Hey, guys, ready or not, twenty twenty four is here and we here at breaking points, are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election.
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We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, chrissal.
Indeed, we do a lot to get to you this morning. Some really interesting economic trends, some of which point in opposite directions. We want to break all of that down for you. Quite fascinating data that is coming out. Also, the Supreme Court with a unanimous ruling on corruption very much limiting what the definite of corruption even is, so that's interesting to dig into, as well as involves a former Andrew Cuomo aid, so kind of remarkable case there.
We also have Trump hitting DeSantis on abortion and pro life groups hitting.
Trump on abortion, So a lot going on there.
In the GOP primary, we have a bit of a reckoning within the diversity and inclusion industry and a totally nonsense piece for The New York Times that we got a break down for you.
That Durham Report Long.
Waited is out with some pretty remarkable conclusions there and some pretty remarkable reactions from CNN. And we're also very excited because today, assuming everything works out, it's looking good, we're going to have a big sit down interview with RFK Junior right here in the studio, and we're getting a good amount of time to talk to him as well.
That's right, So our FK Junior will be joining us here at the desk, the beautiful desk here in studio after the show.
Here's how it's going to work.
So, as we've always promised our premium subscribers, they're going to get the first crack at the interview almost immediately after Trapped. We'll have it edited and then we will send it out, publish it on the podcast, and send it out as an email to all of our premium subs. We will release a clip later today from the RFK interview, but if you want to watch the full thing first and support our work, our ability to convene, you know,
things like this Breakingpoints dot Com. You can become a premium member today otherwise the full interview will be available for everyone tomorrow and promises you know and all that we're not editing anything, we're not cutting anything.
It will be the full uncut. There's no you know, there's.
Nothing being business effectively, no ABC News over here which will cut out whatever he said. He can say whatever he wants, whatever he says, we will publish it.
By the way, YouTube that's not necessarily an endorsement.
That's right, genuinely is one of the most censored people on the planet, So from where that comes from, it's not an endorsement, but we will publish it nonetheless. And if they decide to take it down, well that's their decision. We'll make sure that it lives elsewhere for everybody consumed, because we believe in democracy here non censorship.
Yeah, and you know, we want to treat RFK Junior just like we have other presdential can that's that we've interviewed. There's a lot of issues that you know, I haven't heard him speak to that. We want to get him on the record on and see what his thoughts are about how he would govern if he was in fact President of the United States, so big sit down interview with him. Super excited about that. We're going to schedule
one with Marianne as well. She's obviously been on the show before, but we haven't done a full proper you know, let's dig into the weeds of what your agenda is. And of course, Joe Biden, you're always invited on the program as well.
Listen, I would love to make it happen. We requested to the White House before.
Yeah, not holding my breath, but listen, we would love to do the same treatment with the current President of the United States and Trumps absolutely absolutely, one hundred percent interested in talking to all of them. All right, let's go ahead and get to you some big economic news this morning New York Times with a deep dive into some pretty fascinating migration trends, which our start contrast with recent history in terms of the United States. Going and
put this up on the screen. Coastal cities priced out low wage workers. Now college graduates are leaving two and what they're tracking here, and you can see on this first graphic, this is the San Francisco numbers. You can see those blue bars. For years you had a net influx of college grads heading to the largest metros, these superstar cities that seem to be gobbling up all the wealth and all the top graduates from all the top schools.
For years and years that was the case.
Well, just recently that has flipped and you now have net out migration from these top tier cities of college graduates. Let me just show you some more of the numbers here from other top cities around the country, and then we can dig into why this is happening.
So these are the numbers for DC.
You can see again, for years you had a net influx of college graduates. Now over the past couple of years, really post pandemic, you have net out migration. So college graduates leaving the very expensive we can attest to of Washington, DC. Let's take a look at the numbers in New York. Now, New York, this trend is longer standing. You have a lot of red here over the past decade of college
graduates leaving this extraordinarily expensive city. And if we put all of this together, just put up this one last slide here, you can see they're the number of college graduates who in recent years have been leaving the twelve most expensive large metro areas, but in other large metros outside of that top twelve they are still gaining college graduates.
So it really is a very select phenomenon that reflects the extraordinarily high cost of housing and cost of just living in general in these top tier most expensive cities in the whole country.
And as I said.
Before, this really reverses a trend that has been going on for the past several decades where those cities seem to be a magnet for nearly everything. Now with people sober, I think in particular having a kind of a you know reset during the pandemic, not in the nefarious term, yes version of the world, I mean, you know, and people being sort of forced to rethink what their priorities
in life were forced out of the workplace. And now there's a positive side to this, which is a lot more workers, huge numbers of workers, having the opportunity to choose do I want to be fully remote? Do I
want to be fully in the office? Do I want to have a hybrid work model that also opens up more flexibility where it's like, why am I going to live in some tiny expensive apartment in New York City When I can move to a second tier city, a Louisville or an Austin, which still has all of these urban amenities, but is much less expensive, and I'm still
earning my New York City salary. So many college graduates are making that choice, and it could have huge ramifications for, you know, future economy of the whole country.
I want to balance some of my thoughts here, and I've done monologues and stuff on the before, So first let's start with the good and just the interesting.
The good news is, I believe in mobility, and I.
Believe that ossified places place like here, Washington, d C, New York City, places where they still have these things called broker fees.
If you are not from this area, google it. It's one of the most insane things that exist.
Yeh innerworka apartment hunt. Oh no, it's madness, terrible.
You're just getting robbed left right, So you know, to see brokers out of their fees.
Yeah, I'm gonna smile. Okay, So that's a good thing.
Washington, d C, New York City, San Francisco have family members and or friends who have probably lived in every metro area in the country in the last five years. That was the thing to do. Now, without fail, almost all of them have moved. Now why did they move? And almost entirely it's because cost of living, crime, and just the general feeling that this is not the place that I need to be anymore, especially given the fact that I can get more banged from my buck outside.
And this is having dramatic changes.
Let's go to the interesting part because interestingly, if just ten percent of the white collar workforce move in some way in the next let's say five years. This is from Derek Thompson at the Atlantic, it will be the largest internal migration in the United statess World War two. So this alone, you cannot underestimate how much this will change everything. Because internal migration doesn't only change the tax base of different states, it changes the political makeup of states.
Arizona is going to become way more purple because of the incoming number of people both from California but across the entire US. Idaho, for example, Boise, Idaho had one of the most booming real estate markets in the United States because of its proximity to California. But let's not forget that with changing politics not only changes electoral maps. That's how Atlanta and Georgia become purple as well, but also places like Ohio with net out migration are going to become more read.
Here's the issue. By and large, this is only a white collar phenomenon.
And actually it's becoming worse for a lot of rural and working class people who already lived in the set areas. Can we throw up the emerging divide graphic please, the share of working Americans who moved in the previous year. But what you can see there is that in twenty twenty a massive spike occurred with those with college degrees, but the overall down trend of the share of working age Americans without a college degree has gone down dramatically
after the pandemic. We are now around twelve percent, whereas above fifteen percent about fifteen years ago. The reason why that matters is that mobility for non white collar workers is incredibly important for them to also be able to take advantage of all those benefits. So I am hearing story after story of I lived in Charlotte my whole life. I was able to rent an apartment for X number of dollars. Now all of these workers from New York City are here, and I have to move forty five
minutes out. I had to drive in, and I'm screwed, and now I will I'm paying the same amount of money for less house or for a longer commute, I have to pay more and gas, and I'm farther away from being able to save up from a house that was near my parents. I'm hearing this literally constantly from people who live in places like Charlotte or Boise, or Phoenix or even I mean Austin at this point is like New York City, but let's even say San Antonio, Houston, Dallas.
All these places had major internal migration over the last couple of years. I did a monologue in the past of breaking down with all those exact cities. Basically, if you live in the sun Belt like Atlanta, or you know, even in elsewhere somewhere in Florida, you are going to have a real hard time if you were did not get the same wage increased. You don't have the same mobility of the person who has a white collar thing. So we both have benefits, but we also have a lot of minuses.
Yeah, So the downside is that this creates an unincool situation where white collar workers are they have the flexibility, they have the hybrid work situation.
Or full remote situation.
They could move wherever they want but still earn the coastal city salaries that they were earning previously, or take you know, a relatively moderate cut off of those that's more than made up for by the cost of living going down in the places they're moving to. The downside is definitely, as you're saying Soccer, that people who already live in those places, who are seeing housing prices now
go up. Now they're not matching the expense of like a San Francisco or in La or in New York, but they're seeing significant increases in terms of housing prices and other you know, other like just basic cost of living expenses.
That's obviously going to be an issue for them.
The other bright side, though, is that, you know, we've had this incredibly unequal economic growth across the country and it has fed a lot of you know, very divisive and polarizing politics too, where you have these couple of superstar megacities that are generating a disproportionate amount of the growth and the jobs and the economic activity, et cetera. And you know, for the working class of people or who have been living in those major metro areas. It's
been a positive because the jobs are there. It's been a dramatic negative because the influx of all of those people has made the cost of living so wildly unexpensive that is just completely insane. So there are also benefits to potentially having economic growth more evenly distributed across the country. And we don't have these graphics made, but if you dig into this place, into this piece, it's not just like the next tier of cities that college educated workers
are moving to. It's also small cities. It's also even rural America and small town America. Now, this is a group of workers that, for better or worse, have been really catered to and sought after. Cities have gone on of their way to try to figure out, like what if we create an arts district and attract this or that coffee shop, how do we bring in this group of people.
Are nice, let's not get out of hand.
I'm not honest Bobby shops, all right, but you know they've gone out of their way to attract this group of people, and it will be a benefit to the country if you have more evenly distributed you know, college educated workers everywhere across the country. If you have economic activity being generated in more towns and cities across the country, and not just in these major metro urban areas. So, like you said, there's definitely there's silver linings here.
There's good, there's bad.
More than anything, it's just fascinating to see the way that this could remake both our politics and also our economy.
Even a small shift.
In where workers are going when they're coming out of college, what that looks like in terms of the national landscape, can be incredibly transformative. I also thought it was really interesting, you know, they interviewed some of the people here who had made this choice to move out of a New York city or move out of an LA, move out of a San Francisco, and they say, for these high education workers, it's not so easy to separate those who can't afford a city from those who can but leave anyway.
Affordability is relative and personal. For one person, it means making rent. For another, it means making enough to also join a gym, by concert tickets and dine out regularly. Even a professional who can afford all of that in New York, they still eventually sour on the sixth floor walk up in the laundromat that comes with it. They describe things like, you know, the people that have made this move describe mention, wanting furniture that couldn't fit in a New York elevator, having a home.
Office with the door that closes.
Not just cheaper housing, but washing machines, walking closets, and walls to hang artwork. So very different versions of affordability depending on where you are in that classt incomes life.
Well, I know people who make half a million dollars a year who said that they just couldn't live in New York, right, Well, how does that work?
It's like, well you can.
Yeah.
What you're really saying is I want to live in a four thousand square foot house and I can't live in for it, and hey, that's fine, and I don't want to pay for you know, whatever X amount for childcare. Whereas if I live here close to my mom, I can have a house and I can live near my mom and have to pay for daycare. So my net is the quality of life is dramatically higher.
Like totally.
But it's like, just maybe don't say that you can't live in the right exists that you don't want to live in, right, this is like and there is actually nothing wrong with that. Big question is then you know, when X person moves home or near their house, well, who would have bought that house? And they're willing to pay cash whereas somebody else what a financed it? Well, then I can see why the people there are starting
to get a little upset. And so I genuinely still think it's a net positive just because as long as we can make sure and this is literally almost like a trickle down theory, as long as we can just make sure that some of this extra money goes into the local economy, right and boosts spending and ability for local businesses and property owners and all that stuff to go up, and that the working class folks can still get some share of the pilot.
I think I'm good with it.
But unfortunately, as we have generally seen, a lot of that doesn't end up happening.
And then also even in terms of the services that pop up.
I was just looking yesterday, Manhattan is completely transforming the way that its tax base is working because forty percent of workers are not back in the office.
So what have they decided?
They said, Manhattan needs to become a playground for the rich. Basically, they're like, we need to turn this into the ultimate party just for the people with these five hundred thousand dollars incomes with no kids, who just want to party twenty four to seven, the ultimate entertainment destination, which will require us rezoning the city and making it so that we can capture our tax base, because if we don't do that, we are going to lose a massive portion
of the way that we fund city revenues. This is also a big problem with San Francisco, New York City. In all these places, something like one percent of the population pays almost forty or fifty percent of the tax base. That means that the services for the vast majority of the population literally relies on a few select individuals. And states are not federal governments, Like you can't escape America. Even if you leave America in your US citizen US
still have to pay taxes. But if you leave New York City New York City, you don't have to pay New York City taxes anymore.
And a lot of them left, a lot of them live in Florida.
So even if only a thousand people leave New York City. If it's the right thousand, it can screw you. So that's another reason why keeping your tax system based on that is actually very foolish. You want to I'm not saying that those people shouldn't be taxed. I'm saying you need to make sure that you are not so heavily reliant on a.
Few thousand people.
Or you get the Eric Adamses of the world and the Kathy Hokals who are like, we need to go back to the office. It's like they're not saying that out of the kindness of their heart.
They need the money.
They can't do anything if those people don't go to the office. What if New Yorkers don't want to go to the office, maybe you should work on their behalf.
But they can't because the system is so screwed.
Yeah, I mean, I've talked about there's a real reckoning coming in commercial real life.
I hope so, because I mean.
There are estimates that the value of commercial like office space real estate could decline by forty percent. I mean, that is an earthquake that is looming over the country, and half of the commercial real estate debt comes due in the next two years. This is multi trillion dollar economy that you know, this is kind of hanging over our entire situation right now. So that's a big piece
of this. There was one other part that I thought was interesting, which is they interviewed this economist who is talking about, you know, part of it is how prices out of control. And by the way, we should say, like the politicians that run these cities and states, they've had horrible housing policy and this isn't like a right now phenomenon. This is like right now and over decades, and so that's part of what is pushing people out is.
They're like, there's nowhere to live.
It's wildly unaffordable, even on you know, quite a hefty salary.
Why would I continue to do this?
So it's partly these cities have had terrible policies in terms of building out their housing stock to make them affordable places where people can live.
That's one piece.
But this economist says, you know, some of it is that the most ex expensive places got really expensive, but also the middle tier places became more attractive. This economist has found since two thousand, college graduates have increasingly been moving toward high amenity cities and away from the highest wage ones. Consumer cities, as she puts it, are increasingly replacing producer cities as the places where college graduates want
to live. Now, to me that that's obviously a trend that pre dates the pandemic, and as with a lot of the trends that we have tracked, I think the pandemic has accelerated trends that already were bubbling and already were in place.
But I do think this reflects a sort of cultural.
Mindset shift above and beyond the particular economics of one city or another, where people just have different values for what's most important to them and that is being reflected in their choices of where they decide to live. And then these mid tier cities, since they're trying to attract this group of people, they're building out the amenities that they would want that would make this an appealing place
to live. So I thought it was interesting that it wasn't just like these places have become wildly too expensive to live and have these other problems, but also that the mid tier cities have kind of stepped up their game and made themselves more attractive to a broader cohort.
The next big question is starlink.
When we have apps like America wide high speed Internet no matter where you are, that's when I want to know if stuff will really change. I mean, you saw some of the with the tech workers, you know, people where starlink has been widely available and you can do like starlink for RV. Some people were making like half a million dollars a year living in an RV just driving around wherever they wanted to, literally from national parks, like outside of a lake.
I mean, it sounds like a life, let's be honest. Yeah, look, ten years.
From now, you know, maybe they can beam in from a studio or somewhere. I'm going to be in a compound somewhere deep in the desert. I love it out there, but you know, the technology is really still not there in terms of reliability. That said, ten years from now, I very much think that could be the case. Now that unlocks economic potential of huge swats not only of the West, but here in the East Coast, which is much more densely populated.
We still have a big rural urban divide.
We don't have a lot of starlink or high speed internet access as you know in rural areas, even you know, an hour and a half or so away from Washington, DC, which to me is insane but from an infrastructure perspective, but who knows what that will unlock. It also will unlock a lot of global a lot of the global workforce when you consider high speed internet no matter where you are, across the entire Eastern seaboard, not only of the United States, but of South America, which will be
on the same time zone. I mean, I've heard this from friends who are doing like the.
Digital nomad thing.
How people in Mexico City are so angry at all of these remote American workers. But not just there Buenos Irace, like even Brazil, like any place where you can just get a tourist visa and still be on East.
Coast time or Central time.
Apparently there are American tech workers who are down there. And remember that's only like what one two percent of people who are even able to do that. If you just increase that to ten percent, that's ten times the number who are currently It's millions of people who have basically total freedom.
Now that's not everybody.
Once again, you know, plumber can't be working from Buenos Iris. So that's why you got to make sure that they're right.
Wells, that's true.
But I do want a couple with the fact that you know we talked about was that in the show yesterday we recorded this as an extras gound post this weekend, that job satisfaction is actually an all time high.
Across the board.
I mean, we could obviously do a lot better in terms of wages keeping up with inflation, but you had a lot of people who blue collar or service actor workers who shifted jobs during the pandemic, either because they wanted to or because they were unfortunately forced to, and they were able to get higher wages they were able to get, you know, in sometimes more predictable schedules and a greater sense of sort of control and autonomy over their days, which has contributed to a better landscape in
terms of worker happiness. And to shift into this next piece, we wanted to just briefly show you in terms of where we are in terms with the economy, because it is a very weird and complex picture.
The recent jobs data.
Just came out, Come on, go ahead and put this up on the screen, and job growth actually did accelerate in April. Wage gains increase solidly. They say this points to assistant labor market strength that could compel the Federal Reserved to keep interest rates higher. It's like, oh, we can't have those good times. We've got to screwfey lives. This is always a weirdness of jobs reports during this era.
It's like, this is a great jobs report, but it also is a mixed bag because it means that the Fed is going to be more determined to crush workers and screw them over and hike unemployment and kick a bunch of millions of the amount of their jobs and crush their wages, et cetera. But you know, unemployment rate fell back to a fifty three year low three point four percent. They do note data for February. In March
was revised sharply lower. So important to note because these numbers could also ultimately be.
Revised sharply lower.
But it does show even though you've had this issue of inflation which has really impacted workers and made it so that many of them are seeing their paychecks eaten away and really getting like a net pay decrease every single month, you do have this tight labor market which has made it so that workers can shift jobs and shift industries, and you know, have some choice that they
haven't had in a long time. So even though you know the trends in terms of migration, that choice that the remote and hybrid work choice isn't there for blue collar and service sector workers. There are some positive parts of the labor market right now that are benefiting them as well.
Yeah, I think that's right.
All right, Let's move on to another big trend that is being driven in part by what is going on with AI, which is a lot of white collar jobs may be going away. So put this up on the screen from the Wall Street Journal. Their headline here is the disappearing white collar job.
A once in a.
Generation convergence of tech and pressure to operate more efficiently has corporations saying many lost jobs may never return. So this is one of the other strange parts of our
economy right now. While you have huge job demand for service sector workers blue collar workers in certain especially in like warehousing, you also have had this tech session which has really hit white collar workers, and a lot of the companies that are laying off white collar knowledge workers right now are saying, we don't have any plans to bring them back, because our plan is instead to basically replace supplement our existing workforce with AI and make it so we don't have to hire.
Back any of these workers.
I mean, this is a dramatic turnaround from the way that the economy has been my entire lifetime, where it was, you know, the service sector workers and the blue collar workers where there weren't enough jobs and you know they're retreated as disposable, et cetera. Now you have kind of a turn about where it's a lot of white collar jobs that are being shed in this economy. In this very uneven situation. They say the jobs lost in a month's long cascade of white collar layoffs triggered by over
hiring and rising interest rates might never return. Companies are rethinking the value of many white collar roles in what some experts anticipate will be permanent shift in labor demand that will disrupt the work life of millions of Americans whose jobs will be lost, diminished, or revamped through the use of artificial intelligence. A former chief digital officer at McDonald's Volvo said, we just need fewer people to do the same thing. They point in particular to Meta and IBM,
among other corporations. The head of IBM said in recent weeks, he could see thirty percent of IBM's roughly twenty six thousand non customer facing roles being replaced by automation or AI over a five year period, and for the year ending in March, the number of unemployed white collar workers actually rose by roughly one hundred and fifty thousand people. So very different picture from other parts of the labor and job market.
Yeah, so here's what I generally think about this is that we are normalizing away from a very stupid period between the nineteen sixties and mid that peaked in the twenty tens of the office job. Now all of the benefits of the office job had mostly gone away by after the reces Great rescission, but a lot of the professional degrees, like the idea of just going to go work for a fortune five hundred company with some generic skills, we still wasn't paying out but was still genuinely attractive.
Some of that is still the case, since we see that in the Ivy League and the university, but with the market is basically showing us the employment and the job market generally is if you need to have a skill that is genuinely just going to work out for you, in the long term, because what do we learn from these you know, these more like very basic jobs, is that even you know, people thought, oh, if I just
get an accounting degree, I'll be able to do well. Well, what we see from the chart is actually accounting is going down pretty dramatically. A lot of that software related also whenever it comes to real estate and back end real estate professionals not saying that that can't be a skill that you hone, and that there is of course local like market arbitrage, but as we are really seeing, we're going, I think more back to a skills based economy.
Now.
That skill though, is not the way that people used to say that in terms of you know, like learn to code. It's be a plumber, or be a coder, or be a nurse, or be a doctor. Or even when you're a lawyer, like a niche type of lawyer, that's still a professional degree, but it's not like a generic marketing degree.
The skill itself.
And your ability to dominate that niche or a very basic service electrician, you know, trade So much work in the trades is paying out in the long run and is also mostly non automatable, and that is why, like you can automation proof yourself by having a skill which you can you know, doesn't take a genius to figure
out what will necessarily go away and what's not. And the easiest stuff, the stuff like on the floor that you can just take away, like the ibms and the metas is AI for the most generic of marketing skills like writing copy taglines for product, and that's obviously something you can do on chatch ept today.
Why would you hire anybody to do that?
Yeah, I mean a lot of legal work is really sort of like cut and paste. You know, it's like okay, especially if your corporate lawyer and you got to do the same basic filing for a one hundred different companies. You take the same format, you plug in the different company name, the different dollar amounts, whatever. That's gonna be very easily automatable. Now, do you need a human being at the end of that to take a look make sure.
Nothing g's screwed up? Sure?
But do you need many fewer man hours to already to accomplish that same task.
Absolutely.
A lot of like basic bookkeeping and accounting work, same kind of deal. I'm doing my monologue today about how AI is already set to completely upend digital news just through the summaries that they're going to publish. And when you google something, instead of getting a list of links, you get a summary of news articles. Are you going to click through to the links that are down below? Many people will not, and so that just completely upends the whole business model of digital news gathering.
So a lot of these changes are already here.
There's another piece too, though, which is that a lot of these tech companies got way over their skis during the pandemic and they thought that the gold rush that was the pandemic for tech companies was going to last forever. Yes, so you had them staffing up in ways that ended up being you know, wildly unsustainable. It's really wrong to do to the workers. You know, they're like, oh, sorry, we've hired way too many people.
Now you're unemployed.
But you know, in case after case, so many of these tech companies really hired way too aggressively. And then when the economy you know, went back to more of a normal state and you no longer had people locked in their homes watching Netflix all day, then you had you know, a return and a real reckoning here. So that's part of what is going on here too. But as we've talked about with AI before, part of what is unique is we're used to automation hitting service sector jobs.
We're used to automation threatening blue collar work.
Well, now AI.
Is really coming for these white collar jobs. And so so as we just laid out, some of this is not you know, in the future, ten years down the road.
Some of it is already here.
And you know, obviously it's a negative anytime you're eliminating the need for human beings in you know, an economy where it really depend on being able to earn a wage in order to achieve any sort of basic middle class prosperity. But the other piece of this that again this is the first time in my life that this has happened. You've actually had a reversal of inequality. You've had inequality going down for the first time in my
entire life. I mean, from the neoliberal you know, starting really under Carter and then solidifying under Reagan and Clinton. During that era, you have just had more and more and more going to the top ten percent of society and this gigantic hollowing out.
Of the middle.
Well, now with white collar work under threat, you're having the college wage premium go down, so that also is going to force a reckoning with how much these colleges are charging right now, more people saying like this is not worth it. There's not a rainbow at the end of this. There's not a pot of gold, I guess at the end of this college rainbow, So why am I doing this? So there's going to be a reckoning there.
But it's also just remarkable to see that you are having this convergence in this lessening inequality, which again is a dramatic turnaround from what we have seen in the entirety of my whole life. So that part, in a sense is positive.
But I want to.
See people doing better at the bottom end rather than people at the top end getting screwed, is what you would ideally like to see happening here exactly. The last piece that I want to point to in terms of a very strange and uneven economy is that even as the labor market is really tight, even as you have very low unemployment, a lot of jobs, especially in certain sectors, you also have debt levels, personal debt levels at record highs.
Put this up on the screen from CNBC.
Their headline is consumer debt passes seventeen trillion dollars for the first time despite slide in mortgage demand. So what they're saying there's people aren't taking out new mortgages, which means that they're not adding that debt onto whatever they already have. But in spite of that, the total for borrowing across all categories hit seventeen point oh five trillion, an increase of nearly one hundred and fifty billion, or
almost one percent, during the January to March period. That took total indebtedness up about two point nine trillion from pre COVID periods ending in twenty nineteen. Delinquency rates have also increased for all debts, so people are struggling to be able to pay their credit card bill, pay their car loan, pay their mortgage, whatever it is. It's at point six percentage points for credit cards, up point two percentage points for auto loans, and total delinquency rates moved
up point two percentage points to three percent. Student loan debt also edging higher, and auto loans at a nudging
up as well. They say, so you have a picture of American people who are really saddled and struggling under a huge debt burden, and I would say part of that is certainly a lot of this is due to inflation, do to the fact that things have gotten so much more expensive and that it's so hard to obtain, you know, to be able to make ends meet, to be able to obtain anything approaching like a middle class stability that people are putting it on their credit cards and having
to take out a lot of debt in order to be able to achieve that.
Yeah, exactly. So the corporate the debt part is really bad.
And then in terms of corporate America, where they stand in what they say or it's exactly the same thing. So it's a very odd situation that we're in right now. Put that up there on the screen. Please about corporate America. They say that a recession is already arrived. Obviously we have the technical definition.
That we already reach.
But they say Wall Street's already enduring what is the most prolonged corporate profits downturn in seven years, which is a very easy kind of definition of recession. And when you can see prolonged downturn, you know, after such a long period of time twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, combined with the interest rate cycle.
Just take a genius to see.
Where things are going and very likely to oh for a longer period of time.
Yeah.
So it's a weird situation.
It's a real mixed bag out there for absolutely everyone, no matter what industry, no matter what part of the economy you're in. So we just wanted to take some time to sort through the trends as we see them now so we can keep.
An eye on them going forward.
Another really interesting thing that happened at the Supreme Court, and I would say troubling. Put this up on the screen. So this was a unanimous decision. All nine justices tossed out the bribery conviction of a former Cuomo aid. So what happened here is this guy, Joseph Percoco, who was a.
Top aid to Andrew Cuomo. This was his boy.
He was in the Cuomo administration and then he was out for a brief time while Cuomo was running for reelection, with all expectation that he would end up back in the administration and he did. And during that time he basically took bribes and I mean it was pretty brazen. If you guys watched Sopranos, but they called these bribes that they would take ZD.
They were referring to it.
In this situation also as ZD so brazen. Right now, they argued that, oh, well, he wasn't in government then, so he couldn't really be taking bribes because he wasn't in government. But again it's like, you know, this is Quoma's boy. You know, Quoma was likely to end up back in office and this guy is too, so you could have reasonable expectation what is going to happen here? And he did in fact deliver on you know, what
he was paid to deliver on. So lower courts had found him guilty of corruption, but the justices ended up ruling nine to zero in favor of this former Quomo Aid. And what the reason why they technically ruled is they said that the jury instructions that were given were inaccurate. Put this next piece up on the screen so that this is from Scotus blog. They had a good write up of this. They say, court throws out conviction of
former Quomo Aid. So he had that the jurors had been given instruct that the justices determined were not sufficient or we're not accurate, and that's what led to this unanimous ruling.
But soccer when you look at this case, and.
There was another Cuomo aid whose convictions they also threw out, were sort of similar circumstances. And when you consider okay, they threw out the former Virginia governor Bob McDonald, they threw out his conviction as well for bribery. They threw out New Jersey gunnor Chris Christie's former aids in the pole Bridgegate.
Thing, they threw that out as well.
You can see the Supreme Court really circling their wagons here. First of all, I think partly in response to the corruption allegations levied against them. This is like a little bit of ass covering for themselves personally, but more broadly, because this has been a trend going on for a long time, they're making it so that corruption is so narrowly defined you have to literally be like taking a bag of cash that says.
For political corruption, and.
You get caught on tape saying I am taking this money as a bribe because I am corrupt. For them to even count this as public corruption at a time when trust and institutions exactly from this type of crap is at all time lows.
What's crazy to me is that the quid pro quo is not in dispute at all. They paid him thirty five thousand dollars to expedite a job without union agreement. He made the call and the job was expedited, so the quid pro quo is done. He was, however, at the time, managing the reelection campaign in twenty fourteen, so apparently that makes it okay. And I think that the clear response here is if they have decided to interpret the law this way, then we just got to change the law.
I mean, there's no other way around it.
I mean, we have to make it so that quid pro quos of any time of any kind involving government services, regardless of whether you are in government or not, if you're using your influence to do so, we have to demand and expand it so that you can be convicted of corruption. Now here's the problem, though, Who's going to lobby against that? The government services and lobbying industry here in Washington. It would put I don't even know how
many thousands of people here. Maybe honestly, the entire city, the entire city really runs on lobby cash.
So I don't know if it's possible.
Now I'm saying theoretically we should change the law, but listen, there's a reason that we define the law this way, and it's because what's going on around us is legalized bribery. And if we actually go after real bribery the way that it's commonly understood, not technically understood, then we would put an entire Washington industry out of business.
And that's why you have a unanimous decision. Course, Conservatives, liberals, they were all one on this one and on some of the other decisions that were made as well, because it's not just the present lobbyist class K Street class, but all of these lawmakers, the public servants quote unquote, they see themselves going in cash and as lobbyists.
Down the road as well.
So they're looking out for their ability right now as legislators to take campaign cash or whatever whatever perks are given to them in order to do the will of these lobbyists. And they're also looking out for their future job prospects by making sure that none of the reforms that we would want to see made to make this law much more clear and expand it so that there is an actual standard of hey, you're a public servant. You're not here to take bribes and serve the interest
of this lobbyist class. None of that can come to pass because of people looking out for their own pocketbook and bottom line.
It really is disgusting.
And to see it in such a you know, uniparty state here, every single one of these justices coming together to make sure that corruption is so narrowly defined that it basically doesn't even exist in their minds.
It's pretty disgraceful to.
Behold that is where it is.
Just I mean, I'm untorn because technically in the way they're doing the law or evaluating the law, I guess, you know, is it their fault or is it the law?
Like I think, really what it is like we have to change the law.
And I think it also was passed in such a way and written in such a way to make it amenable for people like this so that it doesn't happen. It's like, you know, their job is to simply analyze it within the bounds of like what's on the book. So that just means Congress has to do his job and pass on. Now, I'm not an idiot. I know that that won't change. But you know, new York state law could apply here, like you could definitely apply bribery conviction.
You can change things on a state by state level in terms of what is technically possible. Once again, I just think that the only reason it doesn't change is that so many things are already legalized bribery that.
They don't want to put them out of business. Yes, yeah, and that's the I mean, that would be there.
And there's just like bipartisan shame in this all around, so they have no interest in changes.
What would all of the former's aids to Clarence Thomas and all of them do if this was.
If we were not just Clarence, all of.
Them pagan sort of, I are all these with these people are all printing money, you know, off their names.
All right, let's go to the next part here.
Some politics, Some really interesting stuff going on between Trump and Ron DeSantis. The open war continues, not just in terms of whether DeSantis's sanctimonious or not.
But now on policy.
Let's go and put this up there on the screen. Trump gave a very interesting interview to a new news site called The Messenger, and he actually hit DeSantis, saying that a six week abortion limit is quote too harsh. So the fulls quote is what he said, he has to do what he has to do. Trump said when
he was asked about Florida abortion rules. If you look at what DeSantis did, a lot of people don't even know if he knew what he was doing, but he signed six weeks and many people within the pro life movement feel that's too harsh.
Now, first of all, I.
Don't think if that's true, that they feel too harsh. But what I think is even more interesting is that when you're reading the transcript of this interview with Trump, he has, you know, and I've said this before, rambling answers on abortion. The answer that he gave here in print is even more crazy. So he asked him about the messenger is asking him about late term abortions. But he both has to brag and also bring himself back to the exceptions.
That's perfect.
In this answer, he says, they've been trying to get rid of Row. I was able to do it. Nobody else could have done that, but me and I was able to do it do it by nominating three justices. What it did, more than anything is give us tremendous power of negotiation, which we didn't have the pro life movement the tremendous power of negotiation. Now the pro life movement has to negotiate a deal that's acceptable for them. So then they ask him about whether the six week
ban is acceptable. He says, no, I think that's too harsh. Then he says, well, what do you think? Is it too harsh for you?
Quote?
I am looking at all alternatives. I'm looking at many alternatives. But I was able to get us to the table. That's the most important thing that ever happened for the pro life movement. Would you sign a six week abortion ban or not? Quote, I am looking at all options. Sounds like a man who doesn't know what he thinks.
He knows what he thinks, he knows he doesn't want to talk a six week abortion ban with a ten foot point.
We know what he thinks. Yeah, we also know that.
You know, at the very least, it shows that he is not a police idiot whenever it comes to abortion. But just to show everybody the quandary that Trump has now found himself in, put this up there on the screen.
The Susan B.
Anthony's List and other anti I guess pro life groups whichever terminology you want blasts Trump over federal ban comments because Trump basically said he wouldn't sign a federal abortion ban.
The Susan B.
Anthony Group actually put out a statement responding to the Trump campaign where they said it was unacceptable and that they would not support any White House candidate who did not support a minimum ban of a fifteen week federal
abortion ban. They say the Supreme Court made its clear decision it was returning the issue to the people, and the group said that holding to a position it exclusively is up to the states is an abdication of responsibility by anyone who is elected to elected to federal office. And you know, here's the thing with the Susan B. Anthony Group and all them, at least you can command them, is their honest. They're very open about what they want,
have a group, they have an agenda. They know it's unpopular, but they don't care. They want to see it and acted, and they have litmus tests. The thing is is that they are playing a very powerful role in the GOP primary because it's not just Trump that they're going after. They're basically setting the stage for Mike Pence. This just happened two days ago, which is why I wanted to
note it put it up there on the screen. They also are blasting Nikki Haley for not saying that she would support a federal abortion band, because she gave an interview to Face the Nation where she said, quote, it is not realistic to have quote advanced gestational limits on abortion at the federal level. The pro life groups, as Susan B. Anthony's List said, when Nikki Haley talks about
national consases, we are in agreement. She says the seventy two percent of American support abortions at least by fifteen weeks, just so everyone knows that polling has changed.
It did previously say that.
But they say that the pro Lacke movement must have a nominee who will we be boldly advocate for this consensus and as president, will work tirelessly to gather the votes necessary in Congress. So they're making it basically fifteen weeks or bust. And I mean, look, Crystal, when you're looking at that, they're not doing. They're just wielding their power that they know that they have. They have millions
of people who belong to their group. But when you have none of the federal candidates basically except for Mike Pence, who is publicly signed on, then you're in a real quandary. And also it's great for Pence, but it also shows you that DeSantis in many ways is running to the
right of Donald Trump. And this is why, Yeah, it is scrambling so many of the brains of the conservative commentariat and even of the liberal ones, because you'll Seeantis or Trump attacks DeSantis on social Security saying he wants to cut sole security and on abortion, and so then I see conservative commentators I think I saw like Matt Wallace or whatever being like, well, Trump was attacking DeSantis from the left, and I'm just like, yeah, but you know,
his ideological inconsistency and quote unquote moderation is kind of why he.
Won in two thousand sixteen.
And also the quote very conservative voters that people always like to look at. Those people are already for DeSantis anyways, He's pulling very high with them. Those are the classic GOP voter, small business owner who will vote for anyone with an R next to their name. They love Romney, they love Paul Ryan, of course they love DeSantis. Guess what though, as Romney found out, you can't win the presidency.
With those people, it's really only forty something percent of the country who will basically vote are no matter what, So you have got to win at least a significant larger portion those people are not very conservative. So running from the left at least in a general election, and when I say left, I mean really more centrist, that is smart politically, and it also shows you why Trump actually could be more electable than Ron de Santis in many ways.
Yeah, I mean, that's the part that's really interesting is DeSantis pitches himself. Part of his pitch is like he's the more electable candidate. But when you stay count these you know, extreme positions on abortion, and you also stay out a position that is enough a lot of American people on social Security and medicare based on his previous comments, Yeah, that makes that that's going to put a hit on
your electability piece. I mean, the parts that's interesting to me about the pro life movement and you know their reaction to Trump, their reaction Nikki Haley, et cetera is Trump can get away with these things more than other candidates can right for and this is why Ron DeSantis, in like the dead of night, felt compelled to sign this six week abortion ban. Even though he's not an idiot, he knows this is a problem for him in a general election. He knows is wildly unpopular with the overwhelming
majority of the American people. But you got a divide between the general election audience and the primary audience and groups that are very organized and very powerful like Susan B.
Anthony List.
And so that's why he signed that ban, because he's placing also this big bet on Iowa, and these groups are disproposed even more disproportionately empower in the state of Iowa. So where Trump Trump staked out this more trying to sound like a moderate position on abortion. He's been singing this tune for a while. And guess what, his polls are really high. They just keep going up. DeSantis probably couldn't weather the storm in the same way.
And here's the other thing. DeSantis is trying.
To appeal to an ideologically consistently conservative group that Trump frankly doesn't really need in order to win.
I mean, Trump's strength is with non.
College educated voters who you know, have been with him the whole time, where it's more of a visceral appeal, and he's he's got those folks wherever he stands on abortion. So DeSantis is more vulnerable on these issues because of the coalition that he is trying to stitch together. And I think all the other candidates too. And it's just, you know, you see this in politics all the time. There are just some candidates who have the charisma and
skill to pull off things that other candidates can't. And Donald Trump is one of those people who can get away with things that other people just can't get away with. And I think that is laid bare by what's going on with abortion right now.
Perfectly said.
You know, DeSantis is held to the same standards as a normal politician, and Trump is just held to whatever the hell standards people have decided to hold Trump.
That's fair, but it is what it is. Life is not fair.
But at the same time, though DeSantis is playing his hand the best that he possibly can. He had a great answer yesterday when he was asked about stop the Steal at a press conference in the state of Florida. It seems like he's got a pretty good pat answer down for the campaign trail.
Here's what he had to say.
You said to her in events in Iowa, ok Tabika that the GP needs to.
Reject a culture of losing. Do you acknowledge that Trump lost and there wasn't all this.
Straw that he talks about. Well, I look at the last however many elections cycles. Twenty eighteen, we lost the House, we lost the Senate. Twenty twenty, Biden becomes president or no, she's we lost a cent in twenty twenty. Biden becomes president and it's not a huge amount of damage. Very unpopular in twenty twenty two, and we were supposed to have this big red wave and other than like Florida and Iowa, I didn't see a red wave across this country.
And so I think the party has developed a culture of losing. I think that there's not accountability, and I think in Florida we really showed what it takes to not just win, win big, and then deliver big. And ultimately, when you're doing all this, what results are you producing for people? That's really what matters. You can sit there and talk about cable news, social media, all these other things that people are fixated on, and for me, it's like, Okay,
what's that true? North, you obviously got to win, otherwise you don't get a ticket to the dance. But once you do that, how are you going to be able to actually bring about big change to make people's lives better next?
I think it's a great answer, and I do wish we lived in a place where, at least in a primary, where results do matter for people in general election, I do think it matters.
But whenever it comes to GOP.
Primary, well, current polls, I guess speak for themselves.
Put this up on the screen.
I once again I wish that Desantas's answer would resonate. And yet Trump is actually up over last month to
fifty five percent in the Republican primary. DeSantis at a whopping seventeen percent, roughly around where RFK Junior is underperforming, actually underperforming in some polls, or RFK Junior is on the Democratic side, Mike Pence form and vice president actually polling under where Mary Anne Williamson is in the Democratic primary, He's at six percent, Nikki Haley's at four, Viake Ramaswami and for Tim Scott at two, Asa Hutchinson at one.
Larry Hillolder, I didn't know Larry Elder was in the race.
Good for him, I knew that. I kind of forgot.
Yeah, I got to I have a soft spot for Lario, do you I have anyway? So any what can we say from this? Well, you know, voters just love Trump.
I have a little bit of a different take on the DeSantis answer. I thought it was fine for that moment whatever, when you're not going to face a follow up and you can just deliver your line and move on. But it does, it does put a little bit of blood in the water because every reporter is going to watch that answer and note that he dodged right, and now every time he's gonna get because he didn't come down, he didn't say what he thought about twenty twenty.
It was a clear dodge.
And so if you don't think anytime that a reporter has a chance to try to drill down and ask him and push him and try to get him, that is going to happen time and time again. And so again, it's one thing when you are in that setting and he knows he can just ignore if there's a follow up and just move on to the next question and just deliver as answer with no pushback, that's one thing.
But if he submits, you know.
Subjects himself to any sort of extended to sit down interview, with a real journalist. They're going to push and you're not going to be able to get away with that pat answer. Or if they do end up, you know, if he does end up on a debate stage, which I think the Republican Party is planning on holding debates, I don't know if Donald Trump is going to participate in them, but those moderators are going to push all those candidates on.
That as well. So I read it a little bit differently than you did.
Here's the reason why I'm reading it politically. That's the best you can do, because what are you going to do? Most people who are Republicans believe the election was stolen, So you can't say, no, the election was not stolen. So what do you do? We have a culture of losing. Well, that reads a little bit differently. I don't even disagree with you. Look empirically, obviously, what does he need to do? Like the election wasn't stolen and I'm a winner, I'm a real winner, unlike you.
True.
Yeah, that's a great answer, but you directionally have to be able to get there. And also again in the very unlikely scenario but still possible scenario where he's able to beat Trump, the best way possible is really what I think he's doing right now. He says we need to reject a culture of losing, and he's doing the Obama strategy. I just read this morning fifty state legislators
in New Hampshire came out and endorsed Ron DeSantis. That's huge and two of them actually endorsed Trump only nineteen days ago, So not sure what happened with that.
He's clearly doing the early straight strategy.
He can go in, spend time on the ground, roll up and give people permission to vote for him. Iowa to New Hampshire, create a media narrative, and have a fighting chance on Super Tuesday. Do I think it's going to happen. No, I think Trump is going to win New Hampshire. I think New Hampshire loves Trump, they have literally since twenty sixteen. Certainly possible, though same with Iowa is a little bit more. If he Super Tuesday, I just really see no chance. But once again, you know
it's you said yesterday, this might be your only shot. Yeah, he's a forty four year old man. You know what's the worst case he loses? And then what he's a multi millionaire losing Florida.
It's not a bad life.
You can go to that lobby of earlier. He's lots of connections.
He will be fine for the rest of his Life's a young man, he has a wife, he's got small kids. Like you know, yeah, maybe you should shoot your shot. Personally, I would just sail off from the sunset.
I guess on that answer, I agree with you. It's the best he can do. Yeah, it's the best you can do.
To me, it's just underscore that he's an impossible bind because part of the base, part of the coalition that he wants to stitch together, wants to hear him say it was rigged, it was stolen Trump one. The other part wants to hear him say this is fake news. Obviously Joe Biden won We you know, have a culture of losing.
We need to get behind a winner.
And so he's trying to split the difference between those two things and just trying not to say anything. And again, you can get away with it in you know, one scripted pat answer, but if you get any pushback or follow up, it kind of falls apart. So so it just to me again, it illustrates he's doing perhaps the best he can. Given the landscape within the Republican primary, it is an impossible situation and an impossible needle to try to thread. O.
I think that's why I don't think it will work out. Yeah. Right, you're in agreement that play the best hand he can. Sometimes it's not always the best.
Yeah, and then you hope like fate is gonna hand you, you know, hand to something you can work with.
Yeah, and you never know.
Yeah, history can roll, always rolls its dice. Oh my gosh, this is such a hilarious story. Flagged by Matt Brunegg. Let's run it up there on the screen. So The New York Times wrote this incredible nonsense story about quote why some companies are saying diversity and belonging instead of
diversity and inclusion. He says, incredible stuff. Businesses are finding out the DEI consultants they hire are running programs that create even more identity based hostility, and are responding by hiring other DEI consultants who market themselves as not doing that.
As he says, quote, all of this is fake. Now.
The reason why this is hilarious is that you basically have the new religion of DEI inside of every Fortune five hundred company in America and have now basically for the last couple of years, especially ramping up after the George Floyd protest.
People thought that they were doing the right thing.
They said, Oh, we're going to eliminate racism by hiring
D and I consultants. However, all evidence that we currently have crystal all evidence, as evidenced by this New York Times article, is that saying to quote diversity and inclusion and emphasizing the place of race quote unquote implicit bias quote quote you know, quote unquote like microaggressions or macroaggressions in some cases are actually increasing hostility in the workplace racist thoughts and are having the opposite intended effect now and also, do any of these people work.
I have no idea why.
Aerospace engineers are subjected to raise your hand whenever you had a racist thought literally at work.
Sounds like something you should do on your own time.
Now, what's fascinating to me is that the corporations are beginning to wake up to this.
I personally thought that they would never.
Move on, but they're doing it in the best way possible, moving from diversity and inclusion to diversity and belonging, ditching some implicit bias training to still spend the same amount of money on quote diversity, but hiring somebody whose recommendation is stopped doing the previous training and is reverting back to do nothing. So in effect, this has all become
a giant money laundering scheme. Matt Tayib had that great piece I think it was two years ago about what was there white fragility, the Broadway robins, some of these ladies who are out there making multi Ibraheim Kendy, making millions of dollars, charging these places to give them lectures and to teach their babies anti racism and all this stuff, and instead it's actually making people not only more racist, is actually no evidence A it's not changing anything on racism.
So congratulations and.
Be like they are basically just bilking fortune five hundred companies to check a box when they can go to Wall Street and say, see, we have all of our employees going undergoing diversity inclusion, and meanwhile you have employees. I can't tell you the amount of people I know who are subjected to these things, who it enrages them to their core. A. They're being taken away from whatever that's supposed to be doing, and b they're like I don't.
They're like, I don't even agree with this, and you're basically shoving this down my throat and you're making me angrier about this problem which I didn't even think was a problem in the first place.
The research has long been in that if you actually care about combating racism, which I do, this diversity and inclusion consultant grift complex is fake.
It doesn't work.
If anything, it makes things worse, according to a bunch of you know, data that they have in the New
York Times, But you gotta love that. The solution to that is like, well, let's hire a different class of telecrifters who are going to pretend to you know, so we can still have our virtue signaling box checking exercise that we can you know, put on our website or whatever to show how wonderful and how virtuous we are, even though we have changed none of our internal structures to actually deal with like the root causes of this problem.
I mean, you could be spending this money on giving people bonuses and races of life better.
Everybody you're raised, especially the most working class people at your company. Take all of that money, give it as a bonus to all of your employees coact and the.
Portion of them more minorities will now do better. Congratulations.
You know, there were a couple of things that we're mentioning here that I was like, oh, you know what, that actually is a better idea. So, for example, one company was going to open a new location or headquarters in Denver, which is so overwhelmingly white. They're like, let's go to Atlanta and that'll just like naturally increase, you know, help us attract graduates. There's more diversity in the city
of Atlanta. I was like, okay, well, that's like actually a thing that makes some kind of sense.
But hiring a different group.
Of fake racist, you know, racism consultants to fix the problems that the other group of grifter racism consultants created, this is just total insanity. And the part of about the New York Times article that was funny to me was, you know, they use these anecdotes of they very credulously report on the new class of consultants that Okay, this is really.
Going to be the solution. Now they've got it. Now they've really got the solution.
They interview like a couple of people were like, Yeah, this was great, we loved it, and that substitutes in for any sort of like evidence or evidence based research that the new class of consultants is going to be better than the health.
Correct you know, I will say that I had a massive flag go up whenever they say that the reason they switched from Denver to Atlanta, because I also know that Brett Governor Brian Kemp and the Georgia State Legislature are throwing money at companies that are coming to Georgia. So even that, I was like, are you really going because you want more black engineering graduates? Or are you may be going because you're going to get more money
by switching there. So I'm just personally suspected basically anything that these people say. I think that the best way to do it is like what we just said, you know, give people a raise and hire people based on merit, and then when we have education, make it so you have merit based admissions so that everybody knows that whoever is there is there, regardless of whatever you know, is there because they are the best person for the job.
That's how we hire here, That's how most people should hire and in general, like spending your time.
Your time is the most precious asset that you have.
When you ask people why they want money, it's because they want to be able to control their time. So involuntarily subjecting people to things that don't work. And when we're saying this, I'm not talking, you know, out of nothing.
Put this up there on the screen. This is just like one of a slew from Scientific American the problem with implicit bias training and an insane amount of evidence based research to show that implicit bias training has either no effect or the opposite effect intended when subjected to tens of thousands of people who have been forced now to go through these programs, so it has not.
Had the intended effect.
It is a societal problem that apparently we're trying to solve through like some corporation.
It's not Microsoft. Rating is Microsoft's.
Microsoft's job is to make Our job is to make sure that they pay people enough money and pay their taxes while they're doing so.
The rest of.
This this leave it to us, Leave it to the government, Leave it to the news, Leave it to churches or bowling leagues or you know, any of these places. Leave it to your friend group where you can sit and talk and be like, hey, what's going on with this? George Floyd the thing man be like, yeah, well I kind of disagree. What's going on in the news.
I hadn't thought about that before.
And the actually I was listening to the show and they said this, and I read this piece and what a national review. But I read this piece in the Nation. You sit down, you talk. That's called society. This is not the way that these problems are supposed to be worked.
I mean, listen, you're responsible for your corporate culture, and lord knows there is a lot of like sex and race and religion based discrimination that still exists within these companies that they are wholly responsible for rooting out. But the idea that you're going to solve a deeply entrenched problem like racism at the corporate training level is farcical.
That's what I'm getting to.
And when you you know, we know what has worked over time in terms of lifting closing the wealth gap, closing the wage gap, especially among Black Americans who have historically been treated as this horrifically abused underclass. And it has been universal programs that have lifted the minimum wage for all people that have helped improve the plate of all working class people. Why because in a lot of times,
race is a proxy for class in America. So when you focus on lifting up, you know, the bottom of society, this is disproportionately impactful for disenfranchised and marginalized groups. That work has to happen at the nationwide level, It has to happen at the government level. It is not going to be solved by Robin DiAngelo getting paid hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars for some bullshit corporate training that doesn't even work and probably makes things worse.
So you're forgetting though that it makes people feel better whenever they buy a book called anti Racist Baby.
That's what we're always forgetting.
Okay, let's go to the final part here about the Durham investigation. This came out a little bit later in the day. I had the time to read as much as I could. This thing is three hundred pages, so I read the executive and some of the key sections, and we pulled out what we thought were the most
important takeaways from the Durham Report. For those who don't remember, the Durham Report was the report to oversee the Muller Report, and which was then in response to the crossfire hurricane investigation, investigate the investigator, investigating the investigators who are the investigators of the president. And I know that this can just seem absolutely maddening. Let's just start with the very basics of it all comes back to Russiagate. What was Russiagate
has now become an all encompassing term. I think at its core, it was this Donald Trump and the Trump campaign. Members of the Trump campaign conspired with the Russian government, both through monetary and political purposes, to damage the Hillary Clinton campaign. That included an allegation that they were helping coordinate WikiLeaks not true, that they were helping coordinate other leaks not true. That they were helping coordinate Facebook ads
to help sway the election also not true. But that was it at its core, and it had different sub elements, like the Steel dossier, like Alpha Bank, like all of these other allegations that have since all been debuggd We know now today that not one of those things happens
to be true. But the investigation as to how said investigation was even sparked by the FBI, how tens of millions of dollars of taxpayer resources were spent by the FBI, the premier law enforcement organization, to investigate and run these things down. How the American people were subjected to the story for what I would say three years, three straight years of NonStop news coverage. And it's one of the biggest screw ups by media and also by law enforcement
basically since Iraq WMD. As Matt Tayibi so eloquently wrote at the time, now, the roots of this investigation go very, very deep, and that was arguably one of the biggest stories from the Durham Report.
Let's put this up there on the screen, please.
According to the report, the plan by Hillary Clinton and the Clinton campaign to hire a law firm to fund the Steele dossier and to shop it around town to get media outlets to on it linking Trump to Russia was briefed in August of twenty and sixteen by then CIA Director John Brennan to President Obama, Vice President Biden, ag Loretta Lynch, and FBI Director Komy. Now, this particular subplot of Russia Gate, for those of the uninitiated, is
actually called Obamagate. Yes, this just shows you how long we've been covering this. So this goes to the initial Trump allegation that President Obama, his lackeys in the White House and others were briefed on said dossier and did their best to do two things. A to maintain knowledge of the investigation, to make sure that the FBI actually launched an investigation into this. B they knew that it politically would have been beneficial to the Hillary Clinton campaign.
And then finally, C is that they did their best crystal at the time to maintain not only the investigation but also elements and other damaging information about the Trump the incoming Trump administration. Why spread quote unquote spreading it around government so enabling it to leak when the Trump
people came into office. I think that that is a tremendously significant and important point because it shows that guy going back to the by going back to the Obama white House, and the involvement of the CIA director than John Brennan, his eventual departure of the CIA to MSNBC, and also unquestionably a part of the leaks to the
press around Russia Gate. He was intimately familiar with this plan from the very very beginning and very likely sparked some of the initial interests in this along with Clapper, who also was then working for CNN.
So part of what this report outlines, as reflected in what we just had up on the screen, is that there were separate allegations about both of these campaigns with regards to Russia. So there was the Steele dossier Russian collusion situation with Trump. That was one infirmed allegation that was out there, and there was also an unconfirmed allegation out there about Hillary Clinton that one of her foreign policy advisors had come up with the plot which was
approved by Hillary herself. Again, these were all allegations, unconfirmed, that they were going to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services. So both of these campaigns had potential sort of like Russian plots that had been alleged against them, And part of what the Durham Report concludes is that they handled
those two separate claims very differently. In the Clinton instance, they basically dismissed it and they didn't launch a major investigation into it, and in the Trump instance, they did.
And what the Durham Report asserts is that some of the people who were involved in opening the crossfire Hurricane investigation, including Peter Strock and some of these other names that again go back years now that they had a bias against Trump, and that was part of why they decided to take this Steele dossier, which we all know now you know almost all of it was bullshit, especially the
most saalacious claims were complete nonsense. Decided to take this uncorroborated report and use it as a basis to launch this investigation. So that was part of what was important to show here is that the two candidates were treated differently.
And then one other piece.
Just before you go onto some of the other revelations here that I think it's really important to keep in mind as we're going through all of this and why this still matters, unfortunately so many years later, is this has screwed.
Up our whole view of Russia.
I mean, this is still reverberating in terms of the Ukraine War and how we're approaching and how Americans are thinking about all of these things. I mean, it just never ends in terms of the impact that this all had on the American public. And if you're a faithful MSNBC viewer, like if you heard the way we were
talking about this and that this was all debunked. Your mind would be blown because you've never heard that on their airwaves, even though they spend more than any other network years and years and years building this sound and milking it for ratings night after night after night, led
by their top performer in talent, Rachel Maddow. So the other piece of this of why this still matters is, unlike I Rock WMD, which eventually the media all admitted like, ah, oops are bad, we got it wrong, and there's a general public acceptance and acknowledgment of that, they are vast loss of mainstream media viewers and audience and readers who have no idea how wrong these outlets got things.
Compare Obama's response to Crimea to Joe Biden's response to Ukraine, and I'm not.
Saying those are one to one, but there is no way that.
Some of the madness going on in terms of US support for Ukraine happens today without Russia Gate. It has massive And when the historians go back one hundred years from now, it's like going back and looking at war fever in nineteen twelve in Britain and in Germany, being like, it's obvious something's about to go down, and at that time they didn't really know it.
It seemed normal. It was like in the air.
Well, I'm going to call it in the living through the time that this unquestionably had a massive impact on US history, on the war in Ukraine and how the US public viewed Russia.
Let's go to the next part here, This is very important.
From the German investigation, they conclude that the Steele Dossier, the infamous quote pe tape claim which was in the dossier was not only an obvious lie, but whose provenance was nonsense and fabricated in its entirety by a Northern Virginia Democratic operative named Charles Dolan who had ties to Russian businesses and lobbying organizations, who levied said ties by planting it in the Steele dossier before then peddling it to media outlets before and after the Trump victory in
twenty and sixteen, and then finally, actually probably most importantly from a national security perspective, put this up there on the screen, showed that the Steele Dossier was included in the illegal Carter page FISA warrant that the report shows the PISA applications included items from the unproven Steel dossier were included directly in said FIZA application, where they took unverified information pedled by the Clinton campaign and used it
as a pretext to spy on an American citizen. So you put all this together and what you find is an incredibly damaging.
Report for the FBI.
I was actually a little bit miffed by the Durham report because in his executive summary he damns the FBI. He says that they opened this investigation with no evidence whatsoever that any of it was true. They spent so many resources and all the running down these bs claims, obviously for political purposes. But in it he doesn't have any recommendations for new procedures. In the summary, he just goes, I have no recommendations, just simply.
Follow the law.
I'm like, well, clearly the law is not working. Because Peter Struck is a hero. Andrew McCabe is on CNN who's literally fired for not doing his job properly. The other guy went to go work for Twitter and got fired by Elon to cover up because he was covering up his own Twitter files. Nonsense, Not what James Comey's a multimillionaire living here in northern Virginia.
What's happening.
Clearly, you can't just have law enforcement officials who don't properly enforce the law or do investigations correctly and suffer no consequences.
Yeah, I feel like I'm losing my mind reading this report.
Yeah, I mean most of the prosecutions that there were three separate attempted prosecutions that came out of this, only one of them resulted in a conviction. The other two resulted in acquittals. So the prosecutions that came out of this ended up, you know, not going very far themselves. And I found that part to a little perplexing, frankly, because you have this whole report that lays.
Out you know, I think pages if anyone would have.
To look at this and say, okay, this illustrates some real problems within the FBI, and it's like all right, so what do we do about? And see it's just like, yeah, just do better next time.
It's like that's not gonna happening.
Is broken?
What is the root cause?
Like, how do we get to this place? What's the
root cause? How do you change that? And he had nothing for you on that front, So it is it was disappointing in that regard for sure, because what you would like to see is some sort of reform that's going to give people confidence that you know, the next time there's this big investigation, big incredibly politically charged investigation which the FBI has now bungled a few of these, that things are going to unfold differently, and instead it's just like, just do a little better.
Next time, guys. We got confidence, so it's going to be all good.
It's so dumb, let's go the next part.
This is so funny, so ccen as Jake Tapper decided to just tell the basic conclusions that are quite obvious from the Duram report that they are very damaging for the FBI and they do vindicate in part many of Trump's acusations against the law enforcement agency and CNN view are not so happy about it. Here's what he had to say, and we'll tell you about the reaction.
President Trump appeared so confident of what Durham would find he openly pressured the special counsel to release his findings before the twenty twenty election. Regardless, the report is now here, it has dropped, and it might not have produced everything of what some Republicans hod for it is regardless devastating to the FBI, and to a degree it does exonerate Donald Trump.
So the reaction here at Crystal is so funny.
Media Matters absolutely losing it, they say, to be clear, this is not devastating for the FBI does not do in any degree exonerate Donald Trump. What in the world are you talking about? They say, is misleading commentary. My personal favorite I just scrolled past is good God. They are now pimping out Jake Tapper for MAGA viewers hashtag propaganda for ratings, just so people know it's not working if that's the case. Because Chris Wallace just lost in
primetime to Newsmax that actually just came out yesterday. They got a total of three hundred thousand viewers.
Matter how much they pay in that dude, yeah.
Exactly, probably ten million dollars a year to be last on the air to freaking Newsmax, which fairly existed five years ago.
Humiliating, absolutely humiliating.
But it just shows same problems with the freakout post CNN town Hall. They cannot handle any semblance of fairness whenever it comes to describing yeah, basic facts, Well.
I think I think Ryan, because I watched a little of you and Ryan's coverage to this while I was on my honeymoon. I think Ryan pointed this out that you know, something we talk about in independent media is this problem of audience capture, where you know, you start feeding audience a certain narrative and then that attracts a certain audience and all they want to hear is this one certain narrative, and then if you veer off of that track, you lose a whole bunch of people. And
so people don't veer off the track. They find reasons to stay on the track. Major problem in independent media. But it appears CNN has the same issue because they've spent years cultivating a certain worldview and a certain audience. And so you know, in a sense, I you know, Tapper is saying things that are just accurate based on what's reflected in the report, But you don't get to avoid complicity for over years and years and years hiding any of the evidence that what was being spun in
terms of rushigate was false. And so you can't be surprised then when there's a frecount, when you host a Trump town hall, you can't be surprised when there's a frecount when you just cover the contents of this report. If they are genuinely trying to, you know, cultivate a different audience, Yeah, it's going to be painful for a while.
They're going to lose some of the people.
That they have been bringing along with them for years because they haven't painted an accurate picture of the world for them. So then when you come in and puncture their bubble, they're going to say. You know, they're going to be confused, They're going to be upset, They're going to be enrage.
There's no doubt about it.
Yeah, I mean, what do we learn I guess from all this. I just think that you can see audience capture. But more importantly, the problem for them is they don't even care as much about their audience. They care more about pleasing each other. And you just know that it drives Jake Tapper insane to see criticism from media matter, you know, from people who they would consider social friends, allies in many respects.
And I feel like Tapper is a little bit of a contrarian.
Yes and no.
He likes to fight.
He does. He's a dm W, he is a warrior, experience.
He's he definitely one thing we can say for sure, every comment about this.
He yeah, tweet this video at him, one hundred percent, will watch it. I guarantee you if I say one negative word, I'll hear about it for the rest of my life.
The problem that I think is that and this isn't about Tapper necessarily.
This is really just CNN and the way that the internal response is look at the freak out from the town hall, and you can just guarantee that if you say something like this factual but potential to help Trump in any way, there's going to be a cringe on.
The other local No, no, no, it didn't vindicate everything they said.
That's not what he said. He said to a certain extent, he said, it's damaging for the FBI. The FBI is not We don't have to religiously pray to the FBI. It's just an organization. It's it's supposed to be neutral.
It's not.
Obviously, deeply it has a lot of problems. Y.
Yeah, it's deeply problematic, and I think that there are a lot of reasons to be skeptical of it. What's wrong with that? Last time I checked, we were in the news business. We should be skeptical of anything law enforcement tells us. My default assumption is I don't believe you prove it, you know, show us the evidence, and that's why it should be. That's why it should be
for a lot of people in media. But they religiously had to defend the FBI during the Russigate years, which now means that if they screw up, they.
Can barely say they screwed up without pissing off a.
Whole bunch of yeah, because they've made them into infallible heroes, which they never deserved. Yeah, all right, Sager, what are you looking at?
Almost everyone in America can agree our economic system is not fair. Now where we diverge is how do we address that. The wolks have the quality of outcome where we basically predetermine what the outcome for the average person should be, and then we rig all racial groups to make.
Sure that's where they end up.
The democratic socialists have visions of egalitarian futures with limited equality of opportunity but a very very high floor for the average individual. The economic libertarians believe that the free market itself will produce fairness, so we should double down Eventually, that we'll get there emerging branch of conservative populists who want something in between each of those groups. In my opinion, they have a point, But I think it's always important
to start with the data. What does it tell us where are we exactly before we even evaluate solutions. Luckily, my friend talman Joseph Smith over at the New York Times actually did a fantastic new analysis on an upcoming largest wealth transfer in American history?
What does it reveal about our future politics?
Let's dive in first and foremost, what generational wealth transfer is he talking about? The basics are this, the boomers are getting fully into retirement age. With that comes the reality that many are beginning to die. With death comes inheritance. The boomers due to the enormous economic growth that occurred during their lifetimes.
I've amassed trillions.
Of dollars of wealth with relative ease given cheap tuition, cheap and abundant housing, ballooning wages, ballooning stock portfolios, and frankly, just the longevity of the effect of compound interest over time. A new analysis finds that the eighty four trillion dollars projected to be passed down from older Americans to their millennial and Gen X airs, roughly sixteen trillion will transfer it just in the next decade.
As you can see.
From the graphic before you, the amount of wealth that the boomers hold is astounding, some seventy eight trillion of one hundred and eighty trillion in existence, with the rest divided up between Gen X, silent gen and millennials holding the smallest share despite making up a massive share of the population. But what is really crazy is not the generational differences, it's who within generations is about to inherit
a whole lot of money. Currently in the United States, the wealthiest ten percent of households are the ones who will be giving and getting the vast majority of riches. As you can see before you for context, the top one percent of American households hold as much wealth as the bottom ninety percent combined. They will dictate alone most of the money flow. The bottom fifty, by contrast, account
for only eight percent of all future transfers. What makes this particular situation and well transfer so unique is the nature of the wealth and how it was attained. The absolute vast majority is held in booming stock portfolios invested since early working years and in real estate values by longer held properties. The twin pillars of Boomer wealth thus not only represent a large portion of what will pass down, but the nature of how it will do so. And
this is where the tax code comes in. As he notes, under US law, the top one point five percent of American household wealth will be allowed for transfer to errors with virtually very little inheritance tax or income tax. The IRS estimates it will capture about four point two four point two trillion dollars off of thirty trillion dollar in the transfer. That's a rate of approximately fourteen percent. So
a massive wealth transfer is about to occur. Most of it will occur within the top ten percent of American household income, and especially amongst the top one percent.
This has severe social ramifications.
Number one changes the fundamental makeup of the relative rich in America. As I've mentioned here before, I've actually been on a bit of a Dave Ramsey kick. Actually read his most recent book, Baby Steps Millionaires, a great book.
I recommend it. The book includes a large.
White paper study on North American millionaires and found the vast majority did not inherit their wealth and got it by slow and steady planning over the years with retirement savings and paid off houses. That's actually an inspiring story. The relative middle class and financial discipline can leave one pretty well off through the laws of compound interests. And to be clear, that's still really good advice. Most people would be better off if they did listen to him.
But the question arises what share of those people will be rich in the future. Because the children of said baby steps millionaires can inherit real estate effectively tax free. The step up basis segments of our real estate laws and saying whenever it comes to stock purchases, the capital gains taxes going only on the appreciation within the period after inheritance, not from the portion when it was held by the original owner.
In other words, absolutely gigantic.
Gifts are turning over to children basically without taxes, the potential to not only widen income gaps, but gift wealth to millions who didn't work for it nearly in the same way that their parents did, not saying they don't deserve it. But if larger shares of the upper middle class attain status through inheritance, it significantly changes accelerating trends which make it much much harder to become middle class today than it was thirty years ago.
Inherited wealth.
Not only do they do what they have inherited wealthy have done since time immemorial. They're just going to use the government and fight tooth and nail to preserve wealth and lobby for tax codes that gives the control over their estates and lets them give their money to their kids tax free.
The problem, though, is.
We still live in a democracy, and in times of great great inheritance, like the Gilded Age before us or the Industrial Revolution in the UK, if you want to keep a relatively free market system, you are going to have to significantly change stuff and make some compromises. Becoming age of those compromises could very much change American society forever. We have not had a period like this really since the end of the Great Depression, when the initial system
broke completely. Before that, we had the Progressive era. Both changed everything in the way our society was ordered, how we do taxes, the way the economy interacts with politics. Now I do not know what the solution is, as obviously many people have very different proposals, but expect this to be one of the central fights of our time, I thought it was astounding sixteen trillion.
Dollars and if you want to hear my reaction to Cyber's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at breakingpoints dot.
Com, Crystal, what are you taking a look at?
Well, guys, this has been an astonishing year already of change across the media landscape. Twenty ten's juggernaut BuzzFeed News, they just shuddered. Vox was forced to raise and half of their previous valuation just to stay afloat, and now in a stunning fall, Vice Media has filed for Chapter eleven bankruptcy protection.
Not so long ago that company was valued at.
Five point seven billion dollars. They are now hoping to fetch two hundred and twenty five million in a fire sale. All of these companies were eaten alive by their bets that social media trends and clicks would amount to vast
revenue streams. To justify their multi billion dollar valuations investors, they poured in hundreds of millions of dollars in cash, but at the end of the day, each of these companies fatal flaw was reliance on major tech platforms to share in a sufficient slice slice of the wealth of digital ad dollars to justify their gigantic overheads. When ad revenues dipped this year as part of the Tech Session, it was the straw that broke a whole herd of camel's backs. But this is far from the end of
the story. In fact, in a lot of ways, the story of widespread media devastation might just be beginning, because now AI has arrived that is all ready capable of cutting the legs out from under even financially solid media companies.
Just take a look at this.
Courtesy of futurism, Google unveils plan to demolish the journalism industry using AI now. In the article, they write the Google has just unveiled their new AI integrated search. A key component is what they call snapshots. Whatever question you ask their large language model AI will generate a summary meant to answer your query, which appears above all of the linked results, and so in a lot of instances, it's likely to be the only thing that the user
actually pays attention to. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what this means for the news business. When users ask questions about news stories, Let's say it was Trump found guilty of sexual assault? What are the latest Democratic primary poll results? Why did DeSantis make that weird face in Iowa?
Anything?
They'll no longer be presented first and foremost with this list of links to news websites where you can read about said topic. Instead, they'll most likely content themselves with that AI snapshot and just move on now.
This will result in far fewer visits to sites, which.
Will generate far fewer ad impressions, and which will circumvent all paywalls, and which will prevent news sites from getting you.
To pay for a subscription.
These are all primary critical sources of news business revenue, and every one of them gets cut off at the knees by the innovation of AI snapshots. As RPG site owner Alex Donaldson puts it, quote, if this actually works and is implemented in a firm way, this is literally the end of the business model for vast swaths of digital media.
Lol. Will publishers be paid.
For providing this grisk for the AI mill doesn't really look like it, A Google spokesperson told Futurism, quote, we don't have plans to share on this, but will continue to work within the broader ecosystem.
Whatever that means. So what is this all going to look like?
Well, if you are not a behemoth like The Times, The Post, or the Wall Street Journal, you're probably screwed. Twenty tens digital media plays were taken out by betting on social media. Now a lot of other outlets are going to be taken out by their reliance on search platforms, squeezing an already struggling industry.
Google, after all.
Accounts for ninety one percent of all search traffic, and other search platforms like Bing they're gonna have their own AI bots as well. In the news industry, they're already in a world of hurt after all. Even large outlets places like NBC News Washington Posts they've announced layoffs to cope with that downturn in ad revenue. So what is
going to survive Outside of the giants? You can kind of still make business models work that either have very low overhead or and or some sort of dedicated audience willing to pay. That means a lot more hot takes than on the ground reporting or investigative journalism, both of which are comparatively expensive. It means more playing to a dedicated niche, either an ideological or personality based one, because a fervent audience willing to pay is more important than
a large general audience with lower commitment. It means a lot more insider tip sheets that lobbyists and corporate interests find valuable to help their bottom line one way or another, you'd better keep it small and provide something, whether it's genuine insight or ideological sucker or insider gossip, that people
find genuinely worth paying for. Now, frankly for any of this, because I think it amounts to an accelerated hollowing out of the media industry giants that will all be forced to rely on for news breaking and a sea of small creators to sift through it all and analyze it. In an analogy to the disappearance of the middle class in our broader economy, the whole middle tier publishers, they're likely to be pushed down an acceleration again of a
process that has already been playing out over years. What other industries is AI set to casually upend and send careening off a cliff Well, we covered earlier how a lot of white collar jobs lost to the tech session. They're gone forever as tech companies plan to replace humans with AI, we're only beginning to wrap our heads around what this all may look like in a new era. Lucky for us, however, Daily Mail recently asked AI to predict how it's all going.
To turn out.
They asked what ten different American cities might look like in twenty fifteen, and according to AI image generator mid Journey, it's all going to work out. Great, guys, here's a rendering of San Diego. Another of Washington, DC looks lush, green clean. Finally get those long promise flying cars. Apparently, perhaps AI is right, and powerful AI models wielded by a bunch of soulless corporations will actually.
Lead us to the promised land.
Or perhaps it we'll just accelerate all of the worst trends which are already eating away at our society and our economy. I'd wager the reality of the doom news business is probably a better predictor than the AI's futuristic utopian hallucinations. This is the piece that was always the most clear to me.
And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at Breakingpoints dot com. Okay, guys, we really appreciate you guys watching. As we said, we've got the RFK interview coming. It'll be later today for our premium subscribers. For everybody else, it will be up tomorrow, so if you want to watch it early, if you want to help support our work stuff like this breakingpoints
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