Pickaxe Mountain And Glitchy Mitch Walk Into A Show

A single House vote cracked open two political realities most leaders still pretend aren’t changing: the Democratic base is no longer lockstep on unconditional military aid to Israel, and the machinery of lobbying money can still punish anyone who says that out loud. We talk through why Thomas Massie was the lone Republican “yes” on a proposal to cut Israel funding, why more than 100 Democrats joined, and what the split between top leaders signals for the future of US foreign policy, Gaza, and the party’s internal power map.

Then we pivot to the Iran war track and why the economic stakes are getting dangerously concrete. The Strait of Hormuz, Karg Island, expanding strike options, and the dwindling global “buffers” in oil supply aren’t abstract to traders or families watching gas prices. We unpack the mixed signals coming from the administration, the fragile state of diplomacy, and why corruption allegations and insider incentives can make real negotiation feel impossible even when everyone claims they want a deal.

Finally, we connect this political dysfunction to the AI boom at home: data centers stressing the electric grid, approvals pushed through with minimal public input, and lawmakers admitting they barely understand tools like ChatGPT. From grid flickers traced to Data Center Alley to the cultural shock of books being destroyed for scanning and researchers asking what human work is for, the thread is the same: governance is lagging behind reality.

Subscribe for more, share this with a friend who cares about war, energy, and tech policy, and leave a review with your take: should Congress draw a hard line on foreign aid, AI deepfakes, and data center growth?

Transcript

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Massey’s Vote To Defund Israel

SPEAKER_00 0:46

Wanted to transition to talk about this amendment uh that was a big vote in the House yesterday. Congressman Massey, you uh offered this amendment. We can put D1 up on the screen here. Ultimately, it failed, but created uh quite a lot of intrigue in the Democratic caucus in particular. You are the only Republican that voted yes on this amendment, which cut all funding for Israel. You actually had a narrow majority of Democrats who did vote for the proposal, which is just such a sea change in the uh positioning of the Democratic Party. I mean, previously the relationship with Israel was really lockstep across the board. So um I'm I'm curious for your reaction to how this broke vote broke down. And if you're surprised that none of your colleagues are where you are right now on this issue.

SPEAKER_13 1:30

Well, the the reason I was able to get this vote on the floor of the House, I sincerely wanted to vote. I offered three amendments to defund foreign aid to Egypt, foreign aid to Jordan, and foreign aid to Israel. And the Republican leadership, to my surprise, allowed me to get the vote on Israel. But I think that's because they made a political calculation. I believe it's a miscalculation, but they made a political calculation that this would be a hard vote for Democrats. And it did turn out to be a hard vote for Democrats. It should have been a hard vote for Republicans because now they've all locked into this idea that American taxpayers should give weapons and billions of dollars. I pointed out in my floor speech, we spend more on offensive weapons to Israel than we do on homeless veterans in the United States. And so uh every Republican has voted to send offensive weapons to Israel, $3.3 billion. Uh the vote was successful, though. Uh my litmus test, you know, we've had votes like this in the past. You get maybe six or ten people to vote for amendments like this. In fact, my vote to defund Jordan got six votes. Okay. But this was different. This moment in time is different because you can't objectively look at what's happening in Gaza and say that there's no moral hazard here for American taxpayers. 70,000 people have died in a country of two million people. I mean, it's it's incredible, it's horrific. And so, but the fact that I thought, let me just say my own secret number in my head was people were like, is how many votes are you going to get? I would say dozens, because I thought I would get 24 votes. And 60, if I got 60, I would have considered it a success. And 100 was beyond what I imagined we could get. But eventually, Nancy Pelosi endorsed the amendment. That was a chalk. I can only say that because I lost my primary. I think part of the reason I lost my primary is wrote conversation.

SPEAKER_02 3:32

Don't blame me.

SPEAKER_13 3:35

Um, but you know, Nancy Pelosi came out for the minority whip, uh came out for it. Uh but the minority leader came out against it. So it really did uh split the Democrats. I think in time, this for the 103 Democrats and myself who voted not to send this money to Israel, it's uh as time goes on, that's gonna be a better and better vote. And uh the people that were on the other side of that, including all of my conference except for me, are gonna regret this vote.

SPEAKER_09 4:05

Congressman Connelly, yeah, curious for your reaction. This was a major intra-democratic war. You know, the House Minority Leader, Hakeem Jeffries, who voted for you, the majority WIP, who then, of course, you know, said that they would cut to vote eight. I'm curious for your reaction here uh about this split within the Democratic caucus. You were an original leader on a movement like this to watch, you know, a significant portion of your Democratic colleagues eventually come to your position. What does that foretell for the future of the Democratic Party?

SPEAKER_02 4:34

Well, I was joking with Thomas that we had more caucus meetings discussing his amendment than Democratic legislation. Wow, that's crazy, actually. Yeah, like Sunday afternoon calls to discuss the Massey Amendment and uh caucus meetings. Uh, but this should have been a such a simple vote. I mean, there are we have to go beyond this, but obviously we shouldn't be giving them U.S. tax dollar aid uh for military weapons. In my view, we shouldn't be giving them military weapons to be killing civilians, uh, and we need to be sanctioning uh the banks and government officials who are engaged in uh the settlement and and work of recognizing the Palestinian state. But uh, in my view, uh you had 103 folks, and the new Congress, you're gonna have even more, and that it's gonna become uh a very, very small minority eventually that is gonna be saying, let's just have uh continued aid to Israel.

SPEAKER_00 5:26

It's pretty wild to see Nancy Pelosi vote for it and Hakeem Jeffries vote against it. Yeah. Um and Pelosi, people are sharing all kinds of clips of her now saying, like, if the capital were to crumble, the one thing that would remain is our you know solidarity with Israel. And now here she is on her way out. She's like, yeah, we'll we'll vote to defund this. And I think she sees the writing on the wall. She's a very savvy political operator of where things are going. I cannot, for the life of me, really understand Hakeem Jeffery's calculus here. Um, because while there is such a split in the House Democratic caucus, there is not a split among the Democratic base. There's not. Overwhelmingly, you know, it is now a small minority that want to maintain the status quo with regard to our relationship with Israel. So, you know, what were those internal conversations like to the extent that you can share some of the details? Because it's just very hard for me to understand why any cynical politician would look at this landscape on the Democratic side at this point and say, I want to stay with this position that has like 15% support among my own voters at this point.

SPEAKER_02 6:31

Well, people were saying, Oh, you're gonna cut the Middle East diplomacy program. I said, by definition, that's probably one of the programs that should be cut or something. You want to look at government programs that don't work or something, but but but beyond that, okay, fine, you want to have those programs. That was less than 1% of the of the aid. And you could have voted for Massey's uh bill and then still said an amendment saying, well, we want to keep uh the program for uh a Middle East peace. But I I do think it's a mistake for anyone uh who voted this way morally, uh, but also politically. Uh if you look at uh Claire Valdez, you look at Brad Lander, you look at Milan, you look at uh Annalillia, you look at Adam Aui, uh you look at the platinum before the scandals, Abdul, the the driving line in these issues is the funding on Israel and Gaza. And the Democrats want to kind of whitewash that part. Oh, is Iran or these candidates won because of affordability, they won because they wanted free childcare, freeze the rent or uh Medicare for all. All of it matters. But the first point of the animating difference that is motivating these uh the candidates uh in the energy is Israel. I mean, the lot would have been no shot to be be together. To get was good on all the issues. She was for Medicare for All, living wage. Why did she lose? She lost on this issue. Wow. And uh I I just think that the the political leadership uh it hasn't grappled with that reality.

SPEAKER_09 8:01

Congressman Matt, yeah, I was coming to you because you were the only Republican who voted for it. I know you speak to many of your colleagues, but you and I both know you're not the only person who thinks something like this. So why uh do they all Well like why do they still see political utility in supporting Israel?

SPEAKER_13 8:16

Because I just lost my election. I mean, $30 million, and 98% of that came from AIPAC or Republican Jewish Coalition or Miriam Adelson. It was all the uh the race against me was fueled and funded by the Israeli lobby. And they made an example out of me, and it worked. I mean, you're getting senators who are changing their positions, you're getting House uh representatives folks who are just going underground on the Republican side, not saying anything about it. But the one thing I want to talk about, two things. They're trying to, they realize this is a political liability, the Israeli lobby. So they're trying to take away the transparency of this money that's being spent, and they're trying to integrate it into our military budget. So it won't be a line item that Congress votes on. It'll be inside of one of these giant military omnibus type programs, and we won't even know because we'll just instead of giving them gift certificates for Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, we'll give them the bombs from Raytheon and the development with us, right? Well, that's the second part is that Section 219 of the NDAA is now it's very toxic. And I'm trying to get a vote on that to strip that section 219 is I think what Rose was alluding to, which is integration of our intelligence and military with uh supply

The Democratic Split And Gaza Politics

SPEAKER_13 9:36

chains, uh, you know, supply lines and technology with Israel. It's a country of 10 million people, right? Like it's not even like NATO, where they're at least the third of the size of us, and there might be some reciprocal arrangement that could help in a world war. That's not gonna help. Uh, you know, with Israel can't help us in a war of a scale where our uh sovereignty is affected. It's only gonna hurt us. Anyways, I'm trying to get an amendment in order to strip 219 from the NDAA. And if I can't get that done or they don't allow us to have that vote, I think they're jeopardizing the NDAA that stands for National Defense Authorization Act. It's one of the must-pass pieces of legislation, like a farm bill or a highway bill that passes every year. Right.

SPEAKER_00 10:20

Um, Congressman Fancy, I wanted to ask you something about that. That money that was spent against you, and I think you're right, they they definitely wanted to make an example of you. A lot of that money came from the Israel lobby. They're now trying to do a similar thing with Abdul Sayyid in the uh Michigan primary on the Democratic side. I think $50 million have come in. And again, the ads have nothing to do with Israel. They're claiming he's a sexist because he one time mildly criticized Michelle Obama. I mean, this is the sort of stuff that they're going with here. And I do wonder, you know, again, from your perspective as a libertarian, if that changes any of your view of the ability for democracy to coexist with billionaires, the impact of money in politics. You know, what are your views there? Has that shaped your philosophy or thinking about how we handle this flood of money, which is not just Israel, I was big pharma, it's big oil, it's the banks, it's all sorts of interests.

SPEAKER_13 13:06

Are you asking that did the ass whipping I took from the billionaires change my perspective?

SPEAKER_00 13:11

I should have asked it that way.

SPEAKER_13 13:14

Oh, it was a beat down.

SPEAKER_00 13:16

How are you feeling about billionaires these days? Yeah.

SPEAKER_13 13:19

Well, you know, I we were able to raise 20 million. And uh so we had enough money. It's just they played dirtier than we were willing to play. They made artificial intelligence ads that showed me in a three-way relationship with AOC and Ilhan Omar. And uh oh, you know, people fell for those ads. They thought they were real. So again, there's another libertarian conundrum that I have in addition to campaign finance, which I do equate with speech. But also, here's another example of speech. Should they be able to make AI ads at random with my image in it? There, you have to think very carefully about the legislative solutions that you don't make the situation worse. I think I could be okay with campaign finance that said if you're running a congressional race, only the money, the only people who can donate are the people who can vote in your district. Um now, Miriam Adelson may have moved to Kentucky. She was so much.

SPEAKER_09 14:17

Just put a casino on top of your house, just to make an example.

SPEAKER_00 14:20

I think that is interesting because I know in the past you've you've pushed for transparency, which I think is an important first step. But you know, at this point, there's a lot of mass education about who APAC is and what they are, et cetera. It's not that transparency, you know, isn't there necessarily, but the problem is that just when you have so much money, of course, it's going to impact outcomes. And we can see it, you know, in the in this vote from yesterday, too. So many of your colleagues take money from APAC or other similar groups. So many of the Democratic caucus, you know, it should be based on the Democratic base. It should be overwhelming and not a problem for Democratic congressmen to vote, you know, for an amendment like that. So you can see the impact of this money in the legislative process, not just electorally.

SPEAKER_13 15:01

Well, ultimately there was a win in my loss, which is I knew they would have to spend insane amounts of money. This is the most expensive congressional primary in the history of the United States. And I I knew that if they would have to spend insane amounts of money, and if they did, and I lost, it would sort of prove the point that they have too much influence in our own government that the Israeli lobby does. Now they'll argue these are American citizens or dual citizens who are donating the money, but I would still say they're operating uh on behalf of a foreign country, and so they are foreign agents. I think they should have to register as such. But there was a victory in it. It's really there was a big waking up. I don't think we would have gotten as many votes on my amendment if people hadn't watched me lose because there was $30 million of Israeli lobby money poured into a little Kentucky race. Yeah. Uh but yeah, I don't know what the solution is. And then also on these AI ads, this fall is gonna be the Wild West. Like I got a taste of it in my own race. And you know, these these weren't online ads, these were like local, you know, Fox cable affiliates running these ads. So not a lot of people saw what's happening. But this November, both parties are gonna run the most ridiculous AI ads. And if you write a piece of legislation that says you have to put a disclaimer on there, it doesn't help. That gives them a safe harbor to do anything. Right. They can show you doing anything and say, by the way, this was made with artificial intelligence, and people are still gonna believe it because people watch videos and they don't read the little stuff at the bottom.

SPEAKER_09 16:35

Yeah. My last question before we start now running a bit short on time is about Senator Mitch McConnell. Uh, do you believe the proof-of-life photo? Uh, and do you there's a lot of speculation uh that they're continuing to keep him uh in his Senate seat in order to prevent you from being able to run in a pro or in a special primary or special election in the state. Your reaction?

SPEAKER_13 16:56

Well, the the special term would be

AIPAC Spending And AI Campaign Smears

SPEAKER_13 16:58

less than six months. And I'm not interested for that. I just broke news, I guess, to tell people I see you did. Yeah. Now they can come clean about Mitch McConnell. Yeah, so Mitch, tell us what's going on. I I mean, I think the public does deserve to see somebody walk up to a podium and say something. Um now, whether we can believe that in this day and age is also another question. Yeah, right. But it, you know, um, I've said I'm going to introduce term limit legislation called Three Strokes and You're Out. Um, because we we've seen this in the House. We saw one of our colleagues disappear for four months, no kind of, you know, had dementia and was still a congressperson for many months. One her.

SPEAKER_00 17:43

Yes. Yes, yeah. I remember that. I remember that.

SPEAKER_13 17:45

Yes. Um, you know, we had yesterday we marked up a bill in judiciary called the National Fossils Act. And I asked them if this was about senators.

SPEAKER_02 17:57

This is what the million dollars can run for.

SPEAKER_00 18:00

Do you think that Thomas Massey and Rokana could run for president together and have some bipartisan kumbaya? I've been skeptical of that because I know you guys collaborate on a lot, but I also know there are a lot of ideological differences there would be hard to sort out. But what are you thinking about your future? Politics still in your future? Senate run, presidential run, what are the sorts of things that you're because the podcast? What are the sorts of things you're doing?

SPEAKER_13 18:22

Well, I'm not going to rule anything out. How about that? But the the political terrain right now in Republican primaries is uphill for me.

SPEAKER_12 18:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_13 18:31

The war in Iran, this doesn't get reported enough, is 70% popular among Republicans. Yeah. Still is. And, you know, that's in Kentucky, where you have Rand Paul and Thomas Massey. In Oklahoma, where you don't have us, it's 80% popular according to the pollster that I use. So, you know, there's still, and then you saw the the vote on Israel sending the foreign aid people. Republicans say they're conservative, they don't want to send money overseas, but then they have a little asterisk and they say, except we'll give Israel as much money as they need, you know, and we'll we'll empty our coffers for that. So that I do have a few political positions that I think are going to be right in four years, eight years. Uh maybe it only takes two years, but right now I'm against the grain uh of where you can win certain races. So yeah, I'm going to watch for the tourists. I should send Miriam Mandelson a thank you card.

SPEAKER_00 19:27

Um sometimes these things work out in a way that you don't expect. So um appreciate both of you guys for coming in. We've been wanting to have you here. We have Ro all the time. We always appreciate your time too, but to have you both together, we really are.

SPEAKER_13 19:39

So exit interview before you go, you'll come back here? Yes. Okay. Um and I've decided to run against each other.

SPEAKER_02 19:45

Oh I thought you were going to endorse my re-election.

SPEAKER_13 19:50

You did that for me. We'll see what that happened about.

SPEAKER_09 19:53

The dynamic duo themselves, the people that seriously start.

SPEAKER_00 19:56

Yeah, love for you to come back so I can fight with you more about libertarianism.

SPEAKER_09 19:59

Okay, yeah, we'll do it. Hey, if you like that video, hit the like button or leave a comment below. It really helps get the show to more people.

SPEAKER_00 20:06

And if you'd like to get the full show ad free and in your inbox every morning, you can sign up at breakingpoints.com.

SPEAKER_09 20:12

That's right. Get the full show, help support the future of independent media at breakingpoints.com.

SPEAKER_00 20:21

I'm sure that will go great. He also seemingly is announcing a cover-up of what exactly happened when we bombed that nob girls' school in Iran. Rokana and Thomas Massey are going to join us live in studio. They have a lot to talk about. They have a new Epstein Transparency Act that they are pushing that would help to enable prosecutions in places like New Mexico with the Zora Ranch. They also are just coming off the heels of this big vote in the House on Massey's amendment to strip aid from Israel, which created a whole fraction within the Democratic caucus. So very, very excited to have them live in person, have so many things that we want to ask them about. Um, we also have some news here about Brad Parscale. I don't know if you guys remember this guy, but he was the campaign chief for Trump. He has now got a $45 million contract to run a pro-Israel influence operation that is effectively targeting, undermining the Iranian war negotiations. So pretty fascinating dynamics there and always important to expose who is getting paid and how these influence operations work. And I am taking a look at how Doge fueled the explosive diarrhea epidemic and some other problems that are going on in the country, thanks to Doge as well. So you definitely want to stay tuned for that one.

SPEAKER_09 21:30

Excited for that one. A lot of viral panic around this there. Maybe it's not panic, maybe it's actually justified. I'm excited to listen. Thank you to everybody who's been subscribing to the show, breakingpoints.com. We, of course, have our free newsletter. Uh, but I do want to take a moment here to just thank all of our premium subscribers. It's a really cool moment uh when you know Thomas Massey and Rokana of this all came together very quickly. And what we were able to do is our whole team just kicks into high gear for the studio, our producers, people getting here early. That is only enabled by the people who pay for our show. So breakingpoints.com, if you're able to do that. We actually we were filming this a bit out of order, and it was just incredible. Like it's to it's very rare to have that much time with these high-profile politicians here in Washington. And uh yeah, just I'm very thankful for our premium subscribers.

SPEAKER_00 22:18

Yeah. By the way, as a little teaser, you guys are always asking us if uh Roe and Thomas Massey would run together on a presidential ticket. So we do bring that. We do bring that up with them. So um a lot of interesting responses, some news that's made, et cetera. You definitely want to check both of those blocks out because we split it into two.

SPEAKER_09 22:33

Breaking voice.com. If you're able to support our show. If you're watching this on YouTube, no worries, please hit subscribe to our YouTube channel. Listen to this podcast, we share an episode with a friend. But let's go ahead and start, as Crystal said, with the Iran war. Let's put A1 up here on the screen. Some very troubling news out from the Wall Street Journal. Trump leans towards expanding U.S. military options in Iran.

Iran War Escalation And Oil Panic

SPEAKER_09 22:54

Quote, while preferring diplomacy, Trump was briefed this week on options, including use of ground troops and the bombing of Pickaxe Mountain. Longtime watchers of the show will know all about Pickaxe Mountain, which has become kind of this neocon. What's that castle the Israelis took in Lebanon? The useless castle like Bufort Castle. So the Pickaxe Mountain is the Buford Castle of the American neocons, where they've just decided this mountain, it's gotta go. Alleged nuclear-linked site, and you know, we can't finish the job until we've taken Pickaxe Mountain. But what's even more troubling here is that in the Situation Room meeting, they discussed, quote, potential seizure of Karg Island, which Trump has talked about, territory all along the Strait of Hormuz, using U.S. troops, the bombing of the tunnel complex at Pickaxe Mountain, and expanding airstrikes against more targets in Iran, including energy strikes, all including that as a possibility. So there are some counterbalance signs which will play for all of you, but right now, all the signs currently point towards more war. Let's go ahead and put A2 up here on the screen, a very predictable thing. It's the same time Trump is considering expanding military options. You have President Trump says Iran called him a while ago, and now they want to make a deal. And you also have the, of course, the U.S. stock market, which extended its rally uh immediately upon the news. They never really learn, uh, do they? Although they did end up uh closing down. At the same time, you know, and I know we do mention this quite a bit, but you have to, I don't know, I just feel like it's so titanic that, and everything seems like it's fine, but with the oil where it's at, everyone who can read a chart, they're scared. And they're they're beyond scared, actually, with the resumption of hostilities. Put A3 up here. The traders themselves, the people who have been buying the Trump taco and all of that, largely have been. You know, on the side of it's not as bad as some of the worst purveyors of Doom had said in the original war, they are now coming out and saying we're close to running on empty as the Hornwood Strait is shut down again. So, what they write is that member countries have already released three-quarters of the planned 400 million barrel emergency stock release that was announced in March. Quote, we have burned through all the buffers we had, everything. All of that is gone now. Oil prices have now rebounded, somewhere around $80 to $85 a barrel. That's its highest since the original ceasefire was announced over a month ago. And what they also point out is that now the agreement that governments in the West and in Asia quote had pulled almost every lever available to them to ensure a supply crunch would not undermine the world economy. Western powers have already released, you know, vast amounts of the strategic petroleum reserve. But what they say here specifically is that there's no more slack left within the system. And so if we do see another six to eight weeks or maybe even a few more months of war, it is almost inevitable that shortages will come up somewhere. It won't be here in America. It certainly won't be because we'll all just pay a very, very high price. But there's all of these other, you know, factors that come into play where the Asian powers are the ones who, you know, you know, I read the Asian press almost every day just to see what they're saying about Iran. And they were actually pretty muted uh over the last few months. We're back to panic. They're like, this is they're like, here we go. What are we gonna do? How are we gonna get this oil out? It's 40 days away, you know, 40 days because in terms of tanker time, they're like, after that, we might run dry again. So the panic is setting back across East Asia.

SPEAKER_00 26:23

I mean, I think we should take the president's word for it when he said, Hey, another four weeks, I'm gonna be Herbert Hoover and we're gonna have all kinds of crisis because of the oil. I mean, he said that when he signed the MOU. And I think he was telling the truth at that point. And certainly he has analysts and also had all of the CEOs of the large oil and gas companies who came to him and were saying, hey, this is where we're at. So uh that timeline, you know, is rapidly approaching. The clock is ticking. And in this article from the Financial Times, they have specific numbers. The IEA on Friday said its members cut member countries had released almost three-quarters of the planned 400 million barrel emergency stock release. I don't know if you guys watched Ryan's interview with Robert Pape yesterday. Pape was sounding the alarm about this as well. You know, the idea was that J.D. Vance floated, oh, we're gonna take this time to be able to refuel, restock, reload, whatever the verbiage was. Part of that was refilling the strategic petroleum reserve. They have not done that. So we continue to have a dwindling of the strategic petroleum reserve here in the US, where you're now getting down to the literal bottom of the barrel. There isn't a lot more buffer there. We don't know what China's gonna do. China has taken extraordinary measures themselves to reduce the amount of oil that they were importing from abroad. How long is that gonna last? It really, really is a very troubling situation. And um, you know, so I'm sure this is why Trump's coming out and saying, oh, where they they want to make a deal, et cetera. But I can tell you this morning, I was just reading an article in CNBC. Uh, the Iranians are threatening uh aggressive retaliation because Trump is once again saying, oh, we're gonna blow up their bridges, their power plants, et cetera, with some credibility because they've attacked civilian infrastructure with no qualms in the past. The Iranians said everything in the region that is still intact, all the infrastructure in the region will be crushed under the steel blows of the powerful armed forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran. So no trace of them remains, and it is as if they never existed in the first place. They added that under no circumstances and in no way will we allow America as a foreign and extra-regional country to interfere in the Strait of Hormuz, this is Iran's invincible red line. Now, obviously, there's a lot of propaganda bluster there, but in terms of the Strait of Hormuz being a hard red line that they will enforce, I think they have a lot of credibility at this point on that front.

SPEAKER_09 28:37

I think you're totally right. And I think what really, you know, is worrisome is the disconnect in the messaging from the U.S. government. And so Trump yesterday gave an interview where, you know, he was said, well, maybe we'll just wipe them out, like in terms of the IRGC. And of course, some Fox News interview. You know, these people have, you know, their IQ has got to be like bottom of the barrel. He goes, Are you just gonna wipe out the IRGC like you did ISIS? I'm like, yeah, it's not like we didn't just try to wipe out the IRGC. Are you an idiot? But anyways, yeah, I digress. And Trump goes, Yeah, maybe I will. Meanwhile, the vice president on the Joe Rogan podcast is making this tortured effort to say, diplomacy's still on track. These are just blips in the radar, right? And I mean, in some ways, he does say the truth out loud, which is for the people who want us to keep bombing, there's nothing else that can be done. He's like, eventually we do have to sit across from the table. But you have to convince Trump of that. So here is JD Vance, A7. I'm gonna start with saying, look, the people who want us to keep bombing, they have no solution. I would just add the addendum is here he's trying to go after the neocons. Trump is also one of those neocons, at least as of right now. Let's take a listen.

SPEAKER_06 29:48

What is their proposal? The people that think you should negotiate with Iran. I think that their proposal is to bomb and bomb and bomb. And the honest view, Joe, is that they they do not actually have a solution. If you actually ask them, what do you want us to do? What is the goal that you're trying to achieve? You know, they'll they'll say things like, well, just bomb them to oblivion. Okay, we can do that. We can drop a lot of bombs, but what does that accomplish if there's still a crazy person who's still unwilling to shoot a few drones at the Strait of Hormouths? What the president has done, I think, very, very capably, is said, we're gonna use military force in the in this situation when it's connected to something we're trying to achieve. So if you shoot at ships, we're gonna shoot at the facilities at which you use to shoot at the ships. But we're not just gonna do something open-ended indefinitely. We're not just gonna bomb and bomb and bomb. We're gonna try to use our military force as one of the many tools that we have to solve the problem.

SPEAKER_09 30:45

So you can see there, I mean, what he's talking about is the inevitable logic. But again, like Trump is the person who wants to keep resume bombing. And this is the basic fracture in the administration. JD's very committed to like the negotiation track. But there are other elements in the government which just don't care at all. You know, our friends at DropSite, Jeremy Scahill and Ryan, let's go to their story, A8, up here on the screen. They say Iran sent a message to JD warning that Kushner and Whitkoff, quote, were abusing their inside access to negotiations. By the way, the White House totally denied it. They said this is all, you know, completely fake, etc. Uh, but here's what a senior Iranian official said directly to Dropsite. We have transmitted data and assessments through an explosive channel to Mr. Vance with direct knowledge of the effort, communicated to Vance they believed Whitkop and Kushner were abusing the diplomatic process, effectively disrupting the overall negotiating atmosphere. At one point, they claimed that Iran had calculated profits from such alleged manipulation from Witkoff

Vance’s Diplomacy Pitch And Insider Claims

SPEAKER_09 31:48

and Kushner that reached $9 billion, and formally requested in writing that Iran should have to share in the proceeds of all of their insider trading. Again, to be very clear, Wickhoff and Kushner completely deny it.

SPEAKER_00 32:01

Uh the White House says that none of this ever the American people need to formally submit our request to share in those proceeds. What do you think? Yeah, let me in.

SPEAKER_09 32:09

Let me in.

SPEAKER_00 32:10

But I mean, the the crux of this, the allegation here, is that their corrupt inside trading is screwing up the effort to come to some sort of a negotiated deal here. It's an obstacle. It creates a problem in terms of actually sitting down, having some sort of negotiation that is perceived as remotely in good faith. When all you see is these guys, you know, it's got all these development deals in the region. You see all these market manipulations from Trump and what he tweets, et cetera. That is making it actively more difficult to not be in this war. So it's not just a question of like morality, and it's disgusting the number of people in the Trump administration, including Trump and his family et al. who are just using the country as their personal piggy bank. But it has a direct impact on what is happening to our country, on the way our foreign policy is conducted, and on what is actually possible in terms of these negotiations.

SPEAKER_09 33:02

And what's what I think is the worst is we just don't see a realistic path to actual resolution. Like, do I think there will be another fake memorandum of understanding? Yeah. Because inevitably you have to, right? Like oil has got to flow eventually. But are we really going to solve the nuclear issue? Like, it just seems so impossible. If we can't even sit without firing bombs for three weeks, how can we possibly get to a situation where the United States has to accept Iranian tolls and control of the Strait of Hormos? And then furthermore, basically guarantee Iran hundreds of billions of dollars while they give up their nuclear ambitions for 15 years? Yeah. I mean, it just seems impossible. And it's like, you know, I'm gonna kick right now. I'm reading a lot of uh World War I and World War II history, like more so even than normal. And when you see what it takes to either defeat somebody or bring them to the negotiating table, they haven't bled enough. And I know that it's a horrible thing to say, but it's just empirically true, either from loss of life or economically. Like the vast majority of Americans really only pay attention when gas prices are high. How many know that as of right now, today, while you and I are speaking, Kuwait is under fire from cruise missiles? Not many. Yeah. And they don't particularly care, right? They're not going to care, honestly, until gas is $7 a gallon. Iran knows this, that's why they continue to close the Strait of Hormous. But there's just enough wiggle room there and, you know, crazy stuff from the Trump administration other to try and just push it off further. And then same on the Iranian side. I agree with Trita. I think they dramatically overreacted by trying to undermine this memorandum of understanding as in immediately shooting instead of calling. But I also get it from their perspective when Trump is like, I'm gonna kill you while you're in the middle of Geneva. Like if somebody said that to me, and you know, it's like if I were to negotiate with a pro-Israel person, immediately I'm always like, You're lying. You know, it's like my my my my absolute you know, going in, how could we ever establish any baseline of trust? Let's just somebody sort of constantly try to undermine you, try to kill you. Yeah. I I understand where they're coming from too. So I just I don't see how we can get out of this. Like somebody has got to bleed a lot. And I hope it's not us, but I seem to think so.

SPEAKER_00 35:18

Well, and on the politics of it, we've already recorded the interview with Thomas Massey and Rokana, and um Congressman Massey said something that was, I think, important for people to hear because there's a lot of sense, because you see the Tuckers out there, and you see the Tim Dillons out there, you know, who are unhappy, who are on the right and unhappy with the Zagranjetis of the world who are unhappy with the Iran war. The MAGA base supports it.

SPEAKER_12 35:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:40

They are they're all in. There, it's like 70, 80% of the MAGA base that's like, yes, Iran war. And so when we were asking Thomas Massey about the nature of his primary defeat, he made sure to bring up, yeah, it was the Israel lobby, it was going against Trump. It was also the Iran War being opposed to it because it's very popular. And we were asking about his future political ambitions. He's like, that's gonna be a real obstacle for me in the Republican Party for now. You know, that training may shift, but for now, it's a problem. And I think it's very different from how people are perceiving the politics of it. Because for Trump, you know, looking at the midterms, the landscape is already really bad. You know, people are unhappy, Republicans are sort of disenchanted over the Epstein files and ever other things. There's a lot of malaise there. So they're already less likely to turn up at the polls than Democrats. We've seen that in all kinds of special elections. You ask them to also swallow a humiliating Iran war defeat, that is actually gonna make your midterm results even worse than they already are. So it's damned if you do, damned if you don't, from Trump for a political perspective. But it actually, you know, his political incentives are not necessarily to end the war now. His political incentives may be to keep it going through the midterm so he doesn't have to fully swallow the level of humiliation that will be required to bring this thing to a close. And so I think that's another dynamic here that we have to take into account as well. His base wants this war to keep going. They want to see the bombs dropped and Carg Island taken and him to be, you know, heroic, tough guy, et cetera. They don't want to see, oh, now we've done sanctions relief, and Iran has all of this newfound power in the region. That is not where they are.

SPEAKER_09 37:17

It's just I mean, that's where Pape's escalation trap, you know, model is just so, it is so obviously true at this point. And it is also very tragically for the US and even for Iran. You know, look, Iran is Iran is desperate because what they're what they also know, as I was reading this morning, is the world will eventually figure it out, like we did with Ukraine and Russia, right? At the beginning, it was a crisis. After a couple of years, you figure out how to get natural gas to different places. It's it's bad, but everyone kind of moves on. Iran has got to actually force hand now. So they have a direct incentive. At the same time, America, which has not bled, and Trump, who cannot admit total defeat, at least not yet, has got to do something extra. And in any one of those extra maneuvers, it brings death and immense cost to America. You know, one of the because we had Thomas Massey and Rokana added uh at last minute, you know, there was this whole segment that I was gonna do about all of like the lack of munitions. It is it is so much worse than even I thought. $500 million we put into a factory, it hasn't produced a single round. Not one round, $500 million. And we gave three million of these rounds to Ukraine. The whole point of the money, remember, Biden was like, this is good for America because we'll make all these weapons here. There they haven't been made. It's impossible to make, apparently, just from our manufacturing backlog. I'm looking at the state of the U.S. Navy. The F-35, for the first time in 20 years, the Pentagon is blocking an open source report about the F-35. Why do you think after one just got hit over Iran? I'm looking at this. And then the oil, I mean, again, you know, you have to read only a few books to say it may not be the Iran war that breaks this, it may be the total destruction and depletion of the American Empire as a result of this. Then when the next one comes, completely out of nowhere, that's how you find yourself broken completely, and you lose everything in a matter of a month. That's the stuff that just absolutely terrifies me. And you can just see it, you know, every day. Four missiles here, cruise missiles there, drones going here, Iranian ships or Iranian, you know, the United States bombed an oil tanker which was docking at Karg Island for the first time ever. We had never done that before. As a result, they blew it that up and potentially some oil infrastructure. Iran is saying, like very seriously, you are going to burn if you continue this. Uh and I just I don't see a way out. The one last, you know, piece potentially of good news that you know I don't want to say that it hasn't happened, is let's put A9 up here on the screen. Is it does appear that there was some American woman. Trump writes, Iran has allowed an American citizen who was wrongfully detained in December 2024 under Joe Biden to leave the country. She is now safely outside of Iran and in good condition. America appreciates this gesture of goodwill from Iran. So that could be a good thing. I just don't know. But my only, you know, my uh I I again I have no idea who this woman is. There's no open source reporting or any of this. This could potentially try to be a sign of, you know, putting things back on track. But just like America has internal factions and domestic politics, so does Iran. It's very clear their hardline faction doesn't want to give another inch. So we'll see. That's that's what else can we say? Let's get to Minabol. Hey, if you like that video, hit the like button or leave a comment below. It really helps get the show to more people.

SPEAKER_00 40:35

And if you'd like to get the full show, ad free and in your inbox every morning, but you can sign up at breakingpoints.com.

SPEAKER_09 40:41

That's right. Get the full show, help support the future of independent media at breakingpoints.com.

SPEAKER_11 40:49

We're gonna end the show talking about something that is going to be very important because it is important, and that is the data center. I've been

Data Centers Strain The Power Grid

SPEAKER_11 40:58

hearing a lot about it, you know, a lot of the stuff that you hear is kind of doom and glue. But at any rate, there's something that happened in the Commonwealth of Virginia in Loudon County that uh should uh give us give us a pause and come in from somebody that I'm not shot, um not a fan of Jim Clyburn. Uh check this out. We're gonna end the show with two data stories, and then we're gonna do a show uh where it's gonna be me talking uh very candidly about some things that I've been interested in.

SPEAKER_08 41:41

Well, Jim Clyburn, obviously one of the more high profile Democrats in the House of Representatives, stopped by the podcast of Esthet Herndon last week and got a question about AI, gave an answer that I want to say is surprising. Unfortunately, it's not surprising, but it is astounding nonetheless. Let's take a look.

SPEAKER_03 42:01

I was asking about AI. There's so much that it's changing in terms of the future of work and our economy. Have you do you use AI? Have you ever used an LLM? No, somebody was telling me I ought to, but I never have.

SPEAKER_04 42:13

No ChatGPT, no cloth for you? Believe it or not, I didn't know what that was until about a week ago. Which one? ChatGPT or whatever it is.

SPEAKER_03 42:23

You didn't know until a week ago. Wow. I mean, I don't know, I didn't know what that was. Okay, have you been to a data center or anything like that? No? Okay. I guess I'm wondering, like, with the speed of technological changes right now, with how much people are anxious about the ways AI and work and work might change because of it, how do you effectively legislate as a member who is distant from some of those technological shifts that are affecting folks' lives right now?

SPEAKER_04 42:51

I have a great staff. You know, I wish I could know everything. I don't know everything. And I don't spend my time trying to learn everything. What I spend my time doing is trying to surround myself with people who do stuff.

SPEAKER_08 43:09

Crystal, this is somehow worse, I think. I don't need to get into too much tit for tat, but worse than Ted Cruz not knowing the population of Iran, as he was like agitating for war in Iran, given how central data centers are right now to the American economy, how companies like OpenAI, ChatGPT, how central they are to the American economy, to national security, to people's daily lives, that is insane. And it's not just like saying, my staff knows the ins and outs of uh the building code policy to get this thing up and running. Like he literally said he's outsourcing all of his knowledge of AI to his staff, basically.

SPEAKER_00 43:49

And I want people to understand this is not an outlier. You you have members of Congress who approach their jobs very differently. Some of them are really involved in thinking through policy and educating themselves. They have a worldview, they're pushing that worldview forward. And some of them are like Jim Cliver, who are happy to, you know, he's what, 80-something years old, he's happy to outsource all of his work and thinking to his staff. So you're really not electing this person. You're electing whoever their staffers are who are actually gonna be doing the research and telling this man how he should vote. And you're also electing a whole host of like lobbyists of special interests who will also be coming to him and telling him how he should vote on various issues. I just looked it up quickly. South Carolina has been a hotspot for data center um construction. There's some roughly 30 projects in existence, more in the pipeline. So this is a very relevant issue for his constituents, and he says, I've never visited a data center. I don't even know what, I barely know what Chat TV is, I've never used any of these products. So pretty stunning revelation there. Um, at the same time, you know, we were struck by this was poll from by uh more perfect union highlighted this local news report about the strain that data centers here in Virginia, which is perhaps the data center capital of the nation, maybe the world, um, are putting on the grid right now, here in the present. Well, obviously they have massive plans to expand uh the data center load across the country. Let's go ahead and take a listen to a little bit of this local news report.

SPEAKER_01 45:18

Something happened on Wednesday morning that you might have noticed but didn't bat an eye. It happened inside thousands of your homes and businesses, and experts say it's a sign the cracks are starting to show in our power infrastructure.

SPEAKER_05 45:33

Yet just before 8 a.m., the electricity flickered on and off for about 10 minutes. It was the result of data centers in Loudoun County, Virginia.

SPEAKER_10 45:41

Experts say the cracks in our infrastructure grid are starting to show as the data center industry consumes electricity at a rate the world has never experienced. Wednesday morning, that crack became visible to millions of Americans inside their own homes in a seemingly small way.

SPEAKER_07 45:56

This is what experts are worried about, right? The data centers are such a big load on the grid that they can have detrimental impact on the surrounding grid.

SPEAKER_10 46:07

Dominion Energy tells News 4 a transmission line servicing a data center failed. So the data centers switched to their own power supply, temporarily leading the grid. In a statement to News 4, a Dominion Energy spokesperson said, quote, Dominion Energy did not disconnect area data centers from the grid. The data center's own control systems transferred them to backup power for a very short period of time. Think of it like ripples in water. The data centers switching their power sources, the rock, and when that change impacts the water, or the power grid in this analogy, the massive shift in electricity load. Send ripples through the electric current across half the country. Ting Labs provided news for with this graphic that shows the scale of the service disruption.

SPEAKER_07 46:48

These events in the future could cause the grid to become unstable and it does not come back to normal in a few minutes or ten minutes. And we're dealing with a a real big problem.

SPEAKER_00 47:00

So, Emily, this seems like something our elected leaders should maybe be looking into and care about and you know, thinking about themselves, not just uh outsourcing to their staffers. But, you know, this is something that we've been warning about and many others besides. The strain on the grid is uh really a major issue. It's not being resolved, and it's only gonna get worse over time. So this is a bit of a warning shot here.

SPEAKER_08 47:23

Well, I was gonna say this is about the concentration of power, but in this case, it's like literally about the concentration of power. And this is all being traced to literally to Loudoun County, Virginia data center alley. And I'm curious how many times Jim Clyburn voted on something in one direction or the other that set up our economy to look like this in a way that enables uh the concentration of actual power, uh, in a sense where it's so, so clustered that it can affect the entire East Coast uh in one fell swoop like that. I'm sure you could go and find votes that, you know, indirectly enabled the economy to look the way it was. Maybe you could even find ways that directly enabled the economy to look that the way it to look the way that it does. But astounding, he's so comfortable outsourcing the staff, he didn't learn what Chat GPT was until a week ago. And meanwhile, we're already seeing these ripples from Loudoun County across the East Coast. That's how dramatic uh the gap in knowledge is.

SPEAKER_00 48:26

Yeah, it's just true. I mean, are you living under a rock? Like, how do you not even know what this is? Who are you talking to? Where are you getting your views from? It's just on every level. How did you manage to avoid this particular knowledge? And what other pieces of knowledge are you somehow managing to avoid? Raises a lot of questions. Um, I got a bit of a one-to-punch for you here in terms of the progress of the tech industry pushing forward with these data centers over the objections of the public. We can put this up on the screen. You've got 300 bands now and moratoriums that the information is tracking that say they threaten the US data center boom. This has increasingly become a hot political issue, both at the local, the state, and the federal level. Uh, it's something I'm gonna ask uh Francesca Hong about in our interview with her because it's something she's certainly been campaigning on campaigning on. We talked to Will Lawrence, who's a congressional candidate in Michigan, who also has been talking a lot about data centers and, you know, making sure that there is a slowdown, at least, if not a moratorium, on the building of these data centers. At the same time, put D4 up on the screen. They're going to, instead of going through any sort of public process, what they're going to do is something very similar to what happened in Louisiana, where they work behind the scenes with politicians. This is Meta specifically, um, with politicians who signed non-disclosure agreements, which is an incredible, I mean, that should be illegal in my opinion. It's technically not, but I certainly think it's unethical for politicians doing public policy to sign non-disclosure agreements with the companies they're negotiating with. They rush through the approvals to get this data center, massive data center, built in a very rural and very impoverished part of Louisiana with very little ability, really next to no ability for local residents to be able to weigh in on whether they thought this was a good or a bad thing. Now, let me be clear, and I think we're gonna see this dynamic develop as well. This was an area, as I mentioned before, it's really rural, impoverished community. And so the promise here was we're gonna build this data center. There's gonna be tons of job creation, it's gonna revitalize this community. And in some senses, that has happened. During the construction phase, they've had a huge number of construction workers coming into the area. Some of the local people have been able to get construction jobs working on the data center. So it's been good for them. But they also talked to some of the residents who had been living in um, you know, trailer parks, which are very common there, who had their rent for their lot escalate so dramatically that they had to move out of the town entirely. One woman who had uh has, I think, four kids, three or four kids, was living there. She was paying $250 a month in rent. Um, she owned her trailer, but you have to rent the lot that it sits on. They jacked her rent up in a single month to $1,200. So more than $1,000 increase that she was just supposed to swallow. She couldn't do it. Um, oftentimes you either it's expensive to move the trailer or they're just not really constructed in a way to be sturdy enough to be able to move them. She had to sit there and watch as they cut her trailer down into pieces. Her kids and her had to live for a time out of her car. So this sort of disruption is um taking place as well. And then the mayor of the town said, you know, it's okay for for now. You've got a lot of people coming in after it's built. Our longtime residents are being pushed down in the area. Who and what is going to be left here after this thing is ultimately built? So, but the the important piece I wanted to highlight is that number one, it's going to be a lot of poor communities that these things are foisted upon because they are desperate and they need the tax revenue and they'll grab on to anything that looks like jobs and opportunity. And number two, that legislators will increasingly find ways, given that they're, you know, their coffer campaign coffers are being flooded with cash from these companies and with the promise of future board seats or lobbying gigs, et cetera, that they will find ways to circumvent a democratic public process and do this behind the scenes so they can continue to push this forward over the objections of the public.

SPEAKER_08 52:31

Yeah. And meanwhile, DC is being flooded with lobbying cash uh from these companies. And like you said, the revolving door, politicians know it'll be wide open, maybe not for Jim Clyburn, who would probably have to uh brush up on ChatGPT and fully intends to remain in that seat uh until he McConnells, which we'll be talking about in terms of crystal.

SPEAKER_00 52:54

But uh Red calls him glitchy Mitchy, which I kind of like.

SPEAKER_08 52:59

Glitch McConnell, man. And and this has been going on for years with glitch, uh, Son of Glitcher. So it's just like the like you said, it's not isolated. The fact that he came out and said this aloud and seemed to have zero shame about it and just said, well, it may sound strange to you. It's like, no, no, no, it's not strange to literally everyone, uh, my man. Like that's that's brutal. Um, and again, they're all getting his staff is getting lobbied. Uh, they're all getting lobbied enormously. So that tells you to your point, Chris Louvre, who's making the decisions. If you're offloading a lot of these big decisions to your staff and you're doing it so comfortably, well, they're getting lobbied. They're going to junkets, happy hours. Like they have these people in their ear and they're not the elected representative.

SPEAKER_00 53:44

That's exactly right. Um, we got a couple of stories here too that speak to the sort of more, I guess, existential nature of the AI threat. This is really disturbing. Put D5 up on the screen. AI companies have been bulk buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed

AI Eats Culture And Human Meaning

SPEAKER_00 54:01

machines that cut the spines off and then shred the originals. Um, they, you know, this um this has been tracked by a number of news outlets. This particular account is called hedge markets. Um, in any case, this is really disturbing because you're talking about the entire corpus of human knowledge. You're talking about books that there may only be one remaining in existence, or only a handful remaining in existence, that are not, have not been, you know, scanned into the internet so you can just access them at some later time. This is the only proof of their existence. And they're just being chopped up and fed into this AI beast. I think that's really struck a nerve with people, Emily, because it does feel like a direct assault on our humanity, on our creativity, on our, you know, the bank of knowledge that we've sort of like a virtual or modern day mass book burning that has been occurring in the background that we didn't even know about.

SPEAKER_08 54:55

A man named Charlie Becker posted a really interesting um post on X about this. He his family runs Houston's largest used and rare bookstore, according according to his post, and he's been working to build an AI tool for bookstores like his. He says every ingredient of the viral story is true. Uh, booksellers really are getting bizarre bulk orders, but quote, rare here isn't what you're picturing. It's the insider's guide to Metro Denver from 1995 and how to use word perfect 1991 manuals, obscure but not but often not precious. And he goes on to say, though, that this is more mundane than the Treasure story. The actual risk is worse because it's quieter. Books that don't sell eventually get liquidated. So if they don't sell via FBA, they end up getting liquidated. And he says, if we really hold the last copies of some of these, we're feeding them into a portal. They may not come back from no AI company required. So basically he's saying he thinks that these are bulk orders done by an AI to mark up and resell things on Amazon. But because when you do that, most of the books don't sell, they end up getting shredded anyway. And so it's like a mess, no matter how you slice it, and one that is doing exactly what you just said is going to do in the the name of like turning around profits uh with this technology bill that allows you to spread the cost out in mass, mass, mass around the world.

SPEAKER_00 56:25

And then Emily, I wonder what you think about this. You know, we talk a lot, I think, understandably, because people are concerned about it, about the way AI is already and is promising to displace a lot of human beings. But there's also a real existential layer to this as well of like, what is our purpose and what are we passionate about? And, you know, what gives our lives meaning? And there uh is this extraordinary substack, we can put this up on the screen, from um this man, Kerwin Hampshire, who was a mathematician. And he's describing the way that he is experiencing this crisis of identity. Because the headline here is the dark night of mathematics, what are we really doing? Because you've had AI now be able to solve some long-standing what are called conjectures, these, you know, math like math problems. I don't know what I'm talking about here, guys. Sorry. But in any case, um, been able to solve these problems that have existed for years and you know, or decades, that mathematicians and math enthusiasts have been puzzling over for years and years and years. And now you have AI just basically come in and like, oh, here's the answer, done. And so he says, I'm going insane. During the last week or so, LLMs have produced a number of counterexamples to significant long-standing conjectures. I won't recount these happenings here. There are many places where you can find the details. Mathematicians, math enthusiasts, and curiously people are responding to these developments in ways that I believe obscure what is for me, the true heart of the problem. I don't speak for everyone in the math community in my response, but I suspect I'm not alone. I'm suffering a profound spiritual crisis due to these developments. I've been screaming internally for days. It feels as though I'm living inside of a nightmare. Um, he says, the recent leading declaration on AI and mathematics is to me a well-muffled screen, a saffron may launch of self-soofing over which I looms a painfully obvious absence. And effectively he says, okay, so if mathematical discovery, if that's just over now, like the LLMs are just better than us now, what's left for us? And he goes on to say, look, even if you were to ban all of the AI and put him back, this discovery process back in the hands of humans, we would always know it was a sort of lie that we had rigged it so that we could be the ones that discover the answer when you have this technology out there that would have reached, you know, would have been able to solve these problems much more rapidly. And so, um, you know, I thought it was pretty profound to think about. And he's experiencing this in math. He says, I don't know what to do. There may be nothing you can do. I have no prescriptions, policy recommendations, or coherent calls to action. Um, I just want to be honest and open about my emotional and spiritual response. I want to feel seen. I want folks like me to feel seen. I feel need the architects of our new mathematical paradigm to look me in the eye, acknowledge our shared humanity and soul before they deliver the coup de grasse. I need most of all for us to understand what we are really doing. So I don't know. What do you think about that, um?

SPEAKER_08 59:20

I mean, we are layering computer on top of computer on top of computer. Everything is computer, as Trump would say. But uh that might be the truest thing that he's ever said. Math is the infrastructure around us. Like that's what builds the infrastructure around us. So think of uh when you have a further reduction of the human element. Of course, some of this has already been offloaded to computers, but when you uh take the human element almost completely out of it, and then you have computer solving problem on top of computer solving problem on top of computer solving problem, um, obviously there are things that can get baked into that that are enormously problematic. And also high-level math is art. It is it is literally art. It's like culturing, it's music, it's um not just, you know, these like abstract goodwill hunting chalkboard problems. They're really meaningful problems, human problems. And uh it's great that we can um progress if we can, if it's used for genuine progress. It's great that we can we can do it more, more quickly and perhaps more efficiently and with more sense of accuracy. Uh, maybe that's that's great in theory, uh, but I don't know that uh anybody trusts that this is actually happening in a way that's good for humanity and not actually unsafe uh and less human in a less safe way. I don't have that trust. And it just scares me that this process is happening all around us so quickly. It is not like the transition from horses to automobiles. It is not like the transition uh from or to to air travel, right? Like this is happening, those all happened actually pretty quickly. This is happening even faster and it's building on itself. Yeah, and it's that there's just no trust.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:06

It reminds me, it makes me think about the rapid transition that was experienced in the industrial Midwest, where all of these factories closed, you know, towns that were built around the factories just completely collapsed. You had men who had previous, mostly men, uh, who had previously been able to earn a good living and support a family and buy a house, et cetera, who lose all of that. And a lot of that is we tend to focus on what's measurable, that's the material loss. But it's also a profound psychological blow. And I think our politics today really reflects the lack of recovery and tending to that psychological blow of now you have no skill that's relevant to people. Now you are unable to provide for yourself and for your family and you know, aspire for better things for your kids. And uh, I think we we aren't really grappling with what the psychological toll of AI will be, because in a sense, how can we? We don't really know what it's going to be. But it did remind me, and I'll just um end with this because we have a guest standing by. But uh, I read these, the three body problem um trilogy. And in the first book, and I'm not really giving it away anything here, but everybody should read them because they're fantastic books. But anyway, um there's a spate of scientists who are committing suicide. And it starts with this sort of mystery of like, what is going on with these scientists? Why do they keep killing themselves? And come to find out, okay, I'm giving away a little bit. But basically, they've been thwarted, and their experiments are coming out in these crazy ways where they're sort of becoming convinced that the science that they expect accepted wasn't real and that there's no physically in quantum physics, and for reasons that I won't divulge because that does give some away, it comes to be realized that they have in fact been thwarted and they are ha are being prevented from making any further progress ended of that, reading his um reading his explanation of what he describes as the spiritual crisis that he's going through. So, anyway, one more impact of AI that we're all gonna have to grapple with.

SPEAKER_08 1:02:56

No, I mean my mom grew up in one of those towns, and a bunch of my family is still there, and we all have seen what happens. Um, and that was in Wisconsin, and we've all seen what happens where opioids filled the gap. Um That's right. Where I remember David Obey represented that district for a long time, and he said he regretted how ineffective the job training programs that they were promised uh after, I forget whether it was after a WTO came in. He ended up losing his seat, by the way, to Sean Duffy in 2010, uh, before really the MAGA revolution. Uh it flipped. That was a damn district for 40 years. So uh people get really, really, really profoundly psychologically unsettled. And uh then, of course, our special interest field economy sweeps in with something awful to fill the gap often, and that breeds more and more resentment and division, and it's like we're heading straight down that road once again.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:47

Well, let's talk about talk about one of the architects of that um world that we live in now, Mitch McConnell.

SPEAKER_09 1:03:52

Hey, if you like that video, hit the like button or leave a comment below. It really helps get the show.