3/15/23: Russian Jet Shoots Down American Drone, Desantis Speaks On Ukraine, Tucker Scoffs Trump Foreign Policy, Is SVB Like 2008, Biden Approves Fossil Fuel Drilling, ChatGPT4.0, Women in Workforce, Ebola Outbreak to Covid Lab Leak

heard of it. Actually, how would you define woke if you had to, if you were like put on the spot, if someone was like, define wokeness, Yeah, I would say that. It's unfortunately a nebulous definition because we don't we have no consensus on what it means. It meant something very specific to the left at a point in time. It was then co opted by the right and has basically become a catch all for political correctness. I mean, that's essentially I think the correct definition is it's a stand

in for all the things that annoy me. It's a stand in for everything that people find annoying about the left. Now we need a version of woke to describe the excesses of the American right. We need it, We need a parallel broke. I think they go with woke. Like a bunch of right wing organizations are calling each other woke. Now.

I know, like if they do, if they do anything that isn't just like completely supportive of like a patriarchy, you'll have people in these right wing organizations who are like, I see wokeness, right, Wokeness is creeping in right. I mean essentially though it's just a it's a one syllable word for political correctness. Political correctness has always been clunky, and people mean ESG, they mean DEI when they say wokeness.

But essentially it's coming from this place that like we do need to reevaluate language, and people even use it to mean cancel culture, which you can say is also rooted in that question of political correctness. But I think that's part of the problem with the word is that it's just it means what it needs to mean to the person at the time they use it, right, And it's actually supposed to mean basically like a wake two injustice, right, And that's what it was originally coined. To describe. It's

a very very annoying term. It can be sometimes a helpful stand in when you are when I only at least I use it sometimes for political correctness, because political correctness is often just very clunk. It doesn't roll right off the top too. But we do have an actual programming note that's people noticed last week we only posted a few episodes of this show directly to YouTube clips

on Wednesday, a couple of clips. If you want to watch the entire thing, you can go to Breakingpoints dot com, sign up ten bucks a month, get the whole show part with that money once a month. You can also, though, get it through Spotify now. So in order to do that, so you go into your go into your Supercast account online, which you'll get if you part with your ten bucks.

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and I love the Spotify video feature. Have you used that? No, I don't have Premium Spotify. Oh my god, I just have that ad one. Oh yes, I love Premier Spotify. But the video function is fantastic. I actually pay for Breaking Points, so I should. I'm going to do this. Why do I do that? I mean, I do support it generally. I didn't want to, like feel like I

was mooching off of it. I like, genuinely like I like the idea of something that is funded by a lot of different people who have different viewpoints, right, so that you can, you know, tick people off, and then if some people on subscribe, it's like okay, fine, Soccer and Crystal. If if you're listening, Ryan and I would like ten extra dollars a month, Well, we have a really big show. Obviously. We're going to start with more

news out of Ukraine. We're going to talk about Tucker's Q and A with all the Republican candidates for president twenty twenty four, some of whom are announced, some of whom are not. On their positions of Ukraine. We're talking about developments in Silicon Valley Bank we have Ken Clippenstein, Ryan's colleague from The Intercept, here to break down some truly truly interesting reporting about Gavin Newsom's relationship with Silicon

Valley Bank. We're going to be talking about potential lablink, We're going to be talking about artificial intelligence generative AI. So it is a huge show today. We hope that you take that step and link your premium subscription to your Spotify account. All right's so let's get into the show. Ryan, talk to us about this Russian fighter jet down a United States drone operating over the Black Sea on Tuesday. According to US European Command, it was an MQ nine aircraft. Ryan,

you had a pretty funny reaction to the US statement. God, great, we're not at World War three yet, so we can laugh about it. But yees. So, basically two Russian jets, you know, basically intercepted a drone over the Black Sea. This happens fairly frequently around the world over the decades. And also while we're at war or well technically we are not at where we are supporting a party with

weapons that is at war with Russia. Right, We're hoping we don't actually get into a hot war with Russia, and so apparently these two Russian jets had a lot of fun with this drone. The military called it deeply unprofessional behavior. So I'm just picturing top gun style stuff like they were watching Maverick and maybe they flipped off this drone, which is funny. I guess you'd have to find the camera because you can't flip off the pilot, so you can flip off everybody back in Tampa, Tampa,

who's like running the drone. And then my favorite part was they dropped a little jit The Russian jets dropped a little jet fuel on the drone, and the military

complained that it was quote environmentally unsound. This is the military, who we know for a fact, produces you know, more climb and carbon emissions, I think than what ten you know, the ten biggest countries after it combined, dumps its own jet fuel in the Honolulu Honolulu water supply and oh also, you know, may have had something to do with the greatest environmental catastrophe of the last year, which was the North Stream pipeline. But yeah, you shouldn't dump jet fuel

on a drone. That's rude, It's it's environmentally nsound, it's an HR matter. It's definitely and it's going to hit Rush as Rush of the Russian military ESG score significantly. Well, my favorite part of the statement is that I really think they're devious enough to know this might work with like the slice of you people with Ukraine flags on the back of the preuses there they dump jet fuel

on the drone like now, I really hate putin. The drone did end up crashing, which is also environmentally on sound because now you've got a big drone pile of junk at the bottom of the Black Sea and the Russian one of the Russian fighter jets which apparently collided with the drone had to basically make emergency landing. Yeah, and this is so according to General US Air Force General James Hacker, he's the command of US Air Forces

in Europe and Air Forces in Africa. He said that before the collision, the Russian aircraft to Russian aircraft, including the one that was involved in the collision, had been harassing the US drone. So going back and forth it ends up in a collision. And that's a good example which we've had several from the first year of this awful war of how fragile the balances and how quickly

things can escalate. You know, this is another another sort of catastrophe that we have to really worry about, these kinds of things where something starts as harassment ends in an accident, and before people realize what's happened, things can escalate. And so the United States is summoning the Russian ambassador to have a conversation about this. Hopefully it's just a little talking to, you know, be more professional and an

environmentally sound in your harassment of our drones. We need to deconflict better so we don't have World War three and hopefully none of us ends up dying as a result of this. But that's the problem with prolonging this war that you'd never know what type of incident is going to trigger some type of escalation that nobody saw coming. You know, people feel like they have control of events in a way that history shows that they just don't.

If you look back at almost any war, you see that events kind of get out of the control of the men and women who are who think that they're the ones who are actually directing it. Yeah, no, absolutely, And you're right on your point about the longer this goes on the higher the chances become, the more time

it's possible for something to just go extremely wrong. You remember the what was the situation in a couple of months back with the missile right, and there immediately he reported Russian missile strikes Poland, right, and you have all kinds of completely reckless reactions. And you know, by the time it was pretty immediately clear that people were jumping to conclusions and having reckless reactions. And now there's more transparency.

Oddly enough, on Twitter, you can sort of see how, you know, the people in the Polish government are reacting, you can see how people in the United States government are reacting or in the media are reacting. And maybe that's all to all of our benefit. I'm generally pretty skeptical of that. But maybe when you have the public watching you really closely and saying poking holes in your theory of the case before you can do something extremely

stupid because you're trigger happy. You know, maybe that's a good thing, But at the same time, it's extremely hard to believe because to your point, Ryan, the longer that we're in this conflict, the longer there is or the more chance there is that something goes very very wrong for whatever reason, we can't know what it is yet, And the rhetoric out of the the Pentagon has actually

been comforting in this sense. On this occasion, they're calling the Russian pilots amateurs, just you know, the idea that they would make their criticism that it's environmentally on sound at least, that's so trivial that it makes it less likely. How dare you? Like, how dare you? And then we're like, oh, how dare you? Okay, we're going to have a duel now, and we're going to be you know, missiles are going

to be pointing at each other. So this this kind of stuff, calling each other amateurs and saying that they behaved unprofessionally is actually, paradoxically a little bit comforting. Yeah. A new way to duel, though, actually might be dumping fuel on each other. Must feel the fast. So I feel like that somebody was saying that that's kind of common, common way to harass each other up up in the sky.

I'm sure that you can dump a little bit of fuel on somebody if anyone wants to take Rhyan and me for a ride along, I don't know, not anywhere near the Black State. Yeah, well, thank you very much. I'll go to Tampa and like it happened. Yeah, Tampa is nice. Right before Happy hour. So, speaking of Ukraine, let's move on to Tucker Carlson's Q and A with every Republican, every possible Republican presidential candidate. Some did not respond, of course, over at Ukraine. It was almost like a

litmus test. He sent the same set of questions to every presidential candidate, and again some folks who have not announced, people like Christy nom people like Mike Pompeo who did not respond and got I think some really interesting responses that ended up roiling definitely conservative Twitter yesterday, but the Internet in general had a lot of reactions to what

people were saying to Tucker. The neo conservative branch of the Republican Party, which is under more scrutiny and more threats than ever before, even if they still have a lot of power, they're even getting backlash from establishment folks like Kevin McCarthy. They were really upset about what Ron DeSantis had to say, and Tucker himself said Ron de Santis's response to his questions was really the most newsy.

So we're going to start right and I are going to do kind of a rapid fire going through a bunch of these different responses. What do you want to start with, Well, let's start with I think we have Donald Trump. Yeah, let's see that one, all right, So if you look at your screen, you can see this here on the screen, but we'll read it for everyone else. Trump goes in and gives a very trumpy answer, most of which I would say is accurate. In Ukraine, There's not a ton to pick at here. He's very clear

that this is okay. So he says, the sad fact is that due to a new lack of respect for the US cause, at least partially buyer and competently handled, pulled out from Afghanistan. In a very poor choice of words by Biden and explaining US requests and intentions, Biden's first statement was that Russia could have some of Ukraine. No problem. I can't really channel Trump very well here. I don't remember Biden saying exactly that. I don't either, so maybe that is one of the things to pick up.

But overall he says of Ukraine, he's saying, at a staggering one hundred and twenty five billion dollars, we're paying four to five times more, and this fight is far more important for Europe than it is for the US. Next tell Ukraine that there will be little money coming from us. We've heard him say something to that except before. Yeah, we did, that's right in a little phone call. But he ends up by saying this can be easily done if conducted by the right president. Both sides are weary

and ready to make a deal. The meeting should start immediately. There's no time to spare. The death and destruction must end now. Properly executed, this terrible and tragic war, war that never should have started in the first place, will come to a speedy end. That's the part I think more Republican candidates, more Republicans in general, should zero in on this part where he says the meeting should start immediately, there's no time to spare. The death and destruction must

end now. That's perfectly put and to me, the rationale behind Trump here is kind of populism at its worst. If you think of Bernie as defined by is kind of not me us. Trump's like, no, there are no problems structurally and materially with the world that I just can't fix on my own the problem. The problem is

just that you don't have meat. So the problem is not that this war's going honest, that's being waged poorly, and it would be waged better by me, and it would be paid for by Europe if I were in there. And he even says he's going to charge them kind of back rent for all of the money that we've spent up up until now. So basically he's just saying, trust me, I got this. Like and he says he's going to meet with Putin, then he's gonna meet with Zelenski, then he's going to get him in the room because

he's such a good deal maker. I don't know if anybody still believes this about Trump, that he's this incredible deal maker, but that's basically that's basically his shtick, which is not saying that I would force an end to this war. Yeah, I think that's a good point. We have talked in the past about the theory of the

mad man what's Donald Trump? And there's actually some good reason to believe that other world leaders bought into that they is so unpredictable that maybe let's Yeah, when he's tweeting about the size of Kim Jongen's button on a Saturday night at eight pm. Who knows what the hell this guy is going to do, So I think there is something to that. I don't think that's what he's necessarily doing intentionally, but I do think there's something to

do that. When Tucker asked him, what specifically is our objective in Ukraine and how will we know when we've achieved it, he says, our objective in Ukraine is to help and secure Europe, but Europe isn't helping himself. Basically, there's there's like five more questions here. Do you believe the US faces the risk of nuclear war with Russia? And to your point, Ryan, he says, it depends on

who the President of the United States is. And then Tucker asked, given that Russia's economy and currency are stronger than before the war, do you believe the US sanctions have been effective? No, they have not been effective, just the opposite. Should the US support regime change in Russia? No? Again, you can definitely quibble with the language, and I think

your point is a very good one. At the same time, there's also some really good stuff in this response that probably sets the tone for the less the rest of the Republican Party going forward. The neo Conservatives don't get upset about Trump anymore because they sort of expect some of this from him. You know, their friend John Bolton has told them about all of the meetings in the White House. But Desantas seem to really get under people's skins. So why don't we go ahead and pop that Before

we do? Let me just quibble briefly with Tucker's question here, where he says, given that Russia's economy and currency are stronger than before the war, do you believe that US sanctions have been effective? Problem of that question is that's not a given. Russia's economy is significantly worse off today than it was a year ago. The currency happens to be actually roughly where it was one year ago, after

you know, wild fluctuations. It's it's kind of the currency has stabilized, but that's in the in the face of inflation that makes ours look mild. So well, and it is. It doesn't mean that the sanctions are are a good thing. It doesn't mean that like driving Iran, Russian and China into a closer trading block is a good thing. But the premise of his question is just factually off. The

Russia's economy actually is not stronger. So for the war. Now, maybe you could argue it is more resilient in the sense that it's building tighter networks with our adversaries, but it's not stronger. So let's actually that's that's one of the answers that Christy Nome and Christy Nome had a surprisingly good and substantive answer on these questions. But she writes it's counterfactual to say that Russia's economy is stronger in the wake of the war. Team Nome right here there, Yeah,

Team Nome. Ryan Gram is all board the Gnome train. Let's go to the Dysantis element. That's the next one. So this is what really I think had a lot of people upset because you know, they just they expected better of Ron DeSantis in the neo conservative camp. Well, what did they expect of him? I was surprised they were upset by this because this, to me doesn't feel much different than what Biden. I'd say, except for some of the rhetoric. But why did this bother the right

so much? There's one right, yeah, the neocon right. I think a lot of other people were very happy with this answer. Tucker seemed to be very happy with this answer. But there's one phrase in here that's set off the kind of national review crowd, and that is territorial dispute. So DeSantis said, well, the US has many vital national interests.

Securing our borders, addressing the crisis of readiness within our military, achieving energy security and independence, and checking the economic, cultural military power of the CCP. Becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them. So this was that that phrase territorial dispute fell to the neoconservatives as though Ron de Santis was minimizing the conflict and minimizing its sort of global implications, of historic implications,

and minimizing Putin's ultimate goal. My response to that, and I think you'd probably have a similar one, which is that we actually have plenty of evidence at this point that Putin would be willing to have conversations about territory. Right. He may have wanted to take Keev and I think at some point he probably thought he could, He thought he had it. It's perfectly clear now that he didn't.

It's perfectly clear that now that he's not going to and he knows that, and that's why he has in the past, we've we've heard about scuttled negotiations, been willing to talk precisely about territory. At this point, I think it's perfectly accurate to call it a territorial dispute. And I think again gets to the delusions of the NA consect that this set them off. Yeah, what I found most interesting about this is that to me, it actually you hear the you've been hearing the phrase uniparty a

bunch lately. To me, it actually revealed how much there is a uniparty when it comes to foreign policy, because I see why that could trigger a kind of internescing battle on the right, you know, because it's a question of whether or not you're you're giving enough, you know, you're you're giving enough kind of weight to the struggle. But if you if you look close at what he's saying, it is very hard to distinguish from the current Biden policy. Well,

he says no regime change, which so Biden. Now, okay, I shouldn't say Biden policy, I should say American policy. Because Biden has said all sorts of things and then they go back to his advisors and they're like, well, no, no no, no, we don't mean regime change. So I don't think that the current American policy is actually regime change. I think Biden might say that because he just says whatever pops into his mind and it slips right out. Although I think you do hear that from other members

of the uniparty and media. You know, you're a apple bombs and certainly Apple apple bomb world for sure, but beyond that, so many while the US has many vital national interests and he names them, becoming further than tagled in this dispute is not one of them. This is

territorial dispute, is not one of them. That actually mirrors the way that the Biden administration says that this is not a you know, critical national interest which requires US troops or US direct US engagement like that is how that is specifically how Biden has rejected the calls from the more hawkish elements of both parties to get more aggressively involved, to give offensive weapons to Ukraine, because he says it's not a national interest to that degree, which

goes to exactly what DeSantis talks about, which is he says, we don't want to give kind of long range offensive weapons to Ukraine. Elsewhere he tries he's critical without saying what he would do differently, Like he says he's against a blank check. It's like, okay, well, we'll kind of check you for because a president of SANTUS with a leader McConnell and a speaker McCarthy would probably be showering just as much money on the war effort as Biden.

Maybe there would be some more, some more efforts to like, actually, you know, monitor where the money is going, but that's trivial compared to the size of the and scope of the effort. Yeah, I don't know about that. Because Kevin McCarthy signaling was a good example that Republicans in Washington, d C. With future interests, with electoral interests, are pretty terrified of the base and understand where the base is.

If you look at public polling and where the Republican Party and Republican voters are on the money to Ukraine. I think you see a trend in almost all of these answers, except for some of the predictable ones. Chris Christie's where you're getting to something here, Lindsey Graham, we have this next element. He actually compared what Desantas said, what Ron Desantas said to Neville Chamberlain. He said, the

Neville Chamberlain approach to aggression never ends. Well, I mean it just no, there's no winning if you stop short of regime change to them. And I saw somebody make this make the point on In response to that, he said, like, actually not an unpopular response here, but the Nevill Chamberlain

project actually does often work. Like it it didn't work against Hitler, Like that's true, but like negotiation to end a conflict does actually have a not that bad track record over the last you know, three hundred years when it comes to wars, Like that's that's how aggression and wars end is through negotiation. Sometimes you're going to have the most evil megalomaniac who's ever like walked the face of the earth, and that it's not going to work

against him. But the idea that negotiations don't work, yeah, Now, one man's negotiations is another man's appeasement. But that's that's what makes a negotiation. You're never going to come out of it with a complete victory, complete victory. That's that's total war right right exactly, And when people in the neo conservative can't use the word appeasement, it is absolutely infuriating because there's then you're just talking about, like you said, Ryan,

total war, and that's that's your other choice. So just say that we'll do rapid fire here through some of the rest of them. There there are some more interesting Tim scottline was hilarious. If we have this, I think we do so. Mike Pence gives a very what I would argue is a fairly near conservative Pence. He's carrying

the standard. He invokes, Yeah, he invokes the Reagan doctrine and says we support those who fight our enemies on their shores, so we will not have to fight them ourselves, and then goes on offense and says there is no room for putin apologists in the Republican Party. Tucker interpreted that as a barb at him in his reading of the Pence tweet. There's some other ones. Vekram Oswami basically

answered with an essay like really really long post. You can you can read all of this on Tucker's Twitter. By the way, I don't know what would you make what do you make of Pence's entire kamikaze kind of campaign that he's running. I mean, I enjoy watching It. Doesn't mean I'm a neo khon all of a sudden, but it is kind of fun to watch him. Just yeah, Kamakazi seems the best word, because it feels like this is not a path to victory for him, but he's

gonna do some damage along the way. It almost feels like when Bernie decided to run in twenty fifteen. It's like somebody e didn't think he was going to win. It's like, but somebody needs to get the message out there and have a debate over these issues. Almost feels like he feels like somebody has to like stand up for the ghost of Reagan. I think he really sees a path for himself, which is that when you have a very splintered, potentially a very splintered primary, we don't know.

One of the interesting things about this Q and A is we don't know how many people are actually running. These are people who are seriously exploring a bid, but we don't know how many of them actually end up on the debate stage, actually end up mounting campaigns and traveling and making a real effort, but it does look like a lot of people are flirting with a run.

And if that's the case, you have the Trump vote, you know, some thirty percent of the Republican base roughly, and then everybody else is split into these different camps, which is essentially how Donald Trump won the Republican primary in twenty sixteen, because you were either voting for Donald Trump or for one or the other against him. He's trying to he's trying to be that guy he's going to like stay in it long enough with that integrity,

and he's going to carry Reagan's mantle. You could see the sort of suburban Republican voter who's uncomfortable with DeSantis, maybe because he thinks that the Ukraine conflict is quote a territorial dispute, and you have Mike Pence, you know, arguing sort of against that. Then yeah, I think they think there's enough room. If everyone's voting against Trump, it

just needs to pick another flavor. Then maybe, now that Trump's support is down to you know, something around twenty five thirty percent, if another person can just beat that, that's their lane. So that's what I would make of Mike Pence's is he competing for that lane with Chris Christy, and should we finish with him. Yeah, let's throw Chris Christie's answer up on here the last element. He's the last element. We'll just go straight to that one. I

have no idea. I didn't even think there was a chance that Chris Christie would mount a bid at all. I guess Tucker has reason to think Chris Christie is on I guess Chris Christy's on Tucker's radar for some reason. And he answered the question the full throated kind of George W. Bush throwback kind of rhetoric completely, as though the Trump administration never happened. Yeah, Russia, Russia's aggression against Ukraine is a national security issue that threatens our alliances

and are standing in the world. Our objective is to assist Ukraine sufficiently to enable him to defeat Russian forces and restore their soverearty. If we do not, this aggression will spread, and the void we leave will be filled by authoritarian regimes like China around North Korea and an empowered Russia if they triumph over Ukraine, which Tucker kind of paraphrased on his show as if we don't beat if we don't beat Russia in Ukraine with Korean and

Iron will take over the world. And the other thing. The other point to make is Tim Scott, Christy Noman particular and Vivek Ramaswami in particular all invoked China and made this argument that our focus on Ukraine financially and just militarily is distracting us and weakening us in the the with the potential urgent threat of a fight in the South China Sea mounting that that was one of the lines that they brought into the conversations with Tucker.

Speaking of Tucker, indeed, speaking of Tucker, we have more Tucker to talk about, because actually this whole exercise where Tucker Pepper the potential Republican candidates with questions was a really interesting one. Some of them gave short responses, some of them gave long responses to every individual question. They came in all kinds of different formats. But he also went on full send to talk. I saw him talk about nicotine. He's always you know, got a dip in

longtime smoker. That a fairly enjoyable part of the conversation because he talked about how nicotine has his health benefits it's not a carcinogen. I tend to agree with him on that point, but he also called it's it's a nicotine dip, like a oh man, you're about to learn about a whole new world. But it's not like old school dip. No. Yeah, it's it's like like what vaping is before. Oh okay, wow, I didn't know that there

was like vaping. But for dip, well, it's it's it's an artificial type, but it's it's not packed with Yeah. So he also now that we Ryan's going to do the next day, Yeah, show what that so. But he also called former President Trump quote a little bit autistic and dismissed this is media writing. Dismissed Trump's claim he would end the war in Ukraine. In a lengthy and

candid interview on the Full Send podcast. At one point during the discussion on the topic of Russia's invasion, came up, quote, I saw Trump said he could close that in twenty four hours if he wanted to. Kyle asked, quote, do you think he could? Carlson responds, I have no idea. I mean, he couldn't build a border wall in four years, so you know there's a gap. Between promises and delivery

with all politicians, very much, including him. I will say, in Trump's defense, and maybe because he's a little bit autistic, he saw the stakes of this like at the very beginning. And this is what I do love about Trump, particularly in foreign policy. I think we have a clip of Tucker's response here as well. Trump said he could close that in twenty four hours if he wanted to. Do you think he could? I have no idea. I mean,

he couldn't build a border wall in four years. So you know, there is a gap between promises and delivery with all politicians, very much including him. But I will say, in Trump's defense, and maybe because he's a little bit autistic, he saw the stakes of this like at the very beginning. He's like, you don't want And this is what I do love about Trump, particularly in foreign policy. He sees the big stuff. He's like, wait, you've got Russia in China.

They don't don't trust each other. We can't let them get together. They'll kick our acts and we'll be We're not going to fight a war against them, one hopes, but we'll definitely be taking orders from them. Definitely. No. And he said that five years ago when everyone's like, shut up, racist. Okay, he's a racist, but is he wrong?

So diagnosis aside his point about how Trump sees the big picture that from his perspective, that Donald Trump comes in has this sort of business mentality, looks at these conflicts from an almost like cartoonish perspective and says, well, because I'm not mired in the theory and the details and you know all of that, I can say, what's wrong with all of you very smart people. Can't you see the bigger problem going on? You're you're not seeing

the forest for the trees. That's an interesting point. What did you make of it? Well? I think that American foreign policy makers also have a cartoonish view of American foreign policy, and that it clouds their judgment, whereas it might actually make Trump to see things a little bit more clearly, at least in that in that particular sense.

In other words, if you're an American, you're guiding foreign policy and you are constantly drinking your own kool aid about how we are spreading democracy and how we are a we are a force for good, that we're the only country out there that doesn't engage in great power politics. What we're out here doing is just policing the world and making it a better place. Like that, That's that's

all we're doing. Everybody wants to be a Madisonian democracy if we can just kind of nudge them in that direction with our m sixteens and maybe potential security guarantees, and if not, then cups of their bad governments. So if you're driven by this belief in your own worthiness, your own your own morality, then you might be blinded to the way that your actions are going to be

perceived and counteracted by other tries. You might not see, Oh wait, if we do this, not only are we going to have Russia and China who do hate each other, but now all of a sudden, you know, find out of necessity a reason to work together. You have Iran

working with him clothes. You might even get countries like Brazil, El Salvador, uh Venezuela, like all of these other countries that we could have, you know, very good relations with all of a sudden start to feel threatened and don't see from their perspective, this is kind of warm hearted sharing of democratic values. What they what they see is a global hedgemon just trying to and enforce its will. And so for Trump, who is you know has you know has is completely a moral only sees kind of

transactions and power plays. He's able transactual morality, right, He's able. He's able to see from their perspective much more or easily how they're going to respond to what the United States is doing because he doesn't really have any buy in into the kind of the mythos around the US spreading democracy around the world. Yeah, he's completely changed the tone,

at least in the Republican Party. And that's what this questionnaire we talked about it in the last block, I mean, one of the big Obviously, it's an open question as to whether you believe that Ron DeSantis sees this as quote a territorial dispute in the way that absolutely angered so many of the old Conservatives who are trying to cling to power but are keeping it much less. They're much less powerful than they wish that they could be.

Precisely because you're getting answers like Ron DeSantis christinome things that you would not have had Republicans talking about pre Trump. And we know that, by the way, because they were talking about Ukraine a little bit differently during the Obama administration, both for political reasons and because Trump hadn't disrupted the party yet. I think there's an argument for that sort of reg and I peace through Strength not being full

contradictory with where they are now. But at the same time, there was a lot more I think eagerness to criticize the Obama administrations what they perceived as weakness for not equipping Ukraine in some cases with offensive weapons to do what it needed to do around the annexation of Crimea. So all of that is to say he completely fundamentally at least changed the way Republican politicians talk about it. But we have not yet tested how a post Trump

Republican Party deals with in office these questions. We obviously have Kevin McCarthy saying he doesn't want the blank check, but he's only been Speaker of the House for a little bit and Republicans have only had the House for just a couple of months now at this point, so we don't really know what the Republican Party post Trump looks like on foreign policy. We do, however, know what they want to talk about, and we do know what they believe the rhetoric should look like, and that is

a change. What do they think it should what do they think the rhetic should be the more isolationist leaning, more realist, say, less near a conservative and more realist the whole like going going to Iraq to build a democracy like that's gone kind of thing. Yeah, And Tucker's talked about himself, how that's his perspective on this has changed. And it would be hard to be And I think

this is where the Republican base has shifted too. It would be hard to be an American who looks at what our foreign policy establishment over the last twenty years, over the last fifty years and says, you know, great job, great work. I trust you to continue doing this. You clearly know exactly what you're doing and need no disruption whatsoever.

Was it what finally brought the right back around? Was it the disastrous occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, like the combination of those two after Vietnam and basically like sixty years of having nothing to show for these adventures. Yeah, I think it's that. I think it's the class element too.

And you know, just proportionately people who vote Republican were affected by sending their kids to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and especially you know now feel as though that was a sacrifice they made while people in Washington were sort of using their children as pawns in this like great global chess game and doing it really poorly. So I

definitely think the class element is there. But yeah, it's hard to look at this and not see failure after failure after failure, and so I think at least the candidates and Trump picked up on that. People forget how central that was to his campaign in the Republican primary back in twenty fifteen and twenty sixteen. When he was talking about in terms of Iraq and Afghanistan was completely

different than basically any other Republican candidate before him. And now we're almost ten years from the escalator that he descended down to announce his candidacy in the Republican Party, at least as talking about these things in a totally different way, because I think they saw the response and

that totally changed. I do remember that incredible moment in the Republican debate where Trump told Jeb Bush, like, you know, your brother, you know, was there for nine to eleven and then he botched the Iraq War, and we never should have done that. Now, Trump, if I remember, was supportive of the Iraq War at the time. But that's fine. He's a politician. He can swing all over the place if he wants. He was probably all over the place

on the Iraq War. Yeah, he's gonna say, right, like, as long as we can get the oil, then we should do it. She probably wasn't for building democracy, since he's not necessarily even for democracy here. But to see him eviscerating the kind of pro war mentality that was dominant in twenty fifteen still by twenty fifteen in the Republican Party, and to see it land on Jeb and just crush him was delightful to watch the front runner

at the time. I mean, again, it's ridiculous to think about that, but he Jeb Bush was the front runner. Was Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton, but it was on the Republican side. It was Jeb's year. Trump's told Howard Stern, and this was in two thousand and two, about six months before the war. Yeah, I guess so when he was asked if he supported going to war, but then yeah, sure he did. By two thousand and four, he was completely in opposition to the war basically, so he's turned

around quicker than other people. He was definitely ahead of the Republican Party on that question in two thousand and four by then, like Abu Graves two thousand and four, like, but it's still faster than a lot of the Republican Party,

for sure. It took the two thousand and six midterm wipeout right for a lot of them to be like, all right, yeah, we'll eventually end this war fifteen years from now, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Well, let's go to the Silicon Valley Bank developments, because there's more to talk about every single day. By the hour, it feels like there's more to talk about every single day. Let's start though, Actually, Ryan with yourself, you were on Russell Brand Show yesterday. We had just I'll tee this up

very briefly. I went We talked about the Department of Justice announcing that it's going to be probing Silicon Valley Bank. The New York Times reported that experts were saying that they're going to be looking at the bonuses that executives in the stock sale, the bonuses paid out to the executives and the stock sales done by executives. That's great, they should definitely look at that. What I hope and also suspect a little bit that they would also look

out look at would be this text chain. We'll talk about it a little bit later, a bunch of text chains and slack groups among these VCS founders the Silicon Valley tech world that very early started saying, hey, guys, why don't we all get our money out? And so

then the question becomes were you, why were you? Why were you making these suggestions to this group rather than if you really had concerns, just pull your money out, like you wouldn't like yell, like if the theater is really on fire, just get out rather than start a stampede.

So anyway, so we talked briefly about some of that so of a dialogue being potentially I know, you know, not Nottro Damus or whatever or some sort of soothsayer, but but potentially this is part of a kind of dialogue taking place between the state treasury and the banking system that's letting them know that there are ways of precipitating financial disaster unless there's compliance and favorable legislation and regulation. Yeah,

nice little economy you've got going here. Shame if there is a bank run and a bunch of contagion that just wiped it out. So yeah, So now the New York Times reporting just now that the FBI, Department Justice are going to look into, you know, the causes of this meltdown and the twenty eighteen rollback. The executives who catched out a bunch of bonuses like those, that's all going to get looked at. You know. They to me

they ought to actually look at that text chain. You got two hundred people, you got two hundred phone numbers. Call those folks in. Maybe it was completely innocent, ask them, you know why, you know, why did you tell Why did you tell your closest two hundred friends to take the money out of here? Why didn't you just take your own money out? At the same time, Peter Thiel's what's it called his founder's firm, they did a call on that day where they they called money in like

on that very day. That required and then a bunch of their partners or urge a bunch of their partners to pull money out as well. Why'd you do this? Just total coincidence? What did this happen? Anything to do with this? I think these are reasonable questions that investigators, you know, ought to be asking because the because it's just the other explanations just don't make a lot of sense.

It's extraordinary that you say that, so is unlikely that the investigation will look into these aspects of the case. What about Biden's public claim overt obvious and playing the consequences of a failed capitalist venture are bankruptcy, Like you said, the bank is involved are unlikely to face bankruptcy. You said that should be the first step and the consequences of those actions should be felt. So the question then would be, well, why, like why would a bunch of

tech bros blow up their own bank? And the speculation that is out there is that it is a shot across the bow at the Fed that the entire tech industry that these guys have made so much money off of, requires quantitative easing at a global scale to get the get the cheap, get the free money flowing out the Silicon Valley that they run through Silicon Valley Bank and then runs to all of these different startups. Some of

them hit and some of them don't. But if you're if you're at four or five six percent interest rates, you can't make all of the different bets that you can make at basically zero percent interest rates. This the bubble can just go on forever. So the idea would be, how do you how do you make it clear to the Federal Reserve that they need to stop ratching up interest rates, that they need to stop tightening monetary policy. You tank Silicon Valley Bank, you take Silicon Valley Bank.

So that would be the that's this, that's the speculation, which speculation ran literally just did. Many people are saying conspiracy that out there. It's many people are saying, well, it also makes more sense than the alternative, because here's the thing. If you really do feel like because of the news that came out Wednesday night that your money is at risk, you have two things you can do.

You can either go to your bank calmly while there's not a bank run, and pull your money out of that bank, like that would be the rational thing to

do if you're trying to protect your wealth. Or you can text two hundred of the richest people in the world who all have money at Silicon Valley Bank and encourage them to take their money out, and then you can do a call to other investors to have them pull their money out, like, those are your two options, Which one of those is going to have you more likely to be made whole by the end of the day, and which one of those is more likely to cause a bank run, which then risks your ability to get

your money out. And if your real goal is to just to get your money out, you know, spreading sewing fear and panic doesn't do that. I've heard anecdotes about smaller businesses, startups that had you know, their assets in SVB. I also, though, think there is an alternative possibly, which is that a lot of these other people basically have been playing with monopoly money for the last twenty years. They have so much money that they're investing in different

places and playing around with that. Their fear of being made whole is not necessarily like understandable or comprehensible from the perspective of people who haven't just been playing with millions and billions for a really long time. I don't know. I mean, I think that's to the question about why they would be chatting in their signal groups instead of

yanking immediately and taking action. Maybe it's it's simply well, first of all, incompetence, but secondly it seems possible to me that they just have been playing with this glut of money like it's monopoly, Like it's those fake gold chocolate coins that you just toss around at a birthday like his birthday party, for so long. It's not as

pressing as it would be otherwise it could be. And the nice thing about this conspiracy theory is that can be tested, Like investigators can literally call these people in and they all of their communication is done by text, yeah, by slack. Let's hope they don't have disappearing messages on signal and just say, look, we want to see what you guys talked about Wednesday night and what you guys talked about Thursday morning. Did any of you say like, hey,

you know what, the FED is out of control. You know what they need? They need to be scared. Like if you find some messages like that right, then you got them. If you don't, then maybe this is just organic idiocy. Well we have The New York Times is reporting that there's a United States is reportedly opening an investigation into collapse of SVB. There's actually also I believe a class action lawsuit that has been filed on Tuesday nights. So the shareholders, right, Yeah, So there's a lot of

opportunity for discovery here. There's a lot of opportunity for evidence to emerge, whether they wanted to, whether the investors wanted to or not. Is there anything particular you expect from the early days of these investigators, Well, not necessarily

from the early days. But what's nice is that when you have powerful entities in a legal fight, then you are more likely to get to the bottom of at least messages, Like the reason we have all those Fox News messages is because Dominion was able to get them right. So the executives at Silicon Valley Bank are very much motivated to point fingers in other directions. It wasn't us,

wasn't our, wasn't our risky business model? Wasn't our lobbying Congress in twenty eighteen to roll back rules so that we could operate in a riskier fashion, which we then exploited to blow ourselves up, Like wasn't us? Wasn't wasn't us, like extracting our bonuses and selling stock at the end, it was actually these tech pros who prompted a run

on our bank. Like that, they're motivated to make that claim, so their attorneys are then going to be motivated to try through the discovery process to get access to some of these messages to see if there actually is anything that points to and you know, some of these pros might be dumb enough to have like typed that up. You know, we'll see you wouldn't think that you'd have, you know, Fox anchors saying like none of this was true. All right, more than eleven, but there you go. Well

for more on this. Ken clippen Stein is actually here, so we're going to pause and bring Ken in right now. One of the most vocal cheerleaders of the Silicon Valley bank bailout was none other than California Governor Gavin Newsom. Ken Klippenstein from the Intercept joins us to talk about some of his new reporting about some potential conflicts that Governor Newsom may have had that he that he neglected to mention. Ken. Thanks for joining us. Good to be

with you, guys. I have to say, when you tuned up this segment, I thought you were going to say one of the most vocal cheerleaders, the best baby who happened to have some of his startup capital lodged in that bank. Ken a lot of people don't know this has a winery like Gavin Newsom, and he was banking with SBB. Well, congratulations, I'm glad that everything worked out for you know me. I like to support the innovators. That's right, Yes, so, so Gavin Newsom loves to support

the innovators as well. Tell us a little bit about his entanglements with Silicon Valley Bank, what we know of them. Yeah, So it turns out he has three wineries. He was a businessman before becoming governor, owns a bunch of companies in the hospitality industry, and three of those wineries appeared in the bank's winery division. That's a thing for the for the bank, and it's it's listed on the website. And so it turns out he uses Silicon Valley Bank

for those three companies. In addition to that, a long time former employee of Newsom's told me that he also uses it for his personal his multiple personal accounts with the bank as well. And then third angled all of this is that his wife runs a nonprofit and on the board of directors is a president of a Silicon Valley bank, and that nonprofit received one hundred thousand dollars from SVB over the last several years, so a number of different points of connection and ties between Governor Newsom

in that bank. And I want to get your thoughts ken on the response from Newsom's camp to your reporting. They claim, right that he has his holdings, all of his financial holdings are in a blind trust. What do we know about the potential conflicts there and how much that would matter if, for instance, you know, his wife has this connection on the board with SVB. Right, So the problem with this blind trust is that it's not

meaningfully blind. If you look at what some of the ethics experts have said, and what this case is really reminiscent of was President Trump in his attempt to put his companies into a blind trust, which he then allowed his son to run. And then in this case sort of in parallel to that, Governor Newsom's sister runs his blind trust. And so the critique of that is, and it's not meaningfully blind because A, he already knows all the companies that's in it, because he's run them for

a number of years. And b you know it's his blood relative that's running this thing. So what kind of wall is that to put between him and these firms and occurred to me. Another good one is Joe Manchin, who has who he and his wife have a coal company and they put it in the name. They put it in a blind trust, but his son runs it. But he still knows it's a coal company, right, he knows what it does. Right. And now Newsome might only be able to assume at this point that the winery

still has accounts with Silicon Valley Bank. But you don't typically, you know, move your know, major banking operations for no reason unless you're a tech bro kind of spark trying to spark a panic or your panic. I was actually just looking up his wine. Plump Jack. It's one of his wineries. Apparently it specializes. It's a boutique like Northern California Cabernet. It's one hundred dollars a bottle for their twenty eighteen plump Jack. You ever had plump Jack Cabernet on?

Never heard of it? Have you ever heard of it? No? Anyway, But you know I'm not a big Cabernet person. And so did you get any reaction from either the California Press or the Governor's office in the story what'd you hear. Yeah, the California press is actually following up on it, and I'm glad that it hasn't just become a partisan football because this is really, as I said with the Trump case, this is an ethics question that is a serious one and has been a serious one in the local press.

They had looked at these problems, not specifically the wine companies in the in the bank, but all of his holdings. And this is something that comes up any time you have one of these business moguls that that you know has a high net worth, as as Governor Newsom does. There are all these questions of conflicts of interest, and so there's been some very good reporting in the local

press around what's called behested giving. So there are strict limits on what California politicians can take in terms of gifts generally, but there's one exception, and that is what's called giving, where the politician directs giving to something, and in this case, Newsom is known to have directed giving to his wife's nonprofit, and so it's not it's not regulated in the same fashion that other gifts are, and that's something that the local prece has been focusing on

for a number of years now, and Ken you just said something important, which is that you didn't want it to become sort of a partisan football. The report you had just before this one was about entanglements in the office of Kevin McCarthy with Silicon Valley Bank. Tell us about what you found there. Yeah, what was interesting about that is that two of the House Speaker McCarthy's senior staffers for a number of years ended up becoming a

registered lobbyist for Silicon Valley Bank. And not just that. When I looked at what specifically they lobbied on, it's directly related to all the stuff that's happening now, which is the twenty eighteen Dodd Frank partial rollback specifically pushed on that lobby the FDIC, which is what's ensuring the depositors at this point and guaranteeing making whole of the people that had money in that bank. So it's directly

connected to all this. What's sort of funny about that is when I have this Newsom piece, come on, some Democrats are very angle agree saying, you know, oh, you're a Republican disguise. It's like, well, it's funny, you missed my last story it's literally about the other I'm not looking for Addy specific, I'm just looking at the bank and trying to see where the nexus is with politicians, and whatever pops up is what I'm going to write about.

So I don't I don't know what the ULL people. Yeah, and it's really in that rule writing and in the regulatory side where the public is at the most disadvantage. So in Congress at least it's happening somewhat in public view, so people can weigh in when it's an obscure kind of rollback. Unless you're reading the intercept the American Prospect, you're not going to follow like those you know, those those repeal efforts through Congress, but you can if you

want to. By the time it gets into the FDICE, it's really like former McCarthy aids, former Mansion aids, you know, former House Financial Services Committee aids, who are going directly to the FDIC saying, all right, so here is what was written into law. Now here's how we can weaken it even further. Because the FDIIC, you know, aside from insuring deposits, also wrote a lot of the rules around Dodd Frank about out, how are we going to implement the law. What does it mean when we're going to

stress tests you. How often are we going to look at your books? What do we feel like is a reasonable amount of exposure? What is not a reasonable amount of exposure? Because what I think a lot of people might not understand is a direct link between the twenty eighteen rollback and this blow up. The link would be if if there were tighter inspections and stress tests of the bank, you might have had regulators come in and say all of these bond holdings is mortgage backed securities.

I've been hearing a lot on the news about potential coming interest rate hikes. I'm not sure that if that stressor hits you that you're going to be able to survive that. So one of two things happens. They make them unwind those or knowing that they're going to get that pressure from regulators, the risk managers don't do it.

They say, you know what, we need shorter term bonds here, or we just need to stay in treasuries, or or we need to we need to make sure we're tightly hedged in the case of some type of shock from interest rates. And this idea that nobody could see these interest strikes, Nike's coming, Are you kidding me? I'm not, like, I'm not a risk manager at a bank. I knew

they were going to raise interest rates. I talked to an employee of SB Bank who himself was frustrated about exactly what you're saying, which is that of course they were going to raise they were saying it, and so it's amazing. I interviewed an economist recently about all this and said, why are these banks so adamant about rolling back regulations, because doesn't that end up hurting them in

the mid to long term? And he's like, well, you're assuming that they're looking at the mid to long term, you know, because again I'm talking to his employee would have been happy to have the stress tests happened because he wouldn't have to worry about all this stuff now that he's having to brief investors and things on and you know, hope for his job to still exist in a year. And so it's kind of interesting how much ends up hurting basically everyone except people at the very

top C suite level, these kind of derregulations. Well, and you quote at the very end, you have you really stick the land again. You say, perhaps no one embodied this contradiction more than Larry Summers, who said this is not the time for moral hazard elections, or for lectures, or for lessons administering, or for alarm about the political

consequences of bailouts from a tweet on Sunday. And when you have to your point about the people in the C suites never ending up getting hurt, well maybe that's partially why. Yeah, coming from the guy that for the last two years has been endlessly talking about how we can't have student loan debt because the moral hazard. And now we don't have to worry about moral hazard. This is a very serious issue right now. All those people, why people, that's the other thing he said, we need

He said, we need more ars. What happened to that, Well, here's your chance, right, not like the wrong the wrong people. We don't want them to be on Come on, now that's a little bit. Those guys I know them, reference, Yeah, they need good people. You know, haveies. That's how you know somebody has lost an argument when they just say now is not the time. Yeah, now, okay, right, you might be right. I just don't want to hear it, right, Kay,

great reporting. Thanks so much, thanks guys. Biden administration this week gave the green light to a controversial drilling project in Alaska, approving a Connico Phillips plan to despoil or be spoil ruin an extraordinary amount of wilderness in Alaska, going after one of the you know, huge untapped uh stores of fossil fuel resources in Alaska. The the left quite quite fairly lost its mind, uh in reaction to this, with a like what with a what are you? What

are you doing? What could you possibly be thinking at a time when we're you know, in the midst of climate apocalypse and you're saying that you're going to be uh some type of apocalypse may be overstating it slightly, climate crisis. You say that you're going to be you know, the best, the best climate president in history, and you're going to improve one of the biggest oil drilling projects ever.

And the idea to me that you're going to get any credit from Republicans or from the right for this, that all of a sudden you're going to start seeing Republicans say, well, you know what, the Biden administration, you know, they really are quite reasonable when it comes to comes to their energy policy. So we're we're not going to continue to call them kind of Marxist who are trying to shut down every every gas station and drilling project in the country. Right, I mean, is anybody is am

I wrong? Or is there some amount of drilling that Biden can do where Republicans will say, you know what, nice drilling, baby, He didn't he drilled, baby, drilled. No. Yeah, no, that's that's really why. And he coupled it, interestingly enough with his announcement that the Interior Department is has new regulations that will cut off two point eight million acres of the Arctics Beaufort See than thirteen million acres within

the National Petroleum Reserve from new leases. So I think it's it's that was described by an administration official in the New York Times as quote a firewall against new drilling. So I think he's coupling it in a way where he is trying, to your point, maybe not to make amends with the right or to impress the right or to neutralize any of their criticisms, so much as he's trying to say this is to twenty five hundred new jobs,

potentially three hundred of those would be permanent positions. It's an eight billion dollar project, whole jobs right, wow, yeah, one hundred that we should burn the world down. Yes, one hundred and eighty thousand barrels of oil down the Trans Alaska pipeline daily. So I think it might not be amends with Republican voters so much as it is anything steps to do anything about gas prices and reliance

right now with a very tenuar situation in the Middle East. Yeah, and the Biden administration's defense of itself was there were five drill sites that Kinaco Phillips wont Yeah, only they only game three, right, And I mean again, like for the Biden administration, with gas prices where they are depending on where you are in the country, By the way, your gas prices are very different. In some places they're

extremely high still, like California for various reasons. But if you're the Biden administration and Conco Phillips is coming at you hard trying to get five new it does feel like if you're in the White House right now, three

is quite a compromise. I see why they're happy with it, but I also see why they coupled it with that quote firewall they described to the New York Times cutting off all of those, cutting off that part of the National Petroleum Reserve thirteen million acres and then two point

eight million in the Arctic Sea. Yeah, but none of it's going to come online in time to you know, practically while Bind's alive, and it's certainly not in time for his not in time for his election, like you're going to you're not going to see it affect gas prices, which was the absurd thing about how they slowed down. They stopped the Keystone Excel pipeline, which by the way,

means export. It was going to export gas. But Republicans kept using the fact that they had stopped the Keystone XL pipeline to say, well, that's why you're paying high gas praises right right now, which just was completely untrue and just made no sense. It gives him, it definitely gives him a talking point in re election to be able to say it's not true what Republicans destroying all this wilderness up in Alaska right and to say it's

it's not true that these claims are false. We started this project, an eight billion dollar project up in Alaska. I am not anti drilling, et cetera. Et cetera. And then he can say to the left, well, I cut off all of these acres. It's just for a president like Joe Biden, he's straddling the fence between I think one generation of Democratic voters and another. It is a

very difficult political question for him, to be sure. And there Lisa Murkowski, Republican from Alaska who's been pushing for this for her entire life, basically put out a statement in which she said she could quote feel Alaska's future brightening. No, those are the that's the greenhouse effect that you're feeling.

It's getting warmer in Alaska, Like the climate that has existed in Alaska for hundreds and hundreds of years is radically changing in ways that are fundamentally undermining the way of life up there. But they'll get to drill. So congratulations to Senator Lisa Markowski. Feel you feel that future brightening? Congrats? All right? Brightening is an interesting choice. A little more SPF up there. Yeah, maybe she used that intentionally to upset the Ryan Grims. It worked, she got me. Well,

let's move on. In more terrifying news to rapid advancements in generative AI technology. Yesterday, Open AI released GPT four. This is generative a AI that's really quickly getting really really powerful. This is happening essentially at an exponential rate. If you talk to experts on AI, they say it feeds on itself and grows exponentially because of that, especially in this open source context. So according to Axios, the new version can accept and generate longer entries up to

twenty five thousand words. It can generate captions and other information using an image, using an image as a starting point. Now chat GPT, as people have noted and Actios notes here can score it in the tenth percent tile on a bar exam. Open AI says that GPT four can score in the ninetieth percent tile. It can pass most ap exams and then on the safety side, according to according to AI, GPT four is quote eighty two percent less likely than GPT three point five to respond when

asked for content. Its rules don't allow. This is a rule abiding AI. And yeah, it's but who makes the rules? What if what happens when it starts making the rules? Well, yeah, exactly, I mean, this is what's really terrifying that rules can be changed when we're referring to these things as And by the way, GPT four is one of you have to pay to access it. You have to have GPT plus, I think, to access it, and then if you don't, you get on a wait list. Developers can sign up

on a waitlist. But I think it's really really important to note that this is we're talking GPT four, this is very new technology, and already we're up to twenty five thousand words. Already we're making these rapid leaps in a matter of months. Every single week, AI is taking a new step forward that is dramatically further than it

was just the week before. And this open source way of collaborating on AI sounds really nice, but I think it's actually absolutely terrifying, not because it's democratized, but because we're putting really powerful weapons in the hands of people who could potentially be bad actors. Now, there are all kinds of benevolent hackers in the world, there are all kinds of doing really interesting like democratized benevolent hacking, but there are a lot of really bad people in the world.

Then we are giving these tools more tools just from our own use of them, every single week, and we cannot fathom, truly, we cannot fathom where this goes in three months, let alone a year, let alone three years. I also wonder if we're sort of the last generation of writers that can kind of trace their lineage in US. I mean, everyone who can trace their kind of lineage back to like the poets in Babylon, like writing has been basically the same since then, your poetry, fiction, non nonfiction.

People have written in different forms and obviously written different content and substance, but it's been the same product. But it's been the same thing. You go from a quill pen to a regular pen, to a typewriter to a laptop,

but fundamentally it's it's just putting. It's putting words from a human mind down onto onto paper that are then read by other people, and that that produces some type of experience with with AI being able to produce, you know, poetry and fiction and nonfiction, I would suspect that people that are growing up today are going to kind of write along with that crutch the entire time, because you already see, you know, if you write in Google Docs,

you'll see you see it start to make suggestions about your grammar or your spelling, and that that crush alone is new like that that that is a break from the way that you know Voltaire would have written. But if you have another artificially intelligent being who's throwing up sentences in front of you like you're you're you're not engaged in the same art that that humans have been engaged and for thousands of years. Well, and it also then destroys trust for people in public spaces in ways

that again we haven't really thought about. We had what a very short period of time to acclimate to Facebook and Twitter, but that's about ten years, right, We've had those for more than ten years now. But by the time we sort of got used to the technology and to the platforms, that happened roughly over the course of a decade. Chat GPT has outpaced those platforms in terms

of gaining users really really quickly. It went. If you look at the chart, it's like Chat GPT is straight up here, and then you see really rapid sort of snowballing with Twitter and Facebook. But it was over a much longer period of time, whereas GPT is just going straight up. And so think about to your point about writing and art, well, think also about law, think about contracts, think about Wills. I mean, there are just really all

of these things. It seeps into all of the cracks of human life and we can't possibly conceive of them and think of them right now now think of how it can exploit code. I mean, these things are really terrifying, and we are feeding into it as we sort of mess around with it on a daily basis. Biological automative possibilities. It can you know, we a B test, now, this can a Z test really quickly. Absolutely everything. I mean, it's just the art point is a really good one.

But also the way that it will artificially sort of fabricate art or writing completely will destroy trust between humans. It has the potential to completely destroy trust between humans. And imagine when AI is linked up with imagine when that kind of AI is linked up with brain wave scans. You are getting into the area of what Nita Forrahani, who has a great book out now called Battle for

Your Brain. She calls it cognitive liberty. And this is a very urgent threat to cognitive liberty happening on a daily basis. At what point are you looking at today, Well, a chart from Axios caught my attention this week. You can see it here with the headline quote women rule

employee rebound quote. The number of women in the workforce in February was higher than pre pandemic levels for the first time, Axios reported, adding the strength of women's return to work was faster than anyone could have imagined just a few years ago, when dire predictions about a SHES session flooded the news. That may seem like welcome news to elite women in C suites and corporate media, but they don't represent the rest of women in America. And

here's why. Time and again, when women are actually pulled, a majority prepare part time worker staying home full time with their children. This is uncomfortable for the left, and it's uncomfortable for the political establishment, but it's true and those who want to serve women best must understand it. As Scott Jenner wrote back in twenty nineteen, quote, most women with dependent children don't want full time work, nor do they want to grind out a path to the

upper reaches of corporate or political power. In recent years, Pew and Gallop poles have shown that fewer women, under the best of circumstances, prefer full time work. Married female MBAs from elite schools are thirty percent more likely to work part time than married female MBAs from less prestigious schools.

And that's a really interesting little fact. Let's start, though, with the Pew pole that was referenced there, which found from twenty seven to twenty twelve, the share of mothers saying that full time work would be ideal for them rose sharply from twenty percent to thirty two percent, while the share saying they would prefer not to work at

all fell from twenty nine percent to twenty percent. So even with that increase, the poll found only thirty percent of working mothers said their ideal situation would be to work full time. Think about that, more women coming out of a recession suddenly wanted full time work. Does that mean women got sixteen percent more girl bossy. No, it means they were anxious about feeding themselves and their children, about health care, student debt and taxes and everything else.

More recent Pew data from early in the pandemic, when government checks had gone out, found a decline, but still that only forty four percent of mothers with kids under eighteen said it would be best for them personally to

work full time. Right before the pandemic. Gallup found roughly fifty six percent of all women, a thirty year high, said they prefer to work rather than serving in a homemaker role if they were free to do either, although that number is slightly less useful because it doesn't break down the options by full time work and part time work.

When it comes to just last year, the Center for American Progress reported nine hundred and ninety three thousand more mothers were working in December twenty twenty two than one year prior, crediting Biden's American Rescue Plan in part for this so called improvement. Well, let's look at the BLS data. Quote. In twenty twenty one, eighty one point two percent of employed mothers with children ages six to seventeen worked full time,

the Bureau reported. Remember that Pew found within a year of this BLS research, only forty four percent of mothers with kids under eighteen said it was best personally for them to work full time. That is not a perfect apples to apples, but it does reveal an enormous, enormous

mismatch between what women want and what women do. It also fits with research like the paper from Swedish academics in twenty eighteen that found quote, sex differences in personality have been shown to be larger in more gender equal countries. As that paper speculated, as gender equality increases, both men and women gravitate towards their traditional gender roles. In other words, more women in good economies choose to stay home and

work part time. The more freedom women have, the more they can live in accordance with their preferences, and the more they choose to work part time or not at all. And that is okay. This brings us back to the Axios blurb and general celebration of women's workforce participation. It may look like progress on its face, but what it probably means is that more mothers are entering the workforce or working full time against their wishes because they have to.

And by the way, those wishes are totally fine. Working women owe a lot too. Second wave feminists, who liberated us from awful cycles of dependency, got us in academia, and fought for many classically liberal protections. A whole lot of women, myself included, are content to be in the workforce and find purpose and meaning in their professional lives. A whole lot of women, though, would rather be raising kids and doing the hard work of supporting healthy families

and communities, and that is awesome. There are all kinds of different numbers that can be crunched here. The research on stay at home parenting can be mixed. Childcare is incredibly expensive. Women got hit hard by the pandemic layoffs. My mom worked a ton and I loved it. She's the most impressive woman I know. But if she's forty

percent of the population, that's okay. All this is to say, when groups like the Center for American Progress celebrate women's and mother's labor force participation rates as quote improvements, they

may be speaking more for themselves than for women in general. And, as Blake Master's campaigned on back in twenty twenty two, politicians should be helping families who'd rather have a mom stay home with their kids supporting their household on one income, rather than taking the corporate bait and pushing more moms into the workforce against their wishes. There's also always been a dark side, we don't talk about it a lot to the corporate class's enthusiasm for women in the workforce.

Christopher Caldwell noted this an age of entitlement, writing quote feminism offered corporations an excuse for breaking the implicit contract to pay any full time worker a wage he could raise a family on. It was feminism that provided, under pressure of the recessions of the nineteen seventies, a pretext for repurposing household and national budgets. Instead of being used for reproduction, those budgets would now be consumed. The increment in the family wage that had been meant for the

raising of children was withdrawn. Families were no longer entitled to it. Mothers would have to enter the workplace to claim it, but they wound up getting only a small part of it, and their competition drove down their husband's wages into the bargain. Earlier iterations of feminism celebrated womanhood rather than trying to reshape women into men. We're different on average and in some really great ways, even as wealthy and educated elite woman push our culture ironically more

towards a masculinized world. In the meantime, Ryan, what's your point today? So when people think lab leak for obvious reasons, they think wuhan. But there's been another outbreak that's been getting a second look over the years and that's the ebola outbreak in West Africa from twenty fourteen to twenty sixteen. The origin of that one was said to be a boy who was playing with bats, except the media made a critical mistake. It turned out the boy was not

two years old as it was reported. He was eighteen months old. And that matters because if you've hung out with an eighteen month old lately, you know, it's not likely they'd be off playing by themselves in a hollow tree or a bush, which is what the story said at the time, and that's exactly it turns out what his father later told a journalist for Reuter's. He said, quote, it wasn't a meal that started it. Emil was too young to eat bats, and he was too small to

be playing in the bush all on his own. He was always with his mother. So in an investigation published last fall by Independent Science News journalist Sam Husseini and virologist Jonathan Latham address other problems with the bat theory. For one, no bats or any other wildlife were found with that strain of a bola, and the species itself, the the zayeer ebolavirus comes from thousands of miles away and there's no explanation for how it traveled to West

Africa without infecting anybody along the way. The dates also don't match up. The boy was first said to have died in early December, but that was then adjusted to late December, but that still leaves a huge gap between that and the first confirmed cases In March. Nobody from Emil's family, including a Meal, was tested for a bola and the symptoms that he had also match other diseases prevalent in Sub Saharan Africa. So the boy in the

bat is one theory. The other theory focuses on a lab run by the US based Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Consortium in Cannami, Sierra Leone, near the border with Libya with Liberia in Guinea. Now, over the years, there's been a lot of speculation, now some of it backed up by strong evidence that ebola research was going on inside that lab, but there have also been strong denials that that was

the case. Now one of the lead researchers there, Christian Anderson, has finally confirmed that yes, there was indeed a Bola research going on there. Take a listen. The problem is

that people see these coincidences. One of the new ones is the Ebola lab Leaku, which also is being blamed on us because we have been studying ebola in Canama and Sierra Leone and Lo and behold, the Ebola emerged just a few miles from there in twenty fourteen, right obviously across the border in Guinea, but it's maybe one hundred miles or so away. And people then put that together and saying, oh, so that Ebola must have been aliab League too, and it was Robert Gary and Christian

Andersen again. And the reason why these names keep coming up, and the reason why we get grant money to study infectious diseases is because we study infectious diseases and have done so for many, many decades. And that's why the names keep coming up again. Right, It's not because there's some major conspiracy theory here where all of us have been sort of fiddling with the fields well prior to

the pandemic. And so what's actually remarkable about Anderson's admission there is that his colleague at the lab, Bob Gary, just recently denied that there was any Ebola research going on there, writing in a recent paper quote, in reality, we did not have ebov in our laboratory and therefore could not have released or engineered it. I reached out to Gary and Anderson, and I'll report back when they respond.

Both of them have been among the most outspoken opponents of the COVID lableik theory, and both were part of the early brain Trust Anthony Fauci assembled in February twenty twenty. That group initially expressed openness to the idea of a lableak, but then days later ruled it out and organized the public letter dismissing the idea as a conspiracy theory. That proximal origins letter was published in March and suppressed debate over the origin of COVID for the next year at least.

So what I also found revealing potentially revealing about doctor Anderson's answer there is he said, he said, and and then there was an outbreak a few miles away. And then he paused and corrected himself and said, well, it was over the border in Guinea, and it was about

one hundred miles away. Because and I would encourage everybody to read the Lathaman Who's saying the article that that dives into the actual origin of the pandemic, because the conventional wisdom is that it was that it started in Guinea with this this with his kid eating bats in a bush, and then it spread from there to Liberia

and Sierra Leone. There there is a lot of evidence that in fact it started in Sierra Leone, so and and and Doctors Without Borders, which is operating in Sierra Leone U produced a report that was extraordinarily critical of this particular lab which was right near h where this uh where where MSF discovered this outbreak. And by the time they started testing for ebola in Sierra Leone, they were the first say like six cases had some had six uh you know, six different variations, and each of

the mutations were like six degrees off. Like it just didn't make any sense that that it had just gotten there, Like it very much seemed to everybody there that it had been there for a couple of months and just

hadn't and it just hadn't been getting picked up. It was that it was a Kinema lab that was doing that was doing a lot of the testing, and the w h O MSF have both accused that lab of of screwing up all the testing, of standing in the way of the of the testing at the time, So for him to say that the outbreak happened right near their lab and then correct himself say well, actually it

happened one hundred miles away in Guiney. I think to a lot of people who've watched as close you will be revealing because they'll say, you're actually it did start right near your lap and then it went from there into Guinea, and it was suppressed first in Guinea because there wasn't enough testing going on in Sierra Leone, and so it kind of exploded there for a while. You

zoom out to thirty thousand feet. I think a big takeaway from everything you just laid out is how much that this sort of the medical community, the medical establishment can get away with because other people cannot possibly follow the granularity of these conversations. The media can't do it,

the public can't do it. Now obviously we can. You can raise questions exactly like the ones that you just raised, but these questions have been raised really in the background of our political discourse because they're actually pretty abstruse, like they're not that easy a lot onto and to follow, and so in that with the benefit of their expertise, which is in some ways held by a small group of people. You really escape a lot of judgment because of that, and God knows what you can get away

with because of that. Yeah, and when you when you go back and look at the explanation that the major media gave for the start of the a bola outbreak, this this kid a meal and either what and it's bizarre, Like first it was reported December sixth, then it was then it was like, well, actually it was December twenty eighth, and then you have the major outbreak in March, and then you and then you dig further and you say, well, what what's the evidence that the scientif that these scientific

investigators came up with to determine that it was this kid playing with these beats And you peel layer and layer and layer back and you're like, oh, there, there actually isn't any evidence here, Like the only evidence is that they say that the symptoms kind of align with the bola, right, But a bola has a lot of different symptoms and it hits people in a lot of different ways, and it you know, you know, conventionally people's doctors will say it's very difficult to diagnose a bullet

just based on symptoms like you you actually have to do in a bullet test because there's there are so

many other diseases that have those very similar symptoms. Uh. And so then you then you ask, well, how how is it that this explanation, which turned out not to be based on you know, anything concrete, like no, no test was done, was most smoking gun and said, well, yep, all right, we found we found the bat uh we test or or even we tested anyone in his family or in the village in the in the days around that and confirmed that yes, this was a bowl of Uh.

You're like, how how did that just become Okay, that's it, open and shut. We're gonna we're gonna move We're gonna move on from that. And then you start just and then you say, oh wait, there was so actually right over here there was this lab that was working working on hemorrhagic pathogens, which doesn't that include ebola. And then if you look a lot of the scientists working in that lab have backgrounds in abola. A lot of published

work related to abola out of that lab. But you never really could you know, there was still denials that anything even recently gary. But then so to have Anderson. I'm curious to see how he'll respond because I don't think he meant to necessarily kind of confirm that they were doing that work in that lab. So this is just one piece of our reporting on this. None of this is to say that it definitely leaked from this lab.

Will continue to follow this up and be great to get Sam Musani and Jonathan Latham have done great work on this on later and we can probe a lot of the different points because I think it is really important. And also last point here, so do you remember that Ron Klaine was the one who was brought in to do the Ebola response in twenty fourteen, and Harold, like everybody involved, was like he did a tremendous job. Like

the heck of a job. Bread have a job, Ron, like he when he after he came in, things started moving properly and they did contain the the Ebola epidemic, which thank god, because absolutely horrifying disease if it ever does break out and become kind of endemic. Uh. The day that he was appointed UH to be the thear the Ebola z are, that's when the Obama administration introduced its pause into Gain of Function research they also did not renew funding for this lab. That is a very

interesting point in the timeline. Yeah, that's very very interesting. And now at the same time, there were some lab accidents that had happened in the United States that might have been the trigger for the gain of function pause, But also why did they why did they pull the funding from the lab? And then at the same time, you know what, what did what did they know? What did? In investigators? No, if you talk about this in Africa, it's almost taken as a granted like in Sieria Leone. Yeah,

I came from that lap. Yeah, I mean to the extent their silver linings from the pandemic. One of them might be knowing the right questions to ask about some of the stuff. And also I think taking whistleblowers and people in the medical community who are raising questions and asking those questions seriously and giving them space in the press the extent that you can to air those opinions out and raise those questions. Well, that's the end of

our show today here in conference Wednesday. We will be back next week, of course, Ryan, any any parting shots, any final thoughts here, That's all I got. That's all you got. Everything I had on the field. I heard that you wrote you asked chat Gpt to write a Phish song about Oh. Yes, well it was so fast. I just haven't close because I don't know what to deal with it. I write a song in the style of the band Fish about the soul of a lizard. Wanted to give it a little prompt, give us a taste.

Let's say the chorus, Oh the soul of a lizard, so cool and calm, living life in its own rhythm and psalm. It works so well, Oh the soul of a lizard, so cool and calm, And shake a lesson from the lizard's soul, and find your way to be whole in this world that moves so fast. Slow down and find your own rhythm to last. That's a little bit preachier than you might get from Fish, But your prompt is a little I mean, of course, when you think about the soul of a lizard, you can't help

but fall into preachiness. Yeah, it's true. I should not be laughing at this us. This technology is absolutely terrifying, but it is great work. Ran, you got it. We'll see you back here at Counterpoints Wednesday. Next Wednesday,