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What do we have, Krystal, Dad, We do lots of interesting stories breaking this morning to talk to you about. So we have new calls from Democrats, including James Carville, for Biden to drop out so well late in the game for that, but we're still going in that direction. Thomas Massey, Congressman Thomas Massey, Republican spills the tea on a pack babysitters to Tucker Carlson, got some interesting analysis
of apack donations to get into with you. Lindsey Graham making some very revealing and I guess very honest comments about the Ukraine world we're in the real reason that we are so deeply involved and invested in that your car may be tracking you and snitching to your insurance company in a way that could cause your premiums to go up. SAGA is taking a look at the FDA doing some shenanigans with regards to cigarettes.
I'm looking forward to hearing that one.
Yes, is one of the greatest. It is a crime against.
Humanity, crime against jewel users. Well that's humanity, okay, all right, Well, well, I'm looking forward to that one.
I haven't read that one yet.
And I'm taking a look at a new investigation into claims of Hama's mass rape on October seventh that has already created It was like kicking a hornets and has created a huge backlash, So a lot to dig into there. Also looking forward to speaking in studio this morning with
Annelle she Line. She is a former State Department employee who resigned about two months ago over her objections to the war in Gaza and our unconditional support for Israel, or to talk to her about why she resigned, what she saw at the State Department, and also some new developments.
We had a UN Security Council resolution pass about that ceasefire deal that the Biden administration claimed was Israel's idea, but for some reason, Israel's the only party actually at this point that says they project the deal their own deal supposedly. So a lot that's interesting there. I'm looking forward to speaking to and Nol this morning.
Yeah, it's always great to hear for people who are actually on the inside. She can tell us about what it was actually like to work there and then also react to.
Some of the things that are going on right now.
So before we get to any of that, just a reminder hoping sure everything and making sure everything is good on the local side.
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com if you want to become a subscriber. As Crystal said, though, there is some interesting development on the Biden is too old discourse. We're kind of like an oscillating thing. First we were allowed to say it, not allowed to say it now. Only some people are like James Carville is apparently one of those people who gave an interesting interview a few days ago that only now has been taking notice why he did not think Joe Biden should run again.
Let's take a listen.
It isn't the choice that I was crazy about. I actually was very public that I thought that President Biden should not run for reelection. But he did, and there's him and Trump, and that's where I am. And I'm a thousand percent behind President Biden. Just the charge I got, where does.
The Democratic Party go?
Well, one of the underappreciated things about current state of the Democratic Party is there is enormous I mean almost could say, I mean there's no Bill Clinton. You never can say that about someone. But with that type of skill.
Oh, so there you go, Joe.
So, first of all, Carville says something which is basically not true, Cristal, because we've been covering this for a long time, he did not ever say publicly or vocally that Biden.
Should not run again. That has not been his amount.
Now maybe it's that like a DC cocktail party the public.
He may have said it out in the circuit, he did certainly did not say here. Carville, of course, the former campaign manager for Bill Clinton, kind of a what just a cable news star.
I guess for the Yeah, he's got that later or so he's got character.
You know, he's a character.
Yeah, and he's looked like he was one hundred years old for my entire life somehow, So I guess he could be a very trusted authority in terms of the aging process and what is appropriate.
There is a good documentary if anybody wants to watch it, called The War Room.
It's actually on HBO Max. Now I just checked.
It was.
It was inside like a camera crew that joined the Clinton campaign when nobody thought that they were going to win, and so they actually were in the room for the entire course of the election, including all the way up to election ize.
So we want to see how Carville really was in action.
Along with George Dephanopolis, I do recommend it, but at the very least, he's a longtime Democratic elite pundit another for him to be saying something like this is pretty astounding because they're admitting the weakness of their candidate at the very same time. Let's put this up there from
Nate Silver, the polling prognosticator. He says, it is clear now that Democrats would have been better served if Biden had decided a year ago not to seek a second term, which would have allowed them to have some semblance of a primary process and give voters to say amongst the many popular Democrats across the country.
As he shows you, Biden.
Has now hit an all time low in approval just yesterday. Dropping out would be a big risk, but there is a threshold below which continuing to run is a bigger risk. Are we there yet? I don't know, but it is more than fair to ask. I mean, we are now at a point really where historically it is very difficult to even put Biden into perspective.
There's really only two options.
He is the most unpopular president ever, including more unpopular than Jimmy Carter. So since the invention of modern polling or every single poll and all of the averages are totally wrong.
Now, the funny thing.
Is both are equally likely, I would say there is still a strong possibility that he could win the election.
In fact, Nate wrote an entire piece.
I recommend people read it about the path to two seventy, where he makes the case we talked about on our show yesterday. The past to two seventy for Biden through white, older voters in the industrial Midwest is still very strong. You can lose the entire sun Belt, a lot of the emerging parts of the country, and he can still win the election. But it is an incredibly narrow path and one that if things trend in this direction, if even somewhat accurate, is going to be extraordinarily unlikely.
I mean, look, we covered yesterday a poll that had them tied, you know, among restered voters, I think Biden was up by one. Among likely voters, Trump was up by one, but just a total jump ball. So yeah, the remarkable thing is that both major parties seem to have chosen and what is probably like the weakest candidate that they possibly could and so that's what's keeping Joe.
Biden in the game.
You if Trump were to like get locked up and drop out of the race because of it, that would be the Democrat's worst nightmare because I think basically any other like generic Republican would probably beat Joe Biden. By five point six point seven points somewhere in that zone, fairly handily, they would sweep all of the battle ground states, very likely on the Democratic side. It's not really theoretical.
We know because we can see the polling in each of the Senate races where every single Democratic Senate candidate, the good, the bad, the ugly, like whatever they are, wherever they are on the ideological spectrum, whatever their level of political talent is, they are all dramatically outperforming the top of the ticket. So Democrats, i think, after the midterms foolishly thought, oh, actually, you know, this went better than we thought, and so we're good. We don't need
to think about another presidential contender. The Biden team, the thing that that they have probably been most competent and most effective at was closing the door to anyone from any elected from within the party. Obviously, Biden did have Democratic primary opponents, even though the party just like pretended they didn't exist. That that also was very effective in keeping Biden's grip on the Democratic Party apparatus. But that
was the thing that they did most effectively. And so now even though everyone's looking at the approval rating, looking at the pulling and going, guys, this is kind of a disaster, especially when you're telling us democracies on the line and this is all existential and we're putting our weakest possible candidate forward. You even have you James Carville, who's obviously a party stalwart.
He's as loyal a.
Democrat as you could possibly get. Admitting that Biden should have dropped out a long time ago. A stet Herndon on Twitter has been making a point that I think is also really worth keeping in mind, which is that this idea that Biden would be too old to serve a second term really originates with Joe Biden himself last
time when he was running. Part of his pitch was, listen, guys, I know I'm getting up there in years, but I'll be the sort of steady hand on the till the senior statesman to get us through this rough Trumpian waters, get him out of office, write the ship, and then hand the keys over to someone in the next generation. He really suggested very strongly that was an important part of his pitch and what made him appealing and allowed him to win and ultimately prevail in that Democratic primary.
So it doesn't even originate with the voters themselves, although I'm sure they were concerned about that at the time as well. Joe Biden really bought into that argument and understood that argument at the time, even as now they try to pretend like it's preposterous and how dare you and its ageist and it's ablest because of his stutter or whatever.
Yeah, it's all because of his stutter. Christmas.
Actually, that's my favorite.
That's the real issue. Of course, let's go ahea and put this up there on the screen.
This is the same, you know, the same normal stuff going on Biden's economy.
Good metrics, bad vibes, and few.
I mean, it's one of those where I don't know if to laugh or cry at this point, because what people don't seem to understand is they're like, well, the metrics are good, but people don't feel that it is good, and it's like, well, maybe the metrics are bullshit. You know. We were talking just yesterday with one of our producers about how the unemployment rate is even calculated. Is it an actual true capture of the unemployment rate or is
it just the same way it's always been calculated. Hmmm, Maybe these like antiquated formulas from the nineteen seventies, which is the best they could come up with the pre computer era. Maybe that doesn't fully capture it. Maybe the quote unquote CPI bundle is not exactly the most accurate
way to measure inflation. What if we were to just look at the way that people preference things in their lives, food, housing and shelter, or food and shelter, look at those two things and just think about what inflation looks like that over the course of biden presidency. Oh, now it's twenty five percent. Oh that's actually very high. Now we're talking about bad metrics and bad vibes. It's not a
difficult thing to understand. It's really frustrating the way that the media continues to write about this.
The housing piece, to me, is just so critical, yes, and so central, And I really think, you know, there's all this analysis of why is Biden holding on to his older voters, but younger voters are fleeing him in droves, And I really think that if you just look at who are the homeowners, who are the asset owners, and who are not, you can see very clearly where Biden's
coalition has eroded. So, you know, predominantly older people tend to have you know, they had a chance to buy a house, they had a chance to accumulate something in their four oh one k or be invested in the stock market. And if you're young, or if you come from a minority community that historically hasn't had a lot of net wealth, you may be shut out of that. And so the economic landscape is totally different for those
two groups of people. And to me, it's just a very simple and obvious explanation for the divergence between you know, how different demographic groups feel about Joe Biden, and yet
it's completely ignored. There was a very revealing, very interesting quote from Ben Harris, who's a former or senior Treasury Department official who helped craft Biden's economic agenda, about these economic numbers and why even though you have jobs reports that show a lot of jobs gains, why they aren't giving Biden credit quote unquote, They say in this article, even if the trend of positive economic news it continues, it's unclear whether voters will give credit to the Biden administration.
Inside Biden's orbit, the fear is that there's little new that administration can do to change the perceptions of a quote stubborn electorate that's living through an upswing, yet simply refusing.
To believe it. There it is.
Quote if half of the people think that unemployment is at a fifty year high when it's actually close to fifty year low. This is a problem of misinformation. It's a problem of perception. That's that Ben Harris, dude, I was just telling you about who helped with the Biden agenda. I think fortunately it'll have a major impact on the election. So it's the voter's fault. They just don't understand how
good they've got it. They're being stubborn because they're not like going along with what the Biden administration wants them to feel about the economy. It's so condescending that you can scarcely believe it. And you can see in this attitude there's no attempt even to understand it. There's no attempt to give any credence to the economic anxiety that many many voters are feeling, and the fact that they
feel very much the bite of high prices continuing. They feel very much the fact that housing, if you aren't already a homeowner, is getting increasingly out of reach. The numbers about how much the average mortgage cost has skyrocketed over just the past couple of years are truly breathtaking. So you know, they're they basically are like, yeah, we're not going to try anything new because we don't think
it'll work. So we're just gonna, you know, hope for the best and remind people that Trump is bad and yes, hopefully that will.
They're just going to keep relying on stories like let's go put this up there on the screen. Quote this from the Wall Street Journal. I'm not blaming them because they're a business publication, so they're writing it the way that they should. This is tiring, and wages are up, reinforcing the economy's resilience. It says the US posted surprisingly large games in both jobs and pay even though the
unemployment rate ticked up to four percent. So they say that the US job growth burst past expectations last month, even as the unemployment edged up. Employers added some two hundred and seventy two thousand jobs. Now, again, whenever they talk about ticking up and we let's say, for example, that we keep wages, and we say wages though across the economy are up. However, if you read at the very very bottom of the story. Wages across the economy,
though are difficult to measure. Federal officials have recently been hiding actual inflation data more than other factors that would influence those numbers. In other words, are wages keeping up with inflation? Absolutely not. And now let's push back to where I was earlier that I'm just talking about CPI inflation, which is a bundle of a bunch of different things. Let's talk specifically about what they talked about in that Politico piece housing, gas and food.
Not a chance.
You have lost a lot of money actually in terms of your overall purchasing power from the last four years, even if your wages went up by ten percent, yourself fifteen percent or whatever.
In the hole. Everybody intuitively understands this.
I've been speaking with many friends, many who are trying to buy a house or saving up for a down payment. When they calculate with their expected mortgages, they just give up. And these people who actually make decent money, many of them are like big law lawyers who probably make I don't know, a quarter MILLI year on top of their spouse, so they're probably pulling three three fifty but we live
here in Washington, DC. Average home prices rum where around a million in terms of where people want to live. So that's two hundred k that you're going to need just saved up for a down payment, which is very, very difficult. And then assuming that you even qualify, or so you have less than that, if you're going to pay pm I, you've got mortgage, you know, payments which are double digits with the current interest rate. They're like, I can't afford that. They'd be like almost forty percent
of my take home pay. And these people are frankly rich by most American standards. Okay, but even drop the numbers to a normal American housing market four five hundred thousand. I believe the average home price in the US is now some four hundred and fifty thousand dollars something like that. When we peg what that both price is along with the current mortgage payment, it is some thirty five to forty percent of average take home pay. Even if you make some one hundred grand a year.
Good luck to you.
I mean, that's that means that fifty percent of the country, you're done. It is not going to happen. And then over that or I guess it can, but it would, you really would. You're going to have what an hour and a half commune or something quality of life hit.
That's going to be very significant.
So all the numbers that people can intuitively see when they're interacting with and trying to ascend the ladder of a you know, quality of life not in an unreasonable way. You're not buying yachts, you're not flying all around the country trying to just buy a house. It is extremely difficult, and that is what the Biden people won't acknowledge.
They don't even look at it.
RFK, you know, to his credit, actually did on our show talk about housing, and I know he has some housing stuff that is out there, but there is no major candidate that is making this like the central issue to them for right now.
And that's a huge mistake.
I mean, Trump benefits because he's simply the anti and you know, in some ways people can project whatever they want on to them.
Yeah, that's right. I mean, it is really the opposite of the incumbent advantage now because people are so like understandably down about the direction of the country, being out of office is almost an advantage at this point. So you know, I just think the level of arrogance from the Biden team, and you know they call the electorate stummering. They're the ones who are stubber and who are looking at these numbers and like, now, we're not going to change,
We're not going to adjust. They're just they're going.
To come along.
We think, we hope. Listen, it worked out for us last time. Joe Biden's in the White House, so you know, we don't need to actually offer or anything. And that's that's what's really astonishing is.
Think about the way that this country's supposed to worry, Like.
Think about how much we talk about democracy and how important that's supposed to be. What percentage of voters says the economy is their number one issue, and yet you have really neither of these candidates that has offered anything
significant in terms of an economic plan or vision. I mean Joe Biden, like, there are things that he has done that we've talked about in this administration that I support that I think we're a good direction, But in terms of delivering for people in the here and now, it's just it's non existent. It's non existent. What he's even promising in the next hour and We know the promises don't always come reality, but he's not even promising anything, so it's it.
Really is remarkable.
And you know, James Carvil Bill Clinton like obviously not a big fan of Bill Clinton or the way that he ran his administration, but when it came to campaigning, they understood that the economy had to come first and foremost. And yet you know, not only do you have no place on the economy, you have so much focus on funding foreign wars that regardless of how you feel about those foreign wars, obviously a lot of voters are going to come away with the correct impression that that is
much more of a priority to Joe Biden. And by the way, the overwhelming majority of the political class in Washington than their well being day.
In a day.
Yeah, and that's where sheer political talent also just comes into play. This is true.
There's an amazing moment in the ninety two campaign debates. You can go watch it on YouTube where some lady asked Clinton a question. I think it's oh no, she asked George hw question about the national debt, which, lady, what are you doing? But it's been thirty years, so we'll forgive her. She asked George W. Hw Bush a question about the national debt. He answers it about the national debt. Clinton is like, she's not talking about the
national debt. She's talking about the economy, and he rattles off like ten statistics about how everything you know. Al Gore had a famous saying, He's like, everything that's up, it should be down. Everything that's down should be up. He's like, we're going to turn things right side up.
It was a good turn of phrase. But my point is that they un stood intuitively that hw Bush and trickled down economics was deeply out of touch with the current recession that was happening there at that time, and they hammered it home every single time that they would
talk about that. So obviously ninety two he gets carried in, But people forget ninety six was a blowout election completely, and it was all because he continued on that economic legacy, and even though he didn't really do very much well he was president, he benefited from a lot of different stuff. He still was laser focused on that message, and even after the whole Lewinsky thing, he left office with a
sixty six percent approval rating. So there is a lot to be learned here about just literal sheer political talent, and neither of the candidates we currently have who are major in the race are even trying to emulate any of that when it's one of the most successful strategies of my entire lifetime as a politician. Frankly, even more successful than Obama if we look at how he left office with his approval rating.
Clinton had more of the common man, you know, that was the thing, I feel your pain like. There was a lot to be that was very interesting about his ninety two campaign, in particular where he really positioned himself as tried to position himself in a more populist direction vis a vi hw Bush, who is this like, you know, patrician scion of an extremely wealthy like political dynasty, and did all sorts of Romney esque things to signal to the public like this guy is nothing like you.
He does not understand your life.
And obviously you know this is disputed, but with a little help from ross Pero, he's able to ultimately get over the top. So in any case, to take it back to Carville's original point in terms of sheer political talent, Joe Biden is no Bill Clinton, no doubt about it. And Democrats have really been fortunate. You know, they were fortunate with Clinton because he was an extraordinary political talent. Barack Obama was also, in a very different way an
extraordinary political talent. Hillary Clinton not so much, and Joe Biden at one point he had some things going for him politically, you know, in this sense of empathy. That was what he was really famous for. But those years are have passed them by, no.
Doubt about it.
If stuttered away.
Senator Lindsay Graham, who's one of the biggest Ukraine warhawks possible.
You know, if this guy was in.
Charge, god forbid, we would already be in World War Three. Like there's no doubt whether it's with you know, Russia, or whethers with regard to Iran. Like any number of World War three's, Lindsay Graham is constantly looking to get us into He made some comments though, that were, I guess, very honest about the real reasons why we care so much about Ukraine, and spoiler alert has nothing to do
with democracy or with their sovereignty or human rights. Let's take a listen to how Senator Graham explains why we should be super committed to Ukraine.
They're sitting on ten to twelve trillion dollars of critical minerals in Ukraine, they could be the richest country.
In all of Europe.
I don't want to give that money and those assets to Putin to share with China. If we help Ukraine now, they can become the best business partner wherever dreamed of That ten to twelve trillion dollars or critical mineral assets could be used by Ukraine and the West, not given to Putin in China. This is a very big deal how Ukraine ends. Let's help them win a war we can't afford to lose. Let's find a solution to this war.
But they're sitting on a gold mine. To give Putin ten or twelve trillion dollars or critical minerals that he will share with China is ridiculous.
Soccercarrius, your thoughts on this one.
Well, first of all, you're not supposed to say stuff like that ever since the World War One and the Great War, because that's when literal territorial conquests went out of style. And if you embrace that, then you are Putin. That's basically Putinism. Putinism is we have the right as a great power to seize this territory under whatever democratic means, because we can, and for for economic.
Purposes, because we want that lithium or what.
This is part of the thing that is so patently. Of course, people used to say that about Afghanistan too. They're like, well, theoretically there's six amount. It's like, yeah, what the Soviet Union and the Russians ruled Ukraine for what hundreds of years. If they were going to extract any thing of true value like that, they would have done it already. And more so, if that was remain true in the modern era, then the Ukrainian government would have done.
It already if it was actually going to be possible.
The reason why it's not possible is that Ukraine is a stratified country along ethnic lines, with deep corruption, and which basically has huge internal contradictions that go against each other that don't make it a functioning nation state, just like Afghanistan doesn't sound familiar. So underlying you know, resources or whatever, who cares about that. It's about the functioning apparatus above that's actually you know, able to bring that stuff to market, to be able to trade it.
There's a reason they're known for grain and have been known for grain for hundreds of years.
Okay, how much, But how much do you think that this is reflective of other elite thinking like in the Biden administration, et cetera.
I would say it's very difficult because I actually don't think they're there. There's a better case for US involvement in Iraq and specifically in the Middle East on oil than there is for this, because, like I just said, nothing he's saying is even proven or actually like true in terms of its deliverables. I think a lot of it just comes down to like putin bad if anything, like I said, he is probably exhibiting more of a
Putinesque like Russian mindset about why we need Ukraine. But regardless what is he saying there, He said, we need to quote unquote help Ukraine to turn it into a mineral vassal state that can work as our electric battery
vehicle manufacturing. Someone should go and ask Ukrainians. Someone should go ask the Ukrainian grandpa who's sixty two years old and had one week of basic training on the front line, whether that is why he is fighting, and be like, hey, do you is that the future that you want for yourself. He's like, wait, I thought I was fighting for self determination. It's like, hey, buddy, we got some news for you about what you're really doing.
That.
I mean, like this is straight up out of World War One, like out of those secret treaties of the Bolsheviks published.
That's that's a view into this mindset. Yeah.
The Washington posted to an article a little while back just to confirm the mineral deposits that Lindsay Graham was talking to.
Put this up on the screen.
They say, in the Ukraine War a battle for the nation's mineral and energy wealth. And they firm it from the other direction of not like, well, this is why we should be here, so that they can turn we can turn them into our lithium vessel state as far or footed. But that's what the Russians are really after. And in fact, a lot of the mineral wealth is in eastern Ukraine, you know, the area that is most in dispute. It's also the area that is the most ethnically Russian.
The one that actually speaks Russian.
You mean, yeah, right, So they say Ukraine harbor some of the world's largest reserves of titanium and iron ore fields of untapped lithium and massive deposits of coal. Collectively, there are worth tens of trillions of dollars. The line's share of those coal deposits, which for decorads have powered Ukraine's critical steel industry, are concentrated in the East, where
Moscow's made the most inroads. That puts them in Russian hands, along with significant amounts of other valuable energy and mineral deposits used for everything from aircraft parts to smartphones. Ukraine would also lose myriad other reserves, including stores to natural gas, oil, rare earth minerals essential for certain high tech components that could hamper Western europe search for alternatives to imports from Russia and China.
Ukraine is widely known as an.
Agricultural powerhouse, but as a raw material mother load. It's home to one hundred and seventeen of the one hundred and twenty most widely used minerals and metals, and a major source of fossil fuels. So I mean, I do think that there are not only this, but there are
other business interests in Ukraine. We've seen the way that private equity has been very excited about the idea of how much money we're going to pay them basically for Ukraine reconstruction, And obviously, the longer the war goes on and the more devastation there is ah the war opordentity there is for those reconstruction dollars to flow into their coffers, so you know, and obviously you have the military industrial complex that are always chomping at the bit for a
new war, and you know what that means for their bottom line. So this is an important part of the story of how we end up constantly engaged in these different wars, whether it's directly or proxy wars like this one, and why they seem to go on forever because you have a lot of people who are either currently profiting from the war or looking forward to future profits from that war.
That is a much more accurate and frankly, I think correct economic case that can really be made here is why do you think Blackstone, JP Morgan and all these other people are holding summits about rebuilding Ukraine Because the American taxpayer is going to pay for it. They're going to finance all the fake bonds and all this other stuff, and We're going to be.
The guarant terror of all of that. Yeah, it's disaster capitalism.
It's happened time and time and time again. And then we'll create these fake state owned companies in Ukraine. Who oh, they just happen to become filthy rich oligarchs too, who end up, you know, basically some corrupt people on the planet. But it's all good because America is gonna get it's twenty percent. And by America I mean the banks, not anybody who is like a normal, average working person, and or the politicians who will then go work for the banks.
That's if there is an economic case to be made for why US elites care about Ukraine.
That's what it actually is.
We're going all dressed up by this bs around minerals or democracy.
But I mean, at the very least with Graham.
This is why you if anything, it is more evil to it is straight up actually out of World War One, to have imperial powers dress up their conquest of territory in some grand fight against fascism or Kaiserism, and then a treaty comes out and it's like, oh well, actually, behind the scenes, we're splitting up, you know, all the remains of Eastern Europe or the Istanbul and Constantinople or whatever.
It's like, No, that's that's what it's really about.
It probably has always been that way, but you know, with a very few exceptions, but you're not supposed to say this stuff out loud, and that's why it's so gross.
Yeah, I mean it's hard to say which I prefer, like, I.
Mean, I do prefer this. I will say I want, honestly more than anything. Yes, you can talk about.
It exactly, because it's confusing to the American public if it's dressed up in values that they really believe in, right, that they actually earnestly care about right, and that they actually earnestly are concerned about the Ukrainian people and what this has done to their lives and their futures, et cetera, And so it confuses them about what our involvement is actually about.
I do think it'd be better if you had, you know, Joe.
Biden and others who were talking nakedly about their like wealth extraction plans out of this war, because then we could have honestly put it to the American people of like, Okay, well is this worth it to you? Is this like what your priority actually is? Cloaking it in humanitarian values, while the true end is just you know, feeding the profit machine is grotesque. So I guess, thank.
You, Lindsey Gram.
Sure your rare honesty, I guess, but your worldview is gross.
Right, this is a very interesting one. I'm sure that's I mean quite literally, is going to affect all of us. Let's put this up there on the screen. Is your driving being secretly scored? The insurance industry quote, hungry for insights into how people drive, has turned to automakers and smartphone apps like Life three sixty. So it says, quote, you know you have a credit score, but did you
know that you might also have a driver's score. A driver's score reflects how many times you slam on the brakes, how much you speed, how much you look at your phone, how much you drive late at night. Then that driver's score is then being bought and used by auto insurance companies to variably adjust your auto.
Insurance rates, it says correctly.
For the last two decades, auto insurers have been trying to get people to enroll in these programs that they monitor their day to day driving, they say, so that the rates can better.
Reflect their actual risk.
But you could flip it around and say, so that the rates can also variably spike whenever we see you doing something quote unquote risky. Well, why is that bad? Because it is a complete invasion of privacy that uses not only the vehicle but your phone to gauge all of the details of your everyday life. It is also, frankly not really fair. I've been thinking about this because I drive and rush hour traffic here.
Well, if I slam on the.
Brakes because somebody is an idiot in front of me, I'm getting penalized.
And it's not my fault.
You know that people drive here in bumper to bumper And by the way, if you're not bumpered a bumper, you're just gonna get cut off and then you're the sucker who's in the drive. So my point is just that there are so many perverse incentives and different ways where this could spike insurance rates for some consumers. Others who maybe have a different commute would be paying less.
It would basically put the burden on you know, let's say people who have to drive in rush hour traffic, and they would have to pay much more, even though they're the ones who are, you know, frankly spending more time on the road, et cetera. It's just one of those where the privacy element of it shows what the invasion looks like. And I would be remiss if I didn't say also that this comes just we're taping this segment.
The very day after that, Apple announces this major integration with open AI and with chat GPT.
So now you know.
At the OS level, your data is hardwired into a large language model where what you think that you know, all of the Geico and all these other companies aren't going to be then using that to churn even more and create predictive models of your driving so they can variably adjust. I mean, you can just see what the future here looks like where they're going to squeeze every single.
Dollar that they have out of you.
And really, in some ways the most disturbing part is people have no idea.
We don't even know.
I didn't notice was happening.
You download an app like a gas but is the one that's mentioned here which helps you, like, I guess, be more fuel lectures?
Cool app? Actually, well it used to be cool after.
Yeah, now you need to read the disclosures very carefully because, yeah, the apps that are on your phone and your car itself is snitching to your car insurance company and selling your data about and I'm talking about down to the minute, like second by second diary of what you are doing in the car. One individual who sort of went on this quest to find out what they knew about him, was ultimately able to obtain his driver's score and all of the information that had been sold to these car
insurance companies. He said there was a Microsoft Excel file with timestamped list of his every offending event and the latitude and longitude.
For where they occurred.
In the speeding tab, for example, there were more than two hundred second by second entries for the handful of drives during which this individual, mister Letherne, had exceeded a eighty five miles per hour. Like they are tracking you second by second, where your eyes are, how often you're on the phone, whether you put the brake on a little too hard, whether you accelerate it a little too fast, Like I think people would be horrified to know that.
You feel like when you're in your car, you feel like you're kind of in like you're.
In your space, supposedly your property, but.
Yeah, you're in your property.
You're in your space, like you feel like this is a you know, obviously there's people could see the way, but you feel like this is like a private space. You have no awareness that everything you're doing in there is being tracked.
And GM, actually we.
Can put this next one up on the screen because New York Times had done some reporting.
On this Previously.
GM had made a deal with Lexus Nexus where they were sending you know, with these digital dashboards, they're tracking everything that you're doing in the car, and they were selling it to Lexus Nexus, which was selling it to the car insurance companies. Now I think after this report and that flash, they stopped with this deal. But this is this is where we're at. You know, cars have so much digital technology in them now they're integrated with
your smartphones, especially through Apple CarPlay. Could actually put this next piece up on the screen because this was something that Matt Stoler revealed to us in the context of the Apple anti competitive DOJ suit. So CarPlay. Apple wants to take over like your entire dashboard through car Play, and the thing is for automakers, CarPlay has become very popular. You know, people really demand it in their vehicles. The
only major automaker that doesn't include it. I believe it's GM at this point because they want to be able to gather your data themselves, I guess, and sell it off. They don't want Apple to be able to sell off your data. But so you have this full integration of everything you're doing in the car being tracked and exploited, and I just think people are completely oblivious to any of this that's going on.
Oh oh, absolutely, I was looking for while you were talking on Tesla. They used to have this thing called a safety score, which is exactly what you're talking about, and it would measure hard breaking. I actually opted out of it because they were using it as part of quote unquote real time insurance, which exactly uses your safety score for And I was like, well, it's not fair, you know, because you drive so DC and Maryland.
There's a whole meme in the DC community abou quote unquote Maryland drivers.
And you know, if somebody cuts you off and you're constantly like in this battle and war against all of these other idiots that are on the road, you're being penalized in real time as a result of other people's bad driving. Yeah, and that's really what I mean about the weird and the perverse incentives and about the way
that this could all be applied. So I mean the real teal dr on this is that when we think about the phone and then the car and as it fuses together, your phone already has a compass, an accelerometer, everything, but they don't even need the car honestly at this point. And then we've combined with large data model. It knows everything about your driving already if it wants to, and then all it takes is a few B to B
deals between Geico and something else. How many people really paying attention every time they hit allows on their of course.
Yeah, because that's what they would. Oh well, technically we asked you whether you wanted this or not. You read through the eighty page like disclaimer, you know, consent form that you have to sign when you get this app what nobody does.
That's the Also, people are terrible judges of their own driving, and there's a lot of data to support this in terms of overall survey as opposed to how they actually drive. Well, what is guyic going to tell you or whomever? This is going to help you because you're a good driver, right, right? And you'd be like, yeah, I'm a greed great whatever.
Boom.
Next thing you know, you know, you're you almost get into a crash and someone cuts you off and your insurance premium goes up by ten dollars a month. And also, I don't know if everybody knows this, car insurance is up by I think forty year over ye. Car insurance is totally out of control, so much so that you know, I monitor my charges very religiously and I was like, what the hell is going on over here? And I looked into it and I was like, Oh, it's not
just me, It's the entire country. There's a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes. They really they claim that.
It's outside of the control.
When somebody jack surprized up by forty percent over a single year, you should probably, you know, think about why exactly that is. But the point here is just the technology, and it's not just an insurance, by the way, this is the whole economy. I just saw a story yesterday about Uber. Uber will actually increase the price of your ride if your phone battery is very low because they know you're desperate. You're like, you've got to get home because your phone is going to die.
Yeah, I mean in a way, it's genius. Right. You're like, well, it's true.
I'll probably be willing to hit forty percent more if my phone's at five percent, because I'm screwed if I can't get home.
But that's pretty bad, isn't it.
There's a lot of variable pricing in Uber eats as well.
You know Uber eats mcdonald'.
McDonald's is making a killing through Uber eats because their stuff is cheap. If you're willing to go to the store when you're drunk at two thirty in the morning, people are gonna pay a lot for McDonald's. They're paying like primo prices or for Taco bell or for any of these, and Uber Eats knows that, so they.
Use the variable price.
The driver usually doesn't get nearly as much, and these people are walking away with billions and billions of dollars.
This is what they're using AI for people.
Yeah, this has to benefit humanity, But to price gouge you to the greatest possible to grind. Seriously, I mean there's whole companies that are spun up now to do the variable pricing. You're talking about exploiting whatever data they
get the car. The phone battery thing is crazy. They'll use whatever info they can to figure out how desperate you are for this particular product, and how willing and able you are to pay for this particular product, and they'll just turn the dial up squeeze you for every bit that you're possibly worth, using AI to fine tune the art of price gouging. What a world, All right, Zager?
What are you looking at as people who watch our amas?
No?
I am a fan of nicotine, which in recent years has had a major cultural resurgence thanks to the development of both smokeless vaporizers and tobacco free pouches from companies like Zin or Lucy. This cultural resurgence of nicotine, instead of igniting a fair conversation about the trade offs involving the drug, has instead sparked an insane bipartisan moral panic, which has both hurt market competition and actually made public health in America much worse. The story begins with Jewel,
which was the major innovator in popularizing vaping. Jewell, through proprietary technology and innovative patents, invented a vaporizer which was small, sleek, and then most importantly delivered the same nicotine hit as an actual cigarette. The impetus for starting that company were as actually two smokers who had tried desperately to quit consistently and were unable to find anything in.
The marketplace which worked for them.
In other words, the intention of the company from the outset was explicitly to help people quit smoking, which it did both for the founders and increasingly for millions of smokers. But then something unintended happened. People who started using Jewel and nicotine may not have otherwise ever have smoked, largely because they intuited that jeweling, while probably not quote unquote good for you, is still a hell of a lot better than actually smoking. Well, here's where the nanny state
kicked in. Jewel innovated by creating different flaser flavors of so called nicotine pods, the most famous of which were mango and crem burlet. Quickly, they became attacked by the US government because of its own success. Despite literally millions of people switching from cigarettes to vaping, including enjoying those flavored pods, the FDA under the Trump administration put them into their sites in twenty eighteen, facing massive regulatory scrutiny
Jewel had to pull flavored pods from its stores. This was under a later rule by the FDA to combat the so called youth vaping epidemic.
Now, since it's.
Been five years or so since that actually happened, we can see and evaluate the results.
How did things work out?
Let's see, the FDA killed Jewel, which was an American homegrown innovative company. Instead, what's happened has been a massive rise in disposable flavored vapes from China. The way that these flavored vapes are able to circumvent US law is by illegally shipping to the US, constantly changing ownership and regulatory structure, and being disposable as supposed to permanent. At the same time, they maintained the flavored vape market to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars in the
many years since. So the government killed Jewel pods flavored, only to then turn around and hand the market share to China. So, if that's not bad enough, a new analysis from the National Bureau of Economic Research finds that not only did the flavor ban kill Jewel, that in selected markets where flavored vapes were no longer available, youths
from age eighteen to twentyquote began switching to combustible cigarette smoking. Furthermore, they found zero evidence that flavor restrictions have any effect whatsoever on the tobacco or nicotine usage of.
Adults who were older than twenty one.
So basically, the killed Jewel to combat youth nicotine use. The youths then switched to straight up cigarettes. Those twenty one and up just bought Chinese vapes with god knows what in them instead. And if that's not enough of an insult, it is now the admission of the failure by the FDA, which is not getting nearly enough attention.
Just a few days ago, the FDA has now reversed itself, placing Jewel Labs products quote unquote under scientific review, removing the ban on its products, and furthermore humiliating themselves even more, they had to announce a new task force to go after illegal flavored vapes that are flooding in from China. So to recap everything has happened so far, FDA went
after Jewel, they said, targeting kids with flavored pods. Those kids then switched from actual flavored pods to cigarettes or the exact same product sold by Chinese companies with very little quality control or oversight by the government. Years later, the FDA says they're now unbanning jool and are setting up a major task force to target the very vape companies that they created a massive market for in the first place. And now they have an actual youth smoking
problem on their hands because cigarettes are cool again. Yeah, that's what happened all of this for nicotine, a product that, once you divorce from actual carcinogenic cigarettes, is arguably one of the greatest nootropics known to man, not to mention neuroprotective against Alzheimer's and a central part now of the human life for centuries, which you don't even need any of the downside risk. Now, let's be clear, that's not health advice. You have to be twenty one. I'm not
a doctor. It's also one of the most addictive substances known to man, so buyer and user beware. But at the very least, wherever you fallo on nicotine, you have to at least admit this.
What the government did to Jewel is criminal.
They killed the only American innovator in the space. They gave the market to China, They created more actual teen smokers. They are now creating a task force to address the problem they created.
You don't hate these idiots enough