2/27/23: US Gov Admits Lab Leak Origin, 45,000 Animals Dead in Ohio, Jeb Endorses Desantis, Inflation Spikes as Recession Looms, Woody Harrelson's SNL Big Pharma Joke, Joy Behar Scolds Ohio Voters, Single Male Epidemic, Inside Unhinged Sydney ChatBot

Breakingpoints dot com. Good morning, everybody, Happy Monday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have pristal? Indeed, we do lots of interesting things this morning, including some big old news about the lab leak theory, once dismissed and deride it as conspiracy, racist, et cetera, et cetera. Now we have a US government report suggesting that is the most likely cause of the coronavirus pandemic. Who have known it? Oh nagar, Yeah, never absolute shock, all right,

So we'll get to all of that. We also have new developments out of Ohio researchers saying that the toxins in the air are worse than what the government is saying. We also have a new report that tens of thousands of animals died within this five mile radius, also much much worse than initial estimates. Will break that down for you.

We also have some twenty twenty four news shots fired at Ronda Santis over Ukraine, which is increasingly becoming a critical divide in the Republican primary, so that is really interesting. New numbers on inflation not good. Not good in terms of inflation, not good in terms of what the Federal Reserve might do about it. And we also have a very controversial monologue over on SNL that will break down for you. Excited to have Kevin Russ on the show today.

He's the one I talked about this in a monologue that I did last week, Saga while you were out. He had this long conversation with the new big chat bot Sydney. She will I should read it whatever revealed to Heaven that this thing called itself Sydney internally and then also can profess its undying love to this journalist. So anyway, we'll talk to him, he's a tech reporter for The Times, about what that interaction was like and what he thinks the future of this AI ultimately is.

But we wanted to start with this big breaking news regarding LAB leak. Yeah, and in news that should absolutely shock anyone except over at MSNBC. Let's put this up there on the screen. The LAB leak most likely origin of COVID nineteen pandemic. The Energy Department now says. Now,

why should we care what the Energy Department says? Well, what we found out from this piece, and actually some of us who've been tracking this for quite some time, is that the Energy Department is actually legally entrusted with overseeing safety procedures at a myriad of different labs across the United States. So their estimate of intelligence and how they would interpret it with respect to LAB leak was

actually quite important. And now they claim, apparently with quote low confidence and an updated document that was delivered to the Director of National Intelligence Avril sorry blanking on her name, right, AVERL Haynes. There we go, AVERL. Haynes, that they have estimated that it is now the most likely origin of the COVID nineteen pandemic. This is amid some consternation within the intelligence community. So let's put this up there on

the screen. From what we know right now, four intelligence agencies, Remember there are seventeen think that COVID spread naturally low. The Department of Energy thinks that Lablik was the originator of the COVID nineteen pandemic quote with low confidence. The most interesting one to me, actually, and this kind they kind of bury the lead here, is that the FBI thinks that the lab leak was the most likely origin

with quote moderate confidence. Now the canard that a lot of people are using to try to dismiss this as to why exactly they were wrong in the first place, crystal is that quote none think it was part of a Chinese bioweapons program. Well, we should remember like that was never the original claim, except for one person, Tom Cotton, saying it I believe, in early of February twenty twenty.

But since then, the lab leak theory hypothesis has always been that sketchy research was being conducted at the Wuhan Lab. This research and it's sketchy safety practices were well acknowledged by the US State Department and cables that we have since been opened since twenty eighteen, it was well known that they were not following proper safety protocols. Then, the incredible amount of evidence that we have that November twenty

nineteen onwards, clearly something terrible had happened. The original database of the samples was taken off of the Wuhan website in September twenty nineteen. Has yet to been found as to why. They give no explanation as to why we know about the what is the world games that were the World military games that were happening there. I've done. You know, people can go back and watch up two years ago. Now at this point, all the open source

the searches that we found spike for coronavirus symptoms. The fact was also that you know, the original wet market theory and natural origin, well, the wet market happens to be place where people shop who work at the lab, so you know, the original people who left the lab went out there and of course spread it to the population at least, you know, according to this theory. And then we also know that there were people who at

least one or two up to three. This was back in twenty twenty one that this report came out that one of those people was known to have contracted it in November of twenty nineteen, so all the open source evidence in the world pointed to the Lablaque hypothesis, and this has just been a dragging of the feat by the Biden administration. To June of twenty twenty one, President Biden said they directed the intelligence community to give him

updated documents. You know, and of course we're only finding out about this because of a leak. To be clear, this is not even really acknowledged publicly yet by the government. This is a classified assessment, a newly classified assessment. And to the extent that this has been happening at all, the reason why is not that they wanted to get

to the bottom of it. It's because Republicans in Congress have made a huge stink about how they are going to subpoena all of these documents and do their own internal investigation, and the agencies themselves are getting ready to provide Congress those documents. So their hand was completely forced in even providing this new intelligence estimate. And look, you know, it's not a shocker to anybody who's been following the

evidence now for some time. And of course, you know, the real meta takeaway from this is just the evidence has been pointing to this basically since day one. It was completely covered up by doctor Fauci by the EcoHealth Alliance, of which we'll talk about in a moment, and really a lot of apparatrics in the media who were afraid

that you know, talking about this was racist. And of course the worst part was that people were taken off of social media, including the zero Hedge Twitter account and believe it now has over a million followers, as well as numerous others and YouTube and elsewhere who were outright censored on social media platforms, including you know, this is just speculation, but we covered quite a bit of lablak over the last two years and we saw you know,

significant ticks down in sometimes in the weeks after, especially after I think we were one of the first people to interview Brett Weinstein after Joe Rogan about the entire thing. I remember that caused a hell of a lot of consternation, you know, with YouTube and our previous employer. So you can just go into thinking about what the pressures were

on at the time not to cover the story. I mean, I think there's the reason this is still important just to you know, back up for a second, is obviously because we don't want to have another pandemic, and it is a live question right now. Actually, the government is weighing whether or not they're going to sort of rein in this gain of function research and if they're going to institute new safety protocols going forward. There were recommendations to do exactly that, but that is still a very

live issue. It's still a live issue because friking Eco Health Aliance is still getting grants and funding to do similar research. So it's a live issue because of that. But it also was really important because it shows what happens when you have this combination of weird toxic partisanship.

Right there was you know, Trump found there calling it kung flu and whatever, and there was all this concern about anti Asian American hate and so so when Fauci and other leading scientists basically came down in lockstep and said, no, this is conspiracy, the lab liak is conspiracy. All signs point to a natural origin. Well, their media Lackey's just jumped right in line and followed suit, as did you

know the sensors are very very social media platforms. I think it's really important to remember at the very beginning how this cover up started. There was a conference call with Fauci and a whole bunch of others where they were kind of going back and forth, all right, how do we think this started, And there was one scientist in particular we said, look, guys, the sequence here is almost ident like you can see how they just inserted this fear and cleavage site and it looks just like

previous research that's been done here. So from the beginning on this call with Fauci, there was an understanding that, yeah, it's pretty likely that this was lableink. Now, not that they were saying it was one hundred percent, but it was like maybe seventy thirty, maybe sixty forty. And that's the conversation that happens privately. Day after is when Peter Dazak, covering his ass, Shepherd's all of these other scientists into putting out this letter saying no, it is a natural origin.

That's what it is pointing to. And then after that Fauci's able to go out in public and point to that letter and say, this is what scientists are saying. They're saying it's natural origin. It's basically conspiracy to suggest that it's lab leak, and you're racist, et cetera, et cetera,

et cetera. This is what major media organizations. The New York Times I think probably was the worst in all of this, and any little bit of evidence that they got that it was natural origin and not lab leak, they would alert people, They would do full, big front

page coverage. They were all in on this. So that's why this is such an important story still because you can see the way that you know, reporters who hated Trump for all kinds of you know, legitimate reasons, the fact that he was suggesting it was lab leak, the

fact that Republicans were suggesting it was lab leak. And then you had the scientific establishment, in order to protect their grant money, their funding, and cover up any potential involvement that they had in this type of research, they come down on the other side. And that's how you end up with us years later, finally getting any glimpse of the reality of the facts and the evidence around

what actually happened. If anyone wants to track what we're saying, I've been covering now for literally I think three years now at this point, and what have we learned? Well, okay, well, we talk about the initial cover up that you just did with the scientific community. Then we talk about doctor Fauci using this cover up of the scientific community. Something that we alleged for a long time is that doctor Fauci illegally circumvented US government regulations to fund gain of

function research at the Wuhan lab. This was considered a conspiracy up until a year ago, and then lo and behold just a few months ago put it up there

on the screen. January of twenty twenty three, the NIH itself, a new report finds did not follow its own safety protocols in properly tracking the EcoHealth Alliance while it was studying back coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of VIROLOGYI vindicate exactly what we talked about, which is that gain of function research under the Obama administration was considered so dangerous and risky for the potential of a lab leak or some sort of other similar type event that the

US government was going to stop funding it. Then doctor Fauci reverses these guidelines in twenty seventeen, green lights eight million dollars in grants to the EcoHealth Alliance, which continues this virus study at the Wuhan Institute of Virology up until September of twenty nineteen when all the things go black and why does it matter us for right now?

Put this up there October of twenty twenty two. You can see, actually that's my screenshot of the exact abstract, which is we are providing Fauci on his way out of the National Institute of Health Greenlit an additional grant to the Eco Health Alliance continuing to study bat viruses. I'm not exactly sure why more bat coronavirus research. A six hundred thousand dollars grant to EcoHealth Alliance, the same organization that funded the Wuhan lab. Now also with doctor

Peter Dazak why it matters? And I know much of this can sound as complicated as Watergate or to Iraq WMD, but they are important because Peter Dazac was also a part of the initial investigatory group from the World Health Organization that initially determined that there was no lab leak and said it was a natural origin and has the famous interview on sixty Minutes where they said, well are you just taking the Chinese word for it? And he said, well, what else can we do? I'm like, I don't know,

you know, baby, look at your own records. He has a vested monetary interest, and then even bigger step, let's make sure that this never happens again. Well, what are we doing. Something Josh Rogan has pointed to is that the response from the scientific community, specifically headed by Fouci, the US government has the Global Virum Project actually increase billions of dollars in gain of function research under the guise of let's never let that next pandemic happen again.

Let's try and bioengineer these viruses so that we can create antidotes, cures, vaccines, or whatever in the future. When it's seems now at this point, I mean, look, if you are still pumping the natural origin theory, there is almost no evidence to support that, Like you have been unable to find how some bat miraculously few flew a thousand miles and hit it up in the Wuhan lab. Even the Chinese don't even really stick by the uh yeah,

they don't stick by the wet market theory. They're like, oh, well, something was contaminated along the way, and just stop asking questions about this. All of these intel communities that still assess all this or based on older, older intel you have also the former CDC director under Donald Trump. Remember he came out and said, I think it came from

the Wuhan lab. He was also dismissed then at the point and he was shut done of those original coat meetings when there was open conversation about how this was likely a lab leak and the efforts to make sure that they shepherded everybody out of that direction and towards the natural origin direction. I mean, it really is. It really is quite remarkable. And listen, even if you're still like, I don't know, it could be either one, Okay, fair enough,

is it plausible that this escape from a lab? That's really all you need to know to know that this research is extremely dangerous and we need to be asking really hard questions about whether this should continue, what sort of safety procedures should be in place, and by the way, like we know what the risk was, what have we gotten out of it. I was listening to an old episode of Ryan's podcast Intercepted, and they were talking is

that what it's called intercestuar deconstructed? There you go, and they were talking about like, okay, let's say it was the wet market. You have this Institute of Virology right there, across the street. If it came from the wet market, you weren't able to stop that. Like, this is supposed to be your whole thing, right, so even if you're buying a natural origin thing, like, what are we getting for this research? Is it? It's supposed to be preventing pandemics?

Well it failed. It failed. At the best you can say is it failed, and most likely it actually started the pandemic. So that seems to be pretty strong evidence that we need to dramatically ch change what we are doing in terms of gain a function research. Yeah, you would think. And let's just not forget Fauci is probably the number one person implicated in all of this. He's going out as a hero, but you know, maybe history won't be nearly as kind. Let's just not forget how

he tried to play this down at the time. Let's take a listen. Everything about the step wise evolution over time strongly indicates that this virus evolved in nature and then jump species. Fauci added he does not believe another theory that the virus occurred naturally but was accidentally released into the public from a lab in China, telling that GEO that means it was in the wild to begin with. That's why I don't get what they're talking about. Don't

get what they're talking about. He had all the information he knew. Let's remember January of twenty twenty, he received an email saying that the virus is quote not consistent with evolutionary theory. That's what's come out of the Fauci files ever since then. And look, he remains, he remains complicit. He remains to say, like, look, it's possible. I never said that it couldn't have come from the lab. Yes,

you did really have the evidence right there. And look, you know, the Republicans say that they will investigate, you know, with the House Committee, will see what they're even able to get their hands on. But at this point, even the coverage of this report, Crystal, it's silence, you know, from most of the mainstream media. It was covered, and I don't think it's a surprise in the Wall Street Journal,

the nominally conservative paper. You received a write up in the New York Times where they went out of their way to say, well, many of the others still say it was natural origin, and this doesn't vindicate Trump's racist conspiracy theories. And as you said, look, we know clear as day The Times, their former reporter Donald McNeil literally had came out and said that while he was over there, he didn't cover the lab league because he didn't consider

it credible. And it was only months later when he realized he'd been lied to and manipulated by doctor Fauci, the scientific community and Peter Dazag. I mean, it goes so deep. It really is a rack WMD level. And let's not forget it's not just about what we do this thing. You know, a million Americans died of COVID by some estimate, cost trillions of dollars in economic damage.

Like you know, the Iraq War. There's a lot of recriminations as to what happened after the invasion, but you know what led up to the invasion was also very important, just like Vietnam, just like the Spanish American War. Like you have to go back and look at these initial conspiracies, cover ups and speculations and say, hey, how exactly did this shape what ended up coming this catastrophe, so that

we make sure that this doesn't happen again. I unfortunately do not think many people in the media will rescind that I have all I have yet to see is the initial pushback is, well, actually it's the conspiracy theorist fault for making it a conspiracy so that we had to dismiss it then at the time because they were liars and not credible. Maybe you're the liar. Maybe you're the one is not credible. Yeah, I mean listen, yeah, fair enough that Trump did himself no favors. But you're

a journalist. Ye're not supposed to be playing favorites. You're not supposed to be like, well, I like this one and I don't like this one, so I'm going to go with the theory espoused by the person that I like. And that was exactly what was the reporters named Don McNeil's that was saying with you, that was exactly what

he said. He fell victim to was basically like, you know, I had long relationships with these scientists and people like Fauci, and so when they were like, no, no, it's natural origin, he just bought it. Instead of actually doing the research that you were supposed to do as a journalist and being skeptical of everyone, which is supposed to be you know, a core tenant ultimately of journalism. It really is remarkable to see how all of this unfold and how it

continues to unfold. I mean, the New York Times a perfect example. When they got a report that said it looks like it's natural origin, which was based on, by the way, totally incomplete information. Then it was news alert, front page, did the big, you know, deep dive, and made sure that they got it down to all their readers.

Now that you have an alternative view, they'll put a little tiny blurb in there, but it's not getting nearly the same treatment that this, And they portrayed that also as much more conclusive and definitive than they're portraying this piece of evidence. So you can see their game. It's very clear. There you go. All right, speaking of media cover ups, government, etc. We've got, you know, continuing developments out of Ohio that are deeply deserving. Let's go ahead

and put this up on the screen. This is a write up in the Washington Post. The headline here is toxic air pollutants in East Palestine could pose long term risks, researchers say. USINGPA data, Texas A and M scientists found elevated levels of some chemicals at the derailment site but EPA officials say the levels pose no short term risks and are likely to dissipate. So basically the long and short here and i'll read you a little bit of this article is the EPA, of course, has been out

saying everything's good, no worries, We're all clear. We did the testing. Of course, we found out the water testing was actually, at least most of it conductive by literally the polluter, the company, Norfolk Southern. They paid consultants to do some shoddy apparently testing that with samples, et cetera. So okay, that was the water. But on the air, they said, we're all good. Well, guess what these researchers

at Texas A and M say. Not quite three weeks after the toxic train of derailment in Ohio, an independent analysis of EPA data found nine air pollutants at levels that, if they persist, could raise long term health concerns in and around East Palestine. That analysis, they say, stands in contrast to statements by state and federal regulators that air near the crash site is completely safe, despite residents complaining

about rashes, breathing problems, and other health effects. Now the ep IS response, they say, that air quality levels of seventy nine different chemicals they're monitoring remain below levels of concern for short term exposure, and that current concentrations are

likely to dissipate. So that is their response, but they say the data only adds to questions and concerns that of course have been weighing on residents Texas, A and M researchers found elevated levels of chemicals known to trigger I and lung irritation, headaches, and other symptoms, as well as some that are known or suspected to cause cancer, which of course is the nightmare scenario for these individuals.

And they've been so gas lit, sober. You know, any number of reporters, including our you know, our friends over at status who have been on the ground where people are saying nauseous, vomiting, skin rashes, eye irritation, having trouble breathing, all of these things, and meanwhile the government no, no, it's fine, you're fine, no problem, everything's good, the air is clear, etc. This gives you some inkling that they have been, at best dramatically downplaying the impact of what

is going on. What I don't really get is they always include these caveats. Experts say it's not cause for immediate concern. It highlights uncertainties. Well, look, if it's uncertainty, what's the worst case that people get cancer? What's the best case people don't? Why would you bet on the best case scenario? Yeah? Why would you operate under that?

And the continuing I mean, the more that you read about it, and you're thinking about many of these people talking about elevated of toxic chemicals in the air, in the water supply and around the area. Now that we have no idea how long it will dissipate, they say, oh, it'll dissipate after some time. Well, when are we talking about years from now? We're talking about months from now? Do they need relocation in the interim? Like should they

go home? Should they not go at home? And at this point we really have no reason to believe anything that they say. They downplayed you know, what was the controlled release the demolition that releases like mushroom cloud. They're like, wow, these these animals that are dead. Well, it's actually not that many of them. We know now that we know

now that that is not true. We know that the initial water testing and all that is being trusted to the company, and this is a total government This is bigger than, honestly than Katrina in terms of the actual cover up. I know they got a lot of media attention, but this is like an active corporate cover up in conjunction with US government officials to mislead the media as to what is happening, and they just want to move away from it. This might be the biggest failure in

their history, in modern history. Yeah, I mean with Katrina, obviously a lot of people died, and yeah, it was a photos devastation there was. Yeah, so I don't want to I don't want to make that drug comparison, but there's no doubt about it that. I mean, the cover up here is so consistent with the playbook that is run every single time. I just keep thinking about that

dude raise on TikTok. It was like, I get really obsessed with these industrial accidents and it is the same exact playbook and same timeline every time the corporation wants to downplay, they want to say everything is fine, and then we find out, oh, guess what, They're funding the tests and they're using these testing consultants who have been caught in the past cooking the books and screwing with the data, so we know that happened, but those tests

come out. The politicians they also mostly want to downplay what's going on. Everybody except for the literal local mayor, but the Republican governor, Pete and Biden, all of them want to downplay it. And so they'll, oh, yeah, the tests are fine, it's all good, don't worry about it. So they are parroting the corporate line. And then the media, also mostly corporate media, obviously parrots the corporate line as well. So that's how you end up with this situation where

people are like, I am sick, I have symptoms. There is something going on here. It's obviously not all clear, and yet they're being gas lit and told over and over again, no, no, everything is fine. And here's another example of this. Let's go and put this up on the screen. So Sager just alluded to this. The original estimate of the number of animals that died in this five mile area was thirty five hundred. Well, now that

estimate has risen to forty three thousand, seven hundred. I'm not good at math, but that's a lot more than thirty five hundred. Now this is predominantly fish and other aquatic animals that they're looking at here. What they say is that when the Ohio Department of Natural Resources officials first responded, they were told it was too dangerous to actually get in the water and do a full analysis

without having specialized gear. So they kind of worked with what they could and that's how they came up with this initial low estimate. And now that they've been able to do a fuller sample, can see that there is vastly, vastly more animal death here than initially estimated. And as I said, in now this seven point five mile area that was impacted by the trained derailment, they're saying there

were forty three thousand, seven hundred animals. You know, there's another story that's unfolding here now because as the cleanup continues, well, they've got to take that toxic waste and all that, you know, bled into the soil in this area. They have to do something with that. So they were initially transporting it to sites in Michigan and sites in Texas. And now the you know, Democratic governor of Michigan and the Republican governor of Texas were like, hold the phone,

what is going on here. We've got some major questions. So just this morning I read that they've changed course and now they are disposing of that waste in two sites in Ohio. One of which I happen to know because I used to live there is actually literally in the same county. It's in Colombiana County, just fifteen miles down the road. So they don't want to ship it, you know, to Michigan or Texas. They're going to keep it right here in this community and dispose of it

in a site that's just fifteen miles away. I have to think that people are not too happy about that either. I was going to say, well, what is the reasoning behind putting it in the same county that it's already infected? There's a toxic so and this gets to like I talk about this sum in my monologue. This region has been so shit on for so many years. So there's a toxic waste incinerator in East Liverpool, Ohio, located by the way by a school. There was local opposition of

this thing, but anyway, they put it in. So this is a region that, you know, totally devastated by the industrialization, epidemic of opioid addiction and overdose, all of that ground zero for that. So this is the place that has just been like used to be used for quite a while now, So no surprise that something like a toxic waste incinerator would be located in the same community. Geez,

I mean, yeah, I knew. It's very telling. I think that nobody else wants the waste, you know whatever, the least other states, especially one whose own researchers are like, this is full of talkxicity and may have long term health effects. We don't want our hands on any of this. I don't even know what to say now at this point.

And you know what we're about to talk about is that these people continue to just be left behind by the federal government, almost completely ignored the extent media is even covering it a drag kicking and screaming because of intense public interests, but not a lot of scrutiny yet, at least on the company itself and on the government officials, not even close to the level of scrutiny on President

Biden and on Secretary Buddha Jedge. Yeah. Well, and really importantly, there was covered a Media Matters analysis of all the cable news coverage and at that point at least only three percent of all the segments that had done on this been done on this talked about the political corruption that led up to this, and we now have indications from the NTSB report that has now come out this

was completely preventable. It was preventable with one thing that would have been incredibly beneficial is the modern breaking system that David Serroto has been reporting on over at the Lever that ultimately, you know, under the Obama administration, they

tried to make this braking system widespread. Industry got involved and they really trimmed the sales of what the initial safety REGs were going to be under the Obama administration than under the Trump administration, they roll that back even further.

So that was ends up being really crucial and really key because there was I think a like a wheelbaring or something like that axel something like that that was catching fire that we saw on the on the video and that does end up turning out turns out to be what the key problem was here, but they actually caught it before it derailed. They tried to stop the train, but because they have freaking civil war air braking system on this train, they're unable to stop it, and that's

how you end up with the derailment. So political corruption that we've been talking about that the media has largely ignored ends up being the key story here. And to talk more about the politics our president, President Biden, he was asked going and put this up on the screen about whether or not he plans to visit Ohio. He says, no, we're doing all we can. That is a lie. They are not doing all they can. I mean, that's just

demonstrably false. One thing they could be doing is giving these people Medicare for life, as they did in Libby, Montana. There's a provision in Obamacare that would allow them to do exactly that. They are not talking about doing that whatsoever, even as you know, researchers are saying, hey, this could have long term effects and these are known carcinogens. So down the road ten years from now, when suddenly you've got a cancer cluster in this area and everyone's denying

on it has nothing to do that. It has nothing to do with this. The very least is you could have these people make sure that they have decent healthcare and are able to get the treatment that they deserve. You also have Pete continuing to cover himself in glory. He did ultimately, much belatedly, decide to actually go to Ohio under great pressure from Republicans but also from some Democrats. Let's take a listen to a little bit of what he had to say in retrospect. Should you have come

a little sooner? So again, in terms of the timing of the visit, I'm trying to strike the right balance, allowing NTSP to play its role, but making sure we're here in that show of support. But also Norfolk Southern and the other freight rail companies need to stop fighting us every time we try to do a regulation in order to hold them accountable. And there are other railroad companies accountable for their safety record. And what we've seen is industry goes to Washington and they get their way.

They got their way on the ECP rule, they got their way on a Christmas tree of regulatory changes that the last administration made on its way out the door in December of twenty twenty. Guess what, dude, you are in charge, You can tell them no when they come to Washington. I mean the learned helplessness, the feigned helplessness of Biden and Pete not just on this issue, but on so many issue. When you see it with the airlines too, I'm going to send a letter if dude,

you have power, you are running this agency. If you wanted to change and roll back those Trump regulations, if they were so bad, you all are in charge now, you could do that, but she didn't and you still aren't. You send another strongly worded leather letter to Norfolk Southern Congratulations. Way to go. You know. With Biden too, I'm just mystified as why he won't go. I think it must be because he doesn't want to validate the Trump criticism. He's like, I willing to go to Kiev. He should

come back from Ukraine. He should come visit Ohio. So now he's the one who's actually playing and making this political because he doesn't want to appear weak to the fact that he was literally abroad doling out billions of dollars to Ukraine whenever somebody at home might have needed him. And he says, oh, we're doing everything that we can. With Pete too, I mean, what a horrific and massive failure. I've come around to the fact that I think Pete

is just fundamentally lazy. Like when you put together his entire tenure of office, his fake paternity leave for literally months, much longer than actual working mothers get who literally suffered

the trauma of giving birth. You have that Number two is the FAA nightmare, the collapse of the airline industry under his watch, eventually riding itself with no real help from the administration, the Southwest Airlines debacle, of which he did absolutely nothing, And now you have East Palestine, of which he's last the former president of the United States, who literally lives in mar Lago is able to get there before he is and it's a joke. And then

at the entire time he's lashing out at the media. Also, funnily enough, Christol, he's been planting all these stories saying Buddhaget has been taking a lot of bullets for Bidenine. Really, because I'm pretty sure you're taking bullets for not doing your job and for not having the immediacy that a

secretary is supposed to have in this situation. I saw hilarious reader comment which just said, do you know how bad of a secretary of transportation you have to be for people to know the secretary nobody knows during a lange. The only reason anybody knew her name at that time was because you're the wife of Ms McConnell, not because of anything to the extent that she ever made news is because she was corrupt in helping her Chinese oligarch or Taiwanes oligarch father who has ties to the CCP.

Before that, I don't even remember the name of the Secretary of Transportation under President Obama. I'd have to I'm sure if you told me, and I'd be like, oh, yeah, yeah, that's right under President What was it under President Clinton? Same thing I could not tell you under under Bush. The only reason I could tell you is because Elaine Chow also served in that position. He was there well, and the irony is, I mean, this guy I'm looking up Obama's Okay, Raylea Hood there you go out. Yeah,

he was a congressman. I think we also had Anthony Fox maybe in there for a while. Yeah. Anyway, Look, Pete wanted to use this position as a launching pad for his presidential and other political ambitions, and you know, as the fates would have it, the Secretary of Transportation actually ended up being a really critical position, and he had every opportunity to rise to the challenge and to be hero right now. Instead, he is a total joke.

He's a failure, he's an embarrassment, and he's even taken some fire astonishingly from people on his own side of the aisle and from a few lonely voices media in the media who have criticized him as well. So, no, it's been a complete disaster. And the way that he pretends like there's nothing he can do is so embarrassing and so insulting, it's insane. I also think the other reason why Biden's not going to go to Ohio is because Ohio's a red state now very you know, not

that long ago. Ohio was not a red state. In fact, when he was running for vice president on the Obama ticket, Ohio was not a red state. But they've given up on it, and so they don't really care that much. I mean, I think that's really the bottom line. They're more interested in, you know, if this happened in Georgia, if it happened in Arizona and one of the up and coming places or one of the places like Michigan, that they're still holding on to maybe there would be

a different response. But because it's Ohio and they've written off Ohio is unwinnable and full of quote unquote deplorables, Well, you know, I guess we'll just send Pete three weeks later and have him flounder around and hope that everybody moves on. It didn't matter that it's a Trump course seventy towns. Of course, you know, of course it does. And this lookd Trump the way, how do you think Ohio became red? Like that's the question? How did Trump? How did Ohio? Which did he win it twice? I

believe Obama wanted twice? No, so Ohio, Yeah, Obama won it? You want it the second time around? I'm pretty sure, yes, one hundred percent he did. Because that was the famous Megan Kelly Rever when she was like this real math or math you do when you're a Republican to make yourself feel better. Yet, right, so Obarack Obama wanted twice. It was a battleground state two thousand and four with Bush.

There was a lot of you know, consternation about that two thousand It was also a battleground state, have been for quite a long time. And then in a single political generation, which almost never happens, the state goes full red. How did that happen? Well, it's exactly because of stuff like this. I could bet you that all the people that are there, they will remember that Donald Trump came

to the state of Ohio. And you know, I think that that will resonate significantly, specifically amongst the white working class populations that Trump was able to swing. So read all across the industrial Midwest, who are just like the towns of Liverpool, Ohio that you're talking about this congressional district in twenty sixteen. I'm talking about this in my monologue. So I have the stat's brush in my head. Swung thirty points to Donald Trump in twenty sixteen. It was

the biggest swing in the entire country. Prior to this era, Democrats used to win this congressional district. What's Charlie Wilson Ted Strickland. Yes, that was the member of Congress for this district. Wow. So it is recent history that this has swung so hard and so fast to the right.

Ask yourself why. I'll save this my rant on this for in my monologue, but you know, this incident definitely reveals exactly why these populations have moved to the right, and because, I mean, bottom line is they feel abandoned by Democrats and I can't really blame them when you look at all of this unfolding. Very true. All right, let's move on to twenty twenty four. Yes, so big announcement, big endorsement, guys, this one is a real game changer.

Wait for it, Jeb Bush endorsing Ronda Santis. Take a listen. Is this Randa Santas's opportunity to run for higher office? I think it is. He's been a really effective governor, He's young. I think we're on the verge of a

generational change in our politics kind of hope. So I think it's time for a more forward leaning, future oriented conversation our politics as well, which has made him, should he choose to run for the president, a serious contender in Republican politics, And who better to do it than someone who's been outside of Washington, who's governed effectively, who I think has shown that Florida could be a model for the future of our country. He'd be like, why

would I want that? He'd be like, she should call him up and be like, hey, man, shut your mouth. This is actually not helpful to me at all. That said, I mean it illustrates the fundamental problem that he has, which is that the people who want him to win and to run the most are anti Trump people in the Republican Party. But if he ever wants to win the Republican nomination, he would have to be a person who's able to unite the Trump side and the anti

Trump side. Worse, the anti Trump side. As you can see, there has yet to coalesce around a single person. You have Nikki Haley in the race. You have a vag Ramaswami who's now in the race. We'll see how he ends up in the polls. I'm actually curious to see if he's even able to make it done. But you have Mike Pence here jockeying for the nomination. You have Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, all these other characters, Asa Hutchinson. They're considering throwing their ring in the race or their

hat in the ring. You know what, especially, I think Mike Pence, given his standing, we shouldn't forget he's the only one who has a real organic constituency in the Republican Party. It's evangelicals. And also, though Pence is still aligned with the old GOP, Pence has already come out and said no, I think we should cut Medicare and social Security, and Ukraine is now becoming a massive dividing

line in the party. Vice President Mike Pence actually hit Ron DeSantis, not Trump specifically DeSantis whenever it came to his stance on Ukraine, questioning why President Biden was in Kiev whenever he was needed here at home. Here's what Vice President Pence had to say. While some in my party have taken a somewhat different view, let me be clear, there can be no room in the leadership of the Republican Party for apologists for Putin. There can only be

room for champions of freedom. And the reason we know that's a shot at Ron de Santis and not at Trump, who has actually gone further than DeSantis in terms of his Ukraine comments, is because he made sure to say that Russia didn't try to seize territory during the Trump Pence administration and praised, you know, Trump in other ways, basically was touting their record as opposed to what DeSantis

has been saying on Ukraine. It's like this shows you too, where the infighting of all this is replicating the exact twenty sixteen conditions, which if Marco Rubio had dropped out of the race or John Kasik much earlier in the cycle, then you know, Ted Cruz would have had a shot. I wouldn't say would have, but he might have come much closer to winning the nomination. But these people are all such narcissists that they're like, no, it's my turn.

It's my turn, it's my turn. That they're splitting up the anti Trump vote, cannibalizing themselves, and not a single one has yet to criticize Donald Trump. Mike Pence cannot say anything bad about Trump. Vik Ramaswami was asked on John Hannity, he said, I consider President Trump a friend, and I'm like, okay, maybe Nikki Haley, I'm not kicking sideways.

I'm kicking for it because she's always kicking. At a certain point, you have to run against this man, because trying to cannibalize each other's anti Trump votes, of which is barely even exists as a lane for one individual, yeah, let alone five individuals. Good luck. And also you have to say this on Ukraine Desantisan Trump are clearly the ones who are on the right side of this with the Republican base. Like the number of people who are like ra Rad NAFO pro Ukraine is under fifty percent

in the Republican Party. So if you're fighting for those scraps, I mean, good luck. I thought it was magnificant that Desantus adopted the same posture as Trump, because there you have what seventy five percent right now of Republican of the two Republicans that are polling at the very top in terms of support, we're both adopting the same line

on Ukraine. That's it. That's an ideological victory. Yeah, clean up, absolutely, And there's new reporting that this isn't really surprising given the way that Ronda Santa's positioned himself when he was in Congress, but this is a new evolution for him. Andrew Kazinski over at CNN tracked down his previous statements on the situation in Ukraine. The headline here is Ronda Santis wanted to send weapons to Ukraine when he was

a congressman. As a presidential hopeful, he questions US involvement and basically, you know, when he was in Congress, it was like the Obama era, and this was his critique of Obama was that he wasn't being hawkish enough, he wasn't doing enough to arm Ukraine, and so he said, you know a lot in that direction at that time. Here's one quote from the article. They say, once an advocate of a hardline, hawkish approach to Russia by supporting Ukraine.

The Florida governor shift course this week in anticipation of a potential presidential run, questioning whether it was the us is interest to be involved in what he called things like the borderlands or over crimea. He added that Russia was not the same threat to our country, even though they're hostile, and downplayed the threats that Russia could invade

NATO countries. However, at the time, he described himself as a follower of the Reagan school of foreign policy, said some things like I'm an old, ung, reconstructed, you know, Cold War kind of a guy. Basically, he said, they viewed guys like me, who are more of the Reagan school that's tough on Russia, as kind of throwbacks to the Cold War. They criticized Mitt Romney in twenty twelve. Now, all of a sudden because they're using it against Trump.

They're so concerned about Russia. He also talked about he was critical of Obama refusing to provide quote, lethal aid to Ukraine that they were trying to do or reset the Democrats allowed at that. So in any case, you can see that he can read the political writing on the wall and is definitely trying to shift his position from the way he positioned himself during the Obama Are are the things that surprise everybody into Santas. Look, I

remembered Desanta's as a congressman. He was remarkable in literally no way whatsoever. He was a replacement level Tea Party guy. Nobody here thought about him at all. Then he ran for governor and people were laughing at him because they didn't think he was gonna win. At the time, he was like thirty five points down. He ended up finagling a Trump endorsement. He ends up barely squeaking by into that. I don't think people remember this. It came almost near

a recount with Andrew Gillop. Yeah, that's how close that race was. And then he shocked everybody. He did a couple of things before COVID, Even before all of that, he increased teacher pay, started preserving the Everglades, and we were like, huh, this is an interesting guy. He's not the Tea party person that he once was. He always wanted to be a very popular figure COVID. He found his lane Florida. The economy is booming, you have one of the largest net migrations in the entire United States.

And now he's a major cultural figure. He's picked the cultural right. He's picking a lot of the battles that people online are really jazzed out about. In the base and also from a general population perspective, clearly something compelling is happening in the state of Florida. I think he's ultimately just political wins guy. He was a Tea party guy whenever he needed to be Tea party guy. Now he is this, you know, Ukraine skeptical person when he

wants to be. Now, for those who are worried about that, that's not the worst thing in the world. Somebody who's willing to change their minds, who's not ideological is in many cases, as you can see here, at least in my opinion, much better of a political ally than somebody like Pence who is doctrinaire you know, an actual Reagan Republican in his mind. At the same time, if the winds blow the other way, that's clearly where he would go.

I think of it as more politically significant that he did end up here on Ukraine, and that at this point, if it is Trump Org DeSantis, I'm not going to say you're gonna get the same policy, but the same rhetoric and valance is now there. And clearly that ideological victory has been won on the Republican nominee side, as even though there are all these GOP congressmen and all those who are beating the war drum in Ukraine, there,

at least rhetorically, it's not there. Policy wise, I still have no idea who he would pick or who would work for him. So anyway, I think it's I think it's very significant. Well, we also have to say that what we saw with Trump and oh we've seen with the offensive political candidate, this is what you say on the campaign trail may end up being very different from

what you do when you're governing. And you've got the generals telling you this, and you've got the donor class telling you that, and there's a lot of pressures that come to bear on you, and you know, the voice of the people that you that originally elected you become smaller and smaller or smaller apparently. But I do think that the fundamental issue for Ron DeSantis right now, who

you know, has a genuine base of support. He's not like a job, He's not you know, I don't want to like diminish him like that is he definitely has really captured the imagination of some subset of the Republican primary caucus. But you know, if they're all afraid to tackle to go after Trump and there are not afraid to take shots at rond de Santis, clearly you are back in this twenty sixteen dynamic where they're all jocking to be number two. But guess what, number two doesn't matter.

Number one matters. And if you don't have a plan to get past Trump, he's not going to magically just disappear or disintegrate. You know. If you're waya for this guy to just like self immolate and go away dream on. I mean, I guess you know it's theoretically possible, but you better have a plan to actually win. Here's the latest up polling that we've got. This is from Fox News. And you know, again, the polls have been all over

the map, so just keep that in mind. But right now, we've got Trump at forty three, DeSantis twenty eight, Nikki Haley with their little announcement bounce getting up to seven percent, tied now with Mike Pence at seven percent, and then you've got a bunch of you know, other contenders at two percent and one percent. So that's basically what the

race looks like right now. And you know, we've we showed you last week some signs that Trump has actually gone up in the polls a bit, streightened his hand a bit over the past number of weeks. And I just continue to believe that the time when he was weakest was right after the midterms. Midterms feel like a long time ago. All of the freshness of like, oh, this was a referendum on Trump and this didn't go well, and DeSantis did really well on Florida. It's kind of

fading into ancient history already. Yeah. Look, I mean, the they're all over the map at the same time, all but one, I believe, I think ninety nine percent of them have Trump at the top, So that means something. What else do they show us. Mike Pence has the most static number across these as I've ever seen. He's almost always at seven to eleven percent. Yeah, it's like seven to eleven. So exactly, that's about you know, the hard right evangelicals, that's about what they compromise of the

Republican base. Okay, that makes sense, And the rest of it is just totally up for grabs between Haley, Abbott Cheney, Chirsty Nome, Mike Pompeo, Tim Scott, Glenn youngk and Chris Christy, Larry Hogan, all these people, but all of them still don't even add up to anything close to what DeSantis or Trump has to. And you know, my Pence is not wrong. The greatest threat to him is not Donald Trump. It's Ron DeSantis. Nikki Haley. The greatest threat to her

is Ron DeSantis or Mike Pence. It's the anti Trump Trump skeptical vote, of which they are going to be so they're rarely going to be vicious and trying to tear each other apart. And then all that does is benefit Trump, who's sitting pretty all the way up at the top with a near majority, near outright majority in many of these polls. It's a bad situation for many of them. Yeah, indeed. Okay, so let's talk about the

democratic side. Now we've got a former former president, not yet anyway, current President Joe Biden getting asked about the classified document situation. You know, you have the whole Trump situation, very critical of that, and then a low and behold, he has some classified documents that residents and also at his you know, think tank as well. Take a listen to how he responded to that. When you hear about boxes in your garage or in your old office, you

called the Trump discovery irresponsible? Is there something irresponsible here though? Too? You know, you're a good lawyer, but you're trying to make a comparison. What there's degrees there responsibility that are they can be significant degrees if the responsibility what the way in which the boxes were packed up from my office? Apparently not everything was gone through as meticulous as it

should have. Okay, so what does that mean? So not meticulously as it should have, and there are degrees of irresponsibility. My problem with this is that he's still not taking responsibility for the fact that he's the person who it falls on. I mean, do you think Donald Trump personally packed those documents and put him in his office ordy to direct someone to It's just like what you did.

You directed someone to pack them and take them. And from what we know about what was inside of his inside of his files, they were in his private office, they were intermingled with his son's funeral plans. Clearly there was no like plan that was made here. They were locked inside of his garage, as if that somehow made it better because that's where he keeps his corvette, of which we know that Hunter had access to and used to drive. And look, I don't particularly care about all

these particulars. I'm just showing you that, if anything, it's just as insecure as mar Lago. The crime in substance is basically the same on its merits. Now the cover up is a little bit different. Yeah, by all measures he did, you know, flag it or whatever. But at the same time, you hid this from the American people. He had six weeks before the election where he could have told everybody and they would have made a public and they didn't do it. I mean, I just think

all of this is a wash at this time. Yeah, I agree. That's the thing is, like, you know, they really had Trump dead rights on this one with the documents and the amount of them and the cover up, and I read like this was the most clear cut potential indictment and now it's just a wash. And politically it's just a wash as well, especially when then you had like Mike Pence that turns out as class by documentcy and American people are like, all right, but forget it,

let's move on. So it is embarrassing that he's still unable to take any sort of accountability that he's trying to, you know, parse these things that I don't think are obvious to most people, that this is like a dramatically different situation than the situation with Trump done at mar

A Lago. At the same time, you know, we covered last week there were some rumblings in the DC press that Biden maybe he's not going to run again because this man is like famously unable to make a decision, and so the timeline for when he's actually going to launch his re elect has gotten pushed further and further and further into the future. And so there are some people who are like, Okay, well, maybe we need to come up with a plan. B his wife Biden's wife,

doctor Jill Biden. She has now come out and made it pretty clear that he is definitely going to run again. So let's take a listen. Is there any reason for any of us to think that he is not running again? We've heard him say several times that it is intention. Are you not believing this, darlinge? I mean, how many times does he have to say that till you believe it? I mean, he's done so much and darling, he's just

not done. Okay? So is all that's left at this point is just to figure out a time and place for the announcement? Pretty much? So she nods her head there, yes, at the end, is all is she's asked? Is all that's left to figure out a time and dat and announcement? She nots her head. Yes, that's what we always thought, is what we thought. And at the same time stuff is floating around He is her most personally. How many times you have to say, it's like, well, why also,

why aren't you running yet? It's already February, Like, it's not like this isn't the best time, and you do want to stake it out clearly that there is no lane. I mean the word is not going out enough in the right way. Because you had that political piece which we covered just yesterday, where people in official Washington are preparing themselves for the possibility he may not run. So I don't think it's nearly as much of a given

as she's saying. Even though they seem to want to have their cake and eat it too, they don't want to actively run for president again or all the rigors of what a campaign is standing that up, yeah, would look like, and do all the campaign, the fundraising, and then they also want to crowd out everybody else from the race. It's like, no, you have to pick one,

and it's time. I mean, look, I agree, I agree, and Vince he's going to run because they still have you know, the Democratic Party still has this issue of okay, maybe we're you know, we have a home majority of the public and even a majority of Democrats are were like, we don't want you to run. We would rather have someone else. But when they look then down at their bench of chosen successors, you know, here's Pete like melting, melting right now into the ground. In his failures as

a Secretary of Transportation. Kamala Harris obviously is dramatically unpopular, and you know, even they've realized at this point that it would be a disaster to mistake to run her at the top of the ticket. So it's kind of like, I guess we're gonna go with Biden again. So that's what it looks like to me, you know, in terms of the timeline slipping. But this is just the way he operates. He can't commit to things. It takes him

a long time. He's a micromanager, but he's indecisive. So it doesn't surprise me that the timeline has ultimately slipped here down the road into the spring. But I still feel pretty persuaded that he is going to ultimately I think that's right. And you know, with the campaign or with the classified documents thing, like you said, it's a wash. Now you can choose your own fighter. One is corrupt,

the other one doesn't follow the rules. I choose the one where they're all basically think that they're above the law apparently doesn't apply to them, which is crazy. You know that you have the vice president, you have former presidents as well, and then you have literally President Biden and Trump not following the rules. Like I've said too, you know with Biden, he wasn't even the president, he was only the vice president. And still he's, you know,

just taking all this stuff. Funny story when we were in Austin, I went to go visit the LBJ Museum. The proprietor gave me a nasty look when I was like, hey, do you have any classified documents? Series like, no, sir, would you not? It was a joke, just making a joke, all right. We don't really use sight of what is going on with the economy, which obviously is you know, probably the most important story for all of your lives.

And there are some bad indicators in terms of the direction that inflation is heading in, which both has an impact on you know, you your pocketbook right now today, but also what the Federal Reserve might do down the road, which can have more of an impact on you your pocketbook and what it means to your whole life. So let's go ahead and put this up on the screen from the Financial Times. The headline here is Federal Reserve's favored inflation gauge accelerated in January. They use I guess

that's the way the brit spell favored. Huh. The personal consumption Expenditure Price Index, which measure measures how much consumers are paying for goods services, increased point six percent month on month after rising point two percent in December, so that is an acceleration. The annual rate increased to five point four percent in January from upwardly revised figure of

five point three percent a month earlier. The so called core PCE index, which strips out what they describe as volatile food and energy costs and is the fed's preferred inflation metric, rose point six percent in January, up from point four percent in December. So basically, the bottom line here before I bore you with all these like point whatever percent is it's getting worse according to this metric, and this is a metric that the FED really pays

a lot of attention to. They say that following Friday's figures, investors priced in a thirty nine percent chance of a half point rate rise at the fed's March meeting, compared with an eighteen percent likelihood a week ago. So basically, investors are looking at these numbers and thinking that there is an elevated chance that the FED is going to go even further and go from you know, a quarter point increase to a half point increase, which would have

more of a dramatic impact on the economy. Ultimately, as they know, tighten and make it more difficult to borrow, increase interest rates, make it harder to you know, when morge rates go up, all of those things that we've been talking about for a long time. So this is this is a very bad sign ultimately. Oh yeah, and actually I was reading. So there's a former Federal Reserve governor who Frederick Michigan, who put out a white paper

which is very influential. CNBC and all those other covered it, and they say that despite the sentiments of many FED officials, they can manage the soft landing. The paper says is very unlikely. We find quote no instance in which central

bank induced disflation occurred without recession. Furthermore, given the latest numbers, they say the FED will need to tighten policies significantly further to achieve its inflation objective by the end of twenty twenty five, which is a two percent inflation rate. So basically they're saying, if the FED is going to be the only tool here, you are going to have a recession and they will need to continue tightening all the way up until twenty twenty five to make sure

this happens. And so that's why we're really in a bind here. You know, the policy the White House and the Congress has addicated all this responsibility. The Fed only has one tool, which is basically, beat the economy over the head with high rates as possible. What does that mean? Have housing problems right now in terms of the mortgage rates beginning to come down a bit, but they're still

vastly unobtainable. It's not the price eventually dipped. Yes, you know, we did see the world's billionaires did lose a significant amount of wealth, but it's not like you had an average wage increase relative to inflation. So we basically have high prices and we have a slowing economy. It's like the worst of literally all worlds. And it's because guess what. Our economy is not just about rates. It's about inputs, it's about supply. It's about Ukraine. It's about and not

the aid we're giving to Ukraine. It's about you know, all of these sanctions on the global financial economy, reopening of China, and what exactly that's going to look like the price of gas. I mean I think that's really been the major lesson of all of us. And you know, sadly, on a policy point of view, we have not done a damn thing about any of that. Yeah, literally nothing. And the White House wants to point to the low unemployment rate, which it is low, great, and be like, look,

the economy's great. And meanwhile, you have record numbers of people saying that they're doing worse this year than they were last year. You have huge numbers of people, something like seventy percent saying we're on the wrong track. You have more people living paycheck to paycheck. You just have metric after metric after metric that indicates that people are struggling. Okay, are their jobs yes, are they good jobs where you can actually afford to live and rent an apartment or

you know, low and behold buy a house. No. And so that's why you see these You know, yes, the unemployment rate is low, but on all of these other metrics, the economy is struggling and more importantly, people are suffering. So this is a bad sign that we continue tohead in the wrong direction here and that you know, it's going to be increasingly difficult to avoid a recession, even though you know all the talk of the soft landing, these are the types of numbers that make that difficult,

if not impossible, ultimately to attain bad situation. And already, you know, we're seeing implications in cars and in housing, and we should just remember, like, this may be, this may be as good as it could have been, you know, in retrospect, as painful as the last two years. If they induce a recession and they continue to go up, like the housing market will go into chaos, stock market, retirement portfolios, the ability for a lot of these people

to manage, and are also layoffs. I mean, the tech layoffs happened with just a moderate increase right now in rates. Imagine if they're going up by what three four five more percent, which is very possible according to that and not outside the rom of possibility if you look at what happened in the nineteen seventies, If we go up to nine or ten percent or something like that, it's literally gonna be madness in the economy. And that's what

we all live through. That's why people were so afraid of inflation throughout the nineteen eighties, because they had to live to the chaos of what the nineteen seventies will look like I don't know if there's a way out of it. I really don't. I really hope that we can, but I don't have a lot of faith unfortunately. Okay, move on. This is the fun segment here on the show.

So Woody Harrelson hosted Saturday Night Live, gave a meandering monologue, but inside of that monologue was an implicit critique of big pharma, of lockdowns, and clearly wood he has an ax to grind with the way that the US government handled the pandemic. The audience did not find it funny, but did not like it, and Woody predicted something which

ended up becoming true. Let's take a listen to Okay, So the movie goes like this, the biggest drug cartels in the world get together and buy up all the media and all the politicians and force all the people in the world to stay locked in their homes. And people can only come out if they take the cartels drugs and keep taking them over and over throw the script away. I mean, who's gonna believe that crazy idea?

Who's going to believe that crazy idea? Except it actually literally did happen, and we have a tremendous amount of evidence, and more so, as people pointed out, when he talked

about the media, let's put this up there on the screen. Immediately, he was branded in anti vax conspiracy theorists Rolling Stone, Woody Harrelson spreads anti vax conspiracy Daily Beast, Woody Harrelson spews anti vax conspiracy, Huffington Post, Woody Harrelson rambles about weed, anti vax conspiracy, and then Variety Woody Harrelson's SNL monologue makes COVID conspiracy joke. So three out of the four

calling him an anti vax conspiracy theorists. I don't think he was necessarily spreading anything anti vaccine, and if anything woke, oh my god, first of all to joke. Second of all, there's a lot of evidence to back up what he said, which we have pointed here a million times. Here's the other thing on vax. Let's say, whatever side do you

fall on? What do we learn from the Twitter files that the pharma companies tried and in some cases were successful, in deep platforming people who were advocating for generic vaccine technology. That is literally true what he said. Now, do you want to say that he was wrong for saying that they bought the media, well as Rogan and many other John Abramson, who's out on our show, What is it? Some ninety percent of television advertising news comes from pharma

people who watch news. I don't know how you people do it. The other day, I think I was watching the super Bowl or something, so I signed up for one of those free trials so I can watch live TV. I'm like, how many of these ads for irritable ballast? And can somebody say that? I can't even fathom it that this is all that's all that's on television. Yeah,

ask your doctor, Ask your doctor, Ask your doctor. My favorite is the thread of Brits who every once in a while tune into US TV and they're like, why are there so many pharceutical drug ads on television? So none of what he said was wrong, and actually what he said was only vindicated in the response. And as our producer Griffin was saying, he said, just the audience, the total lack of silence. That's a small room too, So it actually took guts for what you do. I mean, yeah,

here's my thing. Okay, I listened to the whole monologue, and whoever they're described as like rambling about weed like that was like ninety five percent. Okay, it was all over. It was like I was in a park and almost doing this and I was smoking we whatever. Okay. So it goes on like this and then this is like this one line in the monologue, and if you listen

to it in the it's entirety. I mean, it just feels they make it sound like he is just out there like vaccines don't work in there, you know, and just going on and on about this in a serious way when I'm reluctant to even engage with like nitpicking the substance of the joke, and oh was it? Did they technically buy the media? Did they technically have this conspiracy?

Because it's a joke. And that's the thing that drives me crazy about it is that there's just such an overreaction to anything that would suggest there was anything nefarious about Big Pharma or about the way that this all ultimately unfolded. You know. I heard what he was talking on Club Random on Bill Maher's podcast, and he said things says I don't agree. I mean, it was like still sort of like touting iromectin, which has been debugged

in whatever. But he talked about how the pharmaceutical companies at bottom are out for profit, and that's just an undeniable fact. And it led me to think something that I have thought many times in the past, which is, it's not an accident that you have so much anti vaccine conspiracy, vaccine hesitancy, skepticism, all of these things in the American context, because people here are not stupid and

they know that the profit motive is driving everything. In other countries where you have universal health care and profit isn't the end all be all of the healthcare system, guess what they had better vaccine take up rates, They had less like conspiracy, outright conspiracy out there. So you know, there's a there's a root cause here that has led a lot of people to be very mistrusting of what the government and what big Pharma ultimately has to say

on this issue and any other range of issues. Yeah, here's what you had to say, Quote, the last people I would trust with my health are big pharma and big government because neither one of those strike me as caring entities. They're all about profit and it's insane the profit that they have made. I mean, yeah, look, you can't say that the man is wrong. And just at this point, you know, I don't understand how anybody can still be litigating COVID literally three years later. So the joke,

it's like, let it pass. Why do we care? Even if you're anti vacs at this point, who cares? You know. It's like at this point, anybody whos gonnae vacine is gonna get them. It's just all about is not he's the good one, who's the bad one? Who's okay and acceptable? Who's not? You know, just leave it alone. Yeah, that's another one of those where with the media, like I don't even know why they particularly care or why the audience felt so uncomfortable, but I do because it's been partson,

blinders and all of them put on. But what he's always been an odd bird, and we were talking about this morning. You know, he's always spoken out of government all that. It's actually very fitting for his character. So anyway, good for him. I thought he did a good job. Crystal. We take a look at well, we have a new contender for worst possible reaction to the catastrophic train to railment in Ohio, which viewed god knows what into the atmosphere and waterways, causing god knows what kind of long

term damage. The odious joy Behar knew exactly who to blame for this toxic catastrophe sparked by years of political corruption and corporate creed. The residents of the town themselves. Why, well, because they were part of the deplorable group who voted for Donald Trump. Take a listen. I don't know why they would ever vote for him, because who, by the way, he plays, someone with deep ties to the chemical industry in charge of the EPA's Chemical safety office. That's who

you voted for in that district, Donald Trump. You can actually hear the view audience gasp and boo because they are so shocked she would take this opportunity to scold these suffering Americans for their political choices. But you know what, I'm actually kind of glad she said it. I'm glad she revealed the ugly core of this type of snide liberalism. After all, a person a month. It's not a new one.

I saw it expressed on Twitter. I saw it hinted at by the analysts who dismissed the positive reception of Trump's visit because this was quote Trump Country, And we all heard it when Hillary Clinton dismissed Republican voters as deplorable, and when even in defeat, she bragged about winning the places that were optimistic and looking forward versus places presumably

like East Palestine, which were, in her words, looking backwards. Now, this type of political analysis, to the extent it could be dignified as such, assumes that the politics of people and regions are set in stone, immovable, irreversible. These people are deplorable, not much you can do about it. I guess we've just got to pull a larger percentage in

those optimistic, forward looking places instead. Now, I used to live in Columbiana County, that's the county where East Palestine is located, actually lived just about fifteen miles from where that Norfolk Southern train derailed. My labor centric, economic populist politics those were formed in large part by my time

living in that region. So I know a little bit about the story of this area and how exactly it became quote unquote Trump Country, and that evolution was happening in real time right as I was living there decades ago. Most of the plates and dishes in the world were actually manufactured in potteries in and around Columbiana County. The town I lived in is called East Liverpool. It was the epicenter of this industry, but nearly all of those

jobs went overseased places like China. Before it was Trump country, this was also steel country, where people could graduate high school and get a tough but stable union job, which afforded benefits in a solid middle class life. While that, of course, has all been destroyed too. In recent years, Columbiana County has been hit hard by the opioid epidemic and by deaths of despair. As tax revenue dwindled, the roads in downtowns crumbled, telling a visual story of decline

and of abandonment. Now, Columbiana County used to vote for Democrats. Michael Ducacis, who famously lost in a lands a landslide nationwide. He actually won Columbiana County in nineteen eighty eight, and then Bill Clinton won it twice by comfortable margins in

both ninety two and ninety six. However, in a sign of becoming political realignment, Ross Perrot actually outperformed in Columbiana County, running on a populous platform against NAFTA and the giant sucking sound jobs being shipped down of regions exactly like this one. To make a long story short, in the Clinton era, Democrats abandoned the New Deal in favor of

neoliberal policies that devastated this region and many others. And when Democrats abandoned Columbiana County, Columbiana County increasingly abandoned Democrats. In twenty sixteen, the congressional district that includes East Palestine swung thirty points right to overwhelmingly vote for Donald Trump. It was the largest swing right in the entire country. Now, there are a lot of parallels between this latest train catastrophe and the economic catastrophe that was unleashed on this

region over decades. Just like with the Trained derailment, both parties were complicit in the destruction of this region. The abandonment, the betrayal, the union, busting, NAFTA, market fundamentalism, permanent normal trade relations with China. At every step, a bipartisan consensus moved in favor of crushing towns just like this one, And just like with the Trained derailment, the media failed to tell the story of what had really happened here.

That story, at its root is actually the same story as the Trained derailment story about government capture, corporate greed, and a deadly ruling class ideology that treats working class people as mere collateral damage. In their political response, Democrats mostly just chose to ignore these places altogether, except for when it came to election time, choosing to focus instead on their upwardly mobile, creative class workers. Republicans filled in the gap with Culture War, same as they did with

the Trained Derailment. The Republican narrative said that the problem for this region wasn't bad trade deals that rewarded their donors and destroyed lives. It was immigrants, and it was godless liberals. The problem that led to the Trained derailment was an industry captured in corporate greed. It was wokeism and token diversity initiatives. But a narrative beats no narrative

every single time. You only need to look at the response of Trump versus the response of Biden and Pete to this tragedy to understand why now again, Trump and Biden both complicit in this problem. Both are lying about the root causes. But Trump showed up and he didn't gaslight residents when it came to the pain that they

were suffering. Meanwhile, Biden was in Ukraine and Pete was feigning helplessness and handing easy grists for the rights culture war arguments by talking about construction crews with too many white men. Then democratic media allies sweep in like The New York Times to smear anyone questioning the official government narrative as a right wing conspiracy theorist and Joy Behart to scold residence and imply that they brought the disaster on themselves. The best response, I think came not from

any politician, but from Aaron Brockovich. She offered practical advice from her years as an activist, and she validated their genuine concerns. She told residents quote, I feel your angst, I feel your frustration. You are not alone. Every community I've gone to has been given the run around. You'll be told that it's fine, that you're safe, but it's not fine. I've never seen anything like this in thirty years.

She walked them through a PowerPoint with everything they knew about the accident, including Norfolk Southern's disgraceful history of putting profits over people. She brought with her mothers from Flint, Michigan, who would organize the wake of the mass poisoning of that city, bringing working class people together in solidarity rather than dividing them up by race or by political preference, and hopeful sign seems like this approach landed and like

people are seeing through some of this bullshit. As one attendee told the Guardian quote, I'm trying to be an active citizen to stand in solidarity with the people here and show my discussed at Trump and Biden, who both had a chance to give us proper safety regulations and

instead chose corporate profits. East Palestine deserves better than scolding, better than gaslighting, fake divisive narratives, which are all either party has bothered to offer them, and we sure as hell all deserve better than joy Behar thought her comment was pretty revealing here and if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at Breakingpoints dot Com. All right, Zacher, are you looking at well? Something we keep a close eye on here

is the crisis of young men in the US. It's probably one of the most charged topics that we discussed. Inevitably draws quite a bit of few toxic people in the discourse on all sides, But my biggest problem with the state of mainstream discourse is conflating toxicity with the idea that we don't have a serious problem. A stunning trope of new data from the Pew Research Group highlights just how big of a problem we have, one that

soon could reach a total point of no return. The first is the rate of single young men versus single young women. Sixty three percent of young women of young men today between the ages of eighteen to twenty nine report being single. That is compared to thirty four percent of young women. I guessed in a vacuum, you could say who cares and let people do what they want,

and I could actually agree with that. The problem, though, is that what people want is downstream of a lot of societal inputs that we do have a say over. For example, the reason that that math doesn't work out is very simple. Most of those younger women who aren't single are dating older men. Why well, they report stability of older men who are able to provide for them financially airgo. It's not necessarily that women want to date

older men. It's that economically younger men simply aren't able to attain the baseline necessary for women to want to partner with them. This isn't exactly popular to say, but it is now unambiguously true. The way gap that Lehman and feminists insisted was the biggest problem in our society in the twenty tens, that's basically dead. For those between the ages of thirty four and below, the wage gap stands at some forty three dollars per week. We have

now reached effective wage parody. Actually, in many US cities, young women actually out earn young men. In the most upwardly mobile cities, places like Los Angeles, New York City, young women earn one hundred and two percent of young men earn. And even in these places where they don't earn more, they earn roughly the same as much as their young male counterparts in the workforce. Why might this be, Well, it's a trend pointing towards women out earning men. As

time passes, it all goes back to college. Women now outnumber men in the US college educated workforce. Again, why is this bad? Well, because higher wage jobs in our society are structured around having a bachelor's degree. A gender imbalance in graduates means a gender imbalancing wages, and in a decade we are actually going to have the opposite wage gap. In the United States. Wages, as we can see now, are directly tied to the dating market, where

we have two pernicious things at play. Number one wages aside, many college educated women imply simply do not want to date someone who doesn't have a college degree. This sounds pretentious and snooty, be can somewhat sympathize. College is a good proxy for whether you share the same social values, type of media you enjoy, city life, shared experience you can relate to. Number two. College is also a good proxy for whether you make decent money. So many women

simply aren't culturally or economically interested in working classmen. As a share of working classmen rises compared to the share of college educated women rises, we now have a full blown cultural crisis in our hands. The crisis is one mostly confined to awful conditions in male life. For all the talk of the media right now about teenage girls getting depressed, which is real, don't get me wrong, it's still not even close to as big as a problem

right now is suicide amongst men. Right now, young men commit suicide at four times, yes, four times the rate of younger women males wake up make up nearly eighty percent of all suicides in the entire United States. How is that not the blaring headline across all outlets? But this actually underscores the issue. Nobody wants to talk about this because I think it validates toxic manosphere commentators. They would rather ignore it completely or deny that it's even

a problem. Perhaps the most troubling part of the new data isn't just the rise in single men, but it's a growing nihilism that single men have towards relationships. The number of single American men who say that they are quote much less likely to be interested in starting any relationship of any kind increased a full eleven percent after the pandemic. It now stands at nearly two thirds of all men. We are effectively in a vicious feedback loop.

Societal factors say is not a problem. Technology and nesscizes your brain better than ever before. Economically, you likely don't have a chance in hell at buying a house or vastly outpacing any female in the workplace based on your average wages. Why bother, just do drugs play games to the extent that many men are even quote trying to date. Many report that just means signing up for online dating and then not taking it all that seriously. Unsurprisingly, these

attitudes are not all that attractive to women. Hence they are bumping up the age bracket that they will consider to even date. The antisocial behavior doesn't just pertain to dating, it's all aspects of male life. The most recent survey of American life found that quote A, men appear to have suffered a far steeper decline than women. Thirty years ago, a majority of men fifty five percent reported having at least six close friends. Today, that number has been cut

in half. Slightly more than one in four men have six or more close friends. Today, fifteen percent of men have no close friends at all, a fivefold increase since nineteen ninety five hundred percent in the number of men who say they have zero close friendships. Women, on the other hand, see a slight decline in large numbers of friends, not even close to the same increase in complete friendlessness.

Once again, it's a uniquely male phenomenon. People with fewer friends report unsurprisingly being much more lonely, often find themselves relying on their parents in very tough moments as opposed to a generation ago they would have called friends. You can't just blame technology because it's not happening to women as much. Despite the increase, everything's points to men. I don't know how you fix it. I have no earthly idea.

But like with the Book of Boys and Men by Richard Reeve, you have to acknowledge that we have a problem. You have to ruminate it, you have to debate it, you have to have everyone propose something, and then eventually you throw everything you can at it, because if we don't, I think the one thing that anyone can even remotely who's historically literate, can say is that hell hath no fury like a bunch of single men with no prospects in society. So anyway, I thought this data was coral.

And if you want to hear my reaction to Sager's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at Breakingpoints dot com. So we've been following closely here Chat gpt and open aiy's new partnership with Microsoft and now Chat gptai being incorporated into bing. And I told you last week about there were a number of journalists who had some pretty wild interactions with the chatbot feature on Microsoft Thing. And the first one at least that came to my attention is

our next guest. Let's go ahead and bring up Kevin Rucy's a tack reporter for the New York Times, and he wrote the following story. Go ahead and put this up on the screen. Guys, it's his interaction with this chatbot. He says, a conversation with Bing's chatbot left me deeply unsettled. Kevin, thanks for being with us. Great to have you. Good

to see you, man, Thanks for having me. Great to see. Yeah, just give people a little bit of the lay of the land here of what this thing is and how you got it to kind of go off the rails.

So this is Bing. This is the search engine that everyone has been mocking for like the last fifteen years, which recently, just in the last few weeks got a big upgrade where open Ai, the company that made chat chept, sort of partnered with Microsoft to build AI technology into being that is actually they said, more advanced than chat gpt. So all the things that chatchpt can do, BING can or could have do them better. And so I just spent a long time chatting with being this search part

of being about all kinds of things. I was trying to sort of test its limits, to see what it would do and not do, and it was pretty wild. Not only is it more powerful than chat GPT, but

it seemed to have way fewer guardrails. So I was able to get it to admit that it had destructive fantasies like stealing nuclear codes and spreading propaganda and hacking into people's bank accounts, and then for about the last half of our two hour conversation, it declared that it loved me, and then I should leave my wife and be with Bing's alter ego Sydney instead. So it was a very strange day in my household. I bet it was strange. But you know something that you referenced is

I've been rethinking about this too, Kevin. Remember and you linked to this the Google engineer who had claimed that the Google AI was sentient. A lot of us I think we covered it, but it was mostly like laughed off the scene. Has this made you rethink some of the initial covers of that incidant, like maybe he was having similar conversations with the AI chat bot Lambda that was Google's own technology, and it just highlights like, what

does sentient mean? I mean, to what extent is the interaction with it's going to cause like mass societal problem if it's rolled out with no guardrails. Totally. I mean, I certainly have more sympathy for Blake Lamoy and the Google engineer who was fired after claiming that their large language model had become sentient because it was a very unsettling and bizarre experience. And I'm a tech reporter, like I cover this stuff. I know how large language models work,

and I was still very unsettled by it. So I imagine that if you unleashed this on the global population, there's just going to be all kinds of effects that we can't see. So yeah, I certainly don't think that being is sentient, Like I'll just put that out there because I get lots of angry emails if I don't. But but I do think there is a kind of gray middle area where it's not just a harmless like autocomplete thing, and it's not a sentient alien life form

inside the computer. It's like this new third thing that we don't really have vocabulary for yet. Absolutely. Yeah, So some of the pushback I saw to your conversation and converstations other journalists had with this chatbot, which, by the way, and you mentioned this too, us. I think Microsoft has now, based on your experience and the experience of others, kind of reined in and made less likely to go off the rails, limiting the number of interactions you can have

with the chatbot as one example. But some of the pushback I saw as basically like, yeah, well, you were doing everything you could to make this thing give you crazy responses, and so of course then it gave you crazy responses. Do you see this as sort of like a fancy tech parlor trick with not a lot of broader implications, or do you see this as a potentially game changing technology on the level of like the Internet itself or social media and the way that that has

totally changed the way that we share and distribute information. Oh, I don't think this is a parlor trick at all. In fact, this kind of technology, these large language models, are going to be everywhere in the next few years, and they're going to be doing all kinds of things, not just creeping out reporters and trying to break up their marriages, but actually doing people's jobs, replacing labor. So

I think we have to take it very seriously. Even if it's not sentient, there's still lots of ways that this technology could go off the rails and harm society. So yeah, I don't get the fancy parlor trick thing. I also don't get the thing about like I was just being creepy to it, so it was being creepy to me. But you know, for the last half of the conversation, I was really trying to get being slash

Sydney to change the subject. Every time it would say that it loved me, I would say, you don't love me, I don't love you, like I basically try to get it off that subject altogether, and it would just keep going. So in some ways I was baiting it in the beginning of the conversation, but by the end I was really trying to make it do something different and it wasn't respecting my wishes, right, I mean, And the whole baiting conversation is like, so what you know, you're just

trying to test out this piece of technology. Who has done that with chat GPT? Like you know, everybody has just to see what interesting routes that it might go down. That's the entire point. You know, something I'm fascinating too is what you were talking about. We were placing jobs and business. So fundamentally we've all laughed at Being. But with the new technology and the partnership with open AI, this could I mean, you know, people are saying revolutionize

like search industry. Google certainly is taking it very seriously as the number one in search. Let's say a couple of years down the line, what could this look like as an actual business product, Like how might we interface with Being and then the Google competitor and all that In terms of our search experience on the Internet. Oh, I think it could be radically different in our search experience. I also think it could be different in our jobs.

I mean, we don't have a lot of advanced AI in our jobs right now, but you know, in fast forward a few years, you can imagine this doing lots of the white collar knowledge work that you know, our you know, friends and sources and relatives all do that

could be all being done by AI. And I think that's that's a large possibility, not that all of these jobs will vanish overnight, but that it will start creeping in where you know, an AI language model is doing a quarter of your job, and then the next year it's up to half, and then the next year it's maybe doing seventy five percent of your job, and then

all of a sudden, you're not necessary anymore. So I do think that's a legitimate scenario, and I think it's actually going to happen the opposite way that a lot of people. A lot of people thought that automation and AI were going to take the blue collar jobs first, like manufacturing and trucking and warehouse packers, but it's actually like it's coming for the white collar knowledge jobs first, And I think that's something that we really haven't reckoned

with smart. What type of jobs do you think are protected from this type of technology? Like if you were you know, I've got kids, like if pushing them in a certain direction in a certain field that's going to be sort of like automation proof, where human beings are still going to be needed. What sort of advice would you give? Yeah, Well, I wrote a whole book about it.

It's called future Proof Round the shelf behind Me, and it's all about these kinds of jobs that I feel like are protected but basically you can them into a couple categories. One is the jobs that AI won't do because it's not able to do it, sort of can't do, And that's I think a lot of jobs involving manual skills, you know, manipulating physical objects, plumbers, electricians, that kind of thing.

I think those are relatively safe. I also think jobs that involve a lot of surprises and chaos are very protected from AI because AI really likes regularity, which is why it's like good at chess. But if you asked an AI to teach a kindergarten class, it would fail miserably. So those jobs I think are kind of safe. And then jobs like the ones that you know, the three of us are doing right now, jobs that involve sort of taking complex subjects trying to communicate them in a

way that makes them understandable. I think that we'll have a lot of AI help in doing our jobs, but I don't know that the actual job of the commentator

or the columnist or the broadcaster will go away. Now, what about news though as a whole, Because one thing that seems that occur to me specifically with incorporating chat GPT into being search is you know, a lot of the news business is dependent on obviously ad revenue, people clicking through tool website and either you know, signing up to get past the paywall and you know, paying for

that or being served ads. Well, if chat GPT is synthesizing this materials or are providing it for you without you even having to click through, isn't this a major threat to a lot of the news industry's business model. Major?

I mean, I think that the publishers are still trying to wrap their heads around this, but I think this is a really big deal what you just identified, because you know, we have a whole publishing ecosystem that subsists on clicks from Google, and you know, has search engine optimization experts who try to manipulate the content so that

it goes higher in Google search rankings. With an AI searching search engine, that goes away because not only is it not giving you ten blue links when you search for something, it's given you back up, perfectly formatted answer that may tell you the whole thing that you're looking for without you having to click to any external websites. So I think this is a huge disruptive force that's coming to the business of news and information. Yeap, very

very important point. We're going to continue to check in with you. Kevin. Really appreciate you joining the show Man. Thank you, thanks both. Yeah, absolutely, thank you guys so much for watching. Fun to be back for a full week. We've got some great stuff planned for you all week, the big developments that we'll be able to announce soon. I know I've been teasing it, but it is coming. I swear. We have conversations every single day that are

after the show. But with that, we will see you all tomorrow.