← Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar
Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar
2/19/26: Saagar Rips Trump Degeneracy, Dem Voter Revolt, Trump Voters Rail On AI
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- [00:00]
Podcast Host
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Krystal Ball
you you can't ignore. Stand still. Not a chance.
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Saagar Enjeti
You're a lifelong learner who's come this far.
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Krystal Ball
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Saagar Enjeti
Hey guys, Sager and Krystal here.
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Krystal Ball
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.
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Saagar Enjeti
This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else.
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Krystal Ball
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.
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Saagar Enjeti
We need your help to build the future of independent news media and we hope to see you@breakingpoints.com There's a lot going on in the world. You might have missed this. The Trump administration is currently going to bat for the prediction markets masquerading as sports gambling companies to nationalize sports gambling, to dramatically enrich not only the Trump family themselves, but also all of the most degenerate executives in the United States. So I wanna go ahead and give a major shout out here to the chairman of the cftc, the commodities Future Trading Commission which is responsible for regulating PR prediction markets. Wu, by the way, is actually a former crypto executive and is now actually trying to preempt any state efforts to rein in prediction markets backdoor sports gambling across the nation, violating state sovereignty and their ability to regulate sports gambling internally. Here's the chairman of the cftc, Mike Selig. Let's take a listen to what he had to say.
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CFTC Chairman Mike Selig
CFTC Chairman Mike Selig here. Over the past year American prediction markets have been hit with an onslaught of state led litigation. In response, the CFTC has today filed a friend of the court brief to defend its exclusive jurisdiction over these derivative markets. Today the CFTC is taking an important step to ensure that these markets have a place here in America and have the integrity of and resilience and vibrancy that our derivatives markets deserve to those who seek to challenge our authority in this space. Let me be clear. We will see you in court.
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Saagar Enjeti
So what he is saying there is that states do not have the right to regulate sports gambling which goes directly against the Supreme Court decision. Now let me also explain because if you listen to that, you're like, oh well he's talking about derivative markets and financial. No, that's not what this is about literally at all. And I'll get to that here in a second. Let's put up here Governor Spencer Cox of Utah's response. He says, Mike, I appreciate you attempting this with a straight face, but I don't remember the CFTC having authority over the derivative market of LeBron James rebounds. These prediction markets you are breathlessly defending are gambling, pure and simple. They are destroying the lives of families and countless Americans, especially young men. They have no place in Utah. Let me be clear. I will use every resource within my disposal as Governor of the sovereign state of Utah and under the Constitution of the United States to beat you in court. So that is a Republican governor. And this very much crystal resembles what happened with AI. You have these companies, you have Kalshi, you have Polymarket, now you have DraftKings, FanDuel. All the gambling companies rushing to get into the prediction market space. And let me explain this very clearly. Sports gambling as you all know, which I am massively against, the Fanduels and the DraftKings, they are more tightly regulated than these prediction markets. What the prediction markets are arguing is that because they are explicitly not gambling that they are legalized in all 50 states. And as we have also seen, if go take a look at DraftKingstock and FanDuel stock, they're down 40 50%. The reason why is they're bleeding money to these prediction markets. Vegas actually handled way less money for the super bowl this year than they did the year before. Why? Gambling is a loser take all market. And what I mean by that is whichever person is willing to offer the most degenerate bets, that's the person who wins. And even as bad, as much as I hate DraftKings and FanDuel, you're not betting on dildo colors on the, on the floors, on the, on the basketball courts of wnba. Even the. They have a standard. Cause they have state regulators that they have to deal with. Right?
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CFTC Chairman Mike Selig
They have.
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Saagar Enjeti
I mean we're talking about the different colors of Gatorade. Like it's quaint to think about people in Vegas every year betting on heads and tails. That used to be the worst example of DeGeneres. No, like we are in a 10 to 15 to 20, 30 times worse situation with the type of bets that are being offered on this rife for insider trading. Remember the streaker one I told you about? That literally happened. Somebody actually did bet him on streaker and then did it. It was an offshore book, to be clear. However, and. But I'm giving you an example of exactly the type of things can happen. This is not even to mention all the insider trading possibilities from that we saw the state of Israel just indicted multiple people who were in the military and arrested them for betting on operations that they knew was going to happen. You cannot allow bets life and death. Very recently there was a market on whether a space booster was going to fail. And they were like, wow, it's really cool to bet on stuff which could literally result in the deaths of the crew that are involved. And they're like, well, to be clear, it's just about a mechanical failure. It's like, yeah, mechanical failure. That could literally lead to.
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Krystal Ball
Yeah. What do you think is going to happen in the event of that mechanical failure?
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Saagar Enjeti
I'm just betting on whether Apollo 13 is going to take off or not, guys. Right? It's like, come on. This is the nonsense which has been. This is literally like the clearest example of total free market capitalism which is except as always in the American context, completely backed now by the power of the state, the United States federal government going to bat not just for betting markets, but for betting markets that offer the worst, most degenerate products that milk these people, the advertising of these companies, they're telling children out there, 18, 19 year olds, guys, this is how you can make your life savings. This is how you can pay Your tuition. I mean, I'm getting reels of guys who are betting on whether Trump is gonna say the word low iq. And they're watching, you know, an entire week's worth of news and then cheering and popping champagne whenever he finally says it for a 500 to 1 pay. Well, this is insanity. Like, absolute insanity. And it's being backed by the government because these people are making money hand over fist. It's disgusting. This is gambling, pure and simple.
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Krystal Ball
Yeah, well, the gaslighting put D4 up on the screen of like, this is a derivatives market where Americans can hedge their risk against changing weather or. No, this is sports betting, okay? I mean, the estimate here is that 90% of Kalshee's bets are on our sports. Like, that's, that's primarily what these things are used for. And not that it really would make it better if it wasn't primarily sports, but, you know, their dodge is effectively, oh, this isn't really sports gambling. It's the sophisticated derivatives and we're just democratizing the access to this technology, blah, blah, blah. Like, the whole thing is just complete gaslighting. And, you know, I think to me, zooming out, the two major underlying stories here, the two things that are really going on is, number one, the corruption, obviously. Like, you know, I mean, Don Junior's on the couch board. Like, it's, you know, they're making tons of money. They're throughout the whole government. So they want this gravy train to. The people in power are profiting off of this direct exploitation of, you know, ordinary Americans, and they want that gravy train to keep going. We are at the stage in capitalism where, like, the level of just predatory behavior is completely brazen and completely overt. But I think the other thing that is going on here is, you know, we've always, our, our national story has always had a bit of like a casino lottery element to it of like, you may not be rich today, but hey, here in America, anything's possible. The previous story was about if you work hard and, you know, we have this grand meritocracy, and there was some level of truth to that, right? Not completely true, but there was some level and people bought into it. And so it was like, okay, if we do the right and we go to school, we work hard and we start a great business and we make a great product, we too can join, like, the class of the millionaires. We too can become one of society's elites. Now that story has unraveled, so now the story is just complete casino Capitalism, it's just complete. You know, we used the example before. Maybe you too can get cast as a plant in the Bad Bunny halftime show and have insider knowledge of whether Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin are going to be performing and be able to cash in. That is, in the absence of, you know, a broader redistribution of wealth, they are wrapping this explicitly predatory scheme in a, like, promise of riches and wealth for ordinary people who have lost all hope that there is any other path to success, not even riches and wealth, but just to, like, escape an entirely precarious existence. So I think when you look at, when you look at this in certain ways, when you look at the AI development, certainly in the crypto space and in the betting space, I think part of what is going on here is not just about the corruption and it's about selling a narrative to people that this is going to be the new way that you're able to make it
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Saagar Enjeti
big and let me, you know, bring it out even deeper just to show you how rabbit, how deep the rabbit hole goes. I wanted to cover this a few weeks ago, but we weren't able to put it in the show. Let's put C3 or D3 up there on the screen. The CFTC, before this announcement, literally just a week before, announced the Innovation Advisory Committee. Let me name you some of the people who are on there. The CEO of Coinbase, the CEO of Polymarket, the CEO of Ripple, the CEO of FanDuel, the of Kalshi, the CEO Crypto.com, the CEO of DraftKings, the CEO of Blockchain, the CEO of Kraken, Gemini, Solana Labs, Robinhood. I mean, I just named some of the worst companies in the United States. Like, these are the people who are getting phenomenally rich, basically making gambling as widely available to the American public as they can, using and buying in some cases the power now of the power of the federal government to basically enable their ability to legalize gambling across the nation. I never even thought I would be in the business of defending the DraftKings and the Fanduels, but really this is about state sovereignty. I massively oppose sports gambling. I think we should make it completely illegal at the online level. If people want to have gambling in their states, they should have to go to a casino and it should be very tightly regulated in terms of the number of bets to make sure that you can't do prop bets for insider trading and all of that, et cetera. But at a sovereign level, from what the Supreme Court said, it's up to the states you cannot allow the CFTC and the federal government to just say, hey, California, you know, they had a whole referendum on this. They rejected it, they said, nope, we're not gonna do it. We're gonna keep it in the whatever in the tribal casinos. Texas, same thing. The gambling companies have taken l after L in Texas. Texas legislature's like, nope, we're not doing it. Which has cost Miriam Adelson all these people a hell of a lot of money. But this is how you get around it. It's literally making the worst possible types of bets with zero regulation or at least the least amount of regulation. Taking it out of the hands of the state and saying, no, we're gonna make it widely available for all and none of the proper safeguards that are currently in place for insider trading. And these people are printing money. Remember the Kalshee founder who's like, I'm one of the youngest female billionaires in the world. We should be ashamed of this. This is shameful to become a billionaire by propping up gambling. And you know, everybody is like in the tech industry, everybody's getting bought off. I recently saw a story of a guy, a sports podcaster who criticized Kalsheet. They reached out to him the next week for. They reached out to him literally the week after to offer him a sponsorship. And you know, nobody wants to talk about this because they're all taking money from the same thing. And you would think DraftKings and FanDuel would be trying to do something about it. No, DraftKings is now, oh, we're going to get into the prediction business. This is a race to the bottom to make it as completely unbeliev regulated, open for insider trading, open for corruption as possible. But because they're all making so much money milking all of these people, regular sports fans, people who are, you know, losing hope at the bottom level of society. Like we are turning everyday Americans, especially young men, into the same guys that you see at the gas station doing scratch off tickets. That's what we're doing for a whole nation. And it's like nobody wants to stand up for it. Luckily, at least some are. Let me put D5 up here on the screen. I wanna give credit to Elizabeth Warren. She says Trump CFTC is trying to strip state authority to regulate gambling within their borders. Protect Americans from getting ripped off. The CFTC should focus on ensuring our derivatives markets don't blow up the economy. Again, not helping corrupt political insiders cash in. Excellent, well said. And then finally, D6. Just if you're Wondering where this is all coming from. Don't forget that Donald Trump's own Truth Social company was supposed to launch a Poly Market competitor. And Donald Trump Jr. Himself is literally a strategic advisor to both Kalshi and to polymarket who are currently on the CFTC Advisory committee and who the new CFTC chairman is working on their behalf. And by the way, even before this, the CFTC advisor or the CFTC committee, he wasn't necessarily supposed to have all this authority. There were a lot of shenanigans in terms of making sure that nobody else was on the board, similar to what they did here with the ftc. So here we go. This is gonna be a multi billion dollar bonanza. The amount of people who are going to lose money, it's astronomical. Like the amount of sports bettors and other people who are gonna be lured in. There's no regulation for advertising, no regulation at the federal level. It's gonna be, I mean this is gonna be as close to a rip and roar 1890s silver, you know, pedaling. What were the snake oil like? We're going back. This is what it's going to look like and think about how many people suffered from that. But I'm just glad that a bunch of tech executives are going to get
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Krystal Ball
filthy rich on steroids in the algorithm era too, where it's like all super supercharged. Wanted to shout out Pedro Gonzalez. I thought he had a good take on this. And shout out to you as well for being like principled and consistent in your positions here. He says very funny that the new right does this save the west larp. And then you look at its policy preferences and it's all just legalizing crime, crypto scams, normalizing gambling, et cetera. It's the movement of decline and profiting from decline. And I mean you've been making this point about like all of the quote unquote degenerate behavior is now just like embraced and fully deregulated. And no one bothers to pause and say this seems a little inconsistent with some of the other things our political project has been.
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Saagar Enjeti
A lot of right wingers were so mad at me yesterday for tweeting this and I said that Trump is now the most pro vice president in American history. He, in a single year he is trying to deregulate and legalize gambling in all 50 states. He is rescheduling marijuana to enrich his rich drug peddling donors and is now pressuring banks to maintain access for OnlyFans models. So I mean, there you go. I mean, what Else, you have the most pro porn, pro weed, pro gambling president in American history. Congratulations. For many of us who, you know, at the very least, you know, thought, look, I knew the crypto thing was going to be a bonanza and whatever, like that's bad. But it's kind of separate to gambling. Like, this is the most predatory industry with the highest suicide rate. I mean, they're one third of American young men have an open gambling account. The amount of addiction, if you talk to the gambling hotlines and others, it is horrible. And for those of you who think like, oh, I don't gamble, so it doesn't affect me. When a state legalizes online state legalizes gambling, the aggregate like amount of credit goes down. It actually affects everybody. The amount of domestic violence, it goes up. The public resources are gonna have to be dedicated to dealing with this. It's gonna be like the cocaine crisis in the 1890s, when all of a sudden we just had junkies everywhere and we didn't know what to do. It's gonna be very similar. Go to Vegas and you see the bums that are on the street begging for a dollar so they can get some food. That's gonna be the whole nation, you
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Krystal Ball
know, and it's the audacity to pretend you're pro family while you know, yeah,
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Saagar Enjeti
yeah, nothing will blow up. Nothing will blow your life up like a gambling addiction. I can tell you story after story, lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit. People who never placed a bet to fully bankrupt, divorce, and on the verge of suicide in the span of two or three years, gambling with their kids, Christmas presents, life savings, 529 accounts. And these people will take your money all day long. And now it's going to be even less regulated.
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Krystal Ball
And it's young men who will suffer the most, who are the most, you know, easily sort of like have the psychology that's the most easily exploited by this stuff that are overwhelmingly the largest percentage of the better.
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Saagar Enjeti
So bad. All right, let's get to the next one.
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Krystal Ball
So the New York Times did a very interesting focus group of Democratic voters, which I feel like we don't see that much. I feel like there's always because the liberal media is kind of like more in tune with Democrats, there's less curiosity about what's going on with the Democratic base. So it's usually either like swing voters or Trump voters. Let's go on safari and see what these strange creatures think about the world. So they decided to do that with the Democratic base. And now I think liberal media has become more disconnected from where the Democratic base is. And the Democratic Party leadership certainly has become more disconnected from where the Democratic base is. So, anyway, you can put this F1 up on the screen. This was the headline for their focus group. They said, show up for us 13 Democratic voters on Trump ice and their frustrations with the Democratic Party. And the thing they sees on here at the top with these three voters is their description of the Democratic Party. One says paralyzed, another says sold out, another says afraid. These are three very different people, very different backgrounds. And this was the conclusion across the board. Let's go ahead and put F2 up on the screen. This is probably the slide that got the single most attention. Ryan and Emily mentioned this in their show yesterday, but we wanted to dig in a little bit more. They asked their 13 focus group participants what type of candidates they're looking for, and they asked them, would you prefer someone who's young or you don't really care? And overwhelmingly, of course, people said, we like someone who's younger. What sort of class background there is major preference for middle or working class. They ask them, do you prefer a candidate who identifies as progressive or a candidate who identifies as moderate? Every single person said they prefer a progressive candidate for a moderate candidate. Literally no one raised a hand. Okay, let me go ahead and put the next piece up on the screen of data here. That was also interesting. So this is where they're asking them, okay, well, tell me what you think about the Democratic Party. If you had to use one or two words to describe it, what words would you pick? Now, I remind you, these are all Democrats. Okay? These are Democratic Party voters. Number one, spineless. Number two, more complacent than I thought they would be. Number three, paralyzed, afraid, incompetent. I guess suffocated or given up. Sold out. Next one, sellouts and suckers, immobilized. Can I say no balls, no cojones. I will say there are a large number of young Democrats that are really starting to climb the ranks in the party that are motivated. I'm hoping that that will start to take over a little bit more. So when you see those numbers overall of the Democratic Party being at its lowest approval rating in history, these type of people are a big part of that story because obviously Republicans are going to hate Democrats. There's a significant number of independents who are obviously disgusted with Democrats, but it's their own voters being so disgusted and frustrated with them that has really sent them to the lowest lows. And then, last one, then we can get into Our reaction to all of this, there was a question about, okay, well, is there anyone out there that you think is doing something good? Has anybody seen anything from a Democrat, any candidate or public figure or someone locally that's made you say, oh yeah, we need more of this. This is what we should be doing. More of this guy says Mike, 33, white Democrat, says Zoran Mandani. Clear, concise messaging. It's exactly what everybody wants. It helps everybody. It's the perfect messaging because it's clear and concise, unlike Democrats. Just like Bernie. Bernie has said the same thing since the 80s. You've got to tax the billionaires, you gotta tax the upper class. He's never changed. That's the messaging. You've just gotta drill it into them. And Zoron did it, man, it's beautiful. Diane72 said, Mike said it pretty clearly and I can't really think of anything to add to that. And there was another person further down the list who also was like, yeah, Mike said what I was going to say. Now I will temper that Sagar with the fact that the other two names that came up organically in the course of the conversation as like Democratic candidates that they were excited about were Jasmine Crockett and Pete Buttigieg.
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Saagar Enjeti
I wanted everyone to be very careful
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Krystal Ball
because so what a progressive is, is very contested, right?
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Saagar Enjeti
As we have all discovered over the years of this show. And I have no hate for the average American, but it's not like people are very good at self identifying. Somebody will be like, I'm a conservative, but that means I want to tax billionaires. You're like, wait, what? You're like, what are you talking about? Right? And then somebody, look, people are complicated. They don't think much about terms. When they hear the, I mean, when I say the word progressive, what do they think I want to move forward? Right. I mean it can mean a lot of different things through the activist class to the leftist base. That's an actual identity. So like when I say I am a rightist, that's because I've read a lot about politics. I don't identify as a small C conservative. That's really not something that is like, that doesn't encompass like a belief. Right. Like I would put myself much more in the vein of like a European rightist. But most people don't think about politics like that. They don't read a lot about definitions. To them, progressive means going forward. Great. Awesome. Right?
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Krystal Ball
Can I just to add to that at least one of them, but maybe a number of them brought up Joe Manchin as why they do not want to moderate. And so I think the combination of him, Kyrsten Sinema, and maybe a handful of others, but those two being the primary villains, they really destroyed the moderate label within the Democratic Party. Because now moderate just seems like, oh, you're just gonna obstruct anything good happening. You're just gonna sell out to, like, various corporate interests. So, no, of course we don't want that. And then the other thing, and this is where, you know, where it's dangerous is there is a. The Democratic base is united in wanting to fight harder against Trump. Right. They want someone who's pushing back effectively and is out there and is taking risks and is meeting the moment in terms of the threat that they perceive to the country. Sometimes, though, that can be very amorphous. That's how you end up with someone like Jasmine Crockett being named as. Like, she's a fighter. Well, she is very rhetorically gifted. She's very sassy. You know, she gets out there. She's, like, quick with the quip. Undeniably, like, talented and charismatic. But if you dig underneath the surface, there's some real problems there in terms of who she's taking money from and the positions, how far she's willing to go.
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Saagar Enjeti
She's pro crypto. She's identity politics. She's calling James Talarico a racist. You know, she's the worst, if you ask me. But that's the issue.
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Krystal Ball
But that's the challenge. That's the question mark to me is not, do Democrats wanna fight? They do. There's no doubt about it, you know, that that argument has been won. And I think the argument also has been won about, like, we're not listening to these establishment boys like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries. Go fuck yourself. We don't care what you have to say. Even liberal media institutions, I think there's been a really breaking of the trust. But what it means is being a progressive. Is that Gavin Newsom being on Twitter and doing his trolling routine, or is that a Zoran Mamdani type of politician? Where not only do you have. I mean, Zoran actually doesn't do a lot of Trump clapback or whatever, but where you have an aggressive social media posture, but it's backed up by specific policies as well. And so that's the piece that I think sort of remains to be determined. And we're gonna see. I think we'll get a lot of indication of that from some of the primaries that are gonna play out right now. And then certainly, obviously the biggest test of that will be in 2028, whether someone like Gavin Newsom is going to be able to position themselves as a quote, unquote, progressive, even as he is out there standing with billionaires to oppose a wealth tax in his state. I am personally actually hopeful that some of those things will be a problem. Like you can see them mention in a bunch of the responses throughout this, they talk about taxing the rich as kind of like a litmus test issue. And that would be a very hard one for Gavin Newsom style candidate to, you know, obviously he's like already on the wrong side of that issue. So I am hopeful that there actually will be a substantive policy lens that the term progressive will be viewed for. But I fully acknowledge that that is still a question mark for sure.
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Saagar Enjeti
As I have learned over the years and watched, the words working class came to mean very different things. To remember, Ted Cruz used to say that we're a working class part. Ted Cruz called himself a working class politician. Okay. And if you were to ask people, some of the people who voted for him, they might even say, oh yeah, he's sports the work. Like, be honest, like, is there a huge disconnect for all of it? I've seen the term bastardized about populism or working class now in the Republican Party, and it can be true at a rhetorical level, wrong at a policy level. Turns out a lot of people don't care about the policy level. At the middle of an election, you could very easily see how it could be bastardized. And I mean, for the people who watch our show, it's gonna be tough because these, you know, you guys, if you're watching this, you're in the top two. 5% of people who consume politics. You gotta think about your uncle or somebody who really doesn't pay that much attention, is pissed off about Trump because of the White House law or something like that. You know, somebody who's cranky about decorum. What does the term progressive mean to them? Probably nothing. And so when a Pete Buttigieg can say that famous Hillary line, I'm a progressive who likes to get things done, it might land same with Gavin Newsom. Nobody's done more on climate than me. The billionaire question. He's a very savvy political operator sometimes,
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Krystal Ball
but other times, yeah, and other times he calls him on his face.
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Saagar Enjeti
I'll give you some hope. I'll give you some hope. Which is for the Democratic base, because the Democratic base is now more overwhelmingly college educated than everyone else. They are going to be a lot more well read and literally grammatically, let's think about the best way to phrase this. They're gonna be a lot more educated and a lot more have much more of an ability to parse language and actually think about what these terms mean as opposed to what the current existing Republican base is going to be.
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Krystal Ball
Much heavier news consumer.
- [30:37]
Saagar Enjeti
They're gonna be way more heavier news consumers. Much more well read whenever it comes to politics. Probably care much more about policy. Richard Henania has the famous thing about how conservatives watch TV and liberals read. That actually does matter whenever it comes to policy prescription and other things. Cause if you're going to read a policy position that already puts you pretty dramatically out of step with some of the other base that is voting. I mean, I'm just being real here in terms of how that will look. So I think it will actually look quite different. But the other thing that I'm not, I don't want to underestimate for a lot of the people who are also Democrats is you should forget, don't forget South Carolina could be the first state and that's a very different Democratic primary. And then if you have lower propensity voters who are upset at Trump who come out to vote.
- [31:23]
Krystal Ball
Although those people in South Carolina did not mess with Pete Buttigieg. So I'm not worried about him doing well there.
- [31:28]
Saagar Enjeti
They could mess with Jasmine Crockett. Right. I could see that.
- [31:30]
Krystal Ball
I mean, I don't you think she's going to run for president?
- [31:32]
Saagar Enjeti
Maybe. Why not? I mean, you got to.
- [31:34]
Krystal Ball
I think she has to win, you know, Texas, like the senator from Texas, Beto failed.
- [31:39]
Saagar Enjeti
He ran for president.
- [31:40]
Krystal Ball
Yeah, but how did that work out?
- [31:41]
Saagar Enjeti
Sure, he got 2%, but it's not.
- [31:42]
Krystal Ball
Yeah, I don't know.
- [31:43]
Saagar Enjeti
All you need is Jim Clyburn to come in and make you a king. Remember, there's no Iowa, there's no New Hampshire Clearinghouse this time.
- [31:49]
Krystal Ball
Well, it's not, it's actually not clear what the order of the states is going to be. Some of that is still up for grabs. So South Carolina will certainly be early and important in the process. But, but I mean, here's what I would say. My own prediction is that there are going to be a few issues that are litmus test issues. I think they're money from aipac, I think they're taxing the rich and I think it's abolishing ice. I think those three things are going to be actual litmus test issues and candidates who can't give clear cut answers on that are going to struggle. And I think that the testing ground for that has been that I've had it podcast where you've got, I mean, Jennifer and Pumps at this point have really shifted a lot to the left, right? These were Hillary supporters who are now like, you know what? Bernie was right and we should have been there. So they have shifted significantly. But their audience is very reflective of kind of like the core liberal base of the Democratic Party. And they are not speaking of not having it. They have not having it with Cory Booker coming on and doing his little tap dance or Rahm Emanuel, whoever they are not having it with these people. And so that tells me there is kind of a hard line and an expectation of we want to hear not just you with a bunch of word salad trying to massage an answer. We wanna hear yes or no answers to these few questions. The other thing that gives me some hope, especially on the identity politics front, is there is also the level of trickery that Hillary Clinton was able to engage in in her campaign against Bernie where she was positioning herself like using identity politics to pretend like she was the more progressive candidate. I think people see through that garbage entirely at this point, as evidenced by the fact that Haley Stevens, who is a Michigan member of Congress, she's in the House right now and is running for Senate. And it's like the conservative or moderate candidate in that race backed by Chuck Schumer, et cetera. She went and toured an ICE facility and when she came out, she was like, I felt better because we've got female ICE agents who are running the place, trying to do like a girl boss ICE agent situation. And people were not buying this whatsoever. This is F5. Let's take a listen of note. There are female female leadership here. There's female leadership and there are women who, who walked with us today and explained on the intake process how important it is to treat people with humanity. And that obviously really stuck out to me because some of the things that we are witnessing before our eyes in our neighborhoods, in our streets is really a lack of human humanity. So people were, you know, this one did not land, this did not land with the Democratic base whatsoever. I mean, it's the meme, right? It's like, you know, they're bombing, but they're, but they're. At least, they're female violence, right? They're female and they're flying the gay pride flag. It's like, no, no, no, we're, we, we see through that now. We're not doing this anymore.
- [34:35]
Saagar Enjeti
Hey, listen, I would. I would welcome nothing more. More recently, there's been a gay amazing. There's been a sassy gay ice age who's gone viral on the.
- [34:43]
Krystal Ball
Oh, I thought I saw that guy.
- [34:45]
Saagar Enjeti
Which I loved. Same thing. If we could turn them against. If we could turn them against identity politics, no one will be happier than me. Oh, that was great.
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- [36:59]
Saagar Enjeti
let's get to the next one.
- [37:00]
Krystal Ball
Yeah, so this is an Interesting story. It kind of dovetails with some of the, you know, some of the cross coalitional, I think, backlash against the push towards gambling. But the most clear place where we've had this cross partisan backlash is in the fight against AI more broadly, but specifically on the front lines with regards to data centers. And we could put this up on the screen. This is a scene from Claremore, Oklahoma. This is like a local Oklahoma town meeting where this person who is in Oklahoma says people are being arrested for speaking out against AI data centers. Please keep standing up for your community. There's another video that's gone viral this morning that I saw. You guys can take this down. That I saw of another place. I'm not sure if it was a red state or not, but where there had been significant protests against the data center. And ultimately the town backs down. The backlash against these places is really building. And I was just listening to the New York Times actually did a deep dive into a town in Indiana that has become a hotspot for a bunch of these data centers. And the first ones kind of got built and people just like accepted it. And there wasn't. They didn't need any zoning approval. So the town council, it just kind of sailed through. And now people are experiencing all of this increased traffic and noise and they're starting to research, okay, what even is AI and what is this going to mean and what's it going to mean long term? And how many jobs are even really created and what is this going to mean for our community? And now there was a huge backlash to this new data center that they were trying to place there that did require a zoning change, which meant that the town had a chance to weigh in. So they held meetings overnight. And they first called for, okay, who's in support of this? And people got up and they spoke for. There were like, you know, enough to fill about 25 minutes. Then they opened it up for the opponents. The opponents. There were so many of them that the meeting went on until 4am that's awesome. Ultimately, and this is a small town, right? And ultimately the town council's like, okay, yeah, we're not gonna do this. And so you are seeing this huge backlash. And a lot of these data centers are being located in red states and red areas because rural areas have more space and rural areas tend to be more Republican. Let's go and put G2 up on the screen. This was a fantastic report from the Financial Times. They say Donald Trump's AI push fuels revolt in MAGA. Heartlands on a cold Tuesday evening. Last week, about 200 Missourians, Missouri being another hotbed of AI development and also backlash, crammed into a Methodist church to share a message. The AI revolution embraced by Trump's White House did not have their unqualified support. Quote, I voted for this administration and didn't really think about AI until it started to affect me, said Lisa Garrett, who lives beside the site of a rapidly green lit, $6.6 billion, 400 acre data center development in the satellite city of Independence, just east of Kansas City. A worker for a local ministry, Garrett's unease extends beyond the project's demand on local water and electricity supplies to the broader social impact of the industry it is being built to support. I have grandchildren. It does concern me that they're being drawn into a world that isn't real. She said. Her concerns, which poll after poll has shown are shared by much of Trump's space, are increasingly at odds with the posture and policies of his administration. And actually Sager, I mean, it is very like cross partisan, the concerns here about data centers in particular, but the recent polling that I saw showed that the concerns were actually higher on the right for reasons that you can understand, because there tends to be more, you know, more of a rural base, more concern about, okay, what is this community going to be? And more like sort of like this rootedness in a certain place. And so and more, quote, unquote conservative views of like, we are a little wary of change. We don't necessarily want the world to be turned upside down, not just in our local community, but by whatever this means. So, you know, I think this is one of the important fights as we contemplate what AI is going to mean for our social contract. And one of the places where you can sort of like, you know, throw sand in the gears and at least slow the process down so that there is more of a chance for democracy to be able to catch up.
- [41:00]
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah, I just think it's amazing. Like they're literally organic movements, people with their children, no data center, because again, everyone can feel this encroachment in their lives, especially if you have a child. So I there's all these viral threads that are going around now about Spotify. For example, someone was like, you know, I'm so careful, I don't allow video. And then what ended up happening is I gave my kids access to my Spotify account, but now Spotify is including music videos and it was like a workaround. And he's like, now I have to take Spotify away from. It's like at Every level. You have parents who are bombarded, doing everything they possibly can, having to pay attention to, like, every facet of modern life. More recently, you know how they would give out Chromebooks or computers. You have teachers or you have parents who are turning them in. They're like, I can't have my children on this. They're using it as a workaround, their screen time and all this. They're demanding that schools go back to paper because they're like, we have. We have to just get rid of all this technology. Nothing's good coming from. This is rotting my child's brain. And then you put the AI data center stuff into this, and then you have to look at the promise. What are we getting? More Claude agents that might, like, automate all of the jobs or more slop that children can watch on YouTube or YouTube shorts, more, you know, now there's all these new AI movies that people are competing for. Everyone's like, the bargain is not worth it. Higher electricity price, trying to take my job, which you increasingly brag about. And then general also, just like, propping up a sham stock market all at the same time. It just is ridiculous. On top of corrupting a local community. Energy usage, power bills, it's all about control. And, yeah, the most conservative impulse of all time is to, like, the famous line is like, stand, thwart history and yell stop. And like, that's how a lot of people feel, right?
- [42:46]
Krystal Ball
I feel that way right now. I feel that way because, listen, I, you know, I think the technology is cool. Like, I've been playing around with quad. I think the. The advances over the past year, the more I dig into it, the more I realize is genuinely extraordinary. You know, the things you're able to feed in the hallucinations have been diminished. The level, the ability. This part I haven't been able to figure out yet. But you hear people who are not technical, people who are able to just go and create an app, and it doesn't even take very long. And Claude spins it out in a few minutes. This is astonishing. And if the ownership was done correctly and the democratic control was done correctly, you can imagine a society that was not structured like ours, where this would just be beneficial, where it would just be exciting and we would figure out how to manage the resources. I mean, the other risk that some of the community members in Indiana were talking about is they're like. They're like. We looked into this, and there are a lot of models coming out of China that are much less resource intensive. So you're going to build all of these data centers out, are they even going to be needed in the future as these things become more and more efficient? So even that, you know, and then we're left with this big, hulking, you know, decaying hut in our community, and what does that ultimately look like? So in any case, we would need to have massive democratic input on the resource usage, on the capital expenditure, on how this is deployed, on how it is used, how the fruits of this alleged productivity gains are going to be distributed. That's the essential question, in my view. But obviously we don't have any of that, which is why, again, I think these fights against data centers on a local basis like that is the most likely place where you can have any sort of pushback, any sort of slowdown in terms of this development. Because in terms of, you know, from this administration's perspective, it's just off to the races. And, you know, the dystopian parts of this are becoming. Are increasingly here. Let's put G3 up on the screen. We covered this before. There's this fight between Anthropic and the Pentagon where they're threatening to cut off Anthropic in what is being described here as an AI safeguards dispute. And the TLDR is that the Anthropic people got concerned about the way that Claude was used in the Venezuela raid. Now they have some sort of partnership with Palantir. And Claude Anthropics products are generally more advanced in terms of government applications. So they have a big contract with the Pentagon, and they're saying to the Pentagon, look, we have two red lines. Number one, we don't want Claude to be used in any sort of, like, autonomous killer robots. And number two, we don't want it to be used for mass surveillance against American people. Now, I'm not sure why you have this tie up with Palantir if you have these concerns, but that's where they're trying to draw a line. The other AI companies do not have such moral red lines. And I don't want to give Anthropic too much credit here because I think it's incredibly, incredibly naive to think that you would be able to hold the line on these things. And you, as individual, like business owner or capitalist, are gonna be able to tell the Department of War and the United States government how your technology gets deployed. I think that was a very fanciful notion. But you can see how already the Pentagon's like, no, we're not gonna listen to you. Not only are we not gonna abide by your little moral red lines against killer robots and mass surveillance. But we are going to punish any company that does work with you because you have the audacity to even try to put any sort of red line on how your technology can be deployed. So there was Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, he was talking about a year ago saying that one of the things that all the AI CEOs were basically in agreement with is if this starts getting deployed in killer robots, they would pull the plug. But what you realize is you don't actually have the ability to pull the plug even if you wanted to. And already they've all abandoned that and like eh, well maybe killer robots are okay, maybe it's fine, no, no big deal, we can work around it. But even if they did hold to their moral standards, once that technology gets out, once the Pentagon has access to it, you're so cute to think that you're going to be the one in charge to be able to pull the plug on it.
- [47:06]
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah, it's always been like that is that once you unleash the technology, once people get normalized so it can get open source, they can work from it, the government can use however they want. This is the big danger in all of this for defense technology. And ultimately like maybe you know, it was never really solvable. Like once the tech exists it will always be used for the lowest common denominator. Like there's just no really way around it. It's basically always been that way. War often like blood is the only thing that moves the wheels of history. Let's put G4 up there on the screen just to give an example here. SpaceX is now going to compete in the contest for autonomous drone technology. And this is the next frontier, you know, drone swarms and competition for AI targeting. And then who will build the targeting software? And there's always one company that's going to be willing to play ball and to make money. So there's really no way around this. And also there's a competitor aspect. China has been heavily invested in drones and drone swarms and it's often been like one of the dangers, you know, for some of these bigger US carriers and US Navy destroyers or US Navy US Navy vessels that one of the pain points that they see. And so then the US says well now we need to create our own drone technology, our own counter drone technology. This is the danger this in this entire thing. And we know this, it will be used to some effect. They already use Claude with Venezuela. We may be going to a major War with Iran. There's going to be a ton of AI whenever it comes to.
- [48:37]
Krystal Ball
And we know how it was deployed in Gaza, in Palestine, and the way it is deployed also in the West Bank. In a lot of ways, Gaza is the testing ground for mass surveillance. Palantir, Microsoft, a bunch of these companies been caught involved in the Gaza genocide. And so that has been the testing ground. I think that helped to accelerate the incredibly dystopian place that we're in. The last thing I'll say was Novara Media had a good piece on this and they were saying when and when scientists were building the, you know, were developing nuclear weapons, like, you know, Oppenheimer, they were not so foolish as to think that they, as the developers and creators of this technology, were then gonna get to tell the government how it gets deployed.
- [49:19]
Saagar Enjeti
Well, actually Oppenheimer was foolish enough to think that, but a lot of the
- [49:22]
Krystal Ball
other people, but I mean, I think he knew at the end of the day, the President of the United States is gonna say how this is used, not me. Right? And so he made his case. But I don't think they thought that like, oh, we're gonna get to control how this, how and when. Now many of them organized afterwards to try to check nuclear proliferation and try to check the use and spread in advance of this technology. But there was a much clearer understanding of like, no, we're developing this for the US Government and they're gonna get to have the say over what comes. And because we've lived in this free market capitalist sort of like delusion where government just cedes control to capitalists into markets, I think these guys did delude themselves into thinking like, oh, we're going to get to figure out how this is deployed. And it's like, it doesn't work that way. So when you did your tie up with the Pentagon and now you want to set a moral red line, and I think they did have that red line from the beginning. You're a fool if you think that they're going to abide by what you want. They see themselves as in this race with China and they're going to win it all cost, at all costs.
- [50:31]
Saagar Enjeti
And that's, look, war with Iran, who knows how it's going to go? Could spiral. It could go into this, go into that. Next thing you know, these things are going to get nationalized. The Defense Production act, your data centers and all that will be seized and be put to for. I mean that can happen like this, you know, in, in wartime. Go read a book about World War II. Look how quickly you went from private industry to literally the War Production Board managing what the Ford factory is pumping. What, you think they're not going to do that With AI and with everything else if things get truly existential? The law's already on the books. They have monarchical powers if they want to. So, yes, you're right. This is deeply naive. All right, thank you guys so much for watching. We appreciate it. Please support us if you can. If not, Friday show tomorrow. See you all then.
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