12/11/24: CEO Shooter Manifesto Revealed, McConnell Health Coverup, Trump Replacing Lina Khan, Trump DOJ Spied On Journos, Bill Maher Stunned By Pro-Trump Guest

Summary

Podcast Summary: Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar – December 11, 2024

Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar delivered a compelling and in-depth episode on December 11, 2024, tackling multiple high-stakes political and social issues. Hosted by Krystal Ball and Sagar Enjeti, the episode navigated through topics ranging from political health concerns, controversial legal cases, international conflicts, high-profile nominations, to investigative reports on governmental misconduct. Below is a detailed summary of the key discussions, insights, and conclusions from the episode.

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1. Mitch McConnell's Health and Senate Leadership

Timestamp: 06:14

Krystal Ball initiated the episode by addressing recent concerns regarding Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s health. An Associated Press report revealed that McConnell suffered a fall on Capitol Hill, resulting in a sprained wrist. While Krystal emphasized that McConnell appears mentally sharp, she highlighted his physical frailty, questioning his capacity to continue in such a demanding role.

• Quote:
  Krystal Ball: “Mitch McConnell is clearly too old to be in office. He doesn't seem like Biden. He's incapacitated.”

Sagar Enjeti added that McConnell is making significant efforts to conceal his physical limitations, drawing parallels to historical figures like JFK and FDR who similarly downplayed health issues.

---

2. Luigi Mangione's Manifesto and Legal Proceedings

Timestamp: 15:18

The hosts delved into the disturbing case of Luigi Mangione, whose manifesto was recently released by investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein. Mangione was extradited from Pennsylvania to New York to face murder charges related to the assassination of Brian Thompson. The discussion illuminated the manifesto's chilling content and the inconsistencies between Mangione's admissions and his legal defense strategy.

• Quote:
  Sagar Enjeti: “These parasites simply had it coming. They’re a bunch of selfish, greedy pieces of shit.”

Krystal Ball addressed the psychological aspects, noting Mangione's chronic back pain and his family's ownership of problematic nursing homes as potential factors contributing to his actions.

---

3. U.S. Military Involvement and Ethnic Cleansing in Syria

Timestamp: 39:06

Krystal and Sagar examined the ongoing conflict in Syria, highlighting the roles of various international actors, including the U.S., Russia, Iran, Israel, and Turkey. They discussed the strategic maneuvers that have led to the destabilization and ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza, with specific attention to attacks on hospitals and civilian infrastructure.

• Quote:
  Sagar Enjeti: “Israel has been annihilating any semblance of Syrian self-defense or sovereignty.”

The hosts criticized U.S. foreign policy, arguing that continuous military interventions have only exacerbated chaos and failed to establish lasting peace in the region.

---

4. Pete Hegseth's Rape Allegations and Defense Secretary Nomination

Timestamp: 62:04

A significant portion of the episode focused on Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, who faces past rape allegations. Krystal and Sagar dissected the 2017 police report detailing the accusations and the subsequent settlement in 2020. They scrutinized the inconsistencies in testimonies and the lack of concrete evidence supporting the claims against Hegseth.

• Quote:
  Sagar Enjeti: “It’s the anatomy of a smear. They take something and then add anonymous sources and contortions and flat-out lies.”

Krystal highlighted the potential implications of Hegseth’s confirmation, questioning his qualifications and the broader impact on the Pentagon’s integrity.

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5. Trump Appoints Andrew Ferguson to FTC, Replacing Lina Khan

Timestamp: 79:39

The discussion shifted to President Trump’s appointment of Andrew Ferguson as the new Commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), succeeding Lina Khan. The hosts analyzed Ferguson’s stance on antitrust policies, particularly his opposition to Khan’s consumer and worker-centric approach.

• Quote:
  Krystal Ball: “It was a day that Lina Khan was celebrating one of her significant victories by blocking the Kroger-Albertson merger.”

They critiqued the right’s support for Ferguson, suggesting that his appointment signals a rollback of progressive antitrust measures aimed at curbing monopolistic practices and protecting consumer and worker interests.

---

6. DOJ Inspector General Report on Spying During Trump Administration

Timestamp: 91:01

Krystal and Sagar addressed the recently published Inspector General report by Michael Horowitz, which exposed improper spying activities by the Department of Justice (DOJ) during Trump’s first term. The report detailed unauthorized surveillance of lawmakers, congressional staffers, and journalists aimed at identifying leaks.

• Quote:
  Sagar Enjeti: “These matters with them privately before I opine on them publicly.”

The hosts emphasized the gravity of these findings, warning of potential abuses of power and the erosion of democratic safeguards intended to protect journalistic and legislative integrity.

---

7. Cancel Culture Debate Featuring Bill Maher

Timestamp: 101:58

Wrapping up the episode, Krystal and Sagar explored the evolving landscape of cancel culture. They referenced a conversation between comedian Bill Maher and actor Zachary Levi, highlighting the diminishing stigma around supporting controversial figures like Donald Trump. This segment underscored the broader societal shifts in accountability and the complexities surrounding public backlash.

• Quote:
  Krystal Ball: “Cancel culture was absolutely real. It’s becoming incoherent on the Right.”

The discussion concluded with reflections on how changing attitudes towards cancel culture could influence political discourse and personal accountability in the public sphere.

---

Conclusion

The December 11, 2024, episode of Breaking Points provided a thorough examination of pressing political and social issues, blending investigative journalism with incisive commentary. Krystal Ball and Sagar Enjeti effectively navigated complex topics, offering listeners a nuanced perspective on leadership health, legal controversies, international conflicts, governmental misconduct, policy shifts, and cultural debates. The episode reinforced the show's commitment to holding powerful entities accountable and fostering informed discourse.

Notable Quotes:

• Krystal Ball [06:14]: “Mitch McConnell is clearly too old to be in office. He doesn't seem like Biden. He's incapacitated.”
• Sagar Enjeti [15:18]: “These parasites simply had it coming. They’re a bunch of selfish, greedy pieces of shit.”
• Sagar Enjeti [62:32]: “It's the anatomy of a smear. They take something and then add anonymous sources and contortions and flat-out lies.”
• Krystal Ball [79:39]: “It was a day that Lina Khan was celebrating one of her significant victories by blocking the Kroger-Albertson merger.”
• Sagar Enjeti [91:01]: “These matters with them privately before I opine on them publicly.”
• Krystal Ball [101:58]: “Cancel culture was absolutely real. It’s becoming incoherent on the Right.”

---

This summary encapsulates the essence of the episode, providing a comprehensive overview for listeners new to Breaking Points while retaining the depth and critical analysis characteristic of Krystal and Saagar's discussions.

Transcript

[Sagar Enjeti]

All right, we're all set for the party. I've trimmed the tree, hung the mistletoe, and paired all those weird shaped knives.

[Crystal Ball]

And forks with the appropriate cheeses.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And I plugged in the Partisan Partisan. It's a home cocktail maker that makes over 60 premium cocktails, plus a whole lot of seasonal favorites too. I just got it for 50 off. So how about a Cosmopolitan or a Mistletoe margarita? I'm thirsty.

[Crystal Ball]

Watch.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I just pop in a capsule, choose my strength and wow, it's beginning to feel more seasonal in here already. If your holiday party doesn't have a.

[Crystal Ball]

Bartender, then you become the bartender.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Unless you've got a Bartesian because Bartesian crafts every cocktail perfectly in as little as 30 seconds. And I just got it for $50 off. Tis the season to be jollier. Add some holiday flavor to every celebration with the sleek, sophisticated home cocktail maker Bartesian. Get $50 off any cocktail maker at bartesian.com cocktail that's B A R T E S I A N dot com cocktail after investing billions to light up our network, T Mobile is America's largest 5G network. Plus right now you can switch keep your phone and we'll pay it off up to $800. See how you can save on every plan vs Verizon and at&t@t mobile.com Keep and switch up to four lines via virtual prepaid card. Allow 15 days qualifying unlocked device credit service ported 90 plus days with device ineligible carrier and timely redemption required. Card has no cash access and expires in six months. One in three women and one in four men experience domestic abuse in their lifetime and nearly half of survivors delay leaving because they can't bring their pets with them. Purina started the Purple Leash Project to help eliminate one of the many barriers domestic abuse survivors face, a lack of pet friendly domestic violence shelters. Through the Purple Leash Project, Purina is helping to create more pet friendly domestic violence shelters across the country so abused survivors and their pets can escape and heal together. Visit purina.compurple to get involved hey guys, Sager and Crystal here. Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election and we are so excited about what that means for the future of this show. This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else. So if that is something that's important to you, Please go to BreakingPoints.com, become a member today and you'll get access to our full shows unedited ad free and all put together for you every morning in your inbox.

[Crystal Ball]

We need your help to build the future of independent news media.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And we hope to see [e-mail] Good morning and welcome to Counterpoints. Emily, how you doing?

[Crystal Ball]

Good. It's really rainy here in Washington, D.C. but it is. That's December for you.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Here it is. It used to be snowy here in December, but not so much anymore. Anyway, thank you for that. Exxon wanted to start really quick.

[Crystal Ball]

It came in hot just now.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I mean, it's obnoxious. On my way in, I'm like, this could be snow. And when I was a kid, this would be snow instead. This is gross. But I wanted to update people real quickly on the thing that Crystal told you about in the morning where she encouraged everyone to buy Refat Al Arir's book of poetry and prose, which came out yesterday called if I Must Die. We've been pushing everyone to buy it over the last week, trying to make it a best seller. I just checked. It's number 63 in the world right now. The publisher, as Crystal mentioned, told me that as of several days ago, already 10,000 orders had come in, probably closer to 13, 14,000 by now, which means it has a real shot of making the New York Times bestseller list in its first week out. So you have basically, you have until Friday to put your orders in. It is completely out of stock. They sold out their entire first print run, but you're still able to order it. That just means you won't get it until they do another print run. So if you already ordered a copy, go get some more because you know you have people in your life who need it. Great book of poetry and prose. And it's a message to Refat's surviving family and to the Palestinian people in general that he has not forgotten. He has not been forgotten. They have not been forgotten. We have nothing to do with it commercially. All the royalties go to a surviving family. We just would love to see this surge. So thank you for that. Keep going.

[Crystal Ball]

Poetry is a great holiday gift.

[Sagar Enjeti]

It is. Absolutely. It absolutely is.

[Crystal Ball]

We have a really packed show today. Really packed show today. The news is relentless. We're going to start actually with a little news, I guess, about Mitch McConnell. And we'll go then into the breaking story that's unfolding continuously about Luigi Mangione. Ken Klippenstein secured the manifesto released. Released the manifesto yesterday. So we have all kinds of new details to talk about when it comes to the assassination of Brian Thompson. We're then going to talk about updates also Relentless breaking news cycle from Syria. We're going to break the Pete Hegseth rape allegations from the police report for everyone that's, you know, came out a few weeks ago.

[Sagar Enjeti]

But he looks like he might get through.

[Crystal Ball]

He looks like he might get through.

[Sagar Enjeti]

So it's important for people to know whether or not they're Pentagon secretary as a rapist.

[Crystal Ball]

And Ryan suggested we actually like kind of walk through the police report. So stay tuned to go through that with us. We're gonna talk about the Trump Department of Justice getting caught by a Michael Horowitz inspector general who produced actually a very good report on Russia collusion not that long ago, finding improper spying on journalists and Republican and Democratic lawmakers. So people, it was like 20 Republicans, 21 Democrats or maybe reverse 21 Republicans and 20 Democrats. But absolutely. Improper spying on journalists to catch leakers. And we've got a great Bill Maher clip. You're going to want to stay tuned for the Bill Maher clip.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. And the ethnic cleansing of northern Gaza continues with this assaults on multiple hospitals, Kamala one hospital, Indonesian hospital. We won't have a chance to talk about that today. I'll be on the show tomorrow filling in for Crystal. I'm sure we'll get to that for our Pakistani audience. We had a big story yesterday over at Dropsite. You can read that there. We don't have a chance to get to that one either. Maybe we can do that tomorrow. Basically, according to leaks we got out of Pakistan, the November 26th massacre that we covered was actually pre planned and it was basically an ambush. Just so maybe we'll talk about that more tomorrow. But so much going on in the world. Let's just get into it.

[Crystal Ball]

Let's get into it. We're going to start with this first tear sheet and just do a kind of quick report from Capitol hill where Mitch McConnell, who's no longer the Senate minority leader, he had a fall. We can put a one up on the screen. This is from the Associated Press. He fell and sprained his wrist yesterday, literally on Capitol Hill. There was, you could see medical personnel to assist him in his office. And the reason we're talking about this is that Mitch McConnell is clearly too old to be in office. And by old I mean there are people who are older than him. I think Bernie Sanders might be older than him. When I say old, I mean he's incapacitated. He is. We're getting to Feinstein territory, wouldn't you say, Ryan?

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. So I'm curious, do we know physical versus mental incapacity here.

[Crystal Ball]

I mean, mentally, he seems perfectly sharp.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Right. He had that brain freeze, but he.

[Crystal Ball]

Had that brain freeze. Yeah. I shouldn't say perfect. He seems like an older man, but he doesn't seem like Biden. I guess Biden is the comparison. Mitch McConnell doesn't seem to have gone to Biden levels.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Right. And what we can reveal here is that he's going to enormous lengths to basically cover up how physically frail at least he has gotten. Which presidents like JFK and FDR all did, you know, attempting, attempting to show more physical vigor than they had. But go ahead. Well, this comes from your side.

[Crystal Ball]

I was just going to say. I mean, I think it's for the reason that you're saying it's important that we probe Mitch McConnell's health right now because he's still incredibly influential in Senate Republican leadership. They're about to have the majority. So he's a very consequential figure. Still. He doesn't need to be in office. He's had physical medical challenges. And yet we can put a 2 up on the screen. This is actually an exclusive image that we have here at Breaking Points. This was the day after the election. Mitch McConnell at Reagan International Airport in a wheelchair being pushed by a staffer. That may not seem like a big deal. There has been reporting that he uses a wheelchair and there may or may not be a couple other photos of him in a wheelchair floating around out there. I didn't see many. And that's because they are carefully trying to prevent these photos from being published. Because to your point, Ryan, it's similar to FDR and JFK and not wanting to give any sense of incapacity. But Mitch McConnell is staying in the Senate to, as he said, make sure that the fight for Ukraine as he sees it is complete.

[Sagar Enjeti]

He's subcommittee chair of this important Armed Services panel. He has personally intervened, probably without Mitch McConnell, Ukraine may not have the funding that it has.

[Crystal Ball]

Yes, at this point, he has made it a priority.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Now, I have my own piece of reporting that I can add to that. A source of mine flew next to him on a commercial flight, and when they arrived, there was a wheelchair waiting for him. But McConnell angrily kind of refused it. So it's not that he's constantly in need of a wheelchair and he's very cognizant of what it represents. His refusal to use it yesterday led obviously to his fall and to his injury, to the injury on his face and his wrist. I think, more importantly, from a political perspective, the source also said that he ate A tuna fish sandwich on this commercial flight.

[Crystal Ball]

But he wasn't in first class.

[Sagar Enjeti]

He was not in first class. And at that point it's like, okay, your flying coach despite the fact that you could fly first class because you want to be with the people. You want to show that you're a man of the people. You sit down among these people of which you are one of the men, and you open up a tuna fish sandwich, go to first class.

[Crystal Ball]

The level of take that to first class.

[Sagar Enjeti]

The people will be okay without you being in there.

[Crystal Ball]

Right.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Just get. Come on.

[Crystal Ball]

The level of out of touchness at that point is astounding. Not surprising, but astounding nonetheless.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I try to not bring any even, you know, fries or anything that's gonna. Even stuff that smells good, like fries. No, nobody wants to smell your food. And Coke.

[Crystal Ball]

It's such a small space.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. Anyway, that's why the world made like granola bars.

[Crystal Ball]

Yes, that's true. Ryan does love granola bars.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Who does it. It does the trick. You don't need a tuna fish sandwich.

[Crystal Ball]

Mitch McConnell, yeah. To Ryan's point, has put himself in a position on a subcommittee chair, armed service, where he's. And he's said as much. He's not being quiet about this. He sees the reason that he's continuing to stick around the Senate despite having.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Right.

[Crystal Ball]

He had that brain freeze. Everyone remembers where he just sort of seemed to pause in the middle of a sentence. It's actually happened twice. He's clearly. So while he may be on a good day, in perfectly healthy mental shape, he may feel like he's his old self. We can put a 3 up on the screen. This is more examples of his physical health problems. You can see just his band aid.

[Sagar Enjeti]

On his face as a result of his fall yesterday.

[Crystal Ball]

Yeah. Bandaid on his face and his wrist is really swollen and purple. But when I started this block by saying Mitch McConnell is too old to be in the Senate, I mean, there are people who are older at this point who are probably sharper. I think Bernie Sanders is older than him.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Although he were in Ukraine, they'd conscript him to the front lines.

[Crystal Ball]

Yeah, he'd be, he'd be ready to go. Bernie Sanders, I think also said yesterday in an interview, it's a little bit of breaking news too, that this will probably be his last term. He said it'll be 89 when I get out of here.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Because he was just elected. He's got six years.

[Crystal Ball]

Yeah, yeah. But Mitch McConnell, even after all of these health problems, refuses to resign. And continues to put himself in powerful positions. He did step Senate minority leader and soon to be Senate majority leader, but he continues to put himself in powerful positions because he is clinging to his ability to continue funneling money to Ukraine. He sees it as an existential crisis for democracy. This is how he would phrase it. He's not been quiet about any of this. And we think that it's important that he should be transparent, actually, about what his health is and how ill he is. And there you go.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And from that perspective, I understand why he would stay in. Because when you're a senator and a chairman of a powerful committee that doles out money, it's not as if it's a constant intellectual contest. He's not playing speed chess all day long.

[Crystal Ball]

Right.

[Sagar Enjeti]

He just needs to sit in that position, box everybody out, demand that they move the money that he once moved.

[Crystal Ball]

Yeah.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And just stand there until it happens. So in that sense, as long as you're with it a little bit out of the day and you can be wheeled in and out, you actually can do just as much for the most part in that position as you could as a 36 year old, spry young senator.

[Crystal Ball]

Yeah. No, it makes sense.

[Sagar Enjeti]

All right, we're all set for the party. I've trimmed the tree, hung the mistletoe, and paired all those weird shaped knives.

[Crystal Ball]

And forks with the appropriate cheeses.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And I plugged in the Partisan. Partisan. It's a home cocktail maker that makes over 60 premium cocktails, plus a whole lot of seasonal favorites, too. I just got it for 50 off, so how about a Cosmopolitan or a mistletoe margarita? I'm thirsty.

[Crystal Ball]

Watch.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I just pop in a capsule, choose my strength and wow, it's beginning to feel more seasonal in here already. If your holiday party doesn't have a.

[Crystal Ball]

Bartender, then you become the bartender.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Unless you've got a Bartesian, because Bartesian crafts every cocktail perfectly in as little as 30 seconds. And I just got it for $50 off. Tis the season to be jollier. Add some holiday flavor to every celebration with the sleek, sophisticated home cocktail maker Bartisian. Get $50 off any cocktail maker at bartesian.com cocktail that's B A R T E S I A N dot com cocktail. The all electric Chevy Equinox EV combines everything you need when you're ready to go. EV Starting at 34,995, the 2025 Equinox EVLT gives you an impressive balance of all electric range safety features for peace of mind and effortless technology, including the 17.7-inch diagonal display screen. All at a price you'll love. The Chevy Equinox EV is the fun to drive all electric SUV that gives you what you need to do exactly what you want. The manufacturer's suggested retail price excludes tax, title, license, dealer fees and optional equipment. Dealer set's final price. To learn more, visit chevy.com Equinox EV Gifting is hard, but here's a hint. Give the gift of connection from US Cellular. Not sure what that means. Here's a slightly more specific hint. You can choose four free phones and get four lines for $90 a month from US Cellular. Your family wants new phones. How do we know? They told us. The good news is that compared to wrapping presents, you're great at getting hints. So take the hint and get them. Four free phones and four lines for $90 a month US Cellular built for us.

[Crystal Ball]

Let's move on to the unfolding saga of Luigi Mangione, whose manifesto was was first released in full by a friend of the show, Ken Klippenstein, yesterday. We can put B0 up on the screen. This is the manifesto itself. It's very short as far as manifestos go. And it has barely a manifesto, barely a manifesto. It has a banger of a first line here to the feds. I'll keep this short because I do respect what you do for our country. Maybe one of the weirdest openings to any manifesto in history. Ryan, you wanted to do a somewhat dramatic reading of this. We should add that Mangione had an extradition hearing yesterday. He's being extradited from Pennsylvania, where he was caught at that Altoona, Pennsylvania McDonald's, and he's being extradited to New York to face murder charges. So that's what was unfolding yesterday. We'll play clips of this and everything, but Ken said a lot of people in media had this manifesto but were not publishing it. They were publishing just snippets of it and not releasing it in full.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, and what's wrong with me? Why didn't I have this yet?

[Crystal Ball]

Yeah, why did nobody give this to Ryan?

[Sagar Enjeti]

I mean, Ken has been. Ken has been all over this. From being one of the first Edge lords to like, celebrate the murder of Brian Thompson. And since then has gotten some videos out of UnitedHealth from, you know, obviously leaked by UnitedHealth employees who agree more with Ken than Ken's critics. And then he got the manifesto as well. It is utterly bizarre. I can't even think of a reason why the mainstream press got their hands on this and didn't publish it, but did quote from it. It's like, what on earth are you doing?

[Crystal Ball]

It's so short.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I don't even see how this helps manufacture consent. It's just a little manifesto. Yeah, we can read some more of it. I state plainly that I wasn't working with anyone. This was fairly trivial. Some elementary social engineering, basic cad, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and to do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering, so probably not much info there. Yeah, we'll see about that. I do apologize for any strife of traumas, but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. And there's a TikTok going around of they had it coming. The song from Chicago with some nice edits. A reminder. The US has the number one most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly number 42. Roughly. Number 42 is kind of a funny phrase.

[Crystal Ball]

Roughly number 42.

[Sagar Enjeti]

You're either 42 or you're not. Say roughly 40. If I'm doing edits of his manifesto, I would say just say roughly 40. Because when you say 42, that's implying some specificity.

[Crystal Ball]

You should have submitted this to Dropsite.

[Sagar Enjeti]

He should have. United is the indecipherable largest company in the US by market cap. I don't think that's true. Oh, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. I'm editing the guys.

[Crystal Ball]

Everyone's in the process right now. You're seeing behind the curtain.

[Sagar Enjeti]

It has grown and grown. But has our life expectancy? No, the reality is these indecipherable have simply gotten too powerful. They continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space and frankly, I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed. E. G. Rosenthal, Michael Moore. I assume he means Michael Moore there decades ago. And the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I'm the first to face it with such brutal honesty.

[Crystal Ball]

You know, that last line is actually kind of, I think, central to the debate over ethics and people's reactions here in that Brent, I'm genuinely surprised there hasn't. There haven't been similar acts of like anti health care terrorism, because that's how bad the health insurance system is. And I'm not Saying, obviously, nobody is saying, well, maybe some people are. Obviously, nothing is justified as a horrible thing to do. But I'm very surprised that we don't see, like, actually more violent protests of how bad our health insurance system is.

[Sagar Enjeti]

It is a little surprising in that sense, because being on the phone with these insurance companies in the best of times is a nightmare situation. Being on the phone with them when they are delaying your treatment for trivial paperwork reasons that obviously were manufactured for the purpose of delaying your treatment in the hopes that you either die or don't need the treatment or it moots the treatment at some point. Yeah. You would kind of think that somebody would have done this earlier.

[Crystal Ball]

Yeah.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I mean, it is kind of surprising in that sense. Yeah.

[Crystal Ball]

So I was gonna say we have a video of him being. He shouted something that people were trying to put together, and I think we have a decent transcript of what was said. This is Luigi Mangione yelling. What you're probably gonna hear here is something to the extent of it's an insult to the American people. There's some debate about what he's actually saying. Can says that it's him saying, this is completely out of touch and an insult to the intelligence of the American people. So let's go ahead and roll this video.

[Sagar Enjeti]

So what his lawyer is saying is that they're strongly implying that a lot of evidence was planted on him. And what I think is going on there and with his. This thing stinks here is that they want to give a jury a reason in the face of overwhelming evidence to acquit him. And so what they're trying to do, this is just my guess, is give the jury an excuse to do jury nullification. And people can look that up. A lot of people have looked it up over the last several days. Jury nullification is when you. You know that somebody did the crime, but you think it was. Either there's something wrong with the law, or you think the crime was justified in that particular circumstance. And so the jury. I think it's even illegal to do jury nullification. But how are they gonna prove it? And so the jurors will say, you know what? We find this guy not guilty. And so by saying that all this stuff is planted in this, it would then give a juror who wanted to do that some read to hang on to. That's my guess, because they're saying he's caught with everything. Manifesto. We just read his alleged manifesto.

[Crystal Ball]

He's on tape. Allegedly on tape. You can't really see his face in.

[Sagar Enjeti]

The fuzzy cctv video, but found him with a gun. So if you believe that all of that evidence is real and is actually his 100% guilty, if you believe that and you don't want to find him guilty, then you say, well, maybe they planted it on him. It's very similar to the kind of OJ defense that they did, that they said, look, maybe they planted this glove. These cops are racist. Here they are saying the N word. And so for jurors who were like, I kind of want to find him guilty, there was enough of. They were able to say, look, maybe this was planted because there was so much evidence. They couldn't say that the evidence wasn't beyond a reasonable doubt. They had to say the evidence is itself fake.

[Crystal Ball]

So his attorney, to Ryan's point, said, you can't rush to judgment in this case or any case yesterday. And we can put the next element up on the screen. He is. He was fighting his extradition to New York City, where actually Alvin Bragg will, quote, seek the governor's warrant to secure his transfer. I'm, quote, coordinating with the DA's office and will sign a request for a governor's warrant to ensure this individual is tried and held accountable. Public safety is my top priority, and I'll do everything in my power to keep the streets of New York safe, said Kathy Hochul, New York Governor, in a statement. So that's. He Mengioni is fighting this. He's not sort of just like putting his hands up and being like, yep, I wrote it all in the manifesto. I'm sorry if this causes any trauma, which, by the way, is a line from the manifesto. So it's kind of an interesting disconnect between what the manifesto says and his approach to the case so far.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Right? Yeah.

[Crystal Ball]

The manifesto is literally, I did this, and I'm really sorry. It had to be done.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Gonna have some problems.

[Crystal Ball]

That's a pretty significant disconnect between what he's saying, which is an insult to the intelligence of American people. We don't quite know what that's referring to, but it sounded like he was. And we know from his attorney that he's fighting the charges. So anyway, all that is to say that's a pretty significant disconnect, obviously. Now, this is a quote from an NBC article. This is B3. We can put this up on the scre screen. They're digging into his video game use. So in the game. Well, I'll just read from this first graph. Luigi Mangione once belonged to a group of Ivy League gamers who played Assassins A member of the group told NBC News, in the game called Among Us, some players are secretly assigned to be killers in space who perform other tasks while attempting to avoid suspicion from other players. Brian, on a scale of zero, how newsworthy is this?

[Sagar Enjeti]

It's not even on the scale. It's just funny. It's just hilarious. People watching this have probably played Among Us. I've played it actually with my kids. It's a little kid's game. It's a silly game that college kids play too. You can play it as a grownup. Whatever. That's hilarious. That's utterly hilarious.

[Crystal Ball]

Someone said to NBC News, I just found it extremely ironic that we were in this game and there could actually be a killer among us.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Okay, it's funny. Yeah. I mean if you're, if you actually played Among Us with the assassin, that is a fun story to tell your friends, I'll give them that.

[Crystal Ball]

Is it a fun story to tell NBC News? Yes, because they will tell.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And then if you're NBC News, it's fun to put at the bottom of the story.

[Crystal Ball]

Yeah, right.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I hope that they understood how ridiculous they were sounding.

[Crystal Ball]

Among Us is a child friendly whodunit game in which a group of friends run around several space station like maps. The crewmates who are simply drawn cartoonish looking astronauts run around the and complete tasks. The intent of the game, Question mark. One member is a killer and attempts to off the other crewmates.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Actually if you remember, Hasan Piker, AOC and Ilhan Omar played it on a stream together.

[Crystal Ball]

Oh really?

[Sagar Enjeti]

Back during the pandemic.

[Crystal Ball]

Gotta watch out for AOC Interesting.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah.

[Crystal Ball]

Another New Yorker who's mad about the healthcare system.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, just facts. Yeah, yeah, putting out facts here.

[Crystal Ball]

Yeah, just spitting facts now before there's also some obviously probing of Luigi Mangioni's Reddit history. So Forbes reports UHC show Luigi Mangione appears to have been a Redditor and he researched back pain and back packs. This is really sad, Brian. The more that we're learning about Mangione's experiences with his own long term it looks like he had a chronic back problem. Again, this is all being pieced together from the trails like the breadcrumbs that he left on the Internet. But it's turning out to be an extremely sad story.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, back pain, which, which thankfully I have not really had to suffer with in my life but from people who talk about it is utterly debilitating. When it's not with you, you're thinking about it. Thinking about the possibility that one little tweak and it's gonna be back when it's with you. It is just absolutely all consuming. And the medical profession, when it comes to treating back pain is just no better than random quackery, it seems like. And so he wound up getting some screws put into his back that his family and friends say ended up making him crazy. That's not an uncommon response from people who've gone through this because it just. The grieving from the life that you had to the life that you now have, I think can send people around the bend.

[Crystal Ball]

Well, it's frustrating when you're trying to solve a problem and you're paying into a system and then the system is blocking you. And that brings us again to as awful as Mangione's alleged decision seems to have been, it is surprising to me that we don't get more like domestic unrest from how bad our healthcare system is, because it will drive people crazy. It will drive people crazy.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And I wonder if psychologically it was a little bit harder for him because he grew up a rich prep school kid who is not used to being told no.

[Crystal Ball]

Well, apparently his family owns a nursing home that is riddled with problems. Complaints.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Also called a nursing home, right?

[Crystal Ball]

Yes, absolutely.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yes, yes.

[Crystal Ball]

But actually, this one appears to be exceptional in rankings, like national rankings. I can find out what we're talking. But, yes, exceptionally bad.

[Sagar Enjeti]

He went to this rich prep school called Gilman in Maryland. If you're from Maryland and you saw this, you're like, like, okay, this tracks. Yeah, Gilman, Gilman, Kidd. Yeah, Gilman Kidd could pop and do this.

[Crystal Ball]

Well, that's. I just think it's an insane statement on. Well, not insane. It's like the least surprising statement, actually, but it's a very powerful one on how horrible the healthcare system is, is that you can come from a background of privilege, and unless you're like, tippy, tippy, top of the 1%, you can have the same terrible experience with the healthcare system. It's like a shared socioeconomic experience. Now, it's obviously much worse for people who can't afford health insurance and are struggling to pay their bills and have kids and are doing two jobs to have their health insurance. It's insane. But you can actually still be wealthy in this country, and our health insurance system can utterly fail you in the most frustrating ways. And that actually goes to your point about how frustrating it must be. If you are privileged and you're used to having everything be at your fingertips. You can see psychologically how that can drive you even crazier.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. And also, and not to undermine our man's fundamental point here, but the healthcare system is also not magic. Like, there are some things that even the best, the best providers, the best physicians with all of the money in the world can't fix. Like, that's just a fundamental part of the human condition and it always will be, no matter what Peter Thiel tries to do with young people's blood or whatever. It's just, you know, we are who we are.

[Crystal Ball]

So at some level. Yeah. So his family, including his father, apparently this is just. They own Laurian Health Systems. It's a for profit nursing home. They've been fined for health inspection violations, according to records that have been posted as all of this has come out. And it's got like a 2 out of 5 Medicare rating, quality measures rating of 2 out of 5. So it appears to be, you know, not a. Someone was posting about it saying that it was a measure of hypocrisy. And it's like, well, if Magioni is guilty in this case, it may not be hypocrisy, it may be his partially psychologically, and we're trying to do like armchair psychiatry here, but it might have been what drove him insane is that his own family and his own privilege was built on a system that was hurting him too. I mean, that's something that can.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And he volunteered at that. He volunteered at that nursing home, according to reports, when he was in high school.

[Crystal Ball]

Right. So he may have seen it all up close. Yeah, well, Bill Burr on his Monday morning podcast went on a similar rant to the one that he went on over the weekend that Kristal and Saga covered. Let's roll this clip of Bill Burr weighing in on the media coverage this time of. Well, media coverage and just general people's general reactions to what's happened with Mangione.

[Sagar Enjeti]

You know what's annoying me about this, this kid who killed this CEO, is none of these news programs are talking about the incredible lack of empathy from the general public about this because of how these insurance companies treat people when they are at their most vulnerable after we've all given them our money every fucking month. And now we finally need you and all you do is deny us. And then these pussies and all of these things are taking the pictures of their CEOs off their websites. You know, I gotta be honest with you, okay, I Love that. Fucking CEOs are fucking afraid right now. You should be. By and large, you're all a bunch of selfish, greedy fucking pieces of shit. And a lot of you are mass murderers. You just don't pull the trigger. That's why it looks clean. That's why these people look. Oh, my God. Oh, he was just, you know, walking into a hotel. It's like, okay, well, what was his job? What did he do?

[Crystal Ball]

What was the results of the Everyman, truly? And if you're not, if you are horrified by that argument from Bill Burr and you're like a beltway journalist or pundit, then you should go sit down at a bar in normal America and talk to people.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. And a lot of the people who are saying, look, we have lower costs and these people have some of these outcomes are better. And also the insurance companies are not the real problem. The problem is the providers. A UnitedHealth is a provider too. They're massively involved in the provider side as well. But the CEO was making $10 million a year. It's one thing to say this is a really difficult problem to solve, and we're all working together to try to make sure that we can give the best care to the people who need it. When you say that and then you walk out of the room with a bag filled with $10 million, people are going to give a little bit less credibility to how concerned you are. And when that $10 million is just a little kickback for the billions that you're sending to shareholders who are also walking away with that money, you lose even more credibility around how serious you are about taking care of patients.

[Crystal Ball]

I had Ken on actually undercurrents to talk about. I was like, Ken, I kind of disagreed with the way that you re immediately. But I also think it's really precious to see Chris Cuomo just retire to his fainting couch and clutch his pearls over the reaction of people like you and Taylor Lorenz because about like just tone policing about the United Healthcare CEO. Like, he doesn't have a leg to stand on unless he's using all of his journalistic resources to probe the corruption in the health insurance system regularly, which he's not doing. He only like cared when Ken was mean to the dead CEO who was appears to be unjustly murdered. And so that's like, it doesn't make the murder. Right. But it also doesn't give you any more credibility when you're weighing in to tone police people who are upset about the healthcare system and you're not regularly concerned yourself about the healthcare system.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. And Don Jr. Showed unusually poor instincts out of the gate.

[Crystal Ball]

Oh, really?

[Sagar Enjeti]

On this, he, he did the whole put the Image of the guy up and said, Internet, do your thing. And all of his replies were just like, I don't see anything. Done.

[Crystal Ball]

He put the image of Mangione up.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, yeah. Saying like, Internet, do your thing. Like, go find this killer. Oh. And all of his followers were like, I don't see nothing. So it was like, oh, I forgot, Don Junior's a prep school kid, but not the kind that Luigi became. It'd be interesting because he's really done a good job of donning the garb of the populist. And his dad would not have made that mistake.

[Crystal Ball]

It'll be interesting to see. I mean. Cause at first it started, nobody really knew what to make of it. And it started as an example of disorder and chaos on the streets of New York City.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Right. Squeezing into that, it starts as a.

[Crystal Ball]

Narrative like that, which, by the way, as it unfolds, this is Gotham City. This is straight out of the freaking Batman plot. Like, that's how sad and, like, tragic.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Bruce Wayne got twisted.

[Crystal Ball]

This is. Yeah, it's insane.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Bruce Wayne was the victim, not the killer.

[Crystal Ball]

I don't know, but it's.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Bruce Wayne's the richest man in the world and all he wants to do is go, like, round up a few muggers, Right? How about you build a hospital, Bruce Wayne? Come on.

[Crystal Ball]

Actually, I think I actually watched the Ryan Grimm written Batman.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. Tax that man.

[Crystal Ball]

It's ridiculous, but that is exactly what you're like. It is, like, ripped out of a Batman plot. But, I mean, it's just like, if your energy, if your moral energy is going to. Is like, more directed to being outraged at edgelords like Ken for, like, maybe being callous. You don't have to agree with the way Ken and Taylor Lorenz and others approached the initial reports to be like, hey, maybe the main story here, you know, it's like, don't kill people in the streets of Manhattan in cold blood. And don't run a system and benefit from a system that is, like, sucking the life out of people. Seems like a fair two things can be true assessment here maybe.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Oh, yeah. Okay. I don't like killing. Yeah. I'm uncomfortable about killing.

[Crystal Ball]

Okay.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Though.

[Crystal Ball]

Well, we've established that everyone should see Ryan's belt today, by the way. It's very whimsical. It's not the belt of an edgelord.

[Sagar Enjeti]

All right, we're all set for the party. I've trimmed the tree, hung the mistletoe, and paired all those weird shaped knives.

[Crystal Ball]

And forks with the appropriate cheeses.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And I plugged in the Bartesian Bartesian. It's a home cocktail maker that makes over 60 premium cocktails, plus a whole lot of seasonal favorites too. I just got it for 50 off, so how about a Cosmopolitan or a Mistletoe margarita? I'm thirsty.

[Crystal Ball]

Watch.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I just pop in a capsule, choose my strength and wow. Wow. It's beginning to feel more seasonal in here already. If your holiday party doesn't have a.

[Crystal Ball]

Bartender, then you become the bartender.

[Sagar Enjeti]

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[Crystal Ball]

How do we know?

[Sagar Enjeti]

They told us. The good news is that compared to wrapping presents, you're great at getting hints. So take the hint and get them four free phones and four lines for $90 a month US cellular built for us.

[Crystal Ball]

In news out of Syria, we can put this first element up on the screen. Top US military commander in the Middle East, General Michael Kurilla visited US commanders and troops as well as members of the SDF at several bases in SY yesterday. That is courtesy of reporter Jared Zezba and Ryan. Also the New York Times was just like tallying up all of the countries that are currently bombing in Syria yesterday. Worth mentioning. It's Russia, Iran, Israel, the United States and Turkey. So five countries right now actively bombing Syria.

[Sagar Enjeti]

So you can understand everybody getting their licks in.

[Crystal Ball]

Yeah, that's right. And C2, we want to put this up on the screen as well. U.S. troops are staying in in Syria, according to the White House. And I actually asked Rand Paul yesterday that it'll air today on undercurrents. But I asked him if it's possible that we actually might end up sending more troops to Syria as a result of this, because he's saying we do have 900 troops in Syria right now. At least that's the troops that we know about in Syria right now. And he was saying that's a target, that's not a deterrent. That's the line that he is. Totally fair assessment. But I asked, you know, are some of your colleagues going to use the point that you just made as an excuse to bring more troops in? And I think the Reuters article by Jeff Mason that we just had up on the screen seems like it's potentially going in that direction. I don't know. Ryan, do you think it's possible that we end up putting more troops actually in Syria right now amidst all of the chaos?

[Sagar Enjeti]

You know, I think that they're much more likely to flood weapons to our proxies and mercenaries and rather than try to deploy more troops, more US Troops just before a new president comes in. Because I think that's tricky politically. I don't know. But let's play your Rand Paul clip, I think C3B. Yep.

[Crystal Ball]

Let's roll in. The scuttlebutt on Capitol Hill, of course, and in Beltway media is that this is just posing a real threat to Tulsi Gabbard getting confirmed as Trump's Director of National Intelligence. She's literally meeting with senators like yourself on Capitol Hill this week. Do you think that this helps or hurts Tulsi Gabbard's actual ability to be confirmed in any way? Senator Paul?

[Sagar Enjeti]

Not necessarily. You know, I think that the history of Syria and the Middle east is such a complicated one that it isn't really clear. You know, like I say, were there positive aspects to the Assad, Assad regime? You know, very few. But one of them was the protection of Christians. You know, is there, you know, pluses and minuses to Galani or this new offshoot of Al Nusra? Yeah, there certainly are. One, they got rid of the dictator. But two, will they replace that with.

[Crystal Ball]

A religious intolerance towards others?

[Sagar Enjeti]

I don't know that it definitely changes her chances. I think her 20 year military career.

[Crystal Ball]

She'S a lieutenant colonel. The way she's been treated unfairly by.

[Sagar Enjeti]

The intelligence state, putting her on a terror watch list and obstructing her ability to travel. I think that she's gaining momentum.

[Crystal Ball]

There was a rally recently with military veterans. There's a lot of senators that have.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Come out for her.

[Crystal Ball]

So I think they're gonna have a.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Tougher time defeating her. They will try. And these are the people who are.

[Crystal Ball]

Part of what they call the bipartisan.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Consensus in Washington, foreign policy consensus, which is one of, you know, give aid to everyone, give arms to everyone, and be involved in everyone's wars.

[Crystal Ball]

It's a.

[Sagar Enjeti]

It's a policy of, you know, eternal intervention. And those people are always going to.

[Crystal Ball]

Be opposed to anybody who questions that.

[Sagar Enjeti]

But I, for one, am enthusiastic about.

[Crystal Ball]

Her nomination and will do anything I.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Can or everything I can to try to help her. I really like that music behind the clip there. It had me on the edge of my seat, right, Listening to Rand Paul. I'm like, where's this? This is really suspenseful.

[Crystal Ball]

It's like you're watching Jack Ryan. Yeah, yeah. It was a teaser clip.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I was.

[Crystal Ball]

Yeah, you're ready to. Yeah. So, but anyway, I think that gets to the point about the future of US involvement in Syria, because the scuttlebutt being that Tulsi Gabbard, now she's just tanked. And I think, and I say this in the episode, which is gonna air in a bit, that it's maybe more likely that Tulsi Gabbard gets confirmed as a result of this, because now you have even people like Lindsey Graham talking about the problems with the rebels now that they're in power. And so it all becomes so apparent, like post Assad, the various factions and the sort of ridiculousness of the United States arming Rand Paul mentions at one point in 2016, Elon Musk tweeted this recently to an LA Times article about how the Pentagon and the CIA were funding different warring factions in Syria at the same damn time. It is so absurd. And that will be in full bear now that Assad is gone.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. And the awkward part here is that, right, so Gabbard has always had these kind of complex politics that are not squarely put into isolationists or anti war because she was a strong and relentless supporter of the global war on terror against whatever she wants to call it, like Islamic terrorism.

[Crystal Ball]

It's a head, Right. She's pro modi.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yes. She seems like her hostility to Islamism and sometimes even Islam just shines through as powerfully as Erdogan and the Kurds like, it's intense. And so now that those factions that she has been fighting against, literally, and also politically for a decade, have actually won Right. Before potentially, she gets into the position, is she going to be trying to arm opposition groups to the new kind of dominant groups in Syria because she's so hostile to them? I don't know. It's gonna be interesting. I mean, the whole thing is just absurd. There was a New York Times report that said in Washington, American policymakers are telling all of the kind of jihadist groups or whatever you want to call them, that they better not ally with isis, which means the American policy is basically coming down to we draw the line at isis.

[Crystal Ball]

Right.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Al Qaeda, you know, okay. Nusra, Al Qaeda, offshoot, former isis. Okay. But isis, Absolutely not. We have.

[Crystal Ball]

We have standards.

[Sagar Enjeti]

It's a line in the sand. This is our red line. Yeah, we're not allies, but, yeah, we have standards. Meanwhile, literally, the al Qaeda guy. Yeah. In Damascus now.

[Crystal Ball]

Well, he has such an interesting story, by the way, and I was curious to ask you about this. His personal story is in itself a testament to the follies of US Interventionism. He was at least reportedly radicalized by US Policy in Israel. Right.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Well, also. Well, yes, his family was displaced from the Golan Heights in, what, 67, when Israel occupied the Golan Heights. And then. Yes. And then he was radicalized further in 2000 during the Israeli crackdown on the second intifada and the collapse of the peace process there. And then he goes to Iraq to fight along with other insurgents against the. Against the American invasion of Iraq. And he talks about that in his CNN interview and elsewhere where he says basically what the argument that he's making is like. The US Was wrong to invade. Everybody believed the US Was wrong to invade and occupy Iraq. I went there to fight them. That was the right thing to do. But the way that many of the people who fought them did so deliberately killed civilians. He said, I never participated in that. Groups I was involved with did I have broken with them? A lot of that is the ideological splits with Al Qaeda and ISIS are overblown. Like, the ideology is still pretty similar. What he has recognized is that politically speaking, this idea that you're going to create a caliphate in a world that is hostile, abjectly hostile to you, and that you're hostile. Hostile to as well, is absurd and will never work, that the world will unite against you and destroy you. And so it is a pragmatic pivot to say, look, we just. You can't do that we don't have the assets to accomplish this goal. Therefore, it's a complete suicide mission. And he. And he was not interested in a suicide mission. So he understood, understood that he had to talk about recognizing all the different sects and ethnicities and religions in Syria. And so if he's going to get off the US Terror list and he had to pick the right enemies, what he did is he very strategically targeted, went after violently went to war with Al Qaeda and ISIS in Syria and then kept coming back. And this is what you were hearing from American sources, kept coming back to the U.S. look, we're fighting your enemies here, aren't we your friend? And they'd be like, maybe. So it wasn't as if the US Started arming necessarily this force, but they stopped trying to kill him and otherwise made it possible for him to have room to maneuver.

[Crystal Ball]

Interesting. Other anecdote from his life or a point it's probably more powerful than an anecdote, is that he was actually detained in Abu Ghraib by. When he went to Iraq, he ended up detained in Abu Ghraib by US forces. So he has his own history with American interventionism. And I think that's why it's sort of naive and probably why even the Lindsey Grahams of the world are now expressing sort of skepticism about how Golani governs as they're cobbling together a new government in Syria right now. So, y. The pessimism is probably more warranted than any optimism we're hearing from people referring to the freedom fighters in Syria right now.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, and also we can get to some of that pessimism in this next point, which is that the two main invasions and incursions going on in Turkey now, I mean, in Syria are being led by Turkey and by Israel on the Turkish side. They've been relentlessly attacking Kobani, which was a symbol of Kurdish resistance to ISIS back in 2014. 15. And when the US got involved in that fight, bombing kind of ISIS positions as the Kurds held out in Kobani, that ended up turning the tide and creating this and really cementing this alliance between the Kurds and the US in northern Syria. For our Friday show, we're going to interview an American who fought with the Kurds and was there even fairly recently. So stick around for that Friday show to learn more about that conflict. Now, the American alliance with the Kurds appears to have led to, and this is all developing now, something of a ceasefire around Kobani in exchange for the Kurds withdrawing from Monbeej. Which was another, you know, huge battle back in, back in 2016, which our guest actually participated in, so he can talk about that. The liberation of Monbej by the Kurds was a pivotal victory. They are, this is what the news reporting is, that the Kurds are agreeing to kind of withdraw from eastern Aleppo province and from Monbeach in exchange for, for Erdogan calling off the massive murderous assault on the Kurds. We'll see how long that lasts. The Kurds, nobody has been betrayed, I think, in the region more times and by more people than the Kurds who were absolutely screwed. In Sykes Picot, the Kurdish region covers deliberately Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey. So if you look at the map where those four countries intersect, that's all a Kurdish region. They basically just drew a circle around it and divided them among those four different countries. The thinking being making these countries more ethnically diverse would make it easier for a colonial domination of them. And then dividing the Kurds would make it harder for them to attain any semblance of self determination or any nationality. And in fact, there is obviously Kurdish ethnic solidarity, but all of the different Kurdish groups, Iranian Kurds, Iraqi Kurds, Syrians, Turks, like they have their beefs inside Iraq. You've got two Kurdish factions that are constantly, they went to war with each other in the 90s and there's a lot of hostility among them. And you divide and rule. It's like classic British policy updated for today. And so if you want to bet on anything, you can bet on the Kurds being betrayed. The even more threatening assault on Syria has been coming from Israel, which, and we can put this up on the screens from drop site news, which is they have been just absolutely annihilating any semblance of Syrian self defense or sovereignty. They started by going after what they said was a chemical weapons depot. Like what, what, you want chemical weapons to wind up in the hands of ISIS or Al Qaeda?

[Crystal Ball]

Right.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I was like, okay, well, you've launched more than 300 airstrikes at this point, according to the Syrian Observatory there. And only a couple of those were at the alleged chemical weapons place. Otherwise you're going after radar, you're going after defensive weapons, you're going after helicopters, airplanes, airports. They're rapidly and systematically destroying the entire infrastructure of the Syrian state while creeping further and further into Syrian territory. Around and beyond the Golan Heights. There was an opportunity to reach out. And even if you want to stick with the chemical weapons, the OPCW is there to deal with chemical weapons. This is the United nations institution that is set up for this. Jelani has made it very clear that he wants his group delist from the terror list, that he wants to be part of the world of nations. If the requirement is that you send in inspectors and you put the chemical weapons in trucks and you take them out, obviously he's going to agree to that instead. And so Israel had an opportunity, and Jelani and the rest of this faction that took over Syria has been very clear that they don't actually have a beef with Israel, to the chagrin of the axis of Resistance. And so Israel had an opportunity to say, good, welcome, give up those chemical weapons, sign a peace deal, and let's coexist here peacefully. Instead, immediately they send in the tanks and are Jesus just leading this kind of rampage across Syria?

[Crystal Ball]

The infighting over chemical weapons is just such a disaster in Syria right now. Different factions are.

[Sagar Enjeti]

They could easily just get the OPCW to come in and grab them.

[Crystal Ball]

And different groups are getting bombed by other groups for taking the Assad, what is said to be the Assad stash. And it's just a complete disaster, which is obviously what was always going to happen if Assad ended up being toppled. But.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Right. And remember in 2003 when the US invaded Iraq, the thing that we did was called de Baathification, which meant we wiped out the entire Iraqi bureaucracy and military. Anybody who had anything to do with the military or the bureaucracy was fired, done, you're out. And what did that do? It took. It took tens of thousands of men, many of them young men who were just punching cards, who were willing to work for whatever government came next. And it made them completely untouchable. And so they funded an insurgency, they joined an insurgency. If you collapse the state, some power is going to come in. So Israel, by deliberately destroying the state capacity right at the outset, is going to create a failed state and a civil war. And not a clean civil war, but just faction against faction. And clearly, strategically, they believe that a massively weakened and constantly fighting Syria is somehow geo strategically beneficial to them right across the border, rather than having an actual functioning state. But that misunderstands what has always come out of those types of situations. You have failed state in Afghanistan, Al Qaeda gets refuge there, failed state in Iraq and Syria over the last 10, 15 years, and then ISIS blows up out of it. You don't know what you're going to get. So I guess good luck with all that. But it seems like the only strategy they have is throwing more American bombs at wherever they feel like, well, let's watch.

[Crystal Ball]

Matthew Miller State Department Spokesman, respond to some questions along these lines. This was from yesterday, Ryan.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yep. A lot of sentiments have been expressed such as Syrian led smooth transition, unified Syria, although we are seeing it being dismembered before our eyes. And sun on but nobody speaks of the Israeli attacks. 300 they struck 300 military sites. So why is that? Why are you not talking about what Israel is doing to Syria? What it has done to Syria in the last 24 hours? So destroyed the navy, destroyed all the air force. They did all. That is the purpose, and that's my.

[Crystal Ball]

Question, is the purpose to have a.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Demilitarized Syria, Syria, disarmed Syria.

[Crystal Ball]

I will let Israel speak to its own operations and what it is they are trying to accomplish. I will say that on behalf of the United States, we're going to discuss.

[Sagar Enjeti]

These matters with them privately before I.

[Crystal Ball]

Opine on them publicly.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I would say that broadly speaking, we of course don't want to see any.

[Crystal Ball]

Action that makes a Syrian led process.

[Sagar Enjeti]

More difficult and we ultimately want to.

[Crystal Ball]

See a peaceful process forward, not an.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Escalation of the conflict. So you think what you're saying is that what Israel is doing, whether it's conquering the rest of the Golan and so on, the attack that it's conducting.

[Crystal Ball]

It is like 35km from Damascus and so on.

[Sagar Enjeti]

That is a private matter. Is that a private matter? Is that an Israeli decision? No.

[Crystal Ball]

So first of all, let me just point out with respect to the location.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Of Israeli forces and I'm not attesting one way or the other. I know there are conflicting claims about where they are and they have strenuously denied that they are close to Damascus. They have said that they are in the buff in their forces on the ground are in the buffer zone.

[Crystal Ball]

And I spoke to this at length yesterday, but no.

[Sagar Enjeti]

But when it comes to their operations, I think it's appropriate for us to speak to them privately first, ascertain what.

[Crystal Ball]

It is they're doing before we opine on that publicly.

[Sagar Enjeti]

They're a close ally of ours and that's what we're going to do. This administration cannot leave soon enough. Well, what are you even here for?

[Crystal Ball]

They'll leave and I don't think you'll like who replaces them, right?

[Sagar Enjeti]

No, I don't think so either. No, but we'll be here to complain then too. All right, we're all set for the party. I've trimmed the tree, hung the mistletoe and paired all those weird shaped knives.

[Crystal Ball]

And forks with the appropriate cheeses and.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I plugged in the Bartesian Bartesian. It's a home cocktail maker that makes over 60 premium cocktails, plus a whole lot of seasonal favorites too. I just got it for 50 off. So how about a Cosmopolitan or a Mistletoe margarita? I'm thirsty.

[Crystal Ball]

Watch.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I just pop in a capsule, choose my strength and wow, it's beginning to feel more seasonal in here already. If your holiday party doesn't have a.

[Crystal Ball]

Bartender, then you become the bartender.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Unless you've got a Bartesian because Bartesian crafts every cocktail perfectly in as little as 30 seconds. And I just got it for $50 off. Tis the season to be jollier. Add some holiday flavor to every celebration with the sleek, sophisticated home cocktail maker maker Bartesian. Get $50 off any cocktail maker at bartesian.com cocktail that's B A R T E S I A N dot com cocktail the all electric Chevy Equinox EV combines everything you need when you're Ready to go EV Starting at $34,995, the 2025 Equinox EVLT gives you an impressive balance of all electric range safety features for peace of mind and effortless technology, including the 17.7-inch diagonal display screen. All at a price you'll love. The Chevy Equinox EV is the fun to drive all electric SUV that gives you what you need to do exactly what you want. The manufacturer's suggested retail price excludes tax, title, license, dealer fees and optional equipment dealer sets final price. To learn more, visit chevy.com equinoxev Gifting is hard, but here's a hint. Give the Gift of connection from US Cellular. Not sure what that means. Here's a slightly more specific hint. You can choose four free phones and get four lines for $90 a month from US Cellular. Your family wants new phones?

[Crystal Ball]

How do we know?

[Sagar Enjeti]

They told us. The good news is that compared to wrapping presents, you're great at getting hints. So take the hint and get them four free phones and four lines for $90 a month US cellular built for us.

[Crystal Ball]

Pete Hegseth Obviously Donald Trump's nomination for defense Secretary went on Hannity this week, and while the Trump campaign and Trump himself has been backing Pete Hegseth pretty enthusiastically, along with basically the entire conservative movement and the MAGA movement at this point. Hegseth went on Fox. Obviously his mom went on Fox last week as well, but he went on Hannity to offer obviously vigorous defense of himself. So let's go ahead and roll this clip of Pete Hegseth on Sean Hannity's show.

[Sagar Enjeti]

You had a consensual relationship. It was investigated. You were fully exonerated. And correct me if I wrong here, wasn't there videotape evidence that was largely responsible for exonerating you?

[Crystal Ball]

I mean, in addition to personal. Personal witnesses and all of that, it was fully investigated at the time, years ago. And I was completely cleared.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And that's why, Sean, you know what.

[Crystal Ball]

I look forward to? I look forward to the FBI background check. I look forward to the actual under.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Oath conversations with senators as we go through the process. Because again, this is what the left does, Sean.

[Crystal Ball]

It's the anatomy of a smear. They take something and then they add anonymous sources and contortions and flat out lies, and then they try to try.

[Sagar Enjeti]

You in the media before you can.

[Crystal Ball]

Even get into the doors with senators. So that's Pete Hegseth commenting on these rape allegations or this rape allegation from 2017. And now that his confirmation, having met with Joni Aronson, Joni Aronst saying she's had very good conversations with Pete Hicks, Hegseth Ernst, herself a survivor of sexual assault, she says that she is now feeling good about the nomination. They're having good conversations. It looks like Hegseth is on a path to being confirmed, whereas a week ago, people were more skeptical about whether that happened. I think it has always been likely that he was going to get confirmed, even if there were going to be troubles along the way. But, Ryan, you thought it would be good now that it looks like Hexagh actually is going to be confirmed and there's doubling and tripling down on the nomination to actually go through the police report from 2017. And you've polled the relevant excerpts.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, and in the spirit of treating our audience like adults, I wanted to go through and put forward the different pieces of the police report that would enable Hannity and Hegseth to make those claims. And to be clear, none of what we're saying here is that this is a good guy. This is a good dude. This is a moral guy. He's not nominated for being a moral guy. He's nominated to run the Secretary of defense, which is reminiscent of Arlo Guthrie's line in Alice's Restaurant, where he can't. He gets a deferment to get drafted to go over to Vietnam. And he's like, you're telling me that I'm not moral enough to go burn babies, women and children over in Vietnam because I'm a litter bug. So that's the scale that we're talking about here. But the Question is, is he guilty of sexual assault? And why were charges not pressed? And I think if you go through the police report, you can decide for yourself whether or not he should have been. But I think you'll understand a lot more about it than we get in the press, which is just kind of vague allusions to it. But the police report is out there. It's 22 pages. It's not that long. You can read it. You could put up D2 here, which is the beginning of this police report. Jane Doe in 2017, goes to a hospital where she is from, says that she was the victim of sexual assault roughly a week earlier at a conference in Monterey. The nurse reports it to the police. I put up D3 here. Essentially, her version that she tells the police is that she's at this conference. She goes to a bar. She's hanging out with Pete Hegseth and another woman.

[Crystal Ball]

Hegseth is a speaker at the conference.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Speaker at the conference.

[Crystal Ball]

She's his handler.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. And she winds up blackout drunk, either drugged, some other situation. She has barely any memory of it. The memories come back to her over the next several days. Then she goes to the hospital and reports this crime. So that's essentially her version of it. So to counter that version of it, Hegseth or his defenders would basically have to show that she was not significantly intoxicated. And so the rest of the police report kind of basically investigated that question. And so we can put up the next element on the screen here.

[Crystal Ball]

This is her saying she was in contact via text messages between Jane Doe.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Oh, and they got in a fight at the pool.

[Crystal Ball]

Yeah, he was giving off, quote, creeper vibe. A creeper vibe. So to the point you were making, Ryan, this is information about Pete Hicks that's like, sort of being very flirtatious. He has a new baby at the bar with all of these women who are not his wife. And he's just giving off a vibe. He's trying to get people up to his room is what the kind of. That's the gist of those memories from the night.

[Sagar Enjeti]

So you can put up the next element here. These are text messages that she exchanged with her husband. And you can read them for yourself. You can find them in there. And he's like, whoa. He's saying to her, whoa. It's like 2am you're usually not out at 2am she doesn't respond to him anymore after about 2. Are you okay? Where are you? What's going on? And you can see that he was.

[Crystal Ball]

At the conference right her husband's also at the conference.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Right. You can go to D6 here. This is another person that was with them.

[Crystal Ball]

She was aware of the situation. That's her use to the police report here. She told this person, or the Jane Doe told this person that she, quote, must have fallen asleep.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, that's right.

[Crystal Ball]

And this person said that the Jane Doe did not have a hard time walking and was slurring her words, which is from Hagzus. You can read that in different ways, depending on how you're seeing the situation. You can say that means she knew exactly what she was doing, or you can say that means she must have been later drugged if she had no memory of the situation. But I think probably Hegseth sees that as sort of notch in his corner.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And so D6 is the key spot here. That is kind of what Hannity and Hegseth are referring to. There. They found a bunch of surveillance video from the hotel. So they're walking together, kind of arm in arm. Neither.

[Crystal Ball]

You know, it's 1:30 in the morning.

[Sagar Enjeti]

1:30 in the morning. She doesn't appear to be intoxicated because her assertion was that she was, you know, blackout drunk. Right. Video of her kind of arm in arm, walking Normally.

[Crystal Ball]

Yeah. At 1:30 in the morning.

[Sagar Enjeti]

At 1:30 in the Morning. Undercuts that basically, here they talk. They get surveillance video of them by the pool and also looks like talk to a security guard who kind of went to break up kind of an argument that they were having by the pool. The security guard says that Hegseth actually seemed kind of drunk. He yells at the cop at one point. I have freedom of speech. It's 2am and he's being told to quiet down at a conference. He's drunk and he's like, yelling at the.

[Crystal Ball]

At a. I've got free speech.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yelling at a mall cop that he has free speech and he's gonna be our secretary of defense. But what. So none of this is funny except that part.

[Crystal Ball]

I mean, that's pretty funny.

[Sagar Enjeti]

The security guard says that Jane Doe was there and did not seem inebriated at all. So again, think of. Think about. If you're a prosecutor, you're gonna have to bring all of these. You're gonna have to bring this surveillance camera. You're gonna have to bring this security guard who was gonna set. Okay. She said she was blackout drunk. She did not look that drunk to me.

[Crystal Ball]

And that excerpt also showed the police officer saying, I found additional security footage of them walking arm in arm, smiling, and neither appeared to have an unsteady gait. That's the quote from the report.

[Sagar Enjeti]

So was that so we could put up the next one here.

[Crystal Ball]

This is him touching at the bar.

[Sagar Enjeti]

So basically, what's going on here? Hegseth is at the bar, and he's hitting on a woman. The woman wants absolutely nothing to do with him. And she goes and gets Jane Doe, which she tells the police she brought her in to be a crotch blocker. Now, I think she was being polite to the police there. And in her description of that term. Everybody knows what the term is. We don't have to use it here. And so brings Jane Doe in there to just get this creep off of me. Yes. And so then Jane ends up, you know, spending a lot of time chatting with him.

[Crystal Ball]

Right. The witnesses. She was hoping that Jane Doe's presence would detour Hegza's attempt to have sex with that witness. And he was touching her knee. That's uncomfortable, apparently. And she said that Hikes invited her back to the hotel room, and she politely declined that. And this is where the Jane Doe gets involved.

[Sagar Enjeti]

So we can go to D10 then. This is Hegzeth's version of the story where he's basically saying that they walked back to his room together.

[Crystal Ball]

He doesn't remember even getting into that argument by the pool. But again, that's. There's witnesses.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Right. Guys seems like pretty drunk based on all of this. He says he's kind of surprised that she's coming back to the room with him because clearly he was hitting on somebody else the whole night. He's like, what's going on? How is this happening? So Hegseth independently told the police. Jane Doe stated that she would tell her husband that she had fallen asleep on a couch in someone else's room. Hagseth continually asked Jane Doe if she was okay because he did not want Jane Doe to get in trouble. Hagseth told Jane Doe that she did not have to worry about him saying anything. Hagseth stated Jane Doe showed early signs of regret. Hagses did not elaborate on the signs of regret. I think why this part is relevant. This stated that she would tell her husband that she had had fallen asleep. Is that Hegseth would not have known that. There were these other text messages where she's telling other people that she kind of fell asleep. That would be kind of corroborating evidence that she. Like, how would he have made that? Because that's a pretty specific detail. And then she did then go and tell people, like, look, I Fell asleep in somebody's room. Sorry. Elsewhere in the police report, they quote the person whose room she came back to saying that she got into the room with her own card, no problem, didn't seem drunk, and then did not seem hungover in the morning. So nobody can know what happened in the room. But the claim was not that he violently kind of forced himself on her. The claim was that she was. Was blackout drunk, too, to consent, or.

[Crystal Ball]

Drugs, too inebriated to consent, essentially.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And you can see why there's so much evidence that would have been presented in court that would have undermined that claim.

[Crystal Ball]

It would have been very hard. And this is what law enforcement in the area has since said, is that we would have to have had proved this, but beyond a reasonable doubt. And this is very much a he said, she said situation with a lot of evidence against the she said part of it. It doesn't mean that's impossible. It doesn't mean her story is impossible. It just that proving her story would be borderline impossible. And so this is 2017. She gets a lawyer and starts making noise in 2020. And it looks like we don't know the date of the settlement. Actually, it looks like it happened shortly after the lawyers got involved in late 2020. So around December 2020. So I would assume that the settlement happened in early 2021. You can see why someone would try to make noise about a Fox News host that they had an encounter with. And obviously there' in this situation, she got a rape kit the next morning, and there was semen. So you can understand why she would try to bring this up and why Hegseth, who didn't want to, sort of.

[Sagar Enjeti]

But she didn't go public about it. We still don't know who she is, the situation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Her husband's now being interviewed. And like her husband in this police report is presenting evidence that undercuts her own story. Yeah, if you're reading between the lines, you're like, he doesn't seem to buy it. You could say, if you're reading this.

[Crystal Ball]

Police report and you can read the MeToo part of this, either way, you can say. You can understand where it would galvanize her to say, hey, this powerful married man was being really creepy to me, and it ended up in a tragedy for me. Or you can see where it would be like, I bet I can get money at this point, because he's not gonna want this to be puppet. So you can read it in a couple of different ways, but I think the most important way to read it, Ryan, is that it just can't be proven. Hexeth has obviously copped to the adultery. He's admitted that.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Right. And he literally had just had a child with the woman he had an affair on his previous wife.

[Crystal Ball]

Yeah, it's really gross.

[Sagar Enjeti]

You can read the email from his mom. His mom's like, dude, you're such a dog. Stop treating women so awfully.

[Crystal Ball]

Yeah, it's really gross.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And it's exactly extra gross when he's then draped with all this, like, Christian morality and preaching.

[Crystal Ball]

Well, you know, I will say a lot of people who are late in life converts to, like, zealous Christianity, like, they're really on fire, have very hard backgrounds. And they tend to be people who are clinging to their faith because they feel so emotionally, desperately in need of it.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Self spiritual medication maybe expressing itself in this way too.

[Crystal Ball]

And it's kind of what it's there for, but it does. To me, that's like, not a surprising thing from somebody who is ardently Christian. I've interviewed Pete Hegseth, and he's surprised me. I interviewed him last year and I was just surprised by how sort of. I was surprised by how intellectual he was. And that may sound ridiculous, but I know people, like, have biases against Fox and Friends hosts. I kind of did going into the interview because they turn out a lot of books that are. They're books to sell. But he's a more nuanced figure than I think people give him credit for being. But clearly a rampant adulterer, does not have a history of treating women well.

[Sagar Enjeti]

He's a dog.

[Crystal Ball]

He's a dog. Clearly drinks too much. But I also.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Or drank too much that night, that's for sure.

[Crystal Ball]

There's right now a weaponized smear campaign that's very obvious to Republicans. And it's backfiring on people who don't want Pete Hagseth to be the defense secretary, including Joni Ernst, who's very close. I think with people in, like, Pentagon circles who don't want a disruptor, obviously to get in the middle of their system, two things can be true. The system needs to be disrupted. And this particular disruptor might not be qualified. The thing I would worry about. I'm curious what you think about this is kompromamont blackmail on the head of the Pentagon. If he's been drinking and sleeping around for so long, that seems to be a pretty serious concern.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I mean, for the intelligence community, that's a big concern. I have no interest in the Pentagon being a well functioning institution.

[Crystal Ball]

That's a good line.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And like waging effective wars. So if he's compromised, good. Like it's bad. Like it's a bad thing. It's bad for the world.

[Crystal Ball]

Yeah.

[Sagar Enjeti]

So if he's bad at running it, good. And maybe he'll like bring a wrecking ball to some of the corruption in there. Maybe. More likely he's just completely ill equipped to run an institution of this size and the institution will eat him up. Who knows?

[Crystal Ball]

We'll see.

[Sagar Enjeti]

All right, we're all set for the party. I've trimmed the tree, hung the mistletoe, and paired all those weird shaped knives.

[Crystal Ball]

And forks with the appropriate cheeses.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And I plugged in the Partisan. Partisan. It's a home cocktail maker that makes over 60 premium cocktails, plus a whole lot of seasonal favorites too. I just got for 50 off, so how about a Cosmopolitan or a mistletoe margarita? I'm thirsty.

[Crystal Ball]

Watch.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I just pop in a capsule, choose my strength and wow, it's beginning to feel more seasonal in here already. If your holiday party doesn't have a.

[Crystal Ball]

Bartender, then you become the bartender.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Unless you've got a Bartesian, because Bartesian crafts every cocktail perfectly in as little as 30 seconds. And I just got it for $50 off. Tis the season. 2 Be jollier add some holiday flavor to every celebration with the sleek, sophisticated home cocktail maker Bartesian. Get $50 off any cocktail maker at bartisian.com cocktail that's B A R T E S I a n.com cocktail the all electric Chevy Equinox EV combines everything you need when you're ready to go. EV Starting at $34,995, the 2025 Equinox EVLT gives you an impressive balance of all electric range, safety, feature of mind and effortless technology, including the 17.7-inch diagonal display screen. All at a price you'll love. The Chevy Equinox EV is the fun to drive all electric SUV that gives you what you need to do exactly what you want. The manufacturer's suggested retail price excludes tax, title, license, dealer fees and optional equipment. Dealer set's final price. To learn more, visit chevy.com equinoxev Gifting is hard, but here's a hint. Give the gift of connection from us. Sell. Not sure what that means? Here's a slightly more specific hint. You can choose four free phones and get four lines for $90 a month from US Cellular. Your family wants new phones?

[Crystal Ball]

How do we know?

[Sagar Enjeti]

They told us. The good news is that compared to wrapping presents, you're great at getting hints, so take the hint and get them. Four free phones and four lines for $90 a month. US Cellular built for us.

[Crystal Ball]

Donald Trump announced yesterday that he was picking FTC commissioner, current FTC Commissioner Andrew Ferguson to lead the agency, which is obviously now helmed by Lina Khan, who we cover a lot on this show. Ferguson is kind of a known figure for people who follow these types of things. But let's go to the next element here. This is Trump appointing Andrew Ferguson and.

[Sagar Enjeti]

This was being circulated by his allies, Ferguson. There's some question as to whether or not Ferguson himself was circulating this, but certainly his allies were circulating this. And if you're just watching it, I mean, if you're just listening to it and not watching it, Emily, this is kind of not great. If you like Lina Khan. Yeah.

[Crystal Ball]

It's a big chunk of text, but it says successfully fought to end the Biden FTC's Anti Business Policy of refusing to end merger investigations early and allow firms to close their deals as soon as the FTC finds no complaints, competitive harm. Representative Virginia Numerous other states in a landmark antitrust suit against Google's ad tech monopoly. So I just want to note those two things being literally together and the bullet points. This is the nuance of the right's opposition to. There are some people on the right, including J.D. vance, who've been very positive about Lina Khan, others who have been sort of in the middle about Lina Khan, and then a third group that are just absolutely opposed, Selina Khan at every turn. Ferguson Pearson appears to be somebody in the middle. Yeah. So like you can see they're bragging there about him being part of the antitrust monopoly suit against Google. I'm sorry, the ad tech monopoly suit against Google. Obviously it's an antitrust one as well, but and then the next bullet point is about overreach, Right. Antitrust overreach. And that's sort of interesting.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. And they, and that sheet talk, that memo talks a lot about being too tough on mergers, that Lina Khan's too rough on the business community, that they're going to do a lot of deregulation. It's ironic that, and almost poetic and anti poetic whatever, that Trump made this move ousting Lina Khan and replacing her with Ferguson on the same day one of her most significant victories came through. If you can put up this, this Fox Business article on the screen next, the Kroger Albertson merger was blocked as a $24 billion merger that Lina Khan had fought, arguing not just that it would be bad for consumers, there's agreement across the spectrum, even among the pro business side that if you can prove that there is going to be harm to consumers, then you can block a merger. That's called the consumer welfare standard. Now the, if you can prove it is the part that the pro business side hangs their hat on and says and just constantly argues, well all these mergers are going to be good for consumers. We're going to give you lower costs and look, you're going to, it's going to be wonderful, trust us. And then it happens and then it's not and it's done. So you're screwed. In this case, she argued that actually additionally the FTC going back to its original meaning when it was created, and so when some of these acts were created, that enabled its powers, the power of workers and the well being of workers matters too. And so she argued that this merger would depress wages, would make it and would hurt worker power, which is also an interest of the federal government, of the people of the United States. Which is kind of a radical take like, well, we're supposed to care about workers. What? Yeah, actually it's in the law. You're supposed to. Here she is. I love this, talking to Hasan Piker on his stream about this, this decision being blocked. What kind of labor protections does that offer to people that are working at these corporations?

[Crystal Ball]

So one thing that our lawsuit alleged was that if this merger goes through, it's going to mean higher grocery prices for shoppers, but it's also going to.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Be worse for the workers.

[Crystal Ball]

And this is the first time that the FTC has ever sought to block a merger, not just because it's going to be bad for consumers, but also.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Because it's going to be bad for workers.

[Crystal Ball]

And you know, especially in recent decades, antitrust enforcers had not really been focused.

[Sagar Enjeti]

On the worker harms as much.

[Crystal Ball]

And that's something we've really looked to change. So the complaint lays out how previously.

[Sagar Enjeti]

When there was, when there has been competition between Kroger and Albertsons, that the.

[Crystal Ball]

Workers at each store were able to use that competition as leverage when they were trying to bargain, and that if you allow these two companies to merge, that leverage that comes from having a potential alternative employer or an alternative store.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Where customers can go if there's a.

[Crystal Ball]

Strike, but eliminating that leverage point and bargaining leverage would ultimately be bad for workers.

[Sagar Enjeti]

So again, this is still being litigated, but that was in the complaint as.

[Crystal Ball]

An explanation for why this merger would be bad for workers. When the FTC team put on the trial they actually had on the stand some of the workers that are currently employed by these stores so that they.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Could also share their experience.

[Crystal Ball]

And just generally, I mean, there's a.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Lot of empirical evidence that now shows that after mergers, workers have seen, you know, pay cuts or a limit in any pay rises.

[Crystal Ball]

You often see layoffs. You can see workers have less negotiation power to figure out will I even have a stable, predictable schedule. And so these are all dimensions of.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Competition on the labor front that are important to protect for people. First of all, it's pretty cool to have an FTC chair that goes on Hasan Piker's stream. We were four years in power. It was quite a run. We'll see where it goes from here. The big fear among, among supporters of the kind of Lina Khan approach to FTC was that Melissa Holyoke, who was a commissioner on the ftc, that she would get the chair gig. And she's as hostile as you can get to the kind of Khan Cantor wing of that bipartisan trans partisan movement. So the fact that she didn't get it is something, but the fact that somebody got it who says that she was too tough on mergers. Like the day that she blocked this huge merger, because what the Wall Street Journal would always say about her is she filed another frivolous BS case that's just gonna eat up money. And then when a judge gets this complaint, he's gonna knock it away because this is a child who doesn't even belong in this job and she doesn't understand how the law works. And time after time after time, the judges are like, these are good points. This merger is blocked.

[Crystal Ball]

Well, what she said on Hasan show there is like. So it's one of the reasons conservatives don't like her is because as Rachel Boebert has talked about to us and others is the consumer welfare standard of Robert Bork was gospel on the right for a really long time. Not just the political right, but just sort of the pro business community for a long time. The consumer welfare standard and what Lina Khan was saying there is, it's not.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And when we're saying pro business, I mean pro big business. Yeah. And also the mergers and acquisitions lawyers who make money on these mergers.

[Crystal Ball]

Absolutely. Pro big business. And the consumer welfare standard is predicated on this idea that consumers will choose to shop at places where they treat workers well. And that is not the case when you have monopolies. Right. Like it's this ridiculous sort of cycle. And Ryan, I just looked this up. Actually. We invited Andrew Ferguson to come on a Friday show with Matthew Stoller to talk about conservatives and antitrust policy back in June and never got a response. So your point about Lina Khan going on the Hasan Piker stream is really interesting because one of the reasons Khan irked a lot of people in the business community is that she's just the new Brandeisian. Right? She's actually very much, very much in the moment. And that was irritating because it was a threat. It's like this is a popular movement behind Lina Khan. People seem to like what she's saying. There's a lot of media interest in her and that poses a threat because it makes the right more interested in supporting Lina Khan. Matt Gaetz, very supportive of Lina Khan.

[Sagar Enjeti]

For example, calls himself a conservative.

[Crystal Ball]

Yeah, conservative. So you can see why they would be threatened by Lina Khan, like actually getting an invitation even to go talk to Hasan Piker. I don't know which way it went. Maybe they pitched her to Hasan. But either way, Andrew Ferguson is going to have a slightly tougher, tougher time on this one because Lina Khan obviously was popular in new media spaces like this one.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yep. Yes indeed. All right, we're all set for the party. I've trimmed the tree, hung the mistletoe, and paired all those weird shaped knives.

[Crystal Ball]

And forks with the appropriate cheeses.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And I plugged in the Partisan Partisan. It's a home cocktail maker that makes over 60 premium cocktails, plus a whole lot of seasonal favorites too. I just got it for 50 off, so how about a Cosmopolitan or a Mistletoe margarita? I'm watch I just pop in a capsule, choose my strength and wow, it's beginning to feel more seasonal in here already. If your holiday party doesn't have a.

[Crystal Ball]

Bartender, then you become the bartender.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Unless you've got a Bartesian, because Bartesian crafts every cocktail perfectly in as little as 30 seconds. And I just got it for $50 off. Tis the season to be jollier. Add some holiday flavor to every celebration with the sleek, sophisticated home cocktail maker Bartisian. Get $50 off any cocktail maker at bartisian.com cocktail that's b a r t e s I a n dot com cocktail the all electric Chevy Equinox EV combines everything you need when you're ready to go. EV. Starting at $34,995, the 2025 Equinox EVLT gives you an impressive balance of all electric range safety features for peace of mind and effortless technology, including the 17.7-inch diagonal display screen, all at a price you'll the Chevy Equinox EV is the fun to drive all electric SUV that gives you what you need to do exactly what you want. The manufacturer's suggested retail price excludes tax, title, license, dealer fees and optional equipment dealer set's final price. To learn more, visit chevy.com Equinoxev Gifting is hard, but here's a hint. Give the gift of connection from US Cellular. Not sure what that means. Here's a slightly more specific hint. You can choose four free phones and get four lines for $90 a month from US Cells Cellular. Your family wants new phones.

[Crystal Ball]

How do we know?

[Sagar Enjeti]

They told us. The good news is that compared to wrapping presents, you're great at getting hints. So take the hint and get them four free phones and four lines for $90 a month US Cellular built for us.

[Crystal Ball]

Let's move on to this Inspector general report that was published yesterday by dojig Michael Horowitz, a familiar name to a lot of people because he published an inspector general report on some of the Russia Coll FISA application malfeasance that happened surrounding Carter Page and all of that stuff, and was popular on the right because of that report, rightfully so, because it was a good report and needed to be done. But this next one may be slightly less popular with the right. It was published yesterday and found that the Department of Justice under Donald Trump and his Attorney General Bill Barr, improperly spied on members of Congress, congressional staffers and actually journalists as well in an effort to track down down who was selectively leaking. We can put the first element up on the screen. This is a report from Politico. The headline is Watchdog Faults DOJ in Trump's first Term for secretly obtaining Records of lawmakers and journalists. It's a little bit more complicated than just having done it secretly. And we can go through some of the inspectors general, some of the inspector general report, Ryan, because I think it's fairly important now that we have another Trump administration suiting up and before we do start going through it, we can put it up on the screen here. This is the e2tarif sheet. You can see the PDF of the report itself. You can go through it yourself. It's very long, but very long and very detailed sort of step by step process of how warrants were retained, how warrants were obtained or obtained poorly or improperly in many cases. But essentially the Trump era Justice Department was doing something that was, I think, perfectly reasonable and understandable for the attorney general to do, which is track down the selective leaks that were coming out of classified information weaponized against Donald Trump. We now know for sure, and we knew this at the time in many cases, that these selective leaks were giving a very false picture of what was happening with Carter Page. They were leaking to show that Carter Page and others were definitively involved in some strange plot ripped from a Clancy novel about Russia collusion that just the there wasn't there. And so Bill Barr was trying to track down who was leaking this classified information. His deputies were trying to track down who was leaking this classified information. So in the process, though, the DOJ was not following the proper channels that you need to. Man reading this report, one reason it's kind of an interesting read is that the bureaucratic process of obtaining these warrants is insane.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Which it should be.

[Crystal Ball]

As it should be. Yes, absolutely. 100% as it should be. Were you gonna say something, Ryan?

[Sagar Enjeti]

No, no. Just. Yeah, like. And Eric Holder put this into place, actually, after the DOJ basically spied on James Rosen, the Fox News White House correspondent.

[Crystal Ball]

Yes.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Who was working on a story with a source regarding North Korea's kind of nuclear. Something involving North Korea. And they swept up his communications. And the entire media, left to right, stood up to Eric Holder and said, this is outrageous. Many of us called on him to resign over that, including us over at the Huffington Post. And in response to that pressure, he put in this new policy that if you're going to pick up the communications of a journalist, even if it's incident dental in a report on a car or investigating a cartel or something, if you wind up, if you see a journalist there, you need to come to the Attorney General himself and make your case that this breach of our norms, because it's just norms, legally, if they get a warrant, they can go after anybody they want. But the norms are that journalists are to be protected. And so they've set up these special protections that also cover members of Congress, which to me, I think are also good. Like members of Congress, whether you're Marjorie Taylor Greene or Adam Schiff or aoc, I think should be off limits.

[Crystal Ball]

Dana Rohrabacher. Yeah, absolutely. So let's get into what Horowitz found a little bit here. This is where we'll start on page five. We can put the next element up. He says he found that the department failed to convene the News Media Review Committee. They have a committee, a committee to review such things, to consider the compulsion process authorization requests. The department did not obtain the required DNI certification in one investigation. And we were unable to confirm whether the DNI certification it obtained in Another investigation was provided to the Attorney General before he authorized the request. And the Department did not obtain the Attorney General's express authorization for the ndos that were sought in connection with compulsory processes pro with compulsory process issued in the investigations. So that's from the Executive summary, basically. But yeah, on this next element, you can see they're talking specifically about the New York Times and the Washington Post. CNN is swept up in this. They say, as we describe in this chapter, it's chapter three of the report. The Department complied with some but not all of the then applicable provisions of the news media policy and CNN and New York Times and Washington and Post, many of which provisions have been put in place beginning just six years earlier. That's what Ryan was referencing from 2014 and 2015, which Horowitz references a lot in this report. He says, in our judgment, this deviation from the Department's own requirements indicates a troubling disparity between, on the one hand, the regard expressed in Department policy for the vital role of the news media in American democracy. Yes, I know the DOJ loves that so very much. And on the other hand, the Department's commitment to complying with the limits and requirements that it intended to safeguard that very role. So basically, if you go into the report, what happens with these journalist communications, these are non content communications requests. So they're trying to pull who the journalists were emailing and calling. And that in and of itself would be enough, obviously to figure out who's leaking. And that's why you need to have the provisions that were put in place followed, because it's a very serious thing when you're looking at who journalists are talking to. It should be the absolute high bias standard. And so when we have potentially Cash Patel coming into the FBI and a loyalist like Pam Bondi coming into the doj. Bill Barr was kind of a loyalist, but ultimately really bucked Trump. So imagine what a loyalist who's even sort of more MAGA than Bill Barr might do in some of these situations, even if they're kind of swampy like Pam Bondi legitimately is. These are like really serious things, really serious powers that I would just tell the right can and will be abused against conservative media. Little guys like imagine, imagine the slippery slope as these powers start getting abused. Because there are, and it always happens this way, there are rightful uses of these powers. When selective leaks of classified information that can damage national security literally can. Yeah, that's a reasonable use of trying to figure out who is leaking. I don't think it's necessarily A reasonable use of going after journalist communications. But it may be a reasonable predicate for an investigation. And it is what convinces you to let those powers get bigger and bigger.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And bigger and bigger. Right, Exactly. And these norms get loosened in a ratchet effect. It moves one direction and only. Only tends to move in one direction. So let's say Adam Schiff is one of the members of Congress that they spied on here. And Swalwell, let's say you hate Adam.

[Crystal Ball]

Schiff and Cash Patel, by the way. Cash Patel.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Cash Patel.

[Crystal Ball]

21 Democrats and 20 Republicans.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And cash Patel is a great example here. So take Adam Schiff. You hate Adam Schiff. You think he's a traitor. You think he should be spied on. He's now an incoming senator. If there's a Democratic administration in the next 10, 15 years, he's gonna be likely CIA chief. Yeah, he's gonna be pissed you spied on him. You want him with all these powers, now he can spy on you in reverse. So that's my message to the right. Now, the message to the left would be like, all right, you spied on Cash Patel. The left, yeah, yeah, yeah, Democrats, you spied on Cash Patel when he was a Hill staffer. Now he's gonna be running the FBI. And he's pissed. He's very pissed. Like, he has sued, you know, everybody involved. His case got thrown out. But he's like, guy's angry, as he should be. You don't spy on a Hill staffer. And so now he's going to run the FBI. Look what you did. Like, so don't. Don't do this stuff.

[Crystal Ball]

Yeah, it's ser. I mean, it is really serious when you start setting. When you let the precedent slip like this. And don't get caught until there's an inspector general report a long time later. And part of this is you're supposed to give reporters enough time to respond. And that wasn't done in all of these cases to actually have a legal response to their communications being pulled to the government as journalists. I mean, right now, we've seen how crucial independent media has been. And independent voices in Congress, like people who are willing to buck the party line, We've seen how important that that is to understanding. Like, Cash Patel, as Matt Taibbi came on undercurrents last week and made this point. He was like, the Nunes memo that we were told by selective leaks, by the way, was absolutely wrong, was vindicated. And Cash Patel was basically the author of the Nunes memo. Those independent voices have been really important to understanding what's going on. When nobody else in the Republican Party wanted to really talk about how bad the FBI was, were hesitant to question the Russia investigation initially. It's easy to forget there was even hesitation on the right about that. But there was these independent voices in Congress and in the media are some of the more important voices right now. There's a lot of, like, literal disinformation coming from the establishment. And so as soon as these powers sort of slip into getting bigger and bigger without proper oversight, then guess who's coming after independent media? It'll be Adam Schiff, it'll be Eric Swalwell. It'll be those types of people or maybe even, like, on the right. I think right now, people on the right are primed to overuse these powers because they have good reason to want to know what happened. And that's how things end up getting expanded in very bad directions, because it's like, it's easy to convince people you should be going after and you should be using this power. And so you sort of feel like you have permission to make the power broader and broader.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. Got to protect what's left of this republic.

[Crystal Ball]

Let's do it.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And so it's been a bleak show. We talked about war, ethnic cleansing, sexual assault, the selling out of the antitrust agenda. So let's do a little palate cleanser and talk about Bill Maher for a little bit.

[Crystal Ball]

Let's talk about Bill Maher. And it's a palate cleanser because this clip is sort of delightful in some ways, as either a point about cancel culture never existing or about cancel culture being over. So let's go ahead and roll. Bill Maher talking to actor Zachary Levi on Club Random. And Zachary Levi, for context, came out in support of Trump, like, right before the election. It was a matter of days before the election, and he was talking to Bill Maher on Club Random. Let's go ahead and see how their exchange went.

[Sagar Enjeti]

You got canceled for basically saying, have I been canceled? Well, I hope I haven't been canceled yet. I mean, if it happens, it happens, I guess. I mean, come on, didn't you lose jobs for that? Isn't that what canceling is? No, for coming out and voting for Trump. Yeah. I mean, listen, I have yet to see what the ultimate effects of all that are gonna be. I already had multiple jobs that I was in the process of shooting or that I have yet to shoot, and none of those have been compromised. All of those, like, none of my producers or any of the Studios behind those films or projects have called and said, hey listen, this is a line too far and we can't have you associated with the project anym. We're all still full steam ahead on those. How it ultimately like plays out in the future, I don't know. You know, I'm going to sit down with my team. I have yet I've been in Eastern Europe making this movie all during the election and everything. I mean, I was all, you know, kind of disconnected a lot from what was going on other than social media and following the news and kind of seeing the play by plays. But, you know, I'm going to sit down with my team and we'll talk about. Because I haven't talked to any of them. They might say, hey listen, we've had some phone calls with some people and they don't want to work with you anymore. I don't know. I, I could have sworn that already happened. No, no, I, yeah, I think it was because when I, when I did the town hall with Tulsi and Bobby, so basically I was, I was stumping for Bobby. I really wanted Bobby to be Bobby Kennett. Bobby Kennedy. Yeah. He sat there and you know, I don't agree with everything, but among people in my field, especially who were considered liberals, I have definitely been the most supportive. His general view of health and medicine and how it all works and what's important is closer to mine than Western medicine.

[Crystal Ball]

So I think, funny thing, there was Zachary Levi saying he hasn't yet lost jobs and Bill Maher saying, I could have sworn that happened. Because it takes us back to the central point of the campaign Cancel Culture debate, which is are you just getting criticism or are you actually facing consequences? And I don't know, I think, Ryan, we probably agree and it gets to your great essay, Elephant in the zoom or reported essay Elephant in the Zoom. Like part of Cancel Culture was absolutely, absolutely real. There are people who said it never happened, it was never real, it was consequence culture. It was sort of always incoherent. On the one hand, people were saying it's just consequence culture, but also it's not real. Right. Like you're just getting, you're just facing consequences.

[Sagar Enjeti]

We would name it.

[Crystal Ball]

Right? Yeah, exactly. You're just facing consequences for having unpopular opinions. But also this thing is not really happening. It's not at all a problem. Don't worry about it. There's nothing to see here. So that said, I think this is maybe becoming incoherent on the Right. Because the second Trump administration or the second Trump election. What's interesting about it is you get the guy winning the popular vote. You do have sort of a broad swath of celebrities coming out and supporting him still a lot of celebrities supporting Kamala Harris. No question about it. These tech guys now coming out in support of Donald Trump. We talked about the Federalist headline, like, the day before the election, which was. It's no longer. There's no social stigma around supporting Trump anymore. So this is gonna. This could potentially be incoherent. Right. Like, if the social stigma around supporting Trump is mostly gone, which I agree. In the rest of the country, outside some type of C suite at the 30 Rock building, if you say that, then it also says cancel culture is kind of over.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, it was a wave.

[Crystal Ball]

It was a wave.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. Totally over. And some. I think the more hermetically sealed ecosystems are still operating under some of its ideological rigors. But in general.

[Crystal Ball]

Yeah. Oh, of course, yeah.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yes. Not so much. Yeah.

[Crystal Ball]

There was a.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And the rights. The rights probably isn't quite over yet because you guys were later in adopting it internally. And so you've got to. It's got to work through your system, your own, like, mirror world, bizarro version of cancel culture.

[Crystal Ball]

Yeah.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Well, that you're not sufficiently.

[Crystal Ball]

The woke. Right.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Sufficiently anti woke. Like, it.

[Crystal Ball]

Like, this is a raging debate on the white Right.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. By the way, which gets weird because it's like, you say anything related to racial justice, diversity, make any basic point, tell me if I'm wrong on the right. People are like, DEI woke.

[Crystal Ball]

Yeah.

[Sagar Enjeti]

You're like, no, no. Whoa, whoa, whoa. I'm just saying, like, everybody should be treated with equality. Did you say equality or equity?

[Crystal Ball]

This happened to me once when I was like, maybe conservatives should put a woman on the Supreme Court.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Cancel her. Cancel this woman.

[Crystal Ball]

I was like, it doesn't have to be any specific woman, but if you believe that men and women are different, then maybe a woman will have valuable takes on abortion. Maybe a pro life woman.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Drag this woman. It's been nice working with you. You're finished.

[Crystal Ball]

Yeah.

[Sagar Enjeti]

But that is the kind of thing you say. Anything that gets anywhere near it, it's like, whoa. Yeah. Woke much.

[Crystal Ball]

Well, because. And this is actually, I think, becoming a serious problem because there is a need. There's a legitimate need for litmus tests. If you're the Trump. If you're the incoming Trump administration, you are trying to put all kinds of litmus tests. And this was a problem for Joni Ernst about loyalty up on the hiring process or the confirmation process, because you know that the second somebody is like Bill Barr and is not fully loyal to Donald Trump or Mike Pence is not fully loyal to Donald Trump, then boom, your whole agenda could crumble. It could become a house of cards. So they're trying to not build a house of cards. They're trying to build a house of stone. And that's where their litmus tests are becoming important to them. And so they use these types of stand ins as litmus tests. And it can, I think, really poison or pollute. I should say pollute the discourse because it's not honest.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Always. Take it from me, it's toxic.

[Crystal Ball]

Take it from Ryan, it's tough. Toxic. It's toxic. And so maybe the mainstream wave of cancel culture is coming to an end. There was a time when if Zachary Levi had just breathed so much in Trump's direction, he legitimately probably would have lost jobs in Hollywood.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Maybe.

[Crystal Ball]

Yeah, it happened. I mean, there was some pretty.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, 2016. Yeah, 17.

[Crystal Ball]

2016. 17, 18. Trump is a Russian asset. Yeah, 100%. You're a traitor. All of that. So this is sort of a fun note to end the show.

[Sagar Enjeti]

There you go.

[Crystal Ball]

Thanks for tuning in. I'm excited about the Friday show.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Me too. Yeah. If you missed earlier on the show, we're talking to basically an American leftist who went to fight for the anarcho commies of the ypg, which. Good for him. Yeah.

[Crystal Ball]

It'll be interesting conversation, especially this week. So thank you so much for tuning in. BreakingPoints.com if you want to become a premium subscriber, there's also fun Christmas merch. I've enjoyed seeing everybody's pictures in their Breaking Point sweaters.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I was wearing my sweater. The ornaments.

[Crystal Ball]

Oh, you were?

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah.

[Crystal Ball]

All right.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Is that you on the sweater? Yes, it is.

[Crystal Ball]

It's really. It is awkward.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah.

[Crystal Ball]

It's the same thing with the mugs.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Crystal Ball]

I'll be on the Zoom call sometimes with the mug at home, I'm like, oh, shit, I've got my face on a mug again. Not a good look. Not a good look. Well, thank you, everyone. BreakingPoints.com as a reminder. And we'll see you back here on Friday.

[Sagar Enjeti]

All right, see you then. All right, we're all set for the party. I've trimmed the tree, hung the mistletoe, and paired all those weird shaped knives.

[Crystal Ball]

And forks with the appropriate cheeses.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And I plugged in the Partisan Partisan. It's a home cocktail maker that makes over 60 premium cocktails, plus a whole lot of seasonal favorites, too. I just got it for 50 off. So how about a Cosmopolitan or a Mistletoe Margarita? I'm thirsty.

[Crystal Ball]

Watch.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I just pop in a capsule, choose my strength and wow, it's beginning to feel more seasonal in here already. If your holiday party doesn't have a.

[Crystal Ball]

Bartender, then you become the bartender.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Unless you've got a Bartisian, because Bartesian crafts every cocktail perfectly in as little as 30 seconds. And I just got it for $50 off. Tis the season to be jollier. Add some holiday flavor to every celebration with the sleek, sophisticated home cocktail maker Bartisian. Get $50 off any cocktail maker at bartisian.com cocktail that's B A R T E S I A N.com cocktail hey, it's Jenny Garth here. The talk around GLP1s is inescapable these days, but are you familiar with Future Health? They've made accessing qualified doctors who specialize in GLP1s easier than ever before. My friend has struggled with their weight for many years. It was always up and down. She tried fad diets. Never saw lasting results. So she started using GLP ones. And not only did the weight come off, but she also gained more energy to do all those activities that she loved the most. I'm all about feeling my best and living my life in a healthy way. It's incredible how science is able to help us achieve that healthy lifestyle that we are all striving for. Future Health gives millions of people affordable access to knowledgeable providers who really know weight loss. Medicare for less than $3 a day, find out if weight loss meds are right for you in three minutes at trifh.com that's tryfh.com try fh.com future health is not a healthcare service provider. Meds are prescribed at provider's discretion. Results may vary. Sponsored by Future Health there's joy to be had in finding the perfect gifts for the ones you love, and Saks.com's holiday gift guide can make it easy. Whether it's surprising your hard to shop for sister with a Chloe bracelet bag or gifting your partner a memorable scent from Gucci that matches their personal personality, Saks. Com's handpicked guide can help take the stress out of the holidays, like adding instant cheer to your home with bright decor or giving yourself some comfort by bundling up in a scarf coat from Tatem. Find gifts guaranteed to bring joy to everyone this [e-mail].