of fundraising

and also like get out the vote kind of effort. Yeah. So this is a very important thing, which is that the Facebook case itself probably highlighted, maybe even more so, the capricious nature through all of this and how it is done. Facebook's initial reason for banning Trump was that Trump was quote inciting violence. Now they kept and had a six month suspension that they then upheld. During that period, Facebook had his entire fake oversight board process, right, this

supposedly independent Supreme Court. Well, the Supreme Court looked at it and they were like, yeah, I guess we uphold it, but it's your company, Mark Zuckerberg, and you don't seem to have any real processes in place. So then right now, in terms of what Facebook is saying, they say quote at the end of this period, we will look to the experts to assess whether the risk to public safety has receded. First of all, come on, this is the freedom of speech issue, cut and dry, even on January sixth,

whether you didn't like it or not. But second, two years later, the idea that there's a quote unquote risk to public safety by allowing an active candidate for president to be on your platform is outrageous and it actually highlights exactly what the original oversight board told them, which is that you have an indeterminate and standardless penalty with an open ended nature of suspension, with no real processes

in place, and to actually make a proper decision. I don't know if they're going to light it back on or not, But if you had a situation where Joe Biden was the nominee and he is allowed on Facebook and Donald Trump is and he's not allowed, that's just that can't stand. It's not possible, or the other way I've seen some speculation that the way they may get around this is Facebook may actually just stop having political

advertising entirely on the platform. That's something that was the original policy on the Twitter platform before Elon took over. He's reversed that policy. Facebook never went so far to have that. But they might just say they're like, look, the money's not worth it, these are too many headaches and let it just be a free fra all. I wouldn't be a bad decision. Actually, that would be losing a big chunk of shape, right, But that's the problem.

Advertising I think on Facebook is fairly significant, don't know the numbers off the top of my head. And something that Ryan Granma always pointing out is like these social media platforms and the advertising you can do that there are disproportionately important for upstart, grassroots candidates. So when you talk about blanket bans on political advertising on these platforms, I think that's a bad direction to go in. But

I mean the free speech case, listen. I have enjoyed, as I've said many times, Trump not being on Twitter. It was nice when we had a little break from him. I'm not going to deny that, but I have always said this is This is outrageous when you consider the people who were allowed to continue to be on these platforms, when you consider the fact that we had years of news cycles about some frickin' Russian memes on Facebook or whatever like that was determining the twenty sixteen election results.

Of course, we just just got the study reported by the news media. Turns out that didn't matter whatsoever. But to ban one of the most prominent candidates and the most likely GOP nominee for the twenty twenty four election, to ban him entirely continuing to ban him entirely for Facebook, I just think that that is not a sustainable position. But we will see what they ultimately decide to do.

I have no particular insight into their decision making there and what they're likely to no ultimately come down on. I mean, there is no question also because the Trump campaign could prove, if you're thinking about this from an election interference perspective, twenty sixteen to twenty twenty, they raised an outrageous amount of money on Facebook, like ungodly, especially in twenty sixteen. It was one of the major places

actually that they sold the original red Maga hat. Now nobody's experiencing the same amount of enthusiasm they had that time around. But if you're cut off from such a critical financial lifeline where you were raising hundreds of millions of dollars in twenty sixteen, just due to the private nature of a company, and they're so fake content policies,

that's a big problem. And actually what they point to also in the memo is they're like, if you don't let us back on the house, GOP is now in charge and we are going to go full bore in terms of influencing our allies in Congress to investigate you. And you may hate Trump, may Trump a lot, but they look from a standards perspective in terms of how our society has to run, like this is clearly not fair in any way and would just set a terrible

precedent going forward. Let me also say, even if you don't care about the free speech concerns, I did a little bit of reading yesterday into the research around what happens when you deplatform people and listen, I mean, in some ways, cancelation works on one level, like even if you are Donald Trump or Alex Jones or one of these other larger than life figures when you lose your

place on the most central social media platforms. It does, you do take a hit in terms of your followers, in terms of your reach and those sorts of things. But there's a downside, which is that the people who follow you over to wherever your new platform is, they're more likely to actually become more radical, more hardened in their views. So even if you don't give a shit about free speech and you're just concerned about like public safety and what's going to happen here, it's not clear

that this is the right direction to go in. And you can even see this on a micro level with Trump himself, where since he has been pushed over to the truth Social platform instead of being on Twitter where there are a lot of range of different voices, when he's just on truth Social and you just have this sort of like one ideological contingent that is there on the platform with him, he has become more sort of fringe and isolated and more obsessed with like conspiracies and

QAnon and these sorts of things. I mean, he wasn't reposting q drops before the pushover to truth Social, So you can see how it has just with him in his own like focus and person the way that this move has impacted him and sort of pushed him even more to the fringe and even more kind of to these radical conspiracy theory notions. I think it's fantastic point. No, none of us should be in silos. It's always better,

you know. I've always been against quote unquote alternative platforms that are against those that are at scale, solely for this reason, like I want to just talk to an echo chamber. I want to talk to people, see people who I disagree with. Part of the reason Twitter is actually so valuable to me and I think to our job and elsewhere is to see many of the viewpoints which people who we vehemently disagree and probably would never come across in real life, but have real disproportionate influence

over society and group think. Those things are valuable for all of us, is yeah. Part of the reason also why we cover it on the show, and I think it's important for everyone to be involved in that, even if it is someone you don't like, and especially if that person is the president or the former president of the United States. Indeed, all right, at the same time, the former president Trump had sat for an interview with David Brodie, who actually covered a piece of this earlier

in the week. But there was another noteworthy moment where he got asked about potential contender Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Trump's comments here kind of noteworthy. Let's take a listen. I got him elected, pure and simple. He would have never if I said I wasn't going to endorse you, and I was. You know, there was no reason to

go wild about the endorsing him. You know, he was one of about one hundred congressmen who bought for me, and so you know, I felt, I felt I might as well endorse him because I didn't know Adam Buttnam, but he was the three. He was ready to drop out of the race. It was all done. Adam Putnam had that nomination locked up, you know, the Republican nomination, Piover of Florida. He had it locked up. It was done. And when I, as Adam Putnam said to me when I met him a year later, I didn't know him

at all, but I saw him. He said, it was like a nuclear bomb went off. A nuclear weapon went off when you endorsed him and the race was over. He said, he didn't even spend his money there was no way he could have beaten him after I endorsed him. So you know, now I hear he might want to run against me, So we'll handle that the way I handle things. Well, handle that the way I handled that. Yeah, think that. Oh I thought it was a great answer.

I mean that's exactly what I've said. You know, it's fine. Trump the day after the midterm, maybe like two days after the midterm something, he was really angry. And one of the first he was like, look at this guy, Ronda sand Is. He was nobody down thirty three. I endorsed him. He shot up to number one. So he's had this in his head for a long Yeah, and he hates the amount of press that DeSantis is getting.

The whole run dysanctimonious thing, and it just look this also highlight even if you are not going to run against Trump, even if you're not actively doing it, if the media even annoints you, he'll just start attacking you. And we covered that poll just yesterday or sorry on Tuesday, where we looked at the fact that Trump continues to have forty six percent support amongst likely GOP primary voters.

I also think that the longer time moves on from the mid terms, it's always going to be stronger in his favor. And then, of course, the only real scenario where this would probably work is if it was a true head to head matchup, and who the hell thinks that's actually going to happen. It's not going to happen.

You've got too many people with too many egos who think that this is their moment, you know, I mean, I covered on Tuesday, like Glenn Youngkin looks very much like he's going to run, even though he's sitting at like zero percent in the polls. He's convinced himself that since he won in Virginia at a time when Republican fortunes were at their greatest and he happened to sort of stumble into the right moment at the right time, but he's persuaded himself that that means he's like some

great political talent and genius. So he's probably gonna run. You got Nicky Haley who wants to run. You've got friggin John Bolton who wants to run, Mike Pompeo, Mike Pence, all of these people, and individually they may not garner that much support, but it doesn't take that much support for them to eat into the like maybe we're not with Trump contingent of the GOP base before it just

becomes impossible for anyone to ultimately take him down. But listen, we got a long way to go between now and then. Anything can happen. So who knows, I will say on he's fixated on this particular line of attack against DeSantis, basically like I made you and you're being disloyal. I genuinely don't know how that lands with the GOP, like do they care? Do they care about that loyalty test or not? I think there's a contingent of them that do.

But there might be other stronger points to make against Rondosantas. I really have no idea. It's certainly possible. The other one, I think really what it is is that instead of disloyalty, it's I'm the supreme, like I'm the you know, I'm the alpha, Yeah, exactly, I'm the one, the alpha at the top, Like I annoyed to you. You're the next generation. You're just like a copycam. You can follow after me. When I'm done, then sure you can go ahead and take the mantle, But for now, like when it's my

time on the stage, don't you dare? And I think that's just always going to be the case, honestly, even while he's alive, even if he's not an active candidate for president, You're always going to have to go and kiss the ring if you want to do that. All the thing is Santa's is a prideful man. You know, he's got a very very popular governor of Florida. Yeah, he doesn't want to do that. So you've got a contest of wills right now. Yeah. Another little interesting note

is there's this one advisor to Trump. Now, what's her name, Christy Wiles. Yes, Christy Wiles, who was a top advisor to DeSantis and now is basically running Trump's campaign. He had run his campaign in Florida before. And she seems to be a pretty key piece here because this is someone who had kind of a following falling out with the Susan Wiles. Okay, Susan Wiles, so had kind of a falling out with sis And the thought is, you know, she would know better than anyone how to get under

his skin, what his vulnerabilities are, et cetera. So that's an interesting thing to just kind of keep your eye on in terms of the inside baseball here. Moving on to the next piece. So Trump has been shockingly quiet since he announced his presidential campaign. He did the infamous lunch with Nick Fuentes Kanye West, but we really haven't heard much from him other than that. Well, it looks like they in the new year, are now beginning to ramp up somewhat. Let's go and put this up on

the screen. From Politico, we've got some first details about what he plans to do. They say Trump prepares to open next phase of twenty twenty four campaign in South Carolina. The former president will hold a more intimate event than his typical rallies in the key state later this month. And of course South Carolina in the Republican primary process is one of the early states, so it's important here. They say he slated to make an appearance in late

January in Columbia, South Carolina. It's not going to be a rally, but as I said before, this more intimate event with sort of you know, key players, leaders, donors, that sort of thing. They're casting the plans as part of a gradual buildout of the former president's campaign following a relatively private month and a half since a November launch that coincided with the holiday season. I mean a couple things. First of all, the choice of South Carolina.

As I just said, it's early in the Republican primary process, so it matters from that perspective. You also have two potential candidates who hail from the state in Senator Tim Scott and also his former UN Ambassador Nikki Hayley, so could be something you know, going on there as well. And then the other thing to note is we were talking about Susan Wilds's advisor before. She seems to be taking a very different approach to this his campaign rollout

than they did last time around in twenty twenty. In these unsuccessful effort, you know, we covered they were blowing through cash like crazy, tons of staff, had like a you know, gleaming headquarters in Northern Virginia. This time they're keeping it more bare bones, much smaller in terms of staff. The camp office has like you know, used furniture and is in a strip mall or something like that. So it's a much lower key kind of affair, and she seems to be approaching the roll out in a lower

key direction as well. Instead of jumping out of the gates with these big rallies which generate media coverage and generate enthusiasm, but also are quite expensive. So that's the trade off there, and we shouldn't forget, you know, South Carolina. Things were a little bit on the edge. He loses in Iowa, he does win in New Hampshire, but South Carolina was his second primary. I just looked it up. He won by thirty two percent of the votes, so

it's an important state there. And also you can also work your way back up the calendar thinking about Iowa, Caucasus and New Hampshire and cementing your role in both. I had seen, and I know we covered before a poll which showed DeSantis neck and neck with Trump in New Hampshire, so very likely that Trump also will try

to make inroads there. It's actually a smart move, which is if you think that there is any sort of threat to you, you want to lock down those early states that that the medium momentum going into Super two says that you don't have a chance in hell if you're coming up against Trump. So I look at this, actually, I think it's a smart move. You're also getting the Republican political establishment, people like Lindsey Graham becoming his South Carolina co chair and part of the leadership team. You

want to lock that down. You want to get the political machine in process. So they're making moves even though it is very sleepy down in mar Lago right now. Yes, indeed, okay, let's go into the next one. Some big news with Elon Musk. Things feels like things have been quiet over at Twitter, and maybe we have an explanation as to why financial bomb going off in the Elon Musk Twitter saga. Let's put this up there on the screen. The Financial

Times has very important reporting here. There is a major Twitter interest payment that is Elon has to make in the coming days because he financed over thirteen billion dollars in debt. Now, you would also notice by the way that Elon has been tweeting a lot about federal reserve rates. And this is why because Twitter said that the first installment of these interest payments related to that debt will

be due at the end of January. That debt means that Elon must personally pay one point five billion in annual interest payments. Considering also that he financed a major portion of this deal through Banks, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays, and Mitsubishi. He's got various interest payments that he has to make there at the same time that the company

itself is losing a ton of money. Now remember before he even took it over, Twitter lost one hundred and two hundred and twenty one million dollars in twenty twenty one. He's got some things going for him. He fired ninety percent of the staff and the platform continues to be working, so that's probably a benefit. You've got those people off. At the same time, he had like three month severance payments which he had to make out to all of them, so the financial runway isn't there just yet and the

payment is still due. Also reporting in the same piece as well as Reuters and New York Magazine that you've seen a forty percent drop internally in Twitter. Overall advertising revenue everybody that was approximately five billion dollars in twenty twenty one, which wasn't even enough to cover all their expenses. So that maybe brings you to around two point five billion.

Why does that matter because that means that their entire revenue is barely enough to cover the interest payment that they now have to make on the debt, let alone the debt itself, so it's a big financial problem overall. Also has big impact on Tesla stock if Elon has to continue selling Tesla stock, which right now is at a pretty substantial low as to where it was over the last two years, and company problems over there itself.

So this is all becoming a little bit of financial financial problem for Elon Musk having put downward pressure on Tessa, his major source of wealth, he lost one hundred billion dollars in wealth in twenty twenty two, and at the same time has the biggest problem of all for any billionaire, which is you actually have to liquidate your assets a straight up cash, which is something that none of them ever wants. Well, they don't want to do it. Then you have to pay taxes, and none of them want

will to pay taxes. So yeah, so he has kind of a couple of bad options. One of them would be to liquidate some assets and have to take the tax hit. Another one would be to collateralize Tesla shares, which he's done before, but that becomes really difficult when his the valuation of Tesla has plummeted so dramatically their stock has fallen sixty five percent last year, Musk sold heavily. The value of a stake in the company has plunged about fifty billion from one hundred and seventy billion when

he offered to buy Twitter in April of last year. So, I mean, listen, Elon Musk is still an insanely wealthy man. No one is saying that he isn't. But in terms of the business picture for Twitter, it's pretty bad. I mean, it was bad before he took it over. As you're pointing out, they were already kind of in a hole.

Then you have this huge advertiser exodus. Go and put this next piece up on the screen from the Guardian, they say, as Sagert has mentioned that Twitter's been hit by a forty percent revenue drop as more than five hundred clients have paused their spending. And you know, whatever Elon is doing us and around with like Twitter Blue and the eight dollars a month, it ain't coming close to filling in that gap ultimately. So yeah, he's in

a difficult position. He's also floated maybe taking Twitter into bankruptcy. I wouldn't expect them to actually do that, but it could be a way of putting pressure on the existing investors who don't want to get screwed and be last in line in terms of some bankruptcy proceedings to pony up more cash to ultimately keep this thing going. But given the fact that he wildly overpaid for Twitter to start with, he's also not in a great position visa

vi these investors. And you know, the type of additional funds that they would put in at what rate. It's all a big question. I mean, right now they're trying to squeeze revenue out. And in terms of Elon, I mean, things have been relatively quiet in terms of like major news. They have some platform deals that they have struck that I was looking at just today. So they signed a deal. And then, by the way, it is a little bit suspect, they signed a bunch of twenty twenty three content deals

with media companies. They don't appear to be really focused on the news per se. It's more like sports races, things like The Bachelor for Disney ABC, Paramount MTV in order to promote their shows like the Masks saying more like mass media entertainment, so media companies per se. So obviously some of these companies are keeping their advertising on Twitter.

But remember also, you know, Twitter was a very small part of the overall advertising budget writ large and corded to all the social media companies, and even if they scale back slightly, you know, all of that is adding up to a major impact on the bottom line over at Twitter. So it's a it's a big problem right now for him financially, and it can have cascading effects on Tesla stock, on you know, even SpaceX possibly, and I shouldn't forget, you know, like SpaceX is also a private,

really run company. These these can have major impacts in terms of his ability to finance all of his businesses, just because so much of his intertwined with him personally. So it's a problem. Yeah. Also, wasn't he going to step down as CEO? He said he would set down. We all voted, We all voted to say he set down,

But who knows. He said he would only run what he said, he'd only run the engin teams and he would step down to find a general successor will he actually do so, We'll see, you know, we really I love how these things get floated in and it's like a big deal that everyone just like instantly forgets that it happened, because this is a while ago, two months ago. I think it happened in December he said he would

step down. Nothing yet seems to have come out. Some of the Twitter files remain and continue to come out, but things even that on that stage, you know, really dwindling. I'm still waiting to see some big Twitter files. So again, that's kind of where things stand right now for the company, after all of the initial chaos. All right, second part here, let's go to this again. This is a problem, and this is actually causing problems for Tesla, the company the

major source of Elon's wealth. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. An engineer who worked for Tesla says that the company's twenty and sixteen videos showing quote full autopilot was actually staged. Now, this was a senior engineer at the company, after it was shared in a twenty sixteen blog post saying full self driving hardware on all Tesla's The four minute video, which we will show you in a little bit, purports to say that a person in the driver's seat is only there

for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself. Let's go ahead and play some of that video, which will narrate for all of you who are just watching. As I said, it begins, the person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons. He's not doing anything. The car is driving itself. The car is pulling itself out. The driver is getting in here, he's engaging the Tesla autopilot system. The car begins to move forward. It's moving on a street. There are cars

around there. It's making the coveted left turn, the Holy Grail or AI self driving because it's an incredibly shaky and tough thing to do. Another left turn there that you can see, says that it shows you also some of the right rear camera angles, and we can go ahead and turn it off because I think people get the picture. The car is driving itself. Okay, that's what they claimed in twenty sixteen, however, and also the CEO actually said that the demonstration at the time was Tesla

drives itself, no human input at all. Well, they are now claiming Crystal that this engineer says, actually that was entirely staged, and that's actually leading to some lawsuits from Tesla owners around the purported viability of full self driving and the claims that the company made itself. Now, I mean, look,

is this unprecedented? No, we should all remember what I think it was either the original Macintosh or Mac ninety eight where Steve Jobs basically was like, had them program a display something and they're like, well, we'll get to it eventually to lead consumers stuper and you know he did pull it off to be fair, so not necessarily without precedent, but not a good look, especially because it could open the company up to lawsuits which are already

being filed after this report came out. There's long been a real fake it till you make it culture in Silicon Valley, and the ones who make it end up as you know, world beating billionaire supposed geniuses like Elon Musk, and the ones that don't make it end up like a Holmes in prisoners. And you know what you have here is listen. It would be one thing if there was some sort of disclosure, but they insisted that this was one hundred percent done. Tesla drives itself, no human

input at all. That's what the video says. There is no fine print, there is nothing whatsoever. And this becomes incredibly relevant from a couple perspectives. I mean, number one, Elon has said himself that if the self driving feature doesn't work, Tesla is basically worth nothing, So he sees this as a key clearly saw this as a key

part of the financial prospects of this company. But then word to the point, as you're pointing out here, that this came out as part of a deposition in a lawsuit over the death of someone who really actually trusted these representations that the auto drive feature fully functioned and was safe. This man who ultimately died in an accident, he believed it was safer than human control because he

thought that the AI was that good. So it was the death of Walter Kwang, a thirty eight year old Apple engineer, died in twenty eighteen his Tesla crashed into a highway median on California's Highway one oh one. The lawsuit, which was filed by his widow, alleges that Tesla promoted its self driving systems as safer than they truly were, So you can see why this video becomes a key

part of this lawsuit. According to the family's lawyer, they said Tesla is beta testing its autopilot software on live drivers, and there have been other accidents attributed to the self driving software as well. So not a good development in terms of the credibility of Tesla, in terms of their prospects with these lawsuits, and also potentially in terms of the financial future of the company. Yeah, I will say this is something that's beginning to annoy me. People are

pointing to self driving crashes and all that. Yeah, listen, none of this technology is anywhere even close to one. And frankly, if you trust AI to I view, I really don't know what to tell you, Like if you're not putting your hands on the wheel, they make it pretty explicit, and all of these you know, look, it's not to a Tesla thing because everybody focuses on Tesla self driving. That's because which really has the most advanced technology, So of course they're gonna have the most crashes that

are involved. But almost every car on the market at this point, like Honda's, Honda, Acura, I believe, even Toyota. They they all have lane assists, they all have automatic cruise control. What's the number one thing they tell you on the screen, don't trust it, put your hands on the wheel. Be prepared, keep your foot on the brake. So if you're not doing any of those things, that's straight up just driver error. I mean you have even cases,

I believe also of people like watching movies. The Lily Caught of guy he was like watching a movie on his phone while he was on Tesla's self driving. He's like, Oh, it's a Tesla's fault. Really, it's a testas fault. They literally tell you don't do that. So I have some I get very skeptical on all this. I think it should be treated in the way that you should treat any nascent technology. It's interesting, you should try it. You should always keep your hands on the wheel, you should

always keep your eyes going forward. We're more I think we're probably two decades away from self driving cars. It actually might be one of the most hyped technologies that has not yet made very complex. It's very complex to be able to pull this off. I mean I have like the lane assists on my car, and the thing that it does the most is when there's like a turn lane and so the line on the pavement goes away.

Suddenly the cars like I want to go over the exactly like whoa, or if it's raining, right, if it's raining and you can't see it, or if it's at it once again, just drive. I don't know, it's that difficult. Definitely, don't rely on this tech. Yeah, I think then don't rely on Elon's representations about the tech either, because apparently those are station fake. I think you shouldn't rely on any of these companies and for this stuff, even on

automatic cruise control. Like you know, people break and are crazy all the time. I was driving here this morning and some person just cut somebody off, which leads another person to cut somebody off. Like the idea that we are yet at the point where you can do that safely and that's going to perfectly react especially you know. Part of the problem I think for AI cars is the real case for it is when every car is AI, so they can talk to each other and they like

have fully sync. They were a long way if we have. If we have you know, some guy driving a nineteen ninety five car and then somebody else in a Tesla, like the tesla is going to you know hardstop on its breaks and then it's going to get rear ended or something in the back. Anyway, My my main contention is Look, if you trust a car to drive you, I don't know what to tell you. I think that's fair.

But elon point, I will say, like he does have a track record of making like grandiose technological flames that definitely that don't ultimately come to fruition, and this seems very much to fit into that. And then I mean, just the it is an extra step to put out this video and directly a test, no human imput this is all the car and have no fine print, no disclosure, no nothing, and put that out to the public. I mean, listen, I think you're right. Silicon Valley engages in this kind

of shady crap all the time. That doesn't make it okay or acceptable. I also, to be fair, this is just engineer said it like we haven't gotten confirmation yet that's what he claims. So here we'll see. I'm sure it'll come out in litigation. Yes, indeed. Okay, more tech news for you. This is something that we have been tracking really closely. The trend of mass layoffs across the tech sector continues. The latest company to shed thousands of jobs is Microsoft. Let's put this up on the screen.

They are cutting ten thousand jobs adding as writers puts it to the glut of tech layoffs. In a note to staff that was shared with Reuter's, Microsoft CEO said customers wanted to quote optimize their digital spend, to do more with less and exercise caution as some parts of the world are in a recession and other parts are anticipating one. Microsoft also grappling with a slump in the personal computer market after a pandemic boom fizzled out, leaving

little demand for its Windows and accompanying software. And that really is the story of all of these tech layoffs, more or less, is during the pandemic, you had a massive boom in the sector. Of course, you had the stock market blowing up and going up and up and up. You also had people who were at home, so they were on Zoom, they were on Netflix, they were apparently on their personal computers and buying new personal computers to

be able to work from home. Now that that phase has ended, you have companies that dramatically over hired during that period, were radically overly optimistic, and now they're having shed tens of thousands of jobs. As I said before, let's put some of the context here. Amazon put the next piece up on the screen. They are now beginning a new round of layoffs. This we reported before. The number of people that they planned to layoff is around eighteen thousand. This is one of the largest of the

whole sector, and these are largely white collar workers. So this is incredibly significant and you have actually a wonderful resource to track all of this. This is an independent person layoffs dot what is it? Layoff? FYI, go ahead and put this up on the screen. You've got some indications of where the largest layoffs are coming from. You have Meta here, you have Amazon, You've got Uberbooking dot Com, Cisco, Twitterbetter dot Com, Peloton Group on Carvana. I can't read

that one, Bijew's I've never even heard of that. Kata anyway, those were the top layoffs as of December twenty twenty two. The numbers have actually grown since then because you see Amazon on this chart with only ten thousand cuts. Now we know it's up to eighteen thousand cuts and there's some it's like up to one hundred and seventy thousand jobs in the sector across the entire industry that have been cut in the past two years. So you know

this has a potential. Listen, First of all, it's terrible when people lose their jobs, even people who have been earning a decent salary, even people who probably have some decent job prospects in the future. Losing your job is painful, it's traumatic, it's very difficult. It can put people in a really harriz situation. So that's one piece of that.

The other piece of this is, you know, it really does sort of change the dynamics within the workforce, where a lot of the growth in the upper middle class has been because of these tech jobs. So when you have such a pullback on a part of society that has been so important in terms of culture and also in terms of their spend, I mean, our whole society has practically been geared to this income class group, that's

going to have big impacts. And then at the other end of the spectrum, while wages have been getting destroyed by inflation, you have massive demand for people to fill

service sector pink collar jobs, blue collar jobs. Even so, it's a real reversal of previous trends where you know, those workers in the service sector pink collar blue collar jobs were treated as almost like disposable, like there were so many of them, we can just do whatever we want with them, and now you have a different dynamic where it's actually the tech worker who are getting squeezed

here and struggling. Yeah, And actually a big part of it, and what I always try to focus on is why it even matters, is a huge amount of our growth has been disproportionately concentrated in tech, our economic growth specifically. So for example, the S and P five hundred is weighted to tech, I believe at somewhere around twenty five

to thirty percent. So with so many people's retirement savings and really just a bet on America in general, you're kind of betting on the technology industry and have been first. So let's say twenty five odd years now, that has been actually quite a good bet now if you're looking at long enough time horizon, But in the short term, if you're going to have concentration or if you're going to have contractions in that industry, you're going to have

all signs of spillover. So you're going to have to see a depression in the stocks, you're going to see reduction of people's retirement overall portfolios. But we're also going to see a lot of the subcontracting firms and other things that rely on tech and tech money to actually do well. It's a complicated problem. You're also going to see. These are really the most leading indicators, the biggest and

the biggest of the tech alliance. But from what I've heard, you know, people who work in early stage startup capital, it is a savage and a brutal time to try and raise money. I saw a CEO of one financial company who's talking about how he's talking to one of his investors. One of investors said, you're one of my top five percent companies, and he was like, that's great, So are you going to give me more money. He's like, oh no, I'm not going to get you any more money.

And so he said he can't even you know, he's literally in the top five percent of somebody's investment portfolio and he is unable to even raise money from these people. So a lot of venture capital firms are they're just not writing big checks in the way that they used to. And of course, you know, so much of industry and growth and just money that bleeds all over not only San Francisco but Austin. You know, any of these companies any these cities which have really benefited from all this,

it's a big problem. Yeah. San Francisco's housing market has seen the biggest drops of any market in the entire country. Now, things are still wildly unaffordable, but you see the largest percentage drop there of any metro area in the entire country. And you know, the other piece of this is that there's been a lot of bloat and a lot of

sort of zombie companies in the tech space. I mean, frankly, a lot of sort of like fakery in the tech space, where because money was so cheap, and because you could get those infusions so easily and everybody had so much cash to play with, there was this attitude of like, all right, well, just start your thing, doesn't have to be profitable, and you'll be able to keep it going by basically taking in more and more and more cash. Right, that cycle seems to have ended, And that's not it.

I Again, I don't want to seem heartless because of the real human beings involved, but having an entire segment of your economy that's really central, that's partly built on basically like zombie companies and fakery, is not ultimately a really healthy thing for the economy. So that's part of the cycle that we're seeing playing out here as well,

which is significant, important to track. Yeah, I think it's a I think it's an important story, and it's one on which has big implications for what the future of the US economy really looks like. I would hope some of this money goes to hard industry, but I doubt that we will ever learn. Yes, indeed. Okay. At the same time, as you all may know, the global elites have gathered once again the World Economic Forum in Davos.

This is the first time post pandemic where they're back to the full schedule and the full timing and the whole thing. According to McKinsey, it's the biggest Davos ever in history, saga, and there's been a big shift in focus at the event. At this global confab, the Russian oligarchs, who used to be plentiful have been pushed to the side. Also, you have a lot fewer Chinese billionaires because of the

hit the China's economy has taken. Instead, you have a lot more Gulf billionaires apparently in attendance this year, and the discussion has been dominated significantly by the Russia's war in Ukraine, including an appearance by video zoo or whatever by Ukrainian President Voladimir Zelenski. Let's take a listen to a little bit of what he had to say. Strages our outpacing life. The deteriary is outpacing the demothers. Russia

needed less than one second to start the war. The rule needed it this to react with the horses sanctions. The time the free rule uses to sing is used by the terrorist state to kill the Ukraine. And these allies have been resistingly if for almost a year. These furious proved all our prompt actions grow a positive results the opening of European motives who brandished the Grain deal. So basically his point there is we don't have time to wait. Russia is acting. You all can't just sit

on your hands. We need more, we need more, we need Yeah, but I think it's a dangerous message to say the time that you have to think, as in basically saying like you should stop think, don't consider, just do. This is always a difficulty in talking about Ukraine. You know, look, they're doing what's best for them. They don't want us to think because they don't want us to think about

the downside risk I will never forget personally. You know, we have that fake report Russian missiles fall in Poland. The first thing this guy does is say that or they're Russian, it's not our missiles. We need to no fly zone. NATO needs to intervene him and his government. They lied to us. Let's be real here. They straight up lied and then didn't ever really take it back and didn't never really apologize to Poland either, right after all that happened. Now, you know, on the one hand,

you could say, Okay, you know, that's reasonable. He's doing what's best for his country. He's doing what's best because ultimately that's going to be the best chance that Ukraine has in this war. But you know, the term ally presumes that you get something out of it too, And the question is is like, what would we possibly get out of being with somebody who desperately wants us to drag us into a broader war, even if their cause is just it's a nuance and it's a complex situation.

I just wish more and more people were able to square those two things. You can hope that things work out well for Ukraine, and you can also be skeptical of some of the things that you're saying. Let's go to the next one up here, and this is exactly why why skepticism and thinking is actually quite warranted. This is a headline from the New York Times, which is why it's the most important because you almost certainly know that it is true whenever it's hawkish news quote US

warms to helping Ukraine target Crimea. The Biden administration is considering the argument that Kiev needs the power to strike at the Ukrainian peninsula annexed by Russia in twenty fourteen. Now, on the one hand, what the Ukrainians are saying, I want to be fair here, it's not crazy. Why Because Crimea, if you look at it purely militarily, is a major supply line for the Russian effort going on in Ukraine.

And if you were to look at it purely and on a military basis, this would be one which you could totally consider as to why it matters. Because it's a major supply base. It's where tens of thousands of Russian troops enter and exit. They also have a lot of military bases and critical supplies that they keep there, specifically because they don't believe that it will be struck

by the Ukrainians. And outside of the bridge bombing that the Ukrainians were behind, we haven't seen any major action there. But of course, what's the overall strategic reason why you may want to think about this, Well, the Russians think it's theirs, and whether you agree with that or not,

they think very hard that it is Russia. Yes, and if they think that, well, then the risk of escalation and have specifically of using our weapons and provided weapons to strike actual Russian territory, Well, you're entering kind of a new ballgame. We have no idea how the Russians will react. Part of the calculus by the Biden administration as well. Every time we up the ante, the Russians don't actionly do anything. And it's not true. I'm sorry,

it is true. You haven't seen any major escalation all dispute that I mean the attacks, the massive attacks on infrastructure, trying to turn the lights off in Ukraine. Well, I meant against US, I mean, not against the Ukrainians. Sure, anytime they're like, well we're gonna bomb NATO, it's like, well you haven't done yet, so you know, and it's obviously consideration, but this would be unknown territory. It's one

that we considered non grata six months ago. Yeah, and I don't see any reason why you shouldn't consider it. There's a lot to say here. I mean, first of all, I just on the Davos thing. To me, the Zelensky appearance and all of their posturing around human rights is more a story of their own hypocrisy, where at the same time they're like, of course we're on the side of human rights and we're on the side of Ukraine.

They're welcoming in the Gulf billionaires who are profiting off of this war through massive oil price increases, and also you know, affiliated with like the most repressive regimes in the entire world, human rights abusing, etc. That's fine. So the massive hypocrisy that's on display there, I think is probably the most noteworthy part of his appearance, because yeah, he's going to do and say what he needs to do to try to win this war and defend his

own people, and I can't fault him from that. However, on the crimea piece, this is insane. The idea, the logic that's laid out in this article of like, well, Russia hasn't pulled down the nukes yet, so we think they're just not going to is so foolish and so terrifying that they're taking such a casual approach to this that I just don't even know what to say about it.

And this isn't just you know, us talking about There have been a lot of experts who have said, if you did have a horrific situation where Russia reached for the nukes, it would likely involve their red line with regard to Crime Bea. Anatol Levin of Quincy Institute spoke to Bronco Marctic about exactly this thing said. The thing is, we don't know when or if Putin actually would use

nuclear weapons. My senses, it would be only in the very very very last resort, because the damage to Russia's image in the world, the damage to Russian troops and territory occupied by Russia would be colossal. Talking to Russian experts, the only scenario in which they find it plausible, though they could be wrong too, but they say it would be if CRIMEA itself would be in danger. We've drawn certain red lines for the Russians, and we need to

draw red lines for the Ukrainians. So there are many experts, not just this one, who say, if there is a real hard red line for the Russians, this would be it. And the fact that we have so casually escalated and escalated and escalated in terms of our willingness in terms of our direct involvement, in terms of what we were sending over there, in terms of the territory that we're willing to assist Ukrainians in striking. You know, it reminds me,

frankly of the build up to this war. Bronco also reported on those WikiLeaks cables where it was like you had experts, you had NATO allies, you had the US ambassador to Russia all warning, No, they're serious about these red lines. They're serious about this makes them feel like they're encircled. They're serious about this is really called causing a problem for them, and that you know, it's not

going to go unchecked. Now. Again, always say they are responsible for their own actions, But ultimately, there were many people who predicted exactly the outcome that we have seen based on the actions that we were taking with regards to expanding NATO, and some of the people who dismissed that at the time said very similar to this logic here, they always say that and they never do anything. They always say that and they never do anything. So maybe

maybe it's just all a bluff. Maybe it doesn't really matter to them, Maybe they won't really respond in the most terrifying or horrific way. But to so casually dismiss it and dismiss the red lines that they have laid out very clearly, we just never learned from history, you know, another side of it actually, so actually you're reading an analyst and what they said made a good point. It's like, look, even if they don't nuke it, a lot of Russians they think that Crimea like they may not agree with

the Ukraine invasion, but they're like, Crimea is Russia. According to them, it could actually increase domestic political support for Putin inside of Russia and in the war. And if he used it as a pretext to do let's say, a call up of another three hundred thousand or some thing troops, he would actually probably not face the same level of domestic political pushback that they did. And look, I mean I also think it just highlights the overall

conflict itself. When the Ukrainians say they want to take Crimea is because they're like, as long as Crimea remains in Russian hands, this is going to be a stalemated conflict that we will just continue to get pounded by. And I'm like, yeah, they're not wrong, and that's why diplomatic solution is probably the only way it's going to end. They're like, but we want to have the upper handed and negotiating table, so we want to try and sever some of the supply lines going into Rush. Of the

problem is, you don't know how exactly that could all end. Anyway, I think it's a very important discussion overall. What they say is that President Biden remains unswayed by the arguments. You can look at this article as clearly being leaked by hawks in the administration to test the waters and see where people can there's another major decision point. Actually it just broke this morning. So our remember I don't know if you guys, remember we about the tanks going

from Britain. Germany is now saying they're like, we're not going to give those tanks. We're not going to let Poland give our tanks to Ukraine unless you give tanks to Ukraine. Because they're like, we don't want this on

us at the United States. So they pointed apparently they've been calling the White House and they're like, we're not sending a damn thing in terms of tanks unless you do it, because it needs to appear joint because if there's a problem, then we're the ones who are going to face the brunt and we'll get the blame, and we don't want that. It needs to be a US

based effort. And America never wanted to actually send the tanks as part of the reason why Britain and Germany were doing it because they wanted to be a European led thing. But the Europeans are like, no, no, no, we're not having any of that. We'll see how that

does ye point. I mean, the latest reporting is that we're preparing another two point five billion dollar aid package, including you know, additional weapons shipments, including some things we have never said before, but that they are still ruling out sending tanks. I mean what they say is like, oh, well, these are hard, logistically difficult, and they're very heavy, and it's not even clear they'd be useful in the conflict. But I think the real concerns are more about you know,

the continued concerns about escalations. Well, that's just that. I mean, you know, once you have a tank, you can move pretty quick if you know what you're doing, and next thing you know, you could be one hundred miles inside of Crimea And now we're in a whole other situation. Part of the reason why the Bidendminstration doesn't want to give it to them. Yes, indeed, all right, there was another Davos moment that really caught our attention, This one

flagged by Front of the show Ken Clippenstein. So Senator Chris Coons is probably Joe Biden's closest ally in the Senate, so when he speaks, it's really important to listen to what he had to say. Now we've been covering here the fact that there is some angst on the European side about the Inflation Production Act. They're concerned about the incentives contained therein that some of their industry around green energy may come to our shores. So there's been some

friction in the relationship. So in that context, Cenaer Chris Coons gets asked about near shoring and friendshoring and where does this terrifying protectionism all end, let's take a listen to what he has to say. Whole far will go in front shoring, making short that things goes to Mexico and countries that you're allied with. Did you see the point often IMF Managing director and who will the US balance this to make sure that deals will have growth in the years to come? And this will be a

very shallow recession of a recession. Avol. Look, thank you, thank you for your comments and the opportunity. I do think that American leaders and business leaders in particular recognize that the severe disruptions of the pandemic and some of the challenges of the reach and the scope of globalization that have caused a backlash in many of our countries, a populist backlash certainly in the United States, need to

be addressed. One of the ways to deal with some of our challenges in terms of the hemisphere and migration also is to do some near shoring to improve the job opportunities in Central America, for example. But I don't think it will be as robust as potentially projected. I do think that we will continue to have an open economy, to be committed to free trade and to see the robust value that globalization has brought to the world as

well as to many of our people. So when they say fre each what they're talking about is the Transpecific Partnership NAFTA, which was devastating to a whole swath of the country. They're talking about things like PNTR with China, opening up normalized trade relations with China, which has been devastating for blue collar workers. It's been devastating for our

industrial base. It has made it so our supply chains, which was manifested incredibly clearly during COVID and continuing to this day, are incredibly fragile and dependent on a lot

of other countries, but China in particular and effectively. What Coons is saying here is like, we had to do a little bit of this to sort of placate the people, but we're still really committed to the old way of doing things that lines the pockets of billionaires and a sort of global elite class at the expensive blue collar workers. The irony of it is is that Europe has one of the most protectionist economies in the world. They just

have the European Union. They're pissed that they don't get to have protectionism, and that they don't get to ship their car parts here and that we don't put a tariff on them, or that we require our stuff to be American made while their stuff is European made and European owned, especially financially. The whole thing is a total farce and I cannot stand. Germany's entire economy is a protectionist hellhole for anybody who wants to do business outside

of the world. That's why they are one of the largest, I believe, the largest economy in all of Europe because they have all of these rules and regulations that pile up with the hand of Brussels. This is part of the reason why Britain wanted to leave the EU in the first place. The whole point is that when you look at it, they want protectionism for themselves and free trade for us. And that has been the case with China, with the European Union, with Japan, with India, with Brazil.

I mean, almost every other major trader partner that we have has an incredibly closed off, homogenous system and then they come here and they're like, no, they expect to be able to just do business completely the way that they want and then ship all the profits back home while making sure that people here lose their jobs. It's this completely ridiculous, and it's an ideology you know that the Chris Coons and all of them have set from

the top. I hope it gets rejected. I wish stuff like this was more at the political conversation like it was a couple of years ago. I feel like we've almost forgotten about it. Yeah, I mean this was really core to the rise of Trump. I mean this was one of the things. You know, there was an over attempt by the media to like say, Trump and Bernie Sanders are the same but on some of these issues. At that time, they were singing a lot of the same tune, and they were right, yes, And they have

never been more vindicated in that messaging than right now. Again, we just lived through the terrifying experience of Oh, we're facing a pandemic and we literally don't make any of our own ppe. Oh where are all of our pharmaceuticals manufactured? Oh, we can't even get baby formula on the shelves. I mean, the amount of fragility and vulnerability that we discovered exists in our supply chain because exactly this thinking not to mention.

I mean, guys, we continue to have increases in overdoses and deaths of despair, continued fallout from the way that we decimated the industrial base and the working class of this country in favor of growth, well growth for who to benefit who? That's the question they never ever answered. They never wanted to answer, because of course it's their political donors who benefited from this quote unquote free trade

regime for so many years. So, you know, this is why it's always important to pay close attention to what elites at Davos are saying to each other, because they sort of forget that the rest of the world can hear them, and it's a little bit of a mask off moment. So this is why I always track these things really closely and really appreciate Ken also watching this and paying attention to it, because there was a thought that,

you know, what, things might really be changing. There may really be a new consensus emerging in why Washington and a different approach to you know, supply chains and rebuilding our industrial base and getting some of this fragility on of our system, and the Inflation Reduction Act seem like okay, and we had the chip sacked right, maybe this is a new era of industrial policy and at least according to the Center in Chris Coons, so again is the

top ally of Joe Biden in the Senate. This was all just you know, a little bit of a ruse, a little bit of a sop to the populace, and we're going to go back to doing exactly what we were doing before. Yeah, very unfortunate. All right, let's go to the next part here. COVID Leanna, when doctor Leanna, when you know, having one of the most interesting turns

in politics to really Arc, right, real character. Arc started out as one of the most like wear masks all this and then became one of the really only people on CNN. I guess whenever it was safe to begin the acknowledging things, saying like masks don't work unless you're wearing an N ninety five, now saying actually we're over counting COVID debts, kind of stunning people on CNN itself, and then also drawing a major reaction afterwards. Let's take

a listen to exactly what she said. As you know, I heard this closely being in the Trump White House when this happened. I talked to a lot of health officials about this who are actually kind of skeptical of this claim that you're making. And I think one big thing has been what is the evidence that these COVID deaths are actually being overcounted? Well, this is the reason why this kind of transparent reporting is going to be

so important. There is a way for us to look at death certificates and also to look at the medical records of individuals prior to their death. And I think this needs to be separated into three categories. One is the COVID as a direct contributor, the primary cause of death. The second is could it be a secondary contributing cause. So, for example, somebody with kidney disease, COVID then pushes them over the edge deep kidney failure. That's COVID as a

contributing cause. And then the third is COVID as an incidental finding, So somebody coming in with a gunshot wound or a heart attack and a happy to test positive. I think that we need to separate out and look at the percentages of each That percentage would have shifted over time as well. In the beginning, probably a lot more people were dying with the primary cause of COVID that probably has shifted. She's not wrong. That's been the case now for a long time. And actually this is

part of why it's so difficult. I don't know if everybody remembers, but the CDC put out a statement, what was it about a year ago or so where they were talking about how the average person who's dying of COVID post mass vaccination campaign was like over eighty years old and had up to four comorbidities. And people lost it because what they are attempting to do is a lot of people want you to still believe that COVID

is a major threat to your life. Now, with variance with vaccination, natural immunity, therapeutics, and so much of the evolution of where we are right now, it's just simply not true unless you have some pretty major underlying health conditions, and that's where it genuinely could be a major threat to your life, something that she actually even argues in this Washington Post op ed. Again, I don't exactly know

why she's coming forward. The major kind of crux of her argument here is that it's important to actually keep accurate data as to what this is and to actually make sure that what the COVID death rate, purportedly is is not something that is unacceptably high or so way that we can actually track the virulence and the progress

of the disease. But this has also been the case now for quite a long time for a lot of people who were even looking at you know, age tables and others regarding COVID, many many like I would say, almost two years ago, almost at this point. Now. The thing is, though, is that this is effectively conventional wisdom for most people. I think they understand it when an eighty five year old who's got like heart disease and diabetes dies because they have COVID, Like, is it really

COVID that what's responsible for their death. That being said, this clip itself of benign conventional wisdom, now at this point, received a tremendous amount of pushback in kind of the liberal intelligensia. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen, actually echoing some exactly of what Caitlin Collins was pushing back there with quote unquote health professionals, please doctor when we don't have time to wonder speculate, the data is public. We know exactly how many COVID

debts were primary at first contributing versus incidental. It's actually not true. More debts are now contributing, but that doesn't mean that they are overcounted. Go to the next one there, please on the screen Meddie Hassen saying right wingers are loving the latest nonsense from Leanna, when who has gone from COVID hawk to COVID to minimize to now aid in a better of COVID denialis her latest conspiratorial claims

have been debunked by a number of actual experts. And then the next one there please also important similar doctor Lucky trand the cycle of disinformation. The White House is seeding talking points with handpicked minimizer Twitter docs like Leanna. When minimizer docs spread disinformation via priority access to the media, anti vaxxers amplify minimizer op ed pending, the White House is using dissent as an excuse to loosen its policies.

So these are all people again who really do seem to believe that we Crystal are like in May of twenty twenty or something and want to freeze the conversation there. That's the part I just don't get. How can you

possibly push back against that. Actually, that last person had one part of their thing had a point, which is that I think when you look at her character arc and you ask, like, why has she shifted so dramatically, Well, originally the claim she was making, the way she was positioning herself was beneficial to Democrats, And now you know, while you have a lot of liberals who don't want to engage with with what she's saying and are just like panicked at the very suggestion of it, the Biden

White House is very interested in people moving the pandemic and feeling like things are okay and like moving forward. So, I mean, it does just so happen that her commentary has sort of tracked what is most useful for the Biden White House, which that last commentary, who had a lot of other things to say about it as well, did point that out, and I think that that is a worthwhile point. Listen, I don't claim to be an expert on whether the debts are overcounted or undercounted or

just yet just write or whatever. I have not dug into it deeply. Let me just put that ultimately on the table. But what has bothered me this whole time is the level of panic about even having a discussion around it and providing a quote unquote talking point to someone who might be your ideological adversary, and the shifting

nature of what you're allowed to wonder about. Question dig into the way public health officials have actively admitted to trying to shape public opinion and behavior rather than just present us with evidence and facts and social media and we've talked about that as well. Like has also played into this, is serving as these sort of like gatekeepers or what you can say, what you can't say, and

what counts us fact and what counts as fiction. That has been the piece that has always really bothered me, And so I think that's sort of exemplified by the treatment of the comments here from Leon just so insane. I still can't It's January twenty twenty three. I can't even believe they were having a discussion. I thought people

knew this a long time ago. And then the fact that people who have ded sway over at least public health opinion and public health authority in this country disagree with what she's saying is even more disturbing to me. But it is what it is, all right, Tager, what you're looking at well, when we first had Peter's ihon on the show, I gotta admit I was kind of skeptical.

Peter is just an extraordinarily confident person, and he's obviously brilliant, but he would declaratively say China's going to collapse in exactly ten years. I couldn't help but recoil. Take it from the guy who said publicly he didn't think Russia would invade Ukraine. You can look pretty dumb when things go wrong, making grand pronouncements about major events in the heat of the moment. It can come back to bite you. But what if Peter is smarter than me. What if

he's right? What if the way that we are thinking about China is completely wrong. What if it is not a jugg ornaut but it's actually an illusion the entire time, and it's crumbling right before our eyes. I'm not saying I agree, but let's go through some recent data that actually makes the case. First was major demographic data of China that just came out yesterday. The CCP, for the first time has admitted that its population has fallen for the first time in over sixty years. There are several

things to note here. First of all, this is the official number. Assume the real number is much worse. Second, even if you go by their official numbers, that means that new births in China have fallen a full forty five percent in the last five years, a full blown demographic crisis that started well befare COVID, and it is now accelerating. China now has a birth rate behind India, the United States, the United Kingdom, making it one of

the worst on the largest economies on Earth. To put things in perspective, the last thing time that things were this bad demographically in China it was because of a famine caused by Mao Zadong. Worse, it does not seem like they have any easy way out. For all the talk of the legacy of the one child policy and the culture problems that it foretold, today's problems have a

lot to do with economics as well. While yes, China is an economic juggernaut in the aggregate, on the individual level, things are not set up there for the flourishing of family life. Much of this centers around couples who simply don't believe that it is econom possible to have more than one child right now, and a total lack of faith that the government may not reverse itself in the future and say, actually, only one child is now desirable. Michael Beckley, he's a US based professor who wrote a

book on China. He lays this out in future quote, China will lose five to ten million working age adults and gain five to ten million senior citizens every year for the foreseeable future. There is no way out of that. Worse they are they are not on the backside of COVID right now. In fact, they are having their twenty twenty moment right now after abandoning their idiotic COVID zero policy. By their own admission, tens of thousands of people are dying of COVID per day. The virus is ripping like

wildfire through its population. This too, is causing mass consternation across the population because it is a clear sign that they stayed locked up for two years for absolutely no reason. The rest of the world barely thinks about COVID, but for them, it's a full blown crisis, and of course it will ownly further weaken their population problems, and it

highlights their economic ones. China's economy grew just three percent last year after a target set by the government for five point five percent, and again three is the official numbers. Who knows what the real one is. Some Western analysts have put their real growth as low as point five percent. In reality dig deeper. The overall number is still stunning compared to the previous periods. Just a decade ago, it was growing in a rapacious seven point seven percent per year.

Its economy now looks on par of that with the West, except the West doesn't need speedy economic growth to fund hundreds of millions of people and propel enough of our population into the middle class to maintain social stability and preserve an authoritarian dictatorship. There are other signs of impending problems lurking beneath the surface. We all took notice of the Evergrand bubble earlier this year, but the overall debt

problem right now for China is immense. Right now, their overall level of total debt in China is fifty one trillion dollars. That's three times the size of their entire economy. It's the highest level in Beijing since they even started track it in twenty seven years. And they don't have the American luxury of being the world's reserve currency. Furthermore, with their mounting demographic problems, they're having a hell of a time paying even for major social benefits they need

to care for their increasingly elderly population. They have barely any new workers to replace them. Current trends say soon they will have one worker trying to support three elderly, leading to even more borrowing and debt, not enough taxes or spending. I could go on further. I could point to their record high inflation, the fact they import almost all the energy that they actually need, they have very little reserve. But all of this makes actually a compelling

case for the Zihon thesis. How are they supposed to be tough abroad when they have to sow their entire society back together in such a short period of time. Worse, they don't have the democratic release valve that we do. When our people are pissed, they can vote. There it just boils, and it boils every once in a while it comes up to the surface. So we can take a little bit of notice. Maybe a decade is too short of a time horizon. I've come away in the

last year and with a very basic normy point. Authoritarian societies are just bad in the long run. They really just don't work that well. They're actually not equal to us really at all, nor can they replace us. Look at Russia and China. COVID zero is humiliating and clearly their society is falling apart. At Russia, they claim they could have an alternative system to the West, it turns out they have basically no friends on the international stage

and their economy only runs because of petrochemicals. Look, maybe all of this is way too optimistic. I could do a whole monologue on America's failures. I think I've done many here on the show. But looking from the outside in the view of the Chinese century just does not look the same as it did a decade ago. Maybe Peter's ion is completely right after all. Look, Chris, and if you want to hear my reaction to Sagre's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at Breakingpoints dot com. Christl

what do you take a look at? Well? Guys, Today, in an unusual nationwide coordinated action, in seven different states are introducing a raft of legislation that is aimed at taxing the rich. The Washington Post has the story. The headline is billionaires in blue states face coordinated wealth tax bills.

Some measures are based on Center Elizabeth Warren's proposals to make the super rich pay more, and the article details a range of ideas, from a wealth tax in California and should levy a one point five percent tax on assets over a billion dollars, pretty modest proposal, in my opinion, to proposals in Connecticut, Hawaiian, Maryland, and York that would

increase capital gains taxes. They've also documented here efforts that would expand the state tax in order to curb the extraordinary transfers of intergenerational wealth which have increasingly locked us into a rigid class system. Now, each of these ideas has its own pluses and minuses, but all are wildly popular with the American people. An article a couple of years back summed up the research on this matter quite well. Quote, most Americans want the rich to pay higher taxes, according

to every poll everywhere. They cite polls showing a Warren style wealth tax proposal with seventy seven percent support among Democrats and a majority fifty three percent support even among Republicans. One specific idea to tax wealth over fifty million dollars at two percent, much more than what's being proposed in California that clocked in at seventy four percent support. Overall, even more aggressive proposals, things like lifting the top tax

rate to seventy percent, enjoys about sixty percent support. Overall. Taxing the rich is so popular that even a majority of millionaires supported taxing millionaires more. But we did manage to identify one demographic which was adamantly opposed no matter which proposal was tested, wealthy, bespectacled, bow tie wearing business anchors. This really comes from the Senator Elizabeth Warren. This comes from her playbook that you don't just tax income, you

go after people's assets and wealth. And maybe it doesn't have legs, but this is something that is going to resonate with many members of the public. The demonstrable reality is Greg Vailier said, get out the moving vans. Here come the moving vans. Is what he says, verbatim. I mean this has been proven to Florida and other states as well, Florida, Arizona. There has been you see an exodus at times of people from these very high tax cities.

Think about those living in New York City, you pay federal, you pay state, or you pay city tax. You have incredibly high rents, and then with an elation on top of that, and you compound that with the fact that you can for most people start to work more remotely at home. We obviously saw that exodus to Florida, and potentially there's a wealth tax. It'll continue. I know you're laughing. Oh, I saw. I walked by Pharaoh's desks the other day. We never talked. I walked by his desk once a year.

He's got a map of Texas out of the desk. Tatis story to everyone. I rememberhen I was moving over here seven eight years ago and the accountant said, they give me a call. Bloomberg offs great service to relocate. So I take this call with the account I'm thinking, I'm gonna paying lower taxes in America. This will be great. Gets on the phone and says federal income tax will be excell I'm thinking fantastics. That's down from where I was in the UK. And they said no, no, no,

we're not done. And then they start going state Citty. I'm like, what are you talking of? This is this is so important and I'll let you go back to Amrie Here, John, the summation of the meny taxes is and then they've got pretty taxes on top of that. Question I keep asking me is how on s do you retire it? Personally? Love here how the segment just evolves into a big pity party about how unbearably high their taxes are and how low taxes for the rich in the US are A quote Canard, here's a little

reality check. Thanks to Trump's tax cut, the wealthiest Americans, once all taxes are considered local, state, and federal, pay less in taxes than any other income group. Take a look at these graphics. On one side, you can see what a reasonable tax system looks like, where the wealthier actually pay more. Back in nineteen fifty, that is the

way our system worked. But with the end of the New Deal era and the rise of market fundamentalism and trickle down and the onslaught of unfettered money in politics, we've now got the relationship completely upside down again. After those Trump tax cuts, for the first time in twenty eighteen, the richest Americans paid a lower tax rate than every

single other group. Think about how discussing that is. They have rigged the system so much that a waitress earning a tipped minimum wage of let's say, three dollars an hour has to pay more in tax than literal billionaires. And yet these fools are out here on TV crying about how unfair it all is to the wealthy. Let me give you a couple more stats in our little reality check moment here, the pandemic has ushered in an

even warshocking era of wealth hoarding. Two thirds of all new wealth created globally since the start of COVID went to the top one percent, So sixty six percent of all new wealth went to just one percent of people. Meanwhile, right here in the US, the number of people putting off medical care because they can't afford it reached a record all time high in twenty twenty two. It spiked

twelve percentage points in a single year. Thirty eight percent of Americans are putting off basic medical care because of cost, and a majority of these said that the care that they needed was for at least a somewhat serious condition.

We wonder why we're all sicker and dying earlier, But go ahead, cry more about some incredibly modest proposals to tax the rich just a little bit more cry and threaten to move to another state where they'll allow the plutocrat class to fully run the show exactly as you want it. Although I do have to say much as I find these people's world you discussing and greedy, the rich really do have a track record of relocating their

well from state to state for tax avoids purposes. So their cry baby threats to take their money and go elsewhere they're not idle California and New York Illinois comparatively higher tax locales. They've all been losing population of places like Florida, Arizona, and Texas. Plenty of wealthy New Yorkers spend just enough days in Florida to technically reside in that state. Now, that's not to say these statewide efforts are not a worthy endeavor, but they're no substitute for

better tax policy at the federal level. Insanely, Republicans right now are pushing in the complete opposite direction with a so called fair tax proposal that would guarantee a regressive tax system, with the wealthiest paying the least and the poorest paying the most. A vote on this monstrosity was one of the demands of the McCarthy t Party two

point zero holdouts. The bill proposed to eliminate the income tax in favor of a national sales tax, and it would dramatically hike the price of everything from groceries to prescription drugs. Sounds awesome, right? You know how expensive everything is right now? How'd you like to pay like twenty

percent more on everything? What's more, since the poorest must spend a much higher percentage of their income on things like groceries, the tax is inherently regressive, codifying into place a thoroughly backward system whereby the rich are guaranteed to pay next to nothing in comparison to their income, and the poor take it on the chin. As to the Democrats, they failed miserably while they were in control. They let

the Trump tax cut stand. They did nothing on capital gains, or wealth taxes or estate taxes, just as Joe Biden famously promised, nothing fundamentally changed. And now two of the primary villains and guaranteeing the disgusting status quo remains, kirston Cinema and Joe Manchin are literally high fiving in Davos. Bottom line, our boat friends over at Bloomberg can probably rest easy. The politicians they bought still have their back.

Love these little moments, and if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at breakingpoints dot com, we've been tracking an important story of potential academic censorship. We're very excited to welcome to Kenneth Roth to speak about this. He was the executive director of Human Rights Watch from ninety three to twenty twenty two. He's currently writing a book. And let's go ahead and put this recent i'p ed from mister Roth

on the screen. Here. He says, I once ran Human Rights Watch, Harvard blocked my fellowship over Israel. Welcome to the show, sir, glad to have you, Thanks for having me, my pleasure to be here. Yeah, of course, so just tell us what happened here. Well. When I announced that I would be leaving Human Rights Watch last April, I was planning to leave as at the end of August.

I very quickly received a call from the car Center for Human Rights Policy, which is part of the Harvard Kennedy School, and they asked would I'd be interested in being a senior fellow there during the current academic year. So I could work on my book there, and we went back and forth a little bit, and I basically said, yes, you know, that sounds like a good idea, and we thought that that was pretty much a done deal. There was one technical step that still needed to be taken.

We needed the sign off of Dean Douglas Almendorff, the head of the Kennedy School. But we assumed that that would be just a mere formality, and so I actually over the summer contacted Almondorff and said, look, I'm going to be there in September. Let's get to know each other. And we arranged a zoom conversation and had a very pleasant half hour chat until the end, and then he asked me this weird question. He said, do you have any enemies? Now this is odd for me, because you know,

I've got a gazillion enemies. I mean, I've headed Human Rights Slatch for three decades. You know, we document governments human rights violations, criticized them for it. They hate that, so many of them me and I ran through that with Almandorf. I said, well, you know, the Chinese government and the Russian government have personally imposed sanctions on me. I mentioned the Saudi government and the Rwandan government particularly

to test me. But you know, I had an idea what he was driving at, so I said, And also the Israeli government doesn't like me. And that turned out to be the kiss of death because two weeks later I got a phone call from my friends at the car center who had to sheepishly admit that Dean Almendorf had vetoed my fellowship because of my and Human Rights Watches criticism of Israel. Wow. I mean, it's outraged, and this is something I want to focus on with you specifically,

because you named a number of other governments. One of the accusations I believe that was leveled against you is that you disproportionately spend time criticizing Israel, whereas those appeared

to be ones where it might be more controversial. But you know, layout your other track record, not just Israel, but everything that you covered while you were there for three decades, right, Yeah, I mean that's an odd accusation because I mean, first of all, if you just look at the facts, Israel is one of one hundred governments that Human Rights Quash regularly reports on, so you know,

it's like one maybe two percent of our work. I mean, it's a tiny, tiny percentage of our work, So to say that we're disproportionately focused on Israel is just you know, ridiculous. But the other thing is that the people who make that allegation. There there's this sort of cottage industry of little groups of partisan defenders of the Israeli government, and they, in their view, you know, the Israeli government is never in the history of the world committed to human rights violation.

They devote themselves to attacking anybody who criticizes Israel, and then you know, that epitome of bias. They have the audacity to claim that we're biased because we impartially apply the same factual and legal standards to Israel as we

do to everybody else. It's just absurd. Yeah, And I don't think there's any doubt when you apply that same criticism to one of the you know, adversaries of the United States government, let's say, in Iran or Syria or another nation, there isn't nearly the same level of pushback. I'd love to delve into some of the facts in reality here at Human Rights Watch. You all authored a report that I followed very closely titled This was April twenty seven to twenty twenty one, a threshold crossed Israeli

authorities and the crimes of apartheid and persecution. What is the critique that you level there, and obviously the word apartheid very strong, What is the evidence that you use to bolster that claim. I think you're right for bringing that up, because I think that that is you know, a lot of what's behind this veto of my fellowship. But what we did we were not making very explicitly, not making an historical analogy to South Africa. Rather, we

were applying international law. And there are two relevant treaties here. There's the UN Convention against Apartheid and then there's the Roman Statute of the International Criminal Court, and this that's worth really clearly. You know, these are the legal stats. And then in a two hundred page report which is incredibly detailed, we outlined, you know, why there was this

suppressive discrimination against Palestinians. And you know, if you spend time in the West Bank, it actually is pretty obvious. You know, you have these you know, well developed, beautiful Israeli settlements where you know, Israelis get to live under civil law with the full freedoms of an Israeli citizen. And then you know right next door in area Sea of the West Bank, you'll have these Palestinian villages where they can't even add a bedroom without getting it demolished.

You know, they have to travel on separate roads, they need passes to get through checkpoints. I mean, it has all the hallmarks of apartheid. And the real question, I mean we've been asked, why didn't you call it apartheid earlier? And I think that's you know, that's a fair question. But for many years when we would point out this suppressive discrimination, people would say, oh, yeah, but you know, don't worry, there's the peace process. Once we have peace,

all this will be taken care of. And that defense just stop being credible because there is no peace process right now. It's completely moribund. The current government is going in the opposite direction from any conceivable two state solution. And so we just you know, looked at the reality today. We're not going to assess the future. We just said what's it today? And there's just no question that it's

a part time. This is what Human Rights Watch found, This is what Betsellum, the leading Israeli group, found, This is what Amnesty International found and you know, a plethora of other groups as well. So, I mean that's just the ugly reality. I wish it wasn't so, but it

is what it is. Yeah, And you know, look, even if you disagree, I don't think that's grounds for I mean, I mean the idea that Harvard is supposed to be like endorsing all of the like the opinions of its fellows, I mean, that seems pretty ridiculous in an academic point of view. My question also is do you have any idea who the why where did the pressure on the dean come from? So was it you know, above his

pay grade? Is it donor based like what's happening? Yeah? Well, first let me just pick up in your earlier point when you just say, you know, this is the school. So the Chemty School was supposed to be the nation's you know, foremost policy institute where they teach, you know, tomorrow's the next generation of leaders how to deal with

domestic policy and how to deal with foreign policy. You know, how you address the Israeli government, you know, given its right word dangerous trend is the classic thing that Kennedy School students should learn about. But Evidently Dan Elmendorf doesn't want them to hear, you know, an impartial perspective, as Human Rights Watch would present. He invites literally ten Israeli officials to the Kennedy School every single year. But they're

all partial. That's fine, But an impartial observer like me, like Human Rights Watch, No, apparently that's not okay. Now, what was going on behind the scenes? We know that it was because of my criticism of Israel. Elmandorf has said that to Catherine Sikink, a very respective professor at Kennedy School, and he also told Matthias Reese, the faculty director of the Car Center, that people who mattered to him objected to my fellowship. Now we don't know what

that means. You know, he doesn't seem to have a personal strong view on Israel. But who these people who mattered to him were, you know, were they donors The Nation? Michael Massing's article in The Nation outlined a number of very big donors to the Kennedy School who are big supporters of Israel. Did he consult with them? Did he surmise what they would think? Was it some other influence

that undermined academic freedom? We don't know, but the bottom line is the message that Harvard is sending is disastrous. It's suggesting that, you know, if you criticize Israel, that's the third rail that will compromise your academic career. Yeah, well,

we actually have that Nation article. We can put that tear sheet up on the screen that tracks some of the significant contributors and donors to Harvard and their pro Israeli stances and asks whether this is you know, the reason, whether these were the people that mattered to the dean

that ultimately asked your fellowship there. And part of what I hate about this is, frankly, the dean, by taking these sort of actions, plays into some of the anti Semitic tropes about you know, a couple behind the scenes, well moneyed, et cetera, et cetera. And I mean that's one of the angles of this that I find disturbing and problematic. But you know, listen, you're writing a book, You're you're well established in your career, You're going to

be just fine. You didn't necessarily need this fellowship. So what do you think is the bigger, broader lesson here? Why did you feel it was important to take your personal story public? Well, You're absolutely right. This is not compromising my future. I'm fine. I have plenty of options because I you know, I've been leading him Rights Uch for three decades, so I will go someplace else. I am already someplace else, and I'll continue finding other opportunities.

But as I said, I really worry about, you know, the younger academic, the junior scholar, even the student who you know, when they look at the situation, might honestly want to criticize this reel. But now all says, well, I better or not, this may really cost me my future. And you know, Dean Elmendorf for the Kenny School seems at this point paralyzed. I mean, it's just hard to

know what he's going to do. So we've appealed to Laurence Backau, the president of Harvard, to step in because this is really, you know, Harvard's reputation that is at stake. And you know, if anybody can stand up to donor pressure, if anybody can offer a principles defense of academic freedom, it's Harvard, the richest university in the world. You know, when I ran Human Rights Watch, you know, if somebody came to me and said, you know, here's some money,

but we want you to exempt our favorite country. I would say, no, we're not the organization for you. You know, we have to, like you know, apply equal standards to everybody. And that's just the cost of being principled. Harvard can afford to do the same thing. It can announce that regardless of donor pressure, regardless of external pressure, they are not going to compromise academic freedom. They are going to uphold intellectual independence. Harvard can't do that. Who can? Yeah, Actually,

such a great point. I'm eighty two billion dollar indowmen, exactly. I mean, if they lose a few donations, they're going to be just fine. Thank you so much for taking the time. Good luck in the next endeavor. Let us know when the book comes out so we can talk to you about that as well. Really grateful to get to talk to you today. I'm enjoyed talking to you, sir. Thank you. That'd be great. Thanks for having me. Yeah, our pleasure. Thank you guys so much for watching. We

really appreciate it. Maybe that'll piss some people off, don't particularly care, but listen, we care a lot about censorship and all realms of our society here and this is one which you're probably not going to hear about in some of the conservative press that often talks about it. So it's important to give people a fullsome picture of

everything that's going on in our society. This is a major one too, which look as an American, the idea that you can't criticize anybody and you know, not face pressure like this and supposedly the nation's premier academic institution, that really pisses me off. When I went to Georgetown for my graduate degree, I walked past the sign every single day saying this building was go donated by the

Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. And I don't remember anybody baton and I over that, or any Georgetown faculty getting in trouble for saying it. Well, it's not like any of them, Actress. It's the point about how they welcome ten Israeli officials.

That's no problem, right, they're considered impartial. But the head for three decades of Human Rights Watch that soundabouts like, come on, all right, insanity anyway, Thank you so much for your support to the show so we can highlight stories like this one, and in general, live show tickets don't go ahead and buy them if you haven't already, and get the last couple there, but otherwise, we've got

great content for you guys all over the weekend. We're back here on Monday for an amazing show and we love you all, love y'all. See you Monday,