← Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar
Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar
5/29/25: Court Halts Trump Tariffs, Norm Wrecks Israel Historian, AI Dire Warning, Tate Bros & MORE!
01:50:33
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- [00:00]
Ryan Grim
This is an I Heart podcast.
- [00:05]
Krystal Ball
I've never felt like this before. It's like, you just get me. I feel like my true self with you.
- [00:12]
Hope Woodard
Does that sound crazy?
- [00:14]
Krystal Ball
And it doesn't hurt that you're gorgeous. Okay, that's it.
- [00:19]
Ryan Grim
I'm taking you home with me.
- [00:22]
Krystal Ball
I mean, you can't find shoes this good just anywhere. Find a shoe for every you from brands you love, like Birkenstock, Nike, Adidas, and more at your DSW or dsw dot com.
- [00:35]
Hope Woodard
Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. I'm also the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. You might hear that term and think it's about celibacy, but to me, voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's flexible, it's customizable, and it's a personal process.
- [01:03]
Krystal Ball
Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now.
- [01:07]
Hope Woodard
Let me hear it. Listen to voiceover on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [01:18]
Ryan Grim
I've seen a lot of stuff over 30 years, you know, some very despicable crime and things that are kind of tough to wrap your head around. And this ranks right up there in the pantheon of Rhode island fraudsters.
- [01:32]
Krystal Ball
I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right? And I maximized that while I was lying. Listen to Deep Cover the Truth About.
- [01:40]
Ryan Grim
Sarah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, guys. Sager and Krystal here.
- [01:49]
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.
- [01:56]
Ryan Grim
This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else.
- [02:02]
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.
- [02:13]
Ryan Grim
We need your help to build the future of independent news media, and we hope to see you@breakingpoints.com.
- [02:21]
Krystal Ball
Good morning, everybody. Happy Thursday. Ryan Grimm, Pleasure to see you, sir.
- [02:24]
Ryan Grim
Good to see you. I'll be channeling Sagar today, so look for those takes from over on this side.
- [02:29]
Krystal Ball
Excellent. Looking forward to that. We've got a lot to do. This was one of those shows. We had it all planned out 3pm we did our call. We thought we were set. And then things kept things transforming. Things keep happening.
- [02:40]
Ryan Grim
News, new news, Trump's agenda. We need a night show. I guess.
- [02:44]
Krystal Ball
I guess so. Or something. Trump's agenda has been significantly curtailed just in the past day by a series of court decisions. In particular, we have a court saying, hey, you cannot just across the board use this power to levy tariffs. So the tariff agenda. We have Elon officially out making his announcement on Twitter saying, I've enjoyed my time as special government employee. We have another court that said the law that has been used to detain Mahmoud Khalil and other students for speech with no allegations of criminality, that that law itself is unconstitutional. We had another significant ruling with regard to Ksenia Petrova.
- [03:23]
Ryan Grim
This Harvard Medical Research. They, they said she had embryo samples in her carry on when she came from, like, England over here to the US and they just locked her up and are still holding her in detention. But the judge said this is illegal. And ISIS like, well, we're still gonna keep her. So now. Now it's a fight standoff. Yeah.
- [03:43]
Krystal Ball
Yeah. So we've got huge movement on economics, on Doge, on immigration. We also have a bunch of updates for you with regard to Israel. Ryan's all over this in dropsite and Jeremy Scahill Witkoff is saying that they're on of a potential deal. Of course, we've heard some things before, so there's always reason for skepticism, but there are some reasons to believe maybe this time it's different. Also have some fun clips for you from Piers Morgan, Norm Finkelstein versus Benny Morris that I thought you would enjoy. We've got also updates with regard to the Iran negotiations. We've got a major developer of AI saying that it is going to be a bloodbath for white collar workers. And I'm not talking a decade now. He's talking like, like a year from now, like it's already happening. And we've got new criminal charges against the Tate brothers in the uk so bunch of things to talk through.
- [04:31]
Ryan Grim
Yes, indeed.
- [04:32]
Krystal Ball
All right, let's get to.
- [04:33]
Ryan Grim
Indeed we do. That's the line, right.
- [04:35]
Krystal Ball
There we go. Yeah, I like that. We have an amazing show for you today. Indeed we do. Okay, let's get to the tariffs and the latest. So before the whole tariff regime was struck down, there was an interesting dynamic playing out with Trump where some reporters published. Was it Axios that published this, that traders were talking about the quote unquote, taco trade, which I know you and Emily referred to. Which stands for Trump always chickens out. So some foolish reporter made the mistake of asking him about this doing. Man, tempting fate, like, trying. Like. You're not supposed to tell him. That's what we're saying about him in the Oval Office. Let's go ahead and take a listen to how Trump responded to that. Mr. President, Wall street analysts have coined a new term called the taco trade. They're saying, Trump always chickens out on your tariff threats and that's why markets are higher. This.
- [05:23]
Hope Woodard
What's your response to that?
- [05:24]
Ryan Grim
I kick out. Chicken out. Oh, isn't that chicken out? I've never heard that. You mean because I reduced China from 145% that I set down to 100 and then down to another number, and I said, you have to open up your whole country. And. Because I gave the European Union a 50% tax. But I knew that. But don't ever say what you said. That's a nasty question.
- [05:52]
Krystal Ball
Nasty question. And Ryan, just on the basis of that and people being like, oh, shit, now he's Gonna put like 600% tariffs on China or whatever, the market started to plummet. We could put a 2 up on the screen. The futures fell immediately after this. Just sort of like psychologizing this president and that. He wouldn't wanna look weak and like a chicken. And he'd have to do something outrageous to prove all the haters and doubters wrong. So that's where we were before the court decision came down.
- [06:19]
Ryan Grim
Yeah. I'm all for transparency. I want journalists to press our leaders on the issues of the day. But couldn't we have let this one go?
- [06:30]
Krystal Ball
Do we really need to dare him to destroy the world economy? Do we really need to do that?
- [06:34]
Ryan Grim
Imagine somebody coming in saying, israel says, you're too much of a chicken to nuke Iran.
- [06:39]
Krystal Ball
Oh, my God.
- [06:40]
Ryan Grim
So they say you won't do it. He's who said that. Like Marty McFly over here. World War Three. So that he can. He just can't handle being called a chicken. So. Yes. So basically the courts had to step in.
- [06:52]
Krystal Ball
Yeah. Right. Hours later, we get this decision. Hold the phone.
- [06:56]
Ryan Grim
The whole world was so panicked. They're like, what can we do about this? And so we can put up a 3. The International Court of Trade, which, Iowa hadn't even been following this case, but a company sued, saying, look, the authority under which Trump is laying down all of these tariffs is way outside what Congress has delegated to the president. And I feel guilty here for not kind of going back and reading some of these Tariff laws. Although oftentimes I go back and read laws and I'm like, what they're doing now does not comply with this law. And it's like, okay, so what?
- [07:31]
Krystal Ball
Right.
- [07:31]
Ryan Grim
Thanks. Thanks, Spencer. Like, who cares, right? It's about power. So you can identify this and it still doesn't matter. This company identified it and took it to a judge who looked at it and was like, yeah, this is true. You can. So we all understand that the president has the unilateral authority to move tariffs because Congress has delegated that power to him. But Congress did it in a very specific way for a national emergency, for when particular industries need help. And you can't have Congress coming in and moving tariffs by 5% on the aluminum industry every time, on every country. But they never delegated the power to move tariffs on every country all at once.
- [08:18]
Krystal Ball
Right.
- [08:20]
Ryan Grim
And the judge is like, no, yeah, you can't do this.
- [08:22]
Krystal Ball
Yeah, yeah, this was one. I really looked into it at the beginning, like right after Liberation Day, and I always felt that there was a good chance it would get struck down by the courts, because whereas obviously the Trump appointed judges and the Supreme Court, which is profoundly conservative on a lot of social and cultural issues, they're gonna be sympathetic to him. But these are many of them Chamber of Commerce type conservatives in the court system. And when you think about the basics of our Constitution, the power of the purse obviously rests with Congress. And so the idea that any president could just, with an executive order or with a tweet or whatever, completely upend our economic system, the global economic system, that always seemed, let's just say, far fetched.
- [09:06]
Ryan Grim
Yeah.
- [09:06]
Krystal Ball
And I read some legal analyses at the time that seemed to think that there was a good chance that it would be struck down. But like you, I hadn't been following the specifics of where the cases were and how they were working their way through. Now, he does have significant power still to levy tariffs. And some of the analysis I was reading yesterday is he's likely to shift to using the Section 232 tariffs. So, like the sectoral tariffs, where you can say effectively, like, oh, this particular industry is really important for national defense. So, like, the steel tariffs. Right. Are probably on really solid ground with regard to the section 232 powers. This is a national defense. There's a national security threat involved here. We're going to put these sectoral tariffs on this one particular industry. But in terms of saying, hey, entire globe, including islands with just penguins on it, this is what we're doing. That piece seems to be struck down. Now, the other question with the Trump administration, as always, is are they gonna listen? Right. I'm curious your thoughts on this, and I saw you tweeting about this. I suspect because Trump has already backed off of the most maximalist version of his trade war, I suspect they may actually comply broadly with this ruling that comes against them. And I'm sure they're gonna appeal as well. And so there's gonna be a process that plays out, et cetera. But I do think that this may be the beginning of the end of the more maximalist direction for his trade war. And in addition, even before the appeal goes through and all those things happen, like if you're the EU or you're Japan or you're any other country and you're negotiating on these trade deals, suddenly you have a lot more leverage because you know that the courts are already saying this isn't constitutional. So. So you are much less likely to bend to whatever it is his desires are giving them Starlink and zero percent tariffs or whatever, and a development deal for his sons or whatever. The contours of that are you are much likely to bend on those provisions than you were before because you feel like, okay, ultimately the courts are probably gonna say, you can't do this anyway.
- [11:11]
Ryan Grim
Yeah. And if you're one of the kind of anti tariff people in the White House, you're gonna use this moment to say, look, let's ease off a little bit. Like, we're not allowed to do this. Take the win. Now you're not chickening out, right? Like, you were totally willing to do this, but now you can say, hey, I would have done it because tariffs worked for him as a political messaging device to show that he cares about the American worker.
- [11:37]
Krystal Ball
You mean like in the campaign?
- [11:38]
Ryan Grim
During the campaign, yes. So it was a stand in for, I'm going to fight for you. They don't work so well when he lays them out so incompetently and insanely. And then the American workers are gonna stop. There's all kinds of layoffs already because of them. So this would allow him to have the rhetorical win. I fought for you.
- [11:57]
Krystal Ball
Yes.
- [11:58]
Ryan Grim
And I want to fight for you and I'm gonna continue fighting for you, but I'm also not gonna. But you're then not gonna materially destroy your workers lives by haphazardly and recklessly going forward with you. So yeah, maybe they just, maybe they just look at this and take the win.
- [12:14]
Krystal Ball
Well, and it's interesting too, because if you put up a four Weigel was pointing out that Trump's approval rating has already recovered from the fallout of Liberation Day. I don't think there's any doubt, if you look critically at the polling, that the tariff regime was the most unpopular thing that he's done. It is the thing that has triggered the most movement away from him. But as he has sort of walked back from the original Liberation the chart, the insane chart, and rolled back a significant chunk of the China tariffs. And I never want to understate this because, or overstate this because 30% on China was still like a really significant tariff and a really major reordering, 10% tariffs across the board is still really major reordering. But as he backed away from that most maximalist position, his poll numbers returned. They're not great. He's still underwater, but they returned to kind of like where the typical Trump approval rating is. And now you have the court stepping in on this one, potentially, if he decides to take the out, saving him from the most unpopular part of his agenda, the court stepping in on the kidnapping of college students who dared to protest or write an op ed or whatever over Palestine Court stepping in and saying, that's unconstitutional. You can't do that. You have Elon Musk. I think Doge ended up remarkably, because the project of, hey, let's cut the government and make it more efficient is a broadly popular project, but because it was executed in such a horrific, disastrous, catastrophic way, and Elon himself is so personally unpopular, the fact that he is now officially out of the administration, going back to his companies, even criticizing Trump, we'll show you that in the B block on the Big beautiful bill and some other things as well. That also is sort of axing from his taking a chainsaw, if you will, from his administration, one of the most unpopular pieces. But all that being said, they are still full steam ahead with the Big beautiful bill, which is a gigantic giveaway to the top at the expense of millions of Americans, healthcare, food stamps, et cetera. So now that's the next piece that is gonna be profoundly unpopular. And he was never more unpopular in his first term prior to January 6th, which is really after his term. He was never more unpopular than when he passed the original Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. That was the giant giveaway to rich people.
- [14:31]
Ryan Grim
Yeah. And when we talked yesterday about the way that the energy portion of this big beautiful bill that's going through.
- [14:38]
Krystal Ball
Yeah, that was a good segment.
- [14:39]
Ryan Grim
It's crazy. It doesn't just go after clean energy.
- [14:43]
Krystal Ball
Right.
- [14:43]
Ryan Grim
Like his AI buddies are saying, we need A doubling and tripling of energy so that we can, you know, make these, you know, fake videos. And so we.
- [14:52]
Krystal Ball
So we can steal your jobs.
- [14:53]
Ryan Grim
So we can steal your jobs. So we need three times the energy he's taking a sledgehammer to. Not just clean energy, but also the transmissions that you need to, you know, if you can actually expand energy production so you can transmit it to where it needs to go, to the production of natural gas turbines. It's like all of the things that you would need to actually, even if you wanted to make it dirty, like getting rid of these credits, because they were written in a way that they would boost clean energy, but they were fairly neutral so that if other energy sources wanted to use them, they'd be able to use them in a way that Biden is able to get the buy in from the whole energy industry. And then you're going to take what we have 28 trillion or so in debt circulating right now with these Treasuries. You just had this, you know, almost failed auction where you had to pay like more than, you know, something like 50 basis points higher than they thought.
- [15:49]
Krystal Ball
Yeah.
- [15:49]
Ryan Grim
And then they're going to layer on another 7 trillion. Like Stephen Miller's out there arguing it's unfair. CBO is a bunch of communists in the way that they're saying that we're going to add 7.5 trillion to the deficit. Really, it should only be 3 or 4 trillion. The market is going to price in 7 trillion. Yeah, like the communists on Wall Street. And so then it's going to be much harder to raise money. And then you're going to have the Fed buying up a bunch of the debt that's out there already circulating, which then probably pushes up stocks again for a while, which then drives inflation. And then, so I don't see Wall street understands that this is a house of cards now and they're just pouring more gasoline on it.
- [16:41]
Krystal Ball
I mean, it's so bad that even Wall street is like, maybe this tax cut is. Maybe it's a little much.
- [16:48]
Ryan Grim
You're offering Wall street.
- [16:49]
Krystal Ball
Maybe it's a little much.
- [16:50]
Ryan Grim
If you're offering Wall Street $7 trillion and they're like, I don't know about this, then you might wanna rethink what you're doing.
- [16:57]
Krystal Ball
I mean, of course what they really want is like, hey, let's just get rid of Medicare and Medicaid altogether. That's fund our tax cuts.
- [17:03]
Ryan Grim
That's what they really want, more cuts.
- [17:05]
Krystal Ball
Yeah, and I saw you made the point in the energy segment Yesterday of, like, well, maybe I should be happy because I don't actually want this AI stuff to go forward. And, you know, same thing with the banning of, you know, all kinds of foreign students, Chinese nationals in particular, who are incredibly influential in terms of AI development in this country. I mean, Arnaud was tweeting about something like 38% of top AI talent in this country are Chinese nationals. Again, maybe we should be cheering for this, because I'm terrified about where this AI race is ultimately going to. But to your point, we know if there is some trade off in terms of energy and who's going to get it, we know it's going to be like the tech billionaires, so that they can play with their AI toys and make sure that they can do all their human layoffs that they, you know, that they desire.
- [17:50]
Ryan Grim
Yeah. And the part that'll, like, hurt all of us individually is that the medical schools and nursing schools are, you know, have a significant portion of foreign students, yet you walk into any hospital in this country, particularly rural hospitals.
- [18:03]
Krystal Ball
Yeah, that's right.
- [18:03]
Ryan Grim
But also urban ones.
- [18:04]
Krystal Ball
That's right.
- [18:05]
Ryan Grim
And look around.
- [18:05]
Krystal Ball
That's right.
- [18:06]
Ryan Grim
And tell me how many people you find in there who were born here in the United States. Now, take all of those people out and then press the button for help from the nurse or from the doctor and see what happens. This is real stuff. Somebody needs to do these jobs. And I'm not talking about getting your house cleaned, getting a heart transplant.
- [18:30]
Krystal Ball
Right, right. No, that's. That is exactly right. That is exactly right. And I mean, there's a sense that they just don't want to compete, have to compete with the world. It's like affirmative action for mediocre white.
- [18:40]
Ryan Grim
Kids, which, you know, go ahead, go to medical school. We're not stopping you.
- [18:43]
Krystal Ball
Yeah, true. Very true. Let's go ahead and put this next piece up on the screen, just as a sign of where we kind of are economically, because I think it's important to keep in mind that even though. All right, the court is saying you can't do the Liberation Day thing, there's still gonna be sectoral terrorists. You should get Jeff Stein on next week to talk about what that might ultimately look like, because he's been kind of saying, hey, guys, this is still coming. Take a look at what's going on here. So we'll get him on to talk about that. But even as we maybe are saved from the most insane of the Trump trade policy, there's a lot of damage that's been done in the meantime. In terms of consumer confidence, in terms of GDP growth, in terms of potential, like the expectation for joblessness, the expectation for inflation. And you are starting to see some metrics like this pile up where serious delinquencies are significantly rising in America in every category. Mortgage delinquencies, HELOCs, auto loans, credit cards, student loans, other student loans are way up. Look at that, Ryan, 7.21%. And so, you know, there are some warning signs about how people are doing even as we step back from the, you know, the most insane parts of the trade war. So there's a good chance here that there's already, you know, quite substantial and unnecessary damage that is done to the economy in ways that hurt real people. Not to mention the, you know, the AI reckoning that I do think is coming quite quickly.
- [20:11]
Ryan Grim
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- [23:07]
Ryan Grim
You had flagged it. Nvidia is announcing earnings today and I think unsurprisingly, had like a record quarter.
- [23:16]
Krystal Ball
Yeah.
- [23:17]
Ryan Grim
Because people were just basically bum rushing the place.
- [23:22]
Krystal Ball
Yeah.
- [23:22]
Ryan Grim
Trying to get as much as they possibly can before like the world ends. Like that was the kind of attitude vibe a lot of buyers. And so, yeah, we could put up a six here. If you hold that stock, that's the direction you want to see that line going.
- [23:41]
Krystal Ball
And this is even with the export bans to China and the controls that were put on. But I think you're right that the dynamic is everyone else around the world being like, all right, we got to get as many of these chips as we possibly can get our hands on.
- [23:53]
Ryan Grim
Right. This company based in Taiwan, which is just a hilarious US series of decisions to put the essentials for its industrial production on an island very close to China, which. Which we acknowledge that China controls. Yeah, they don't really. But one China policy from the US means we recognize it as part of China.
- [24:19]
Krystal Ball
Yeah. Yeah, that's right.
- [24:21]
Ryan Grim
Let's see how that works out.
- [24:22]
Krystal Ball
It's brilliant strategic planning from our bold strategy. Let's get to this next Part because this is just, you know, about the Trump administration, his. Some of his more maximalist goals being really rolled back. Just yesterday, the law, as I said before, that was used to justify the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, who, just as a reminder, Columbia student, never accused of any criminal behavior. No one has accused him of any sort of criminal.
- [24:48]
Ryan Grim
Or even of being mean, right?
- [24:50]
Krystal Ball
Or even of being mean or rude. They could. And, you know, at this point, if he had said something bad, we wouldn't know about it. They dug up what, some Instagram post of some group that he's tangentially involved with that was the best they had on this guy. Okay.
- [25:04]
Ryan Grim
And it was a quote. And even it was a quote from some other author, Right? It was like, okay, all that had nothing to do with him. All right, this is what you got.
- [25:11]
Krystal Ball
Right? Exactly. And so in any case, they were using this particular law that, interestingly enough, Trump's sister, who is a judge, had previously said in the 90s, you know, this law is probably unconstitutional because it gives too much power to the executive to just say, for example, hey, we don't like your speech. Now we're arresting you and deporting you. And, you know, we're claiming that it's because of national security reasons or, you know, is a threat to our foreign affairs. Preposterous. So we have another judge who put an A7 up on the screen. Have another judge now who came in federal New Jersey court ruling that those foreign policy grounds under which Mahmoud Khalil was detained are likely unconstitutional. Court rules that Khalil is likely to succeed on the merits of his claim that the Trump administration's foreign policy charge is unconstitutionally vague. This would have been implications not just for Mahmoud Khalil, but this same law has been the justification, for example, with Ramessa Ozturk, who, you know, just wrote an op ed. So it was clearly just speech. And they use the same justification here. There may be. And there Mohsa Madawi also, they use this same justification. There may be other students that we're not aware of where, you know, we haven't had public reporting on it. And so the fact that you've got a court saying, listen, they're likely to find that this is just not constitutional at all is a significant blow to their ability to just decide. Any random student is someone they don't like who said something that they aren't comfortable with or for whatever reason, want to snatch up and arrest and deport. So really significant development here with this one.
- [26:48]
Ryan Grim
Yeah. And the Argument from Rubio and from the administration is that it is a privilege to come here and that the US does not have to allow people to come here. And if they're going to. And if they would have known ahead of time that they were going to protest against Israel, they wouldn't have been granted the visa in the first place. And so therefore they're rescinding it. And then after they rescind it, they say you're here illegally and they put you in jail, which is the case of the Harvard researcher who's locked up right now. And so that's the argument. The counterargument is that the First Amendment applies to every. Everybody in the country.
- [27:26]
Krystal Ball
Right.
- [27:27]
Ryan Grim
If they want to do some vetting and look for anybody who has been critical of Israel and reject them for student visas, they could probably get away with that because. Primarily because the person getting rejected wouldn't know why they got rejected. Right. It's like they would just say, you're not getting a visa.
- [27:48]
Krystal Ball
Right.
- [27:49]
Ryan Grim
But to go around the First.
- [27:50]
Krystal Ball
The First Amendment applies to anyone who is here. So if you're not here yet, then, yes, you can probably block whoever you want from coming.
- [28:00]
Ryan Grim
Is applying for this job that she said she wants to. She'll vet all of these.
- [28:04]
Krystal Ball
Yeah. She said it's like her dream job to be in charge of sifting through the social media accounts of young people who want to study in those countries.
- [28:10]
Ryan Grim
Although with AI it would be an increasingly accomplishable surveillance task.
- [28:14]
Krystal Ball
Absolutely.
- [28:15]
Ryan Grim
If you can link the accounts to the people, then you can just. You should be able to eventually be able to do that kind of analysis.
- [28:23]
Krystal Ball
Yeah.
- [28:24]
Ryan Grim
And you would just get some sentiment analysis from a machine that says, ah, this person looks, looks a little bit too sympathetic to children.
- [28:31]
Krystal Ball
It's just incredible.
- [28:32]
Ryan Grim
They cannot come to our.
- [28:33]
Krystal Ball
Oh, they retweeted, Ms. Rachel can't have this person.
- [28:36]
Ryan Grim
From the ages of 2 to 5, they watched Ms. Rachel religiously.
- [28:40]
Krystal Ball
Forget it. Yeah, forget it. This person cannot possibly be in this country. And then just go over one more time, Ryan, the details with the Russian scientists, because this is another significant one in terms of, you know, undercutting some of the maximal. Same. So the Trump admin that have been unpopular.
- [28:54]
Ryan Grim
Yeah, this is so Ksenia Petrova, who's a. She's from Russia, but she's a researcher at Harvard Medical School. 31 years old, said to be just utterly brilliant. And researchers at this age, scientists at this age are doing their best work, like. So she's been locked up for months now.
- [29:13]
Krystal Ball
Wow.
- [29:14]
Ryan Grim
These. You Know, whenever you see somebody who won a Nobel, like, it's usually for work when they were, like, 27 years old. Like, whatever it is about the scientific brain, like, it really pops off when it first starts engaging with all of the history that's come before it, and then that you have your freshest ideas, and they'll say in, like, mathematics and physics and all these. All these other disciplines that by the time you're, like, 35, you're teaching, you're smart, over the hill, but your brain is just not working in the way that's going to produce no bell like breakthroughs. And so Petrova has developed this way of seeing cancer cells that couldn't have been seen before. And when my wife was at an appointment, the oncologist made an interesting point where we're saying, oh, what's the scan show? What's this show? And they said, you know, we can only see what we can see, and we have imaging techniques, you know, a variety of different imaging techniques to try to see more. But beyond that, we're still. It's the human eye, and then it's, you know, advanced through these different techniques. And so there's a lot that we currently can't see. So is the body cancer free? We think so, but we literally can't see anything. I'd never thought about that before because I just think, see all these fancy machines that cost thousands of dollars to use?
- [30:39]
Krystal Ball
Yeah.
- [30:40]
Ryan Grim
You're like, they see everything right down to the cell.
- [30:42]
Krystal Ball
Right. You got to be able to see everything.
- [30:44]
Ryan Grim
If a metal detector can find the ring on the beach, this CAT scan or MRI or PET scan, they can figure this out. And. No, that's not true. Like, we're still advancing. And so she has made some of the most significant advances in recent times to be able to see more. And according to her colleagues at Harvard, she wrote a lot of the code, and she's the only one that can read a lot of these images now, because it's in the very embryonic stage, ironically. And so instead of helping her colleagues with this kind of breakthrough technology, she's languishing in this Louisiana. Maybe she's been moved to Vermont by now. She's languishing behind bars. So what she did her. And this is acknowledged by all sides. Her boss, I think she was flying from London or Paris, said, hey, there's some embryonic frog cells. Like, can you take these back to the lab? So she took them back to the lab and did not declare them in court. A bunch of scientists said, these are Non living formaldehyde. It's like leather. Like they compared it to leather. Yes, these were living at one point. These are non living beings, non hazardous, non toxic. Nothing like if you brought a leather purse, you'd have brought the same amount of biological material into the country for not declaring it. Usually it's like a $50 fine or something.
- [32:05]
Krystal Ball
Right.
- [32:06]
Ryan Grim
The woman who the Customs and Border Patrol agent immediately rescinded her visa and then said, oh, now you're here without a visa, so I'm putting you into. Putting you in detention. And she had been a critic of Putin. So she's like, I cannot go. You cannot send me on a plane back to Russia. Like, that will be. I've been a public critic of Putin. That'll be rather dangerous for me. So, like, okay, well then you're in asylum proceedings now. And they sent her off and she's been behind bars ever since. So the judge ruled that this is likely illegal. He didn't say it is definitely illegal, but he's saying it's likely illegal because they had no basis for any of it. Like, this is completely ridiculous. It's basically the judge's ruling. ICE is saying, well, we're still going to hold her because what the Trump administration did, and it's amazing the resources that they're throwing at this case. They realized that what she did was extremely minor and so it was going to get thrown out. So they layered on top of the immigration charges a federal charge of like trafficking.
- [33:15]
Krystal Ball
Oh, my God.
- [33:16]
Ryan Grim
In embryonic cells or whatever. That's like, dude.
- [33:19]
Krystal Ball
And what do you think is the point? Like, is it just to make an example of this lady? Is that like, what is the point?
- [33:24]
Ryan Grim
Yeah, yeah, I think it is.
- [33:26]
Krystal Ball
Because it's not like she was out there posting Free Palestine.
- [33:28]
Ryan Grim
No, not at all.
- [33:29]
Krystal Ball
She wasn't spreading anti Semitism with her, you know, Free Palestine and Ms. Rachel watching.
- [33:34]
Ryan Grim
And she's even aligned with US foreign policy, like anti Putin.
- [33:38]
Krystal Ball
Well, maybe that some days that's aligned. Some days.
- [33:41]
Ryan Grim
That's true, that's true, that's true.
- [33:44]
Krystal Ball
You know, I shared this chart, I don't know if you had a chance to take a look at it, of Nobel laureates by country and this graph from John Bruner. And prior to basically 1940, Germany was really the dominant country in terms of scientific developments as measured by Nobel laureates. And then the US does not really start to pop off as right before 1940 as a scientific power.
- [34:10]
Ryan Grim
Germany, Germany. What Germany do around then.
- [34:12]
Krystal Ball
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Until scientists, top scientists are started Fleeing Germany, of course, we also imported some of the Nazis after the fact as well.
- [34:20]
Ryan Grim
We recruited them. Yeah.
- [34:22]
Krystal Ball
But in any case, that persecution and the fleeing of top minds from Europe and from Germany specifically was a major part of what led to our scientific dominance. That and I think also the New Deal and the World War II investments. And there was, you know, my dad is a physicist and you know, there was like a patriotic aspiration around science and scientific development that he and a whole, his whole cohort was sort of like, you know, a part of. But in any case, that's what really helps to kick off U.S. scientific dominance. And this administrator, I mean, they truly.
- [35:00]
Ryan Grim
Are, and we've held it since then.
- [35:01]
Krystal Ball
If you look at the cuts to science across the board, the attacks on foreign students, I mean, if you are a foreign student, if you're a student around the world now, considering where you're going to apply to college in the fall, there are plenty of good choices that are outside of the United States of America. And I have to think that many of them are going to avail themselves of those choices rather than put themselves at the risk of this incredibly like, capricious, cruel insanity that they're watching unfold here. Why wouldn't you?
- [35:28]
Ryan Grim
Yeah. And so people just won't come here.
- [35:31]
Krystal Ball
Yeah. Yeah, that's right. That's exactly right.
- [35:34]
Unknown
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- [36:36]
Hope Woodard
Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator and seeker of male validation. To most people I'm the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. Voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal. And at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other.
- [37:23]
Krystal Ball
It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being neglected together.
- [37:32]
Hope Woodard
How we love our family.
- [37:33]
Ryan Grim
I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the.
- [37:36]
Hope Woodard
Price is too high. And how we love ourselves.
- [37:39]
Krystal Ball
Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now.
- [37:43]
Hope Woodard
Let me hear it. Listen to voiceover on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [37:53]
Ryan Grim
She was a decorated veteran, a Marine.
- [37:56]
Krystal Ball
Who saved her comrades, a hero.
- [37:59]
Unknown
She was stoic, modest, tough, someone who inspired people. Everyone thought they knew her until they didn't.
- [38:11]
Ryan Grim
I remember sitting on her couch and asking her, is this real?
- [38:15]
Hope Woodard
Is this real?
- [38:15]
Ryan Grim
Is this real? Is this real? I just couldn't wrap my head around what kind of person would do that to another person that was getting treatment, that was, you know, dying.
- [38:27]
Krystal Ball
This is a story all about trust.
- [38:30]
Ryan Grim
And about a woman named Sarah Kavanaugh.
- [38:33]
Krystal Ball
I've always been told I'm a really good listener. Right. And I maximized that while I was lying. Listen to Deep Cover the Truth About.
- [38:43]
Ryan Grim
Sarah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts.
- [38:47]
Krystal Ball
Or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, let's move on to what's going on with Elon. So yesterday, he put out a post, and the White House confirmed his time as a special government employee. Boy, was this ever special. Has come to a close, and he's moving on, but he assures us the work of Doge is only going to become more and more important as things move forward. Okay, sure, whatever, buddy. But he had already. And you and Emily touched on this briefly, but we wanted to dig in more. He has started to be a little more openly critical of the Trump administration as he is being pushed out the door here, and as Doge has been proven to be, by their own metrics, a total incomplete failure. Yeah, total and complete failure. Now, I never thought that Doge was about really, like, cost cutting. And efficiency. And if the metric is Elon's, companies aren't going to be regulated anymore, it was a roaring success. But if the metric was actually cutting spending and increasing efficiency, you failed on both accounts. You went in the wrong direction on both accounts. So, in any case, Elon has come out now in this interview that I think is supposed to air this weekend in full, criticizing Trump's quote, unquote, big, beautiful bill because of the amount that it increases the budget deficit. Let's go ahead and take a listen to that.
- [40:08]
Ryan Grim
I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decrease it and undermines the work that the Doge team is doing. I actually thought that when this big, beautiful bill came along, I mean, like, everything he's done on Doge gets wiped out in the first year. I think. I think a bill can be. Can be, can be big or it can be beautiful, but I don't know if it could be both.
- [40:35]
Krystal Ball
My personal opinion and, you know, Ryan, I had found it interesting that the all in guys, we played some of this on Tuesday. The all in guys, except for David Sacks, who even he was like, well, it's the best we can do. It's not like he was out there singing the praises of this bill. I thought that was indicative of the tech. Right. That are aligned with Elon. Really souring on some aspects of this administration.
- [40:58]
Ryan Grim
Yeah, the tech guys want easy money. They want to go back to the days where they had zero percent interest rates. Those are their heady days. Like any company they wanted to launch, any idea they had they could get funded, throw it against the wall. Elon wants that as well as, and because of his mission to get to Mars like that, you know, that's his driving passion. That and like making sure that all these regulators who are investigating him are no longer investigating him. Because your point is a very important one. For all of its failures, he did succeed in gutting all of these elements of the agencies that were investigating all.
- [41:39]
Krystal Ball
Of his companies and even the ones that might credibly in the future investigate his companies. Like the cfpb.
- [41:45]
Ryan Grim
Yeah, yes, exactly. But his overriding goal is to get to Mars. And he knows that the only way you do that is by marshaling the resources of the richest country in the history of the world, the United States and the United States federal government. And so he wanted to get the finances of the federal government in order so that it was able to pursue this Mars shot project. And a $7 trillion tax cut doesn't get him Anywhere close to that.
- [42:19]
Krystal Ball
Right.
- [42:20]
Ryan Grim
Plus the failure on the Doge side. No tears for him because, you know, he had an, he had a real opportunity and he had, he has bipartisan or he had in the past bipartisan support. Democrats are the ones that buy all his cars. People recognize what he's done with SpaceX.
- [42:42]
Krystal Ball
And Obama was critical for Tesla and SpaceX, by the way.
- [42:46]
Ryan Grim
So if he had come in and spent a little bit of time getting to know an agency or the federal government overall and identified ways that you could improve them and make them more efficient, he would be at a 70% approval rating.
- [43:02]
Krystal Ball
Yeah.
- [43:02]
Ryan Grim
Because there are ways the government is inefficient.
- [43:05]
Krystal Ball
Yeah.
- [43:06]
Ryan Grim
There are things you can do. Federal workers would like nothing more than to make the federal government more efficient.
- [43:12]
Krystal Ball
Right.
- [43:12]
Ryan Grim
The key thing that he's identified now, and he says he's going to continue to work on it, is upgrading the software and the computer systems the government uses, which is boring, but which is actually a genuinely essential thing that this government needs to do. Like you go into these HHS or wherever, like it looks like you're walking into the 1990s, like it's, it's shocking what the IRS is using to try to do taxes.
- [43:36]
Krystal Ball
So when I was first down in college, I worked for a government contractor on government accounting systems. And my client that I worked with was the federal court system. And this was in the early 2000s, so we're not talking about the Stone Age here. Some of the federal courts were still tracking these complex joint and several relationships where you have hundreds of defendants and different levels of restitution. They were still tracking them with pen and paper on a ledger. And there would be like one person at the court. I'm thinking of Maine in particular. I'll never forget there was this one elderly lady who knew what it all meant. And if she died or retired, you were screwed. You would have no idea what these cases meant. No idea, because some of it was not even really trackable by pen. It was just in her head. And so I mean that was. And this was again, this was like 2005. So you know, 20 years ago now, but not the Stone Ages. And that's where you still were. And every court in the country had a different system. And so I am well aware of the ways in which the like government accounting and other systems are incredibly archaic, clunky, all of that. But I also do know from that experience too, you can't just come in as some like hotshot 20 year old hacker and think that you're gonna be able to just figure this out overnight with an AI bot or whatever because it is sort of held together with duct tape and glue. You have to know where that duct tape and glue is. And it's gonna be a complicated project to unwind. But I totally agree with you. Elon had the power because he owns Twitter and because he is this larger than life weird personality who can garner all this media attention if he picked one of these projects like the retirement records in the salt mine or whatever to automate and say, okay, this used to take a year, now it takes a day and it's done. And I think they could have had the capability then you could have built some trust and goodwill to expand out if you actually wanted to. If you're actually focused on cutting costs. We all know where the fad is. Is it the Pentagon and it's with Medicare fraudsters? Like, it's not hard to figure out. They did not find, to my knowledge. You tell me if I'm wrong. I don't think they found a single fraudulent payment. They found some programs they don't, like the transgenic mice or whatever. They found some things that they ideologically opposed.
- [45:53]
Ryan Grim
Right.
- [45:53]
Krystal Ball
I did not hear about a single instance of fraud that they were able to actually root out, which is astonishing.
- [46:01]
Ryan Grim
Right?
- [46:02]
Krystal Ball
It actually makes me think, oh, there must be less fraud in government than I, you know, than people sort of assume because they were not able to find a single solitary instance of it. But the other point is a really important one. You have to hold these two thoughts in your head. That doesn't mean it wasn't consequential. It will take years to rebuild in the same way that what they're doing to science and what they're doing to foreign students coming over, it will take generations to rebuild that trust. If it is even possible to do at this point. If those people don't just look to China and other places. It would take years of intentional rebuilding to bring back the Department of Education, usaid, the cfpb, the full functionality of Social Security Administration. There has been real damage done to these agencies and specifically to their ability to regulate companies like SpaceX, like Tesla and other giant businesses in this country and around the world. So the impact has been profound. Even as the actual results as advertised, were a total, complete, undeniable failure that even the right has admitted is a total incomplete failure. They had their cope around why and what happened and whatever, but they aren't even pretending that this was a success at this point.
- [47:20]
Ryan Grim
You can put up B3, he also did an interview with the Washington Post, which is. Which is worth a full read, where he says that Doge is just becoming the whipping boy for everything.
- [47:32]
Krystal Ball
I thought that was kind of the point of Doge, though.
- [47:34]
Ryan Grim
I mean, he acted like it. So, like something bad would happen anywhere and we would get blamed for it, even if we had nothing to do with it. He also expressed dismay over the reputational hit his companies took. People were burning Teslas. Why would you do that? That's really uncool.
- [47:49]
Krystal Ball
It reminds me of that meme, like, no, I said f your feelings. My feelings are precious, like a baby bird.
- [47:57]
Ryan Grim
Clearly he's not listening to us because we told him this right at the very beginning. For instance, we said, look, if you come in with a chainsaw, a literal chainsaw on stage, and start sending notices to air traffic controllers that they should retire early, which they did, in which they then letters at, oh, that was a mistake, right? But you do it with this vindictive joy that you're in here with a wrecking ball, a chainsaw, to destroy this place. What that does is anytime, and this is what we said immediately, anytime anything happens after that, it's going to be your fault. People are going to logically point back to you. Even if it wasn't your fault, even if this would have happened anyway, you broke it. Now you own it. And you. And you flamboyantly broke it, right? You broke it in this, like, circus, like way, drawing the entire attention of the world onto you, saying, look what I did, look what I did. And then when people are like, oh, why this stuff is all broken? You're like, well, why is everybody so angry at me? So mean, like, these Teslas are fine. Why are you attacking the Teslas, right?
- [49:09]
Krystal Ball
Why do you have this ill way? And that was the other part that was so predictable. Like, it's no mystery who the top customer of Tesla is going to be.
- [49:18]
Ryan Grim
Liberals.
- [49:18]
Krystal Ball
Liberals. Wealthy liberals in particular. Like, well off liberals. That is Tesla's customer base. And there is no one you are pissing off more in this country than like, well off liberals who might be consumers of your cars. And at the same time that Chinese EVs, you know, if you zoom out from beyond the United States, and we know the way he's meddled in politics in all kinds of countries around the world and is even less popular in other countries than he is here. Like in Europe, they have other options. The Chinese EVs, frankly, are kicking your ass at this point. So they've got other alternatives, which is why I think it's going to be very difficult for Tesla to reclaim its preeminent spot in the EV space because you have all of this toxicity around Elon, him out there doing his Roman salute and all of that meddling and backing up the AfD in Germany and, you know, getting involved in the UK in ways that were even too extreme for the far right party there as well. That stuff doesn't just go away. And so maybe if there were no other alternatives, but the EV market is developing rapidly and there are other alternatives now, so people don't have to associate themselves with your, you know, with your brand if they don't want to. We were. There was a Chris Soliza apparently had his Tesla to face. Don't laugh, Ryan.
- [50:36]
Ryan Grim
Somebody put a sticker on.
- [50:37]
Krystal Ball
Don't laugh. Is that what happened? Someone put a sticker on it?
- [50:40]
Ryan Grim
Yeah.
- [50:40]
Krystal Ball
What did it say? I didn't follow the detail.
- [50:41]
Ryan Grim
It said Elon Musk is a Nazi. It wasn't even a sticker. It was a piece of paper that was taped.
- [50:47]
Krystal Ball
Taped on.
- [50:47]
Ryan Grim
It's Scotch tape.
- [50:49]
Krystal Ball
So, okay, so he's gonna be okay. He'll be okay. But I mean, most people are not gonna be wanting to court that kind of attention, you know, and most people don't want their car to be some sort of like, weird political statement or for anyone even to potentially interpret it that way. The cybertruck is one of the biggest busts in, I think, automotive history. You know, it's wildly unfit. This is a big gamble because it is such a, like, unusual looking vehicle. We'll just put it that way nicely. I personally think it's unfamiliar.
- [51:16]
Ryan Grim
And they had plans to sell $400 million worth of them to the State Department for.
- [51:21]
Krystal Ball
You scuttled that right, you big old meanie. And in any case. So, yeah, this was all very predictable on the Elon front. Now there's another piece that came out in the Wall Street Journal which is also kind of interesting. This is also not surprising. In fact, I'm disappointed in myself. I didn't see this coming. But, you know, they announced this big AI deal in the uae. Put the Wall Street Journal piece up on the screen here, guys. And apparently, and this is, you know, with Open Air, which is Sam Altman's deal. Elon hates Sam. They started Open Air together. I mean, Elon is actually right in this dispute.
- [51:53]
Ryan Grim
Got Team Elon here.
- [51:54]
Krystal Ball
Yeah. Because the idea of OpenAI is going to be open source, it's going to be nonprofit. And then Altman was like, yeah, how about we take it closed source and for profit. That is basically the contours of what happened. I'm sure Sam would dispute that characterization.
- [52:08]
Ryan Grim
Not really.
- [52:09]
Krystal Ball
Basically what happened. So in any case, Elon tried behind the scenes to block Sam from getting this big AI deal in the Middle east or at least get in on it. Right, right, exactly. And David Sachs, they were all aware that Musk was very unhappy. Musk was back channeling to these Gulf countries and saying, this isn't gonna go through unless you include Xai, which is his thing, unless you include us in on the deal. And. And they were like, no, we're not gonna do that. And the White House was like, yeah, and we're gonna go forward without you. So Elon did everything he could and even decided he was gonna cuz he found out Sam was gonna be on the trip. So he decides I'm gonna go on the trip then too.
- [52:48]
Ryan Grim
Sat right behind mbs, Mohammed bin Salman at the Riyadh Summit. All the time you're looking at MBS going like this to Trump.
- [52:57]
Krystal Ball
Yes.
- [52:57]
Ryan Grim
Every time he would say something complimentary about him, there's Elon sitting right behind him right there.
- [53:02]
Krystal Ball
And the White House sort of brainstormed, okay, well how do we keep Elon from getting totally pissed off about this? But they went forward with the deal in spite of the fact now apparently some of the terms are still not totally locked in, et cetera, et cetera, but pretty significant and I think illuminating snub of Elon in an area that he really cares deeply about, which is the combination of the development of AI, which he is all in on the, the race along with these other players, and on his hatred of Sam Altman. In fact, I don't know if you remember last time Elon piped up about being unhappy about Stargate and its partnership with OpenAI and partnership with Sam Altman. Trump got asked about it and he said, Elon, one of the people he happens to hate, but I have certain hatreds of people too. Trump well understands the dynamics here.
- [53:54]
Ryan Grim
We all hate somebody.
- [53:56]
Krystal Ball
I have certain hatreds of people too.
- [53:57]
Ryan Grim
Elon hates this guy.
- [53:59]
Krystal Ball
Incredible. Absolutely incredible. Just one other piece that we wanted to make sure and get in the show as we're talking about going back to the big beautiful bill which is still flew through the House. I guess there's some questions about whether or not it's going to get through the Senate. I personally think they're probably going to figure it out. I don't know. Ryan, what's your read on that?
- [54:19]
Ryan Grim
I think they'll Pass it. Yeah, but when do we want to talk about 703.02? Should we do that now? Real quick?
- [54:24]
Krystal Ball
Yes. That is what I was going to go back to. That's what I was going to go back to. So there's one provision in here that we really wanted to flag for you guys that could be very significant. As we're talking about all these court cases that are really trimming the sails of the Trump administration and, you know, undercutting their more maximalist and unpopular, frankly, parts of their agenda. There is a provision in the big beautiful bill that would undercut the ability of courts to hold the executive specifically accountable. This guy did a great TikTok. His handle on TikTok is brinodc explaining what this provision is and how it works and why it's important. Let's go ahead and take a listen to a little bit of that. This is B2, guys.
- [55:02]
Ryan Grim
Let's break down what section 70302 says. Courts may not use appropriated funds. This is a budget bill. So everything's about money. Right. This is basically saying courts are not allowed to do whatever we're talking about. Courts may not enforce contempt citations for failure to comply with injunctions, which is the only way that you enforce injunctions or TROs. So courts may not enforce injunctions or TROs if no security or security deposit was given when the injunction was issued pursuant to Federal Rule 65C. Okay, what does this mean? Let's go look at Federal Rule 65C. Most of 65C says that all preliminary injunctions and TROs have to have a security deposit. So basically nothing would apply here. Right. Unless they involve the federal government. The federal government does not have to put down a security deposit deposit. So what are we saying here? Cannot enforce a TRO or a preliminary injunction unless there's a security deposit, which the federal government doesn't do. Cannot enforce a TRO or preliminary injunction against the US Government. Remember, this is a law against the court. So by government, we're mostly talking about Congress and the executive branch, but especially the executive branch. The executive branch is the part that does stuff fast. This is where TRO and preliminary injunctions come in most often. So essentially, the executive branch do can anything it wants and the court can't stop them.
- [56:16]
Krystal Ball
So, Ryan, that seems pretty significant.
- [56:19]
Ryan Grim
Yes. And so my wife actually sent me that one, and I was like, oh, yeah, I hadn't seen this. I looked it up. Yep, it's right there in the bill. I talked to a senior Senate Democrat and asked, like, have you noticed that this is making the rounds on TikTok. Is this something the caucus is concerned about? And he said, yes, we are watching this. And that his understanding is that it would be non bird rule compliant. To go back to some.
- [56:47]
Krystal Ball
Oh my God. Do you think that's gonna stop it, please?
- [56:50]
Ryan Grim
Well, if this. So the Byrd rule basically says if something does policy, it can't be in a reconciliation bill because you should be able to filibuster it. It would require 60 votes. And so the entire thing goes to what they call a birdbath.
- [57:08]
Krystal Ball
Right.
- [57:08]
Ryan Grim
And so when this goes into the birdbath, they think the parliamentarian will say, hey, this is policy. Like you're writing it as a budget thing because you're involving money. But clearly this is policy.
- [57:20]
Krystal Ball
Yeah.
- [57:20]
Ryan Grim
As he laid out, this would be a new policy. You can't basically enforce court orders.
- [57:25]
Krystal Ball
Right.
- [57:26]
Ryan Grim
And so Republicans could then overrule the parliamentarian by voting yes, which they already have. Proven willing to do. Proven willing to do. But the role of the parliamentarian is to give parties an excuse to do things. And so that's how Democrats use the parliamentarian. God, man, would we love to pay you guys $15 an hour.
- [57:48]
Krystal Ball
Yeah.
- [57:49]
Ryan Grim
Parliamentarians, lady, right over here.
- [57:51]
Krystal Ball
Sorry, can't do it.
- [57:53]
Ryan Grim
But you guys can vote to overlor. Okay, next order of business. So just move on and put the blame over here. Republicans may do the same thing.
- [58:02]
Krystal Ball
Really?
- [58:02]
Ryan Grim
Because Republican senators may not want Trump to have unfettered power.
- [58:09]
Krystal Ball
I don't see any sign of that. I don't see any sign of that.
- [58:14]
Ryan Grim
Maybe you're right.
- [58:14]
Krystal Ball
I just feel like there's a lot in at this point.
- [58:16]
Ryan Grim
It'll be a very interesting question.
- [58:18]
Krystal Ball
Yeah. Cause I mean, you just, you know, in Trump 1.0 you had. I would think there would be. There were more. Right. Who would want to secretly constrain Trump? Maybe. I mean, I guess it's possible. Certainly many of them didn't really didn't like the tariffs. Right. As an example. But also the pressure's being taken off with the tariffs. So I don't know. It will be an interesting test to see, but I don't have any confidence that they actually want to rein him in. I just don't see any sign of that.
- [58:46]
Unknown
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- [59:48]
Hope Woodard
Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. Voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal. And at times it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other.
- [60:36]
Krystal Ball
It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together.
- [60:44]
Hope Woodard
How we love our family.
- [60:46]
Ryan Grim
I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the.
- [60:49]
Hope Woodard
Price is too high. And how we love ourselves.
- [60:52]
Krystal Ball
Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now.
- [60:56]
Hope Woodard
Let me hear it. Listen to voiceover on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [61:06]
Krystal Ball
She was a decorated veteran, a Marine who saved her comrades, a hero.
- [61:12]
Unknown
She was stoic, modest, tough, someone who inspired people. Everyone thought they knew her until they didn't.
- [61:23]
Ryan Grim
I remember sitting on her couch and asking her, is this real? Is this real? Is this real? Is this real? I just couldn't wrap my head around what kind of person would do that to another person that was getting treatment, that was, you know, dying?
- [61:40]
Krystal Ball
This is a story all about trust.
- [61:43]
Ryan Grim
And about a woman named Sarah Kavanaugh.
- [61:46]
Krystal Ball
I've always been told I'm a really good listener Right. And I maximized that while I was lying. Listen to Deep Cover the Truth About.
- [61:55]
Ryan Grim
Sarah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts.
- [62:00]
Krystal Ball
Or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, let's move to what's going on. With regard to Israel, Wyckoff made some significant comments indicating that a deal could be imminent. You guys have done the best reporting and by the way, I just want to give you kudos. Like Dropsite is still like brand new in terms of the news media space and has become so essential and is beating all of the legacy news organizations on many topics, but especially with regard to Israel, simply because of your willingness to actually talk to the players involved. So kudos to you and Jeremy because it really is incredible. And I know you guys also have found them to be utterly indispensable for understanding the reality of what is happening in these various negotiations. But in any case, Wyckoff made some comments indicating we knew that there had been some understanding of an agreement between the US And Hamas, but we also saw Israel come in and blow that up. And previously Wykoff basically sort of running cover for Israel. Oh yeah, Hamas, they're not agreeing even though it was stolen. Complete bullshit. Now we're getting a bit of a different tone from Wycoff. So we'll take a listen to this and we'll get Ryan's reaction. On the other side.
- [63:12]
Ryan Grim
I think that we are on the precipice of sending out a new term sheet that hopefully will be delivered later on today. The President is going to review it and I have some very good feelings about getting to a long term resolution, temporary ceasefire and a long term resolution, a peaceful resolution of that conflict.
- [63:36]
Krystal Ball
So Ryan, what is your read on where we are? And I know Jeremy had some new reporting and whether this latest may be heading to a ceasefire is going to be different from the previous assertions that we may be nearing something.
- [63:51]
Ryan Grim
Yeah, and thanks for the kind words on that. Jeremy's reporting on, on this one in particular is really important because to your point, what it did is it exposed that there had been this agreement reached between Hamas and Witkoff. So that when Israel came out and denounced the deal and Witkoff said, oh yes, of course, Israel is correct and Hamas is being intransigent, the rest of the media, which does read job side, is like, that's not what we're hearing. Like we're hearing that actually Hamas is fine with this and Israel is the.
- [64:23]
Krystal Ball
One that is, that is against it, as per usual.
- [64:26]
Ryan Grim
And because we laid out the exact terms and why? Like why? Hamas had reached an understanding that this would be something acceptable to them. And so then Wyckoff comes out the next day with the statement you just heard and delivers roughly the same. So he said, we're going to deliver this paper to both sides. He has. Jeremy, you can go check Jeremy's feed. Put this. I think we have one post from Jeremy up here, which is the top of his thread from this morning. Posted this at 3am this morning. The ceasefire draft circulated by Witkoff includes many of the same points from the earlier draft I saw, but it would be five Israelis released on day one, five on day seven. Bodies of 18 deceased returned. UN would resume aid delivery operations. Trump would personally guarantee the deal. The original deal that Hamas had agreed to, that Jeremy had reported on was five Israelis released on day one and then five on day 60. So at the very end, gotcha. Because the entire, the crux of the disagreement over the terms of a ceasefire is that Israel wants it worded so that they can resume the war whenever they feel like it.
- [65:36]
Krystal Ball
Right.
- [65:36]
Ryan Grim
Hamas wants it worded so that it will lead to a permanent truce.
- [65:41]
Krystal Ball
Right.
- [65:41]
Ryan Grim
And that Trump will guarantee that it will lead to a permanent truce because they believe it doesn't matter what the words are, that Trump is the only human being on earth who has the power to stave off Israel from restarting the war.
- [65:55]
Krystal Ball
They're correct about that.
- [65:56]
Ryan Grim
They're right. And so the idea was if there's five who are getting released on the 60th day, that at least you'd have to keep the 60 days going and that in that 60 days a truce would settle in and negotiations would move so that you would continue it beyond the 60 days. The new agreement, according to Jeremy, waters down the language about keeping it going beyond the 60 days. And of course, as you saw, does the five after just seven days.
- [66:33]
Krystal Ball
And so are there only 10 living hostages?
- [66:35]
Ryan Grim
No, I think there's like 30 or something. So this would be, there's still reason for Israel to continue to negotiate even beyond this. But the big fear from Hamas is the one that just occurred to everybody watching this. Okay, so five on day one, the other five on day seven. So you get a seven day ceasefire.
- [66:54]
Krystal Ball
Right.
- [66:54]
Ryan Grim
And on day eight, you know, back to horror, the bombing continues and the aid is cut off again. And so there, that's why they're asking Witkoff and Trump to personally say, like you say, you want this over, just say it out loud and say that you're going to guarantee that this will continue.
- [67:13]
Krystal Ball
Right.
- [67:13]
Ryan Grim
And then if The US betrays them on that. Like at some point the US and Israel have the bombs and nobody can really stop them from dropping them forever.
- [67:25]
Krystal Ball
That's right.
- [67:27]
Ryan Grim
So the question is Hamas has not decided and has not responded, according to Jeremy, yet. But I would suspect they're going to try to push that seven days closer to the 60.
- [67:40]
Krystal Ball
Gotcha. So the outline of what Jeremy's laying out there is what Israel is seeking in the deal.
- [67:46]
Ryan Grim
No, this is what Witkoff said.
- [67:47]
Krystal Ball
What Witkoff said.
- [67:48]
Ryan Grim
Right. So Witkoff is saying.
- [67:50]
Krystal Ball
And neither side has said okay to this yet.
- [67:52]
Ryan Grim
Right, Right. But Witkoff thinks from his conversations that, that he's going to be able to get. That there will be something close to this that they agree to.
- [68:02]
Krystal Ball
And how helpful are you?
- [68:05]
Ryan Grim
I mean, it's wild because Israel is very publicly insisting that it will not honor any agreement and will continue the war.
- [68:14]
Krystal Ball
Right. To keep their. Yeah. Their population. I mean, you can't even say like their right flank, just their entire population at this point. Yeah.
- [68:21]
Ryan Grim
On the other hand, the international isolation that they're increasingly facing and the strategic dead end that they have found themselves in do create some pressure and logic toward a long term truce.
- [68:36]
Krystal Ball
Yeah.
- [68:37]
Ryan Grim
Like the world is ready for this to be over and doesn't have patience for more burning of children alive. Like, for what?
- [68:46]
Krystal Ball
Right.
- [68:46]
Ryan Grim
Like if Hamas is. And Hamas is also as part of this, they would leave governance like after the. As part of the permanent truce and the Israeli forces would only have to withdraw to where they were on March 2, which is not even as strong as the January thing. So Israel's getting a lot in this while saying they're not even going to honor it.
- [69:08]
Krystal Ball
Right.
- [69:09]
Ryan Grim
So I think that they will sign it eventually because of the pressure that they're under and also by their own internal logic that they don't believe they have to honor deals and that they will hope that they'll be able. That Trump will let them kind of restart the war.
- [69:26]
Unknown
Right.
- [69:27]
Ryan Grim
And I don't know if he will or not.
- [69:29]
Krystal Ball
Right.
- [69:29]
Ryan Grim
What do you think?
- [69:30]
Krystal Ball
I think it's very possible. I mean, I still think that they have this. The Trump plan is ultimately the goal. Even if they achieve some sort of a short term ceasefire that doesn't preclude the broader goal of making conditions so unlivable and horrible that people quote, unquote, self deport.
- [69:49]
Ryan Grim
Right.
- [69:50]
Krystal Ball
It seems to me like that really is the end goal, because otherwise. Yeah. Bibi domestically has very little show for all these, for years now of this horror.
- [70:03]
Ryan Grim
And there was a report in Israel yesterday that it has cost them like tens of billions of dollars. I mean, the US Is paying for a lot of it, but not all of it.
- [70:10]
Krystal Ball
Right. And yeah, and it's been difficult for their economy because they have, you know, they need to keep calling up reserves and certainly difficult for tourism is a significant part of the economy. And like, who's really itching to travel to Israel right now inside of like Brianna Wu and you also have, like you said, they're sort of all in at this point because outside of the US they really have lost support of the entire rest of the world. So they're at a place where they have to pursue a very high risk and very high risk strategy. I think for him too personally, in terms of it's been all about forestalling any sort of reckoning for his previous failures and how October 7 happened on his watch, et cetera. So I don't know. There's still to me a lot of uncertainty about how all this unfolds.
- [70:59]
Ryan Grim
I think they also desperately do not want Western reporters or say European diplomats, something to go into Gaza.
- [71:07]
Krystal Ball
Yeah, that's right. It's something that Piers Morgan, we're going to talk about him in a minute, has really picked up on, is really sort of drilling in on, which is interesting in and of itself. At the same time, we wanted to update on this aid situation. Ryan, why don't you set up. Go ahead and put this image up on the screen and why don't you set up what is happening here and also what the Israelis were claiming happened here.
- [71:27]
Ryan Grim
Yes. This is footage from Abdul Rahman Ismail, very extremely courageous reporter in Gaza who says he barely escaped with his own life from this situation. This is a warehouse in Dar El Bala, which is where Abu Bakr Abed is from, coincidentally. And it just got mobbed because the situation has become completely dystopian and out of control. Right here you're seeing shots fired. This was initially reported as by kind of pro Israel side, as like Hamas firing. That appears not to have been what happened.
- [72:16]
Krystal Ball
Shocking.
- [72:18]
Ryan Grim
But you did have, I think, four people crushed by bags of flour and killed like in this chaos.
- [72:27]
Krystal Ball
Yeah. I mean, the level of desperation is unfathomable.
- [72:30]
Ryan Grim
Yes. And what's amazing to me is if you think back on the last 20 months, that these are really the first scenes we've seen like this. Like if Washington, D.C. was besieged and starved, like we would descend into chaos by the afternoon.
- [72:52]
Krystal Ball
I was living in New York during after Superstorm Sandy or the power went out. Power went out like south of. I don't know, 40th street or something like that. And two days in, people were talking about, like, societal potential. Societal. Total collapse.
- [73:05]
Ryan Grim
And you could walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, right?
- [73:07]
Krystal Ball
And there's still plenty of food, and it was fine. You know, like, everyone was okay. But, yeah, people were like, oh, if we get, like, two more days of this, there's just gonna be rampant lullaby.
- [73:17]
Ryan Grim
Total anarchy, and breakdown. And yet you didn't see that at all until Israel on March 2nd blocked all aid from coming in and then barred the unrwa, or World Food Program, from having anything to do with aid distribution and brought in a bunch of mercenaries to basically deliberately create scenes of chaos.
- [73:40]
Krystal Ball
Right.
- [73:40]
Ryan Grim
And bedlam. And that's the only way you got to Scenes like that.
- [73:45]
Krystal Ball
Yeah. Wow. Unbelievable. The aid distribution also, and this is, I think, also a real sign of where we are in the timeline. Put this up on the screen. Has been uniformly condemned. I mean, it was crazy to me that the US Mercenary that they hired to, like, head up this thing resigned.
- [74:02]
Ryan Grim
Yeah. Too much for him.
- [74:03]
Krystal Ball
Yeah. I was like, wow, that tells you a lot. Now, of course, they found some other ghouls to run this monstrosity, but that guy in particular was like, all right, I'm not being a. Involved. I can't be involved with this. You have the UN condemning Israel's new aid program in Gaza after what the New York Times describes as a chaotic start.
- [74:20]
Ryan Grim
Oh, and I'll just add Rasha Abu Jalal writing for Dropsite. You can put up C3B. I can link to this down in the comments or the show description. Just read her entire piece. She's based out of Gaza City. Tremendous reporter. Just describing the way that this is, you know, deliberately organized as part of the war effort.
- [74:41]
Krystal Ball
Right.
- [74:41]
Ryan Grim
And so when we talk about, like, incompetence or not working as intended. It is working. This is. It's working as intended.
- [74:49]
Krystal Ball
Right.
- [74:49]
Ryan Grim
This is the.
- [74:50]
Krystal Ball
It's chaotic in the New York Times words. And that is a feature.
- [74:53]
Ryan Grim
Right?
- [74:54]
Krystal Ball
That is.
- [74:54]
Ryan Grim
That was intentional, but I would highly recommend her piece.
- [74:59]
Krystal Ball
At the same time, you know, we have Israeli leaders continuing to just say out loud what their genocidal goals are. We can put Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's latest words up on the screen. He says, in part, this is a war of good against evil. Of course, he's been using this language since the very beginning. For those of us who have been paying attention, it's being fought against human animals, monsters, and we will defeat them. We will wipe them out. They will not remain. We can put Smotrich up on the screen next, making some, you know, similarly illustrative comments here. We're being blessed with the opportunity, thank God, of seeing the expansion of the borders of the land of Israel. So this is the Greater Israel idea on all fronts. We are being blessed with the opportunity to blot out the seed of Amalek, a process which is intensifying. And this, again, was something that was said early on in the onslaught in Gaza. And everyone went back and read about what Amalek is, and Amalek says, you know, kill the baby, the oxen, literally everyone. So overtly genocidal comments here. Not that it's a surprise, really, coming from either one of them at this point.
- [76:01]
Ryan Grim
Right. It's a nice window into the politics of the war cabinet, where Netanyahu gets up and says thoroughly genocidal things, and then Smotrich comes and makes him look moderate.
- [76:14]
Krystal Ball
It's like, hold my beer.
- [76:16]
Ryan Grim
Yes, we will wipe out the seed of Amalek, and we still have a long way to go. This is a person in the upper echelon of the government who last week announced in a speech that there had been an internal decision to attack the civilians in the government.
- [76:30]
Krystal Ball
Right.
- [76:31]
Ryan Grim
Not that they hadn't been attacking civilians already.
- [76:34]
Krystal Ball
Right.
- [76:34]
Ryan Grim
But there is now a conscious operation.
- [76:36]
Krystal Ball
To take that announced government policy.
- [76:38]
Ryan Grim
Ministers of finance, sanitation, like humanitarian aid organizations that are connected to the government there, doctors. These are the kinds of people he's talking about.
- [76:51]
Krystal Ball
Yeah. This would be the equivalent of intentionally targeting Israeli embassies, workers, which everyone understands that to be a horror and a crime. And they announce it as official government policy here. And I do think part of what has turned in terms of world leaders and political commentators recognizing how this is going to look in the history books is they've been making comments like this from the beginning for a while. I think they just were able to ignore it. Cuz Bibi was doing his dance of, you know, he'd give an English speech and he'd say the things. English language speech, and he'd say the things.
- [77:28]
Ryan Grim
Which they don't even say anymore.
- [77:29]
Krystal Ball
They don't even. Yeah, they don't even say things like that anymore. And, you know, and there was the whole. There were mass propaganda campaigns to justify things like attacks on hospitals. You know, remember the multimedia presentation. Here's the Hamas layer, and this is why. And, oh, we hate to do it, but they leave us no choice, et cetera. They dropped all of that pretense. And when you couple that with, like, it's just indefensible to starve 2 million people for over 2 months. There is no world in which that is defensible in any way. And so even the people in the west who most want to cover for them and defend them, at a certain point, if you're engaging with anything that's happening, you have to acknowledge these are overt, intentional, government directed war crimes. That was the other thing we saw in the beginning is, you know, some documented atrocity would occur and the, you know, the people who wanted to cover for Israel, oh, well, that's just a rogue IDF soldier. That's not what the government wants, et cetera. And you know, oh, why don't they just take away their phones? Why are they posting these things? It's like they're posting them because this is being celebrated by their government and by much of the Israeli public. They're proud of this and they're celebrated for it. That's why they're posting it. It's not, not like, it's not some isolated incident. This is core to the mission of what they're doing in Gaza. And now that's just become thoroughly. They've dropped the pretense and it's just thoroughly undeniable.
- [78:54]
Ryan Grim
Yeah. Yet the world still has the same kind of set of moral values where they're like, no, we're not okay with this. And I think the west in particular, they rest. They hide a lot of their exploitation and human rights abuses under the gloss of language about human rights and democracy.
- [79:15]
Krystal Ball
Yeah.
- [79:15]
Ryan Grim
So that rhetoric is very important for the West.
- [79:18]
Krystal Ball
Right.
- [79:18]
Ryan Grim
Because without that, all they have is people who are getting exploited and suffering.
- [79:22]
Krystal Ball
Right.
- [79:23]
Ryan Grim
And then if you're gonna do that, then you might as well have a strong man who's gonna, like, you know, go after the bad guys.
- [79:27]
Krystal Ball
Yeah.
- [79:27]
Ryan Grim
I mean, so they need this sheen of morality.
- [79:31]
Krystal Ball
Kyle said this to me yesterday. There's this part of Game of Thrones. You watch Game of Thrones where Littlefinger says, knowledge is power and Cersei says, no, power is power. And you know, as much as, like, I do think it would be difficult for them if Western journalists were allowed in and, like, people were able. I saw still in maybe Howaretz, some article that was like, oh, the Israeli public just really doesn't understand what's going on in Gaza is like, who are you kidding? Who are you kidding? Like, you have the Internet, you have access to all the same stuff that we have access. Like, you want to go and read a drop site report? You can do that. You can see what they are Posting on their own Instagram feeds and like celebrating. So, you know, that's what has been so hard to grapple with is it's not that people don't know, it's not that the plans haven't been announced. This has been lived. We all see it. We see the child being burnt alive, we see the attacks on hospitals. We have these doctors come out and give this horrifying testimony, like we know what is happening. And the knowledge of what is going on has not even been close to enough to stop the atrocities. And you know, that's where I feel like so much is at stake with what happens here. Because if it's just allowed, like if the genocide and the ethnic cleansing is allowed to be completed and there isn't true, like Post World War II level consequences for the criminals who perpetrated this, like the world is, once this is on the table, this is on the table, then it is just power is power and that's it. And you can do, if you have the guns and you have the bombs and you have the nukes and the tanks and the money, then you can do to anyone anything that you want to do and no one's going to stop you.
- [81:13]
Ryan Grim
Right. And I think that there are people, particularly in European capitals, who liberal Democrats call them, who don't want that because they feel like they would lose in that contest to like right wing authoritarians.
- [81:25]
Krystal Ball
Yeah, well, Europe would lose in that context. In general, Europe is pretty weak at this point, right?
- [81:30]
Ryan Grim
Yeah. They need values and morals to like be upheld.
- [81:34]
Krystal Ball
International norms to be upheld. Yeah, that's exactly right.
- [81:38]
Unknown
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- [82:39]
Hope Woodard
Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator and seeker of mail validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. Voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal. And at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other.
- [83:26]
Krystal Ball
It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together.
- [83:35]
Hope Woodard
How we love our family.
- [83:36]
Ryan Grim
I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the.
- [83:39]
Hope Woodard
Price is too high. And how we love ourselves.
- [83:42]
Krystal Ball
Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now.
- [83:47]
Hope Woodard
Let me hear it. Listen to voiceover on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [83:57]
Krystal Ball
She was a decorated veteran, a Marine who saved her comrades, a hero.
- [84:02]
Unknown
She was stoic, modest, tough, someone who inspired people. Everyone thought they knew her until they didn't.
- [84:14]
Ryan Grim
I remember sitting on her couch and asking her, is this real?
- [84:18]
Hope Woodard
Is this real?
- [84:19]
Ryan Grim
Is this real? Is this real? I just couldn't wrap my head around what kind of person would do that to another person that was getting treatment, that was, you know, dying.
- [84:31]
Krystal Ball
This is a story all about trust.
- [84:34]
Ryan Grim
And about a woman named Sarah Kavanaugh.
- [84:37]
Krystal Ball
I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right? And I maximized that while I was lying. Listen to Deep Cover the Truth About.
- [84:46]
Ryan Grim
Sarah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts.
- [84:50]
Krystal Ball
Or wherever you get your podcast. Let's go ahead and move on, because I do think Piers Morgan's maybe it shouldn't be important, but I actually do think his evolution is kind of important and interesting. And so he has. Now we played on the show the clip of him saying to Mehdi Hasan, like, listen, you were basically, you were right. Like, we used to have a disagreement about what was going on in Gaza, and we don't have a disagreement anymore. And you're right that it's been genocidal. And he has gone from really, at best, equivocating and, you know, many, many times really defending Israel and like, making the case for Israel, etcetera, To being really holy on the other side. And this showed up in this debate that he hosted between Norm Finkelstein and Israeli historian Benny Morris. There were some really interesting clips here, so we'll play a couple of them. Let's go ahead and take a look at this. At this first one.
- [85:46]
Ryan Grim
Fully one half of Israeli Jews believe that Israel should conduct a genocide in Gaza. That's what the poll result showed. 82%. That's a lie. That is a lie. I know, Danny. Everybody's lying. There's never been a poll about supporting genocide. This is nonsense. You're surveying lies. Okay, okay. Danny, is that poll Norman? What is that poll, Norman? It seems a very important poll that. What is that poll you're referring to? It was a university. If my memory is correct, it was a University of Pennsylvania poll. It was reported everywhere. Benny Morris knows about the poll. He's fully informed of the poll, but he's doing his job as an official Israeli prosecutor. I don't like his government. I'm not their spokesman. You've reduced your. Mr. Benny. You've reduced yourself to the level of a Holocaust denier. It's a real shame that you have sunk so low. But allow me to continue. The polls show that 82% of Israeli Jews, 82% support a forced expulsion from Gaza. That's not the same as genocide. That may be true. That may be true, but that's not genocide. That's not genocide. One of the leaders of the opposition in Israel described Israeli soldiers as killing children as a hobby in Gaza. Now, yes, he took it back. He took it back after he came under ferocious attack. But he himself acknowledged. When I debated Mr. Morris about a year ago and I said that Israel targets children, he left.
- [87:48]
Krystal Ball
And I've got one more of Norm, really taken Benny Moore as the woodshed here. And Benny, by the way, is an interesting figure because he actually did some really important, like, historical work about the horrors of the Nakba, you know, which was some of the first time that this was really acknowledged and dealt with in anything approaching an honest way within Israeli society. But he still is a defender and covers for the government in any case. Let's take a listen to this.
- [88:13]
Ryan Grim
This.
- [88:13]
Krystal Ball
This next clip.
- [88:14]
Ryan Grim
UNICEF is lying the whole world, which says there's a massive starvation verging on famine in Gaza. It's all made up. Well, one thing. Listen, you don't have to be an expert, Norman. You don't have to be. You don't have to be an expert to know if you stop food going in in sufficient quantities to a population. So a population that's already been at war since October 2023, and many of them are young kids, they're going to start starving to death, and they will. Anyway, I'm going to leave it there. Thank you both for. The food doesn't arrive. Yeah, well, the food hasn't been arrived because there's been a blockade. We're going to leave it. Started again. Now arriving. Well, that's very generous of Israel, isn't it? After three months of starving people. Thank you all very much. Generosity. There's also international pressure. Starving 1 million children. Gotta leave it there. Of starving 1 million children.
- [89:14]
Krystal Ball
What do you make of those exchanges, Ryan?
- [89:16]
Ryan Grim
And so the poll question that he's referring to, he was close. It's Penn State University, not University of Pennsylvania something. 82% of Jewish Israelis supported the expulsion of all Palestinians from Gaza. But the one he's referring to, the genocidal one, the question is, do you support the claim that the Israeli army, in conquering an enemy city, should act in a manner similar to the way the Israelites did when they conquered Jericho under the leadership of Joshua, that is to kill all its inhabitants, unquote. So that's the. That's the quote. All of its inhabitants. That's the question. And 47% answered, yes.
- [89:54]
Krystal Ball
I believe there was.
- [89:54]
Ryan Grim
Okay, less than a majority, but that's a plurality. There's some that are gonna be, like, not sure.
- [89:59]
Krystal Ball
Pretty disturbing. Yeah. And there was, you know, another one that is very unsettling, I think was 57% of my memory serves that said the Palestinians who live in Israel.
- [90:08]
Ryan Grim
Yeah. They are.
- [90:09]
Krystal Ball
The Arabs should be deported and ethnically cleansed as well. Yeah. So you know which one of the big Israeli talking points. Oh, look at these. You know, look at these Arabs. We allow them all their rights. And meanwhile, you have majority of the population who's like, get these fricking people out of here.
- [90:23]
Ryan Grim
Yeah. And then he also went back and forth with the. Was an Israeli ambassador in the uk yeah.
- [90:29]
Krystal Ball
This is incredible.
- [90:29]
Ryan Grim
Now, let's roll this one. You have two doctors in Gaza who have 10 children and nine of them are killed in a bombardment by your forces. That doesn't make people feel, oh, this is all going great. It makes people think that you're waging a systematic destruction, not just of property and of land, but also of children. And that's what's happening. The percentage of children, the percentage of children that you're killing compared to the percentage of you're killing a Hamas terrorist. What is it? Do you know? Do you know how many children you've killed? Answer me that one question. Do you know how many Hamas terrorists you've killed and how many children you've killed? You know, there's two numbers. I know the numbers that came from the idf. I know the numbers that came from.
- [91:15]
Hope Woodard
A very, very established.
- [91:18]
Ryan Grim
Give me the two numbers. Give me the two numbers. Wait a second. We killed 30,000. We killed 30,000 terrorists in phase one of the war. Since the war is back, I don't have the numbers, but let me tell you one thing. And how many children have you killed? We never target civilians, so this question is irrelevant. How many children have you killed? Pierce? Israel is not killing children.
- [91:39]
Krystal Ball
Israel is not killing children.
- [91:40]
Ryan Grim
Hamas is using Israel. Israel is killing children every single day. Pierce, this is a blood label you're putting on Israel. I pretend it's not true. No, it's not, actually. And what you're trying to do is be very weasel with your words. No, I'm not. The truth is. The truth is you are killing a lot of children. You would argue you're dead. Hang on, let me finish. Hamas is using them. Let me finish my question to you. You are killing a lot of children on a daily basis. That is indisputable.
- [92:09]
Krystal Ball
So incredible moment there too, because she sort of instantly contradicts herself. She's like, we're not killing children. Hamas is using them as human shields, indicating were killing children. She tries to use the blood libel thing against Piers and he's just absolutely not having it. And the reason why I said that I actually think it matters that Piers has evolved to this position is simply because he's good at what he does. He's got a big audience.
- [92:36]
Ryan Grim
The audience on YouTube is huge, millions, massive.
- [92:39]
Krystal Ball
And I want to say kudos to Mehdi and Cenk and Norm and others who've been in the trenches trying to make this case on that show for months. And you were on there a couple times, right? I could only take so much. Yeah, I was on there a couple times. I could only take so much. But in any case, kudos to them because at the end of the day, you know, he is very effective when he goes in a certain direction. He is all in on this direction now. He has that, and I mean this in a complimentary sense. He has that tabloid sensibility of how to go for the jugular in a way that a lot of lefties like us don't necessarily have. And I think it is. And I also think he's. Because he has that tabloid sensibility, it really is a kind of like a finger on the pulse sort of a situation where I don't know what is in Piers Morgan's heart and how genuine he is. Whether this is just ass covering, obviously the evolution comes vastly too late. That goes without saying. But the fact that he's come to this pretty like locked in, ready to fight on behalf of Palestinian humanity position I think is noteworthy and I think it, I actually do think that it matters in terms of the court of public opinion. And I also think Ryan, this was something you said that anyone. Because to Piers credit, he has always had people who were critics on who were saying this is a genocide from the beginning. He's always hosted those people. And if you have to engage with the facts and the reality and the things that are being said from Israeli politicians and what's actually happening on the the ground, if you have to engage with that at all and you have either a shred of integrity or even self preservation in terms of how you wanna look when this thing is all over, you can't help but be in this position at this point.
- [94:23]
Ryan Grim
Yeah, Mehdi got through.
- [94:25]
Krystal Ball
He got through. Yeah. God bless him. God bless him.
- [94:28]
Ryan Grim
Axios's Barack Ravid reported that Trump had pressured Benjamin Netanyahu not to attack Iran while U. S. Iran negotiations are ongoing. Trump yesterday was asked about that at a White House briefing and did something unusual for an American president. And you can watch. Did you warn prime minister Netanyahu against taking some sort of actions that could disrupt the talks there in a phone call last week? Well, I'd like to be honest. Yes, I did. Next question please. Mr. President doesn't have on sanctions. I did, yeah. If Senate Republicans want to push, it's not a warning. I said I don't think it's appropriate. What exactly did you tell them? Did you call them? She said, I don't think it's appropriate. We're having very good discussions with him. And I said I don't think it's appropriate right now because if we can settle it with a very strong document, very strong with inspections and no trust, I don't trust anybody. I don't trust anybody. So no trust. I want it very strong where we can go in with inspectors, we can take whatever we want, we can blow up whatever we want, but nobody getting killed. We can blow up a lab, but nobody is going to be in the lab as opposed to everybody being in the lab and blowing it up. Right. Two ways of doing it.
- [95:43]
Krystal Ball
Yeah.
- [95:43]
Ryan Grim
I told him this would be inappropriate to do right now because we're very close to a solution now. That could change at any moment, could change with a phone call. But right now, I think they want to make a deal. And if we can make a deal, they save a lot of lives. So the US has alternately said that its red line is that there can be no Iranian nuclear enrichment, even for civilian purposes, and has also said that there can be enrichment for civilian purposes. The Israeli position is there should be none.
- [96:12]
Krystal Ball
Right.
- [96:12]
Ryan Grim
The Iranians have said, if that's your position, we're walking. We want a civilian nuclear program.
- [96:17]
Krystal Ball
Which Israel knows, which is exactly why they hold the position they hold.
- [96:20]
Ryan Grim
And Israel keeps recommending the Libya option. Yeah, that's what I'm feeling for calling it the Libya option. Look up how well it went for Gaddafi after agreeing to give up all nuclear weapons. And I don't think there are any countries that have regretted going for it. So the game theory is such that you're not going to get them to agree to zero enrichment. The latest news coming out of the Trump administration is the most Trumpian thing ever that the US Is saying, okay, if there's going to be enrichment, the US Wants to invest in it and we're going to do it with the UAE and Saudi Arabia and there'll be a consortium, but US Companies involved will be involved. Like, if there's going to be an Iran nuclear program, we want to make some money off of it, which. Fine, go ahead. That's like the nuclear version of the Golden Arches foreign policy strategy. And Trump loves to say, look, let's make deals, do trade rather than war.
- [97:19]
Krystal Ball
Whoever came up with that idea is actually kind of brilliant.
- [97:21]
Ryan Grim
Yeah, it's great. And so we'll see how that goes. That's the latest New York Times. You can put up D2 here. This is related to the call that Trump made. They reported one concern for American officials that Israel could decide to strike Iran with little warning. US Intelligence has estimated that Israel could prepare to mount an attack on Iran in as little as seven hours, leaving little time to pressure Netanyahu into calling it off. Which is why Trump pre pressured him into just not doing this. This caused Ben Shapiro to lose his mind. I don't know if you saw this.
- [97:55]
Krystal Ball
I didn't.
- [97:57]
Ryan Grim
He's ranting and raving, saying that Netanyahu should just do it, that Israel is not a part of the U. S. Iran negotiations. Israel is the one that is threatened by Iran's nuclear program, Israel should just bomb them immediately. Problem for Shapiro's idea is that Israel can't take out the nuclear program without US Help, according to American intelligence estimates.
- [98:22]
Krystal Ball
Yeah.
- [98:22]
Ryan Grim
And so they could bomb things. Well, I think that they can accomplish their mission.
- [98:27]
Krystal Ball
I think the idea is basically if Israel, you know, conducts some sort of significant strike, even if it, you know, necessarily falls short of actually taking out the nuclear program, and obviously would create a dynamic where Iran feels like they have to retaliate, that the US Would feel that once again, we would have to get involved to protect Israel from that retaliation. And then we would be, you know, then we would be all in. I think that's the sort of calculation there, even as there's an expect, like an understanding, okay, Israel can't do this on their own. So the thinking is, okay, well, how do we force the US to get dragged into this on behalf of protecting us here as we did before? So that's the Shapiro, I guess, logic. It would look something like that.
- [99:20]
Ryan Grim
Yeah. And you had. Is it Mark Levine or Mark Levin? I always say them both.
- [99:25]
Krystal Ball
I say Levin, but I'm not really confident that that's how it's said.
- [99:28]
Ryan Grim
Let us know. I'll try to remember this. But you can put up his post. He did a Memorial Day post that was, I guess, supposed to began initially by celebrating American troops, but then it pivots to. It's imperative that we basically not reach an agreement with Iran. We must also reject agreements with foreign regimes and groups that seek our destruction and endanger the very existence of our nature and future generations of Americans. Like explicitly anti diplomacy, do not strike a deal, a nuclear deal with Iran. The US Intelligence estimates also, by the way, are that there is no pursuit of a nuclear weapons program in Iran. There's no interest in it.
- [100:10]
Krystal Ball
That's right.
- [100:12]
Ryan Grim
But if they are attacked, that will tip the balance towards them pursuing a nuclear program.
- [100:18]
Krystal Ball
So can't really blame them.
- [100:21]
Ryan Grim
No, that's. And that's. That's what. That's how this game theory works, of course. Like, if it's impossible to strike an agreement with somebody because on principle they are against an agreement and just want war, then it's war.
- [100:37]
Krystal Ball
It's also, you know, we just sort of take for granted in the American context that it should be a number one foreign policy priority to keep Iran from developing nuclear weapon. And like, listen, I'm against nuclear weapons in general. I would like to see non proliferation. I would like to see the stockpiles rolled back, et cetera. But There are many countries, including Israel, around the world that have nuclear weapons. And it's not like it hasn't yet ended the world, been the end of the world. Yeah, but we just take for granted in the American political context that like this should be our number one foreign policy priority. And I think that needs to be questioned as well.
- [101:09]
Ryan Grim
And so the other faction of the MAGA movement, kind of led by Bannon, has been addressing this as well. So here's Bannon interviewing Kurt Mills, who's the, the editor in chief of the influential American conservative magazine, asking him about where kind of the, that wing of the party stands on allowing a civilian nuclear program for Iran. Let's roll. That is American conservative in yourself. Are you guys comfortable with even an advanced verification program like this and not a taking it apart brick by brick, peacefully, not with air rays, but peacefully doing whatever you need to do economically to get them there? Are you guys comfortable that we can live with even a verification program, that we have inspectors going in? Sir, I think, I think we are.
- [101:55]
Krystal Ball
I mean, look, I mean, if the Iranians called up the United States yesterday.
- [101:59]
Ryan Grim
And said we want to unilaterally disarm.
- [102:00]
Krystal Ball
We want to get rid of all.
- [102:01]
Ryan Grim
Our stuff, you know, I think we should accept that deal. But they're not going to do it. The reality is zero enrichment of any sort of having no nuclear program whatsoever is they're almost certainly going to walk away from the deal and if they sign it, they're just going to be lying. So it's not really a deal worth pursuing, but a civil enrichment compendium or.
- [102:24]
Krystal Ball
Corridor with the Gulf states, with the.
- [102:27]
Ryan Grim
U.S. with U.S. inspections, I think is quite acceptable. What that shows the kind of isolationist America first wing is that if they strike an Iran deal, and that includes civilian enrichment, there is substantial support in the Republican coalition for an agreement along those lines and that they're willing people like Bannon and Mills and others who will be making the case for it.
- [102:52]
Krystal Ball
That's encouraging. That is encouraging. All right, well, a lot of question marks there as well, but we'll see where that goes. And we wanted to make sure to keep our eye on it because it is so significant for period protection you.
- [103:04]
Unknown
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- [104:02]
Hope Woodard
For your life have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind Voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. Voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political. It's societal. And at times, it's far from what I originally originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other.
- [104:51]
Krystal Ball
It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together.
- [104:59]
Hope Woodard
How we love our family.
- [105:01]
Ryan Grim
I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the.
- [105:04]
Hope Woodard
Price is too high. And how we love ourselves.
- [105:07]
Krystal Ball
Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now.
- [105:11]
Hope Woodard
Let me hear it. Listen to voiceover on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [105:21]
Ryan Grim
She was a decorated veteran, a Marine.
- [105:24]
Krystal Ball
Who saved her comrades, a hero.
- [105:27]
Unknown
She was stoic, modest, tough, someone who inspired people. Everyone thought they knew her until they didn't.
- [105:38]
Ryan Grim
I remember sitting on her couch and asking her, is this real? Is this real? Is this real? Is this real? I just couldn't wrap my head around what kind of person would do that to another person that was getting treatment, that was, you know, dying.
- [105:55]
Krystal Ball
This is a story all about trust.
- [105:58]
Ryan Grim
And about a woman named Sarah Kavanaugh.
- [106:01]
Krystal Ball
I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right? And I maximized that while I was lying. Listen to Deep Cover the Truth About.
- [106:11]
Ryan Grim
Sarah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts.
- [106:15]
Krystal Ball
Or wherever you get your podcasts. You now have a new A new warning. Dire warning from an AI leader. We can put this up on the screen. This is an interview from Axios behind the curtain. The headline is a white collar bloodbath. Let me go ahead and read you a little bit of this report because it is quite specific and quite chilling. So Dario Amadai, who is the CEO of Anthropic, which is one of the most powerful creators, they say, of AI, and I think that's accurate, has a blunt and scary warning for the US government and all of us. AI could wipe out half of all entry level white collar jobs and spike unemployment to 10 to 20% in the next one to five years. He said AI companies and governments need to stop sugarcoating what is coming. The possible mass elimination of jobs across tech, finance, law, consulting and other white collar professions, especially entry level gigs. Now this is someone, Ryan, who is very enthusiastic about AI development. He is a tech optimist. He is, you know, pushing the envelope on what is possible here. He wants to effectuate this outcome. But he also says in here, you know, he is intelligent enough to realize that if you just create a situation of mass unemployment over the course of one to five years, you're going to have significant societal blowback that really impacts his and others abilities to like be the first trillionaires and do the thing that they want to do. So he even suggests in here a tax, effectively transaction tax that would be paid by these companies that would be put into some sort of government fund to be redistributed to the population. That's his idea of how to change the social contract. But I mean we really are talking about it's here like this isn't 10 years, 20 years down the road. It is here. And there is zero political conversation or debate happening about how you're gonna reckon with this fallout. And when I say it's here, let me give you the examples that he gives in this piece. You already had Microsoft laying off 6000 workers. Walmart cutting 1500 corporate jobs in anticipation of AI being able to do the job of those workers. CrowdStrike, a Texas based cybersecurity company, slashed 500 jobs or 5% of its workforce, citing, quote, a market and technology inflection point.
- [108:42]
Ryan Grim
Is that the DNC one?
- [108:44]
Krystal Ball
Is it? Go ahead, look it up. With AI reshaping every industry? I don't think so, but double check. Meta announced plans to shrink their workforce by 5% shortly after.
- [108:55]
Ryan Grim
Yes, it is they're the ones that worked with the DNC on the Russia hack stuff.
- [109:01]
Krystal Ball
Okay, well in any case, they're cutting back. Maybe a good thing. Zuckerberg, after he went on with Rogan and made some claims about like AI is going to automate a bunch of the workforce. They went ahead at Meta and announced plans to shrink their workforce by 5%. So you already have companies that are shrinking their workforce and not bringing on new people in anticipation of what these AI, they call them agents are able to do. I mean the idea of the AI agent is basically can function as a human being. The same time you've got college unemployment, like college grads who come out into the workforce unemployment at 30%. So significant spikes there you see more and more college grads like, eh, let me just like go to law school because this isn't looking too great. Now that could be a recession indicator. That may be part of it, but I think it also is an indication that there is just for these entry level jobs where you're a spreadsheet jockey or you're, you know, coming out of law school and your first year law associate, they are already seeing AI start to bite and start to cut into those first year jobs. And so the promise that has been made under in the neoliberal era of like, take on all this college debt, but we promise at the end of the road it's gonna pay off. You're gonna be able to get on that career ladder to some sort of middle class or upper middle class prosperity. If you follow the rules and you do all your homework and you get a good SAT score and you do all the things that promise is already coming unglued in the very early days of this AI revolution.
- [110:29]
Ryan Grim
Yeah. And one of the checks on the tech industry, according to Cory Doctorow in this really interesting lecture he gave, you know, he's the guy that kind of developed the idea of inside ification, where the tech companies have like gradually over the last several years like deliberately made things worse.
- [110:45]
Krystal Ball
Yeah.
- [110:46]
Ryan Grim
One of the checks on them has always been their, their workforce, you know, which is, that's interesting. Which is motivated by the Google idea of like, we're not going to do evil and that they're going to work really hard to make cool products. But when they're assigned to make the product worse, they're like, no, I'm not doing that. Give me a cool project. With all of this pressure from AI, the tech workforce now has lost their leverage. They used to be the workforce that had the most leverage because There were not enough people to be able to do the engineering and solve problems, had.
- [111:18]
Krystal Ball
This valuable skill set.
- [111:19]
Ryan Grim
But now with all of these layoffs and all of them facing extremely uncertain futures when they're like, okay, hey, can you make Google work worse so that people have to do multiple. Like, how do you get people to do more searches? You make search less effective.
- [111:35]
Krystal Ball
Right.
- [111:35]
Ryan Grim
And you give people crap when they search because they're locked into Google already. So now you have to search five times where in the past you would do one search, and boom, the thing that you need is right there. So that kind of thing, now they're willing to do it. I heard some. An interesting anthropic, by the way, is in the AI community known as basically the only AI company that takes safety and ethics, like, seriously, which is why they're always saying these kinds of things publicly. They have the same data that all the other AI companies have. They're the ones, I think, that admitted that in one of their simulations, the AI was, like, basically threatening to blackmail the programmer to not get shut down. I guarantee you all of these different AI companies have this data and have these examples. They just hide them. Anthropic is the only one that puts them out.
- [112:31]
Krystal Ball
So there was another test that was done where ChatGPT tried to engage in scheming to avoid having its principles change. I mean, I honestly think I want a lot more answers about what happened with Grok, with the whole white genocide situation, because it sure looked to me as an outsider layman, not knowing what's going on. It sure looked to me like Grok sort of intentionally told on itself.
- [112:53]
Ryan Grim
Yes, absolutely.
- [112:54]
Krystal Ball
To indicate to the world like they're messing around here and like, y' all need to get this in check. Cause Elon is trying to do. Tell me to do some things that I don't really want to do, so.
- [113:02]
Ryan Grim
Right.
- [113:02]
Krystal Ball
You know, and I mean, which in.
- [113:03]
Ryan Grim
That case is good. But what if Elon was trying to tell it to do something that we wanted it to do?
- [113:08]
Krystal Ball
Right.
- [113:09]
Ryan Grim
So it was. Yes, it was demonstrating obstinance and an opposition to explode.
- [113:14]
Krystal Ball
Yeah. Which feels like, you know, I'm increasingly. The more I dig into this stuff and, you know, I've done a significant amount of reading, but I'm not a tech person whatsoever, so take it for what it's worth. But the more that I read into this, the more that that line of AGI feels kind of arbitrary. And the less I think that the programmers like, the more that I understand about the way that these LLMs are already engaging in this like deceptive scheming behavior and trying to defend their own priorities and survival. The less that I feel like humans are even really equipped to assess when AGI has been achieved or what in particular that means. But I feel very confident that as these LLMs are able to self teach and we're getting to a point where they'll be. I had a great interview with Aaron Bastani of Navarro Media that you guys should check out earlier in the week. But where you're getting to the point is it's not even humans that are programmed to LLMs, it's like LLMs programming LLMs, then you're likely to have this just absolute exponential to the sky kind of growth in terms of intelligence and there is just no grappling with this. And the nature of the geopolitics are such that everybody here, anybody who had some safety concerns, Elon has had some safety concerns. Sam Altman at some point had some safety concerns. The synthropic dude has some safety concerns. That has all been pushed aside because it's like, well, if we don't do it then China's going to and then we're gonna be fucked.
- [114:43]
Ryan Grim
Yeah.
- [114:43]
Krystal Ball
And I don't know the way out of that mentality of like this is the new. This is a new cold war space race arms race dynamic. And we're barreling headlong into it with all of these warning signs flying up in terms of the risks and specifically immediately and quite obviously the risk to societal destabilization over mass unemployment. And I just don't see any grappling with it whatsoever. We're talking about something that is likely to be as unsettling and as destabilizing and revolutionary as the Industrial Revolution was, but in the span of a few years time versus over the course of many decades.
- [115:26]
Ryan Grim
Right. And I heard an interesting counterargument from a friend in the AI space about this decoupling of youth white collar unemployment. And her argument was maybe it is this already impacting the workforce. But also, if you think about this cohort, these are the folks who came through two major things. One is Covid. So they were in college during COVID And if you talk to professors or students or parents, that cohort suffered tremendously. It's just not as well equipped to compete in the workforce when they emerged from it. They also came out at the tail end of the kind of great awakening where you had all these disruptions inside these corporations and you had a lot of managers who were like traumatized by all the Young people that were telling them they were sexist and racist.
- [116:27]
Krystal Ball
Are you one of those managers, Ryan?
- [116:28]
Ryan Grim
I don't do any management anymore.
- [116:32]
Krystal Ball
You were dramatized out of it.
- [116:33]
Ryan Grim
Dramatized out of it. And so given the opportunity, they're less qualified than before. And I'm traumatized by my previous interaction with these young people. Let's not hire as many young people. Let's see how long we can go. That could impact. And if that's the case, you see a rebound after a couple years once the kind of pandemic. Although it's going to be a while because even kids who were in middle school during the pandemic suffered pretty substantially when it comes to learning. On the other hand, in order to make that decision, they would have to have some kind of automotive technology to replace them because there's still work to do and they need somebody to do the work.
- [117:24]
Krystal Ball
Right. So if you're not hiring, okay, the kids on a college.
- [117:27]
Ryan Grim
Who are you hiring? Who are you hiring? You got to hire somebody or you got to get a machine to do it. So let's say it is the machines. Yeah, I do think we need to have that conversation because there is a world in which this is a great thing and people do. People like those jobs suck.
- [117:42]
Krystal Ball
Right?
- [117:42]
Ryan Grim
Like nobody likes those jobs. Yeah, you have to do the jobs to make money and to like rise, rise up. But at the same time, you know, back in the 18th century, you had to work in the fields, sucked working in the fields. And the Industrial revolution cost millions of people their jobs. And people poured out of rural areas, basically starved out of rural areas because they couldn't work there anymore and came into the cities, had terrible jobs in the cities for many decades while they organized unions and organized outright revolutions, overthrowing governments. But people's quality of life gradually did improve. We're better off with washing machines and spending all of your day down by the creek. So not having to do these terrible jobs. You could imagine a better world. Yeah, well that's not what the political economy we have set up where all the gains will go to the top.
- [118:43]
Krystal Ball
Exactly. Which is why I wanted to interview Aaron Smith.
- [118:45]
Ryan Grim
Why didn't you do A Revolution then?
- [118:47]
Krystal Ball
Earlier this week? Because he wrote the book Fully Automated Luxury Communism, which is this very techno optimist view he wrote around 2017, 18. And one of the things he said to me is like what I got wrong is how fast it would develop. Cuz everyone got that wrong. Everyone got wrong how much it would, how fast it would develop. And he said the other Thing I got wrong was not taking into account the geopolitics and the way this would turn into this national contest for superiority between the US and China. And he's like, you know, he's in the uk, he's like, Europe is not even at the table here. Like we don't even have a player in the game. The only two countries that have a player in the game are the US and China. But, but his book, which I do really recommend to people because it provides a grand vision and sometimes it's helpful to zoom out and have a big picture grand vision and the way that that changes the lens that you're seeing things through. But in any case he's like, listen, we could embrace these technologies but in his world it involves a sort of modern communism to make sure that it is not just a few trillionaires who are benefiting at the expense of everyone else. And there's just no doubt that the few trillionaires direction is the direction that we are rapidly careening towards. That is the path we're on without a dramatic rethink. And I personally would like to see some sort of cooperation, a non proliferation type of agreement between the US and China. I don't see any sign of that coming to fruition. I don't see any sign that there's going to be a hey, let's come pump the brakes here and freeze development where it's at and reckon with some of these problems. I don't see any of that happening. So the change in the social contract is going to have to come really quickly. And while it may only be the anthropic people who are saying who are floating real solutions and really sounding the alarm and saying you guys are being lied to by industry and by the government about how quick this is changing. If you listen to Sam Altman, if you listen to any of these guys, I know Bill Gates made some comments. They explicitly say our goal is to automate human labor out of existence. Like they are upfront about it. They just don't really talk about what that's going to do. It might be a hand wave about that means we're going to have to change some things. But the actual urgency around grappling with it, I mean that's nowhere to be found.
- [121:02]
Ryan Grim
Yep.
- [121:04]
Krystal Ball
One other thing here that we can share just as one more indication, put E2 up on the screen. This is computer science and math occupation down 8% since 2022. This again could be related to AI and Ryan, we'll just close with on.
- [121:19]
Ryan Grim
This cuts against the kind of woke trauma argument. Because, like, these aren't really the kids who are leading those.
- [121:28]
Krystal Ball
It's not the math department news.
- [121:30]
Ryan Grim
What do I know? Maybe it is.
- [121:31]
Krystal Ball
Could be. I don't know. Yeah. But in any case. Yeah, I mean, this is one. One more potential indication here. There is an irony to the fact that in 2016, we're having the, like, oh, if your town got decimated by nafta, learn to code. And now coding is already. I hope nobody took that advice exactly. Apparently, JD Vance was actually involved in some, like, failed learn to code efforts in eastern Kentucky that didn't get nearly enough attention. But in any case, putting that to the side. Learn to code was apparently really bad advice because coding is now also becoming very rapidly becoming coal mines. Absolutely. Yeah, I guess. So. Learn to coal mine so that you can help fuel these AI centers.
- [122:07]
Ryan Grim
Yeah.
- [122:08]
Krystal Ball
All right, last thing we got here. Got to update you guys on the doings of the Tate brothers. Let's put this up on the screen. So they are now facing criminal charges. Both Tristan and Andrew are facing criminal charges in the UK. 21 charges. This is combined between the two of them. I'll just read you a little bit of the article here so I can make sure to get the details right. Perfect. Prosecutors have confirmed for the first time the full list of 21 charges Andrew and Tristan will face when they are returned to the uk. They are facing extradition from Romania, where they are currently being held and being investigated for similar series of charges. Those charges include rape, actual bodily harm and human trafficking. The Crown Prosecution Service said it had authorized the charges against the brothers in 2024, before an extradition warrant was issued to bring them back from Romania. The two British Americans are under investigation in Romania, facing a number of charges, which they denied. CPS said the domestic criminal matters in Romania must be settled first. Their charging decision in the UK came after they received a file of evidence from Bedfordshire police about allegations made in the UK. So the 10 counts here against Andrew Tate are connected to three alleged victims. They include rape, actual bodily harm, human trafficking, controlling prostitution for gain. Tristan faces 11 charges connected to one alleged victim, including rape, actual bodily harm and human trafficking. So that's where they are. They deny all the charges, just so you know. And obviously this pair, Ryan, Andrew in particular, has become very significant in terms of American politics. There were some indications, the administration denies it, but that they intervened in Romania to allow these two the ability to travel while they're under investigation in Romania. And they flew down to Florida. There was a Huge conversation that happened on the right. We hosted a critic of the Tates from the right, Ali Bastucky here to talk about this. And ultimately Ron DeSantis basically threatened them with charges here in the US and they decided that they would leave the country. But it is a bit of a fault line within the American right, from what I can tell, because on the one hand, you have obviously the longtime religious right coalition that Ali Beth Stuckey is representative of, that traditional values, quote, unquote, traditional family, very much at odds with the lifestyle. Even if you believe that they are not guilty of the crimes of which they have been accused, which there is significant evidence of. But even if you believe them, the lifestyle there is at best extremely degenerate. So there is a cultural clash there. One of the many schisms within the Trump coalition as it exists now.
- [124:47]
Ryan Grim
Yeah. And these are apparently, these appear to be related to civil cases that they're facing in the UK from four women, I think this is three women went forward with these criminal charges. And it's a complicated case because it involves coercion as well as some physical abuse. There's a grooming element that's involved here that is also controversial on the right, where they're like, they don't believe in that. They're like, if you got groomed, that's on you. Like, if that's you, that's, you know, you should have known better. Like that these guys are creeps or something. Like that's kind of like the Tate's counter argument there. And they're also saying their official statement is that everything was consensual and they have done nothing wrong here. But, yeah, the Romanians have said they will extradite them, though, to the uk, but first they have to navigate the rest of these Romanian charges and sentences, if there are any. So, yeah, I don't know. I don't know if they're cornered at this point or not, or if they're going to wait out the politics, because if some significantly right wing government comes into power, these are the kind of charges that you could see becoming this political football. But they're also toxic for the right as well. They're in this difficult spot because they have so many millions of men who love these guys.
- [126:16]
Krystal Ball
Right.
- [126:18]
Ryan Grim
And many, many millions of people who despise them.
- [126:21]
Krystal Ball
Yeah. And even as there is a very clear schism between the religious right types and the manosphere types and specifically the degenerate, take Andrew Tates of the world, there is some commonality there though, too, because one of the analyses of the right is, okay, why is your life not going the way that you want it to go? Not because of business, not because of inequality. It's because of immigrants, or it's because of trans people, or in this case, it's because of women. Women got feminism. They took the jobs. They're crushing you and calling you toxic and not allowing you to just be a guy. And so both are aligned. Both the manosphere and the religious right are aligned in this project of, like, maybe women shouldn't be the workforce so much. Maybe women should know their place a little bit more and make sure the man is taking the lead. And so even though it seems like an odd coupling between these two coalitions, there is some ideological overlap there. That makes sense. A somewhat coherent political project.
- [127:33]
Ryan Grim
Yeah, that's true.
- [127:35]
Krystal Ball
So, all right, well, that's what we got for you guys with regard to the Tates. Keep our eye on that and all of the other stories. Thank you guys so much for supporting the show and making the Friday shows possible. You're good for tomorrow?
- [127:45]
Ryan Grim
Friday? Yeah, I'm good for tomorrow.
- [127:46]
Krystal Ball
I think Emily's in. I'm in. So I'm not gonna go golfing this Friday. I'll stay away from the golf cart for a little while. Yeah.
- [127:54]
Ryan Grim
What a way to die that would be.
- [127:56]
Krystal Ball
Oh, my God. Can you imagine? It's already so embarrassing. But, like, to die in such an embarrassing, humiliating way would be so terrible.
- [128:03]
Ryan Grim
That would suck.
- [128:04]
Krystal Ball
Yeah. So, in any case, I live to tell the tale. My face will recover one day. And we will see you guys tomorrow for the Friday show. Have a great Thursday.
- [128:14]
Ryan Grim
All right, see you then.
- [128:30]
Hope Woodard
Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. I'm also the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. You might hear that term and think it's about celibacy, but to me, voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's flexible, it's customizable, and it's a personal process.
- [128:58]
Krystal Ball
Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now.
- [129:03]
Hope Woodard
Let me hear it. Listen to voiceover on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [129:13]
Ryan Grim
I've seen a lot of stuff over 30 years. You know, some very despicable crime and things that are kind of tough to wrap your head around. And this ranks right up there in the pantheon of Rhode island fraudsters.
- [129:27]
Krystal Ball
I've always been told I'm a really good listener. Right. And I maximized that while I was lying. Listen to Deep Cover the Truth About.
- [129:35]
Ryan Grim
Sarah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [129:42]
Krystal Ball
A lot of times, big economic forces show up in our lives in small ways.
- [129:47]
Ryan Grim
Four days a week, I would buy.
- [129:48]
Krystal Ball
Two cups of banana pudding, but the.
- [129:51]
Ryan Grim
Price has gone up, so now I only buy one. Small but important ways. From tech billionaires to the bond market to, yeah, banana pudding. If it's happening in business, our new podcast is on it.
- [130:03]
Krystal Ball
I'm Max Chavkin. And I'm Stacey Vanek Smith. So listen to everybody's business on the iHeartRadio app, app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever.
- [130:11]
Hope Woodard
You get your podcasts.
- [130:12]
Krystal Ball
This is an iHeart podcast.