Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Multiple US Banks Suddenly Collapse—Are “Bailouts” Needed to Avoid Catastrophe? Ft. Matt Stoller
Video Transcript: System Update #54
March 16, 2023
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The U.S. government took very aggressive action over the weekend to save the vast wealth of depositors at Silicon Valley Bank. That 40-year-old institution had become rather unstable of late as a result of rising interest rates that they failed to anticipate and invest in the kind of long-term, high-risk/high-reward vehicles responsible for the 2008 financial crisis, such as mortgage-backed securities.

Late last week, the bank's depositors, composed of bold, wealthy tech investors, as well as startup companies with substantial venture capital, began getting somewhat nervous about the bank’s ability to cover deposits above the $250,000 level, the amount which the FDIC insures for every account and that worry very quickly – in a matter of fewer than two days – turned into full-blown panic and then a bank run that prevented the bank from even coming close to finding the liquidity to cover the mountain of withdraws and transfer requests that poured in from very panicky depositors.

Over the weekend, at the urging of some of the most prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalists, the Biden Treasury Department announced that the U.S. government would ensure that all depositors would be made whole, no matter how much in excess of the $250,000 limit their balance was. 

That move, surprisingly, has provoked a very vitriolic debate between people like, on the one hand, our guest tonight, Matt Stoller, of the American Economics Liberties Project, who insist that this is quite similar, if not in scope, then in kind, to the 2008 Wall Street bailout under the Bush and Obama administrations in which the U.S. government first acted to save the country's richest people who caused the crisis while the middle class and working class were about to suffer. And then on the other side, we have tomorrow night's guest, venture capitalist David Sacks, the first CEO of PayPal and a prominent venture capitalist who has been insisting that the problems at Silicon Valley Bank are not unique to that institution, but instead reflective of a systemic problem, and that without U.S. government intervention, not only Silicon Valley Bank but countless other regional banks would have failed quickly due to contagion, panic and other similar bank runs. We'll examine that debate by speaking first to Matt Stoller tonight and then to David Sachs tomorrow. 

Plus, last night at the Oscars, Hollywood liberals did what Hollywood liberals and liberals generally love to do. They heaped praise on a film, “Navalny,” with the Academy Award for Best Documentary. 

Now, Navalny, as you probably know, is the dissident – an opponent of Vladimir Putin currently imprisoned in Russia for that dissidence – and, in the process, these Hollywood liberals bravely denounced the abuse of a dissident by a faraway government who was an official U.S. enemy, i.e., Russia. In the meantime, these same people, as usual, ignore, if not outright support, their own government's ongoing years-long imprisonment of our own dissident: the journalist Julian Assange. 

This is about far more than who wins some glitzy and increasingly pointless awards but it does say a great deal about how governments are able to get their own citizens – not just our government, but all governments – to constantly focus on the abuses of governments on the other side of the world, over which they exert no control. All of that means forgetting how their own government is doing the same, and often worse. 

As a reminder, System Update is now available in podcast form. We are available on Spotify, Apple and most other major podcasting platforms. The episodes are published in podcast form 12 hours after we first air here, live, on Rumble. If that's your interest, look for that and follow System Update on those platforms.

For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.


Monologue

 

 So, in order to understand the debate that has been provoked by the Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen's announcement that the U.S. government would step in - as leading Silicon Valley venture capital has spent the last several days demanding that it do - and protect 100% - every penny - of all depositor’s funds in the now collapsing Silicon Valley Bank, as well as at least one other bank, that is also collapsing rapidly, – on which Barney Frank, ironically, the longtime Democratic congressman who, along with Senator Chris Dodd, authored the legislation after the 2008 financial crisis that was designed to prevent exactly this from happening again – as it turns out, Barney Frank happens to sit on the board of the bank that is the second bank to fail as part of this bank grab, meaning his legislation did not evidently fulfill its promise of preventing a systemic contamination and essentially threat of a financial collapse from happening again as it happened right under his own nose at his own bank. 

Now, in order to understand the debate and it's a complex debate and one that requires expertise – which I am the first to acknowledge I do not possess, which is why we're going to have a guest on tonight who does, who has one view and a guest tomorrow night who also does who has the other – it's very important to remember and understand the 2008 financial crisis and the context of that debate, and that I do feel very comfortable speaking up because I covered it extensively at the time as a journalist involved not only with complex financial instruments, but also the political dynamics that shape our country. 

That financial crisis was a long time in the making. It was something that people were able to predict and actually did predict. Increasingly, Wall Street was able to invest in very, very complex and opaque economic instruments that were highly risky and like all risky instruments, had a high amount of profit. They were able to invest in that because of the rollback, various financial protections that came in the wake of the Great Depression, in the early 1930s, that were designed to keep separate commercial banking activities – that are generally more conservative and risk-averse from investment activities that tend to be riskier. And the idea was to prevent a systemic collapse in the commercial banking sector that led to the Great Depression in the first place. And over the years, especially the Clinton administration and their genius economists like Larry Summers and Robert Rubin, right from Goldman Sachs, decided that these protections from the FDR era were obsolete and banks could be unchained in order to start to become much riskier. And they were heavily rewarded because the Wall Street sector and the banking sector began investing heavily in and funding heavily the Democratic Party as a result of its servitude to the banking industry. They had a lot of Republican support as well during the Clinton administration with all of these rollbacks, and that led to the ability of all kinds of banks with your money, depositor money, to be able to engage in much riskier types of investments. One of the investment schemes that they particularly liked was called mortgage-backed securities, which was when banks would offer loans to people to buy houses and would keep the houses as collateral. And the value, the very high value of the real estate market ensured that those mortgage-backed securities, which were all grouped together, had a great deal of value and could be traded as commodities. Unfortunately, when the real estate market and the real estate bubble collapsed, the value of those mortgage-backed securities collapsed with them. And that led to an unraveling, a very rapid unraveling, of almost all of Wall Street, starting in September and October of 2008. So, during the last several months of the Bush administration, when the Treasury secretary still was Hank Paulson, who before joining the Bush administration as Treasury secretary, had been the CEO of Goldman Sachs, very much of a Wall Street background and his argument was that we need to act immediately to save the financial markets with a gigantic infusion of credit and cash in order to protect the credit markets from collapsing. 

What a lot of people don't remember is that the very first proposal that was negotiated between the Bush White House, as the 2008 presidential action and John McCain, was approaching with congressional leaders, including John Boehner, the then House speaker, and Nancy Pelosi, the then House minority leader and the head of the Democratic Party. Both of them were on board. The establishment wings of both parties were on board with Hank Paulson's plan to give a gigantic infusion of $800 billion into the Wall Street sector to prevent it from collapsing. The warnings were just as grave, in fact, way graver than the ones we're hearing now, that if the government doesn't immediately act to save these Wall Street institutions, the entire system will collapse. There will be bank runs, nobody will trust these institutions any longer, everyone will try and take their money out of the system and not just the U.S. financial system, but the global financial system will collapse. 

That crisis was much greater in scale than the current one, at least so far, but the arguments are very similar. Obviously, there was a lot of resentment that the U.S. government was going to bail out the titans of capitalism after all. The whole idea of capitalism is the reason that you get rich is that you make bets, risky bets. And if you're right, you get rich. But that only works if you also then lose everything when you're wrong. And yet what happened here was they all made very risky bets. They got rich when they were right and then when they were wrong, instead of losing, which is the other side of capitalism, which has to be the other side of capitalism, instead, the U.S. government intervened, stepped in and said, “Oh, don't worry, we're going to back you up. We're going to give you a gigantic infusion of cash to prevent this system from collapsing”. 

Even though it generated a lot of anger – why should the richest people in the world, who caused the crisis in the first place with their recklessness, be protected with taxpayer-funded money? – it nonetheless happened because the argument prevailed that if we didn't protect the richest people on the planet who caused the financial collapse, all of us would suffer because the entire financial system would collapse. And there was an infusion of $700 billion or $800 billion that was nowhere near enough to calm the markets. And then once President Obama was in office, he selected Timothy Geithner as his treasury secretary, who was most known for being an incredibly loyal servant to Wall Street. They infused a lot more money into Wall Street, and Wall Street and its casino went on. Dodd-Frank was the promise of the American people to say, we're going to reform everything so this never happens again. The argument was, look, these institutions are too big to fail. We cannot allow them to fail. We're allowed to watch them succeed and get rich when they're right. But when they're wrong, we can't let them fail. And that created a lot of resentment, political resentment. That first bill sponsored by Hank Paulson, was negotiated with John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi, the first time it came up for a vote in the House it actually failed, despite warnings that its failure would cause the implosion of the global economic system. And it failed because a majority of Republicans on the right voted no, as did I believe, up to 90 Democrats, most of whom were from the left wing of the party. And on the day the U.S. government refused, through the vote in the House, to intervene in the markets, the U.S. stock market lost something like 8% of its value; other stock markets around the world lost 10% of its value and there was real panic, which is why they finally ended up coercing members of both political parties to change their vote to yes and to start infusing huge amounts of money into that system.

It did end up saving Wall Street. But the funds that were set aside to help homeowners and working-class people and middle-class people were basically ignored. Huge numbers of them were evicted from their homes and lost their homes in foreclosure and people to this very day are drowning in debt, generational debt, because of that financial crisis. That is absolutely the context for this debate. Namely, is this a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis? Not necessarily yet to the extent that it's of that magnitude, but that the political dynamic is the same, namely all of these libertarian “keep the government out of our lives” anti-socialist tech billionaires in Silicon Valley –  who hate socialism, who hate the idea that the government steps in and helps people who are poor – “Those poor people should be self-sufficient”; “They don't need government help.” The minute their bank and their money are at risk, they start pounding the table. All to be saved. And then, the government comes in and saves them. 

Let me just show you a couple of videos that set the stage for what this debate is and then we're going to go talk to Matt Stoller and see what he thinks and question him on his views. 

First, let me show you the Democratic Congressman, Ro Khanna, whose views on this question are significant for two reasons: one is he absolutely holds himself out as a progressive; he ran on the view that the main problem of the United States is that there's economic inequality – the government far too often acts in favor of the rich and ignores the middle class and the working class and the poor. But he also happens to be the congressman from Silicon Valley. He represents Silicon Valley. And as you can imagine, in order to win that seat, you need the financial support and political support of the very same Silicon Valley tycoons who spent the weekend demanding a bailout for their bank. So, he went on “Face the Nation” on Sunday when he was still in doubt about whether or not the government would act. They had just interviewed Janet Yellen, who gave very mixed signals about whether she intended to do so and this is what Ro Khanna said: 

 

(Video: March 12, 2023)

 

“Face the Nation”: I wonder what you make of the Treasury secretary's remarks. I know you've been in contact with the White House, with Treasury and with FDIC. 

 

Rep. Ro Khanna: I have great respect for Secretary Yellen, but I think we need to have more clarity and greater strength in what the Treasury is saying. First, the principle needs to be that all depositors will be protected and have full access to their accounts Monday morning. 

 

“Face the Nation”: Depositors, meaning those with accounts bigger than $250,000, which is the cutoff for insurance right. 

 

Rep. Ro Khanna: Yes, all of them. There's precedent for this. Chair Powell when he was at Treasury, in 1991, the Bank of New England collapsed. And Chair Powell said the Treasury, coordinated with FDIC and with the Fed, and they insured every depositor. And why did they do it? They didn't want a regional run on the banks. Here's what I'm hearing from people in my constituency. They are getting nodes to pull out of regional banks, and all of this will be consolidated in the top four banks. We don't want that as a nation, especially if you're a progressive. The other thing is the payroll companies that are involved. Some of them have 400,000 folks. They're not going to be able to meet payroll if they don't have access to direct deposit. 

 

 

That is the argument being made. I mean, it's amazing. I think, you know, one of the things I've noticed, as I get older, I'm not yet old, but I'm just saying as I'm getting older, is that I think one of the reasons why history repeats itself so often is because people who are young didn't live through the history and, therefore, don't know about it and other people forget it. 

It's amazing how identical that sounds to the arguments made to bail out Wall Street. It was like nobody wants to help the rich. That's not what this is about. The problem is if we let AIG go under if we let other Wall Street firms go under the way we are, Lehman Brothers go under, the middle class, are going to lose their 401k, they're going to lose their retirement accounts and everybody is going to suffer. 

So, yes, we're going to help the rich but work for progressives. Obama was very much in on that and he said we're not doing it to help the rich. That's just an unfortunate, incidental byproduct. The people who funded my campaigns are, of course, going to get what they want. But that's not why we're doing it. We're doing it to prevent further panic, and further runs on the bank, which would prevent people from having their retirement accounts protected or even having their jobs. Everybody would lose their jobs or there would be no money to pay them etc. 

So, just because it resonates with the arguments made in the 2008 financial crisis doesn't mean it's invalid. I'm just putting in place all bear to note for a minute that if you find that persuasive, that was very similar to the arguments made in the 2008 financial crisis. 

 

In 2018, there was a rollback of bank regulations that a lot of people, beginning where people like Senator Elizabeth Warren in today's New York Times and I'm sure Matt will be on board with their view as well. I saw AOC making this view. Lots of Democrats make this view that part of what Dodd-Frank was designed to do was to make sure that banks got a lot more regulatory scrutiny than they had previously received prior to the 2008 financial crisis. And it was a very complex regulatory scheme that was put into place. And what midsize banks like Silicon Valley Bank began to do was to make the argument through lobbyists, through paid lobbyists, that, look, these regulations are too onerous for us. They make sense for Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan and Bank of America, the kind of big four banking institutions. They can sustain this level of regulatory scrutiny. They need it, but we're not anywhere remotely in the same level of danger in terms of the risks that we're taking and especially the impact that would be caused if we do fail. And they wanted the size of the bank that is subject to this added regulatory scrutiny of Dodd-Frank to be increased from $50 billion, which is where Dodd-Frank put it to $250 billion. In other words, any institution with a total amount of deposits or assets under $250 billion would no longer be subject to this heightened scrutiny and that included Silicon Valley Bank, which was one of the banks whose CEO aggressively and actively lobbied. It wasn't like they were just a beneficiary, incidentally. They actually lobbied to change this regulation and to make it laxer, they were able to put together a majority in the first and then in the Trump administration, in 2018, most Republicans joined with a good chunk of Democrats to create a majority in favor of making those changes so that banks like Silicon Valley Bank got much less regulatory scrutiny. And here is President Trump upon signing that legislation explaining his argument for doing so. 

(Video. May 24, 2018)

Pres. D. Trump: The legislation I'm signing today rolls back the crippling Dodd-Frank regulations that are crushing community banks and credit unions nationwide. They were in such trouble. One size fits all. Those rules just don't work. And community banks and credit unions should be regulated the same way and you have to really look at this. They should be regulated the same way with a proviso for safety as in the past when they were vibrant and strong. But they shouldn't be regulated the same way as the large, complex financial institutions. And that's what happened. And they were being put out of business one by one and they weren't lending. Since its passage in 2010, Dodd-Frank has dealt a huge blow to community banking. As a candidate, I pledged that we would rescue these community banks from Dodd-Frank, the disaster of Dodd-Frank. And now we are keeping that commitment and all of the people with me are keeping it. That commitment. 

 

 

So, when I first begin hearing that this is all Trump's fault, that it was due to the 2018 changes to the banking regulation scheme, I was very skeptical because of the obsession, the addiction on the part of the media to blame everything on Trump. And one does have to note that President Biden is the current president. He has been the president for more than two years now, for the first two years of his presidency up until about two months ago his party, the Democratic Party, controlled both houses of Congress. There was never a time during President Trump's presidency when the Republican Party controlled both houses of Congress. Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats controlled the House during this time and yet somehow everything that happened under the Trump presidency gets blamed on Trump, whereas nothing that happened under the Biden administration gets blamed on President Biden. But with that caveat, it does seem clear, having looked at this a lot more, and beginning with that skepticism that you can draw at least something, if not a very clear and direct one between the rollback of this regulation that the Silicon Valley banks demanded, among other banks, and the fact that this bank was allowed to get very rickety, leading to a bank run, although there are still a lot of questions about. 

There you see the Senate roll call vote on the screen. It was 67 to 31. As most of you know, the Senate has been very evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, very 50-50. So you only get a 67 to 31 vote if it's a very bipartisan bill. And that's exactly what happened here. So when you're trying to pick villains or whatever, that's certainly a critical question, as is the question of whether or not this added regulation would have really prevented this from happening. There are a lot of people who believe that what really happened was that the bank was nowhere near as fundamentally unstable as was suggested, that instead, because of an in-artfully worded press release and an attempt to sell off some of these assets to fix their balance sheet, a lot of people in Silicon Valley who follow these things very closely to talk to one another all the time talked themselves into a kind of panic that led to all of them trying to pull out their massive wealth from this bank that caused the bank run to happen, and that the failure of these other banks is not a reflection of systemic problems or even any sort of similar problems, that it was just contagion, that once you see one bank failing and you have your money in a regional bank, you start thinking, “Wow, I want to take my money out of my community bank, a regional bank, and put it in a much safer place like Bank of America or Wells Fargo”. And if that's the case, it's questionable whether or not added regulatory scrutiny would have solved the problem, because maybe there were really problems in this bank that should have caused it to collapse in the first place. I consider that to be one of the unanswered questions that we have to explore. But whatever else is true, the U.S. government has very quickly, very, very quickly responded to the calls of the richest people in our country, as they so often do. And the question is are they acting cautiously and wisely for the good of all of us, rather than acting corruptly to serve the needs of the people who fund both political parties? 


The interview: Matt Stoller

 

So, to help us answer that question for our interview segment tonight, I'm going to speak to one of the most knowledgeable scholars in the country on Big Tech, on Silicon Valley. We've had him on the show many times before. He spent a lot of years working on the political capture of Washington and Congress by big in interest. He's the author of “Goliath: The 100-Year War between Monopoly Power and Democracy”. He's also the director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project. He is Matt Stoller, and we're really delighted to speak to him. 

 

M. Stoller:  Hey, thanks for having me. 

 

G. Greenwald:  Okay, So first of all, that was not yet your time to say thanks for having me. I need to first welcome you to the show. Say hello, Matt. Good evening. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me. And now you can go ahead and say that. 

 

M. Stoller:  Hey, thanks for having me. Yeah. 

 

G. Greenwald:  I'm happy to have you. You know, you're a veteran in the show. I expect you to know the timing a little bit better. 

But let's get into the substance of the matter. I can scold you for that later. I want to start at the most basic level for people who do not follow these issues obsessively, who are trying to grapple with them and think about their kind of from the first principle, and that includes myself. So, let's just begin with the most basic way of thinking about this which is what is the best way to think about the relationship between a depositor of a bank and the bank itself. Is the person who's depositing money, nothing more than a creditor whose investment the government has decided partially to insure up to $250,000? Or is that kind of an archaic way of thinking about it and there's a different relationship now between bankers and depositors? 

 

M. Stoller:  No, technically that's exactly accurate. And, you know, it's not just that the government decided in the 1930s we had bank runs all the time that was similar to Silicon Valley Bank, except it was everywhere and people would lose everything. And so, the government and banks kind of cut a deal, right? And democratically. And what they said is we are going to make insurance so that if a bank goes under your deposits up to a certain level – the ordinary people don't have more than $250,000 in an account – you're going to be insured, so you're fine. You don't need to worry about your bank unless you are really rich or your business has a lot of cash. 

Then the banks get really cheap funding, so they get to borrow really low cost and then they lend at a higher cost and they essentially get free profit. But in return for essentially being able to use the government's full faith and credit – the government credit card – they have to accept supervision and regulation so that they're not gambling too much with the government's money. And that was kind of the deal and it prevented bank runs, which are horrible, pretty much until – I mean, you could go the seventies, eighties, nineties in various ways – but you know essentially they still prevent bank runs and your bank account up to $250,000 is still safe. 

There's also a variety of other institutions like the Federal Reserve and the Federal Home Loan Bank program which create what is known as the safety net for the banking system. So really, the banking system is a public system. I mean, people think about banks as private institutions and bankers as businesspeople, but really they kind of have a public obligation as well, because they draw so much support from the safety net. But there are good reasons to have a safety net here. 

Now, I have a lot of rage over the situation, but I'm just trying to give you an analysis of why we have FDIC insurance, why your money is probably safe in the bank account unless you have more than 250,000 and setting up for some context to discuss not just Silicon Valley Bank, but the Fed and FDIC also quietly resolved a different bank signature bank in New York, which is only $107 billion of assets and that's a crypto bank and they kind of snuck that one in as well. 

 

G. Greenwald:  That's Barney Frank's bank, right? the bank where he's a director…

 

M. Stoller:  That's right.

 

G. Greenwald: So, I'm going to absolutely, deliberately, provoke your rage as I love to do. It's actually not that hard. But before we get to that, I just want to spend a couple of more minutes on kind of the foundational understanding. So, we have the culture of the basics to work with. 

If this model is correct that you just described – or that I describe and you kind of accept it and then added to – which is, so, I'm someone who grows and I have a lot of money, I want to put my money in a bank and maybe I have a lot of money, not because I'm rich, but because I have a startup company that people just invested in. Someone gave me $50 million because I need startup cash for my company to develop a new technology – to pay the people who are going to develop it for me. I need a place to stick my money. I stick it in Silicon Valley Bank because it's a 40-year institution, it's well-regarded, and it's something that seems profitable. And then let's assume that the people who run the bank do all kinds of bad and reckless things. They lobby the government for less regulatory scrutiny. They make really terrible decisions. They make bad bets. I think everybody understands that those people who make bad bets and who are reckless should lose whatever gains they would have had. And should basically lose everything, especially if the government has to come in and save them. 

Why, though – the depositors who didn't do anything wrong or who didn't bet wrong, they're just putting their money in a bank that has a well-regarded reputation – why should they lose their money? About $250,000. Just because the executives of this bank acted irresponsibly? 

 

M. Stoller:  Well, there are two reasons. First of all, it's uninsured. It's not a secret that the FDIC limit is $250,000. It's plastered everywhere. So, if you're a treasurer of a corporation or a municipality, you know the score and you're choosing to ignore the rules. And that's just capitalism: sometimes you take a loss if you make a bad decision. And the other reason is, first of all, let's just be clear, uninsured depositors are not going to be wiped out. In fact, they'll probably get 80 to 100 cents on the dollar […] 

 

G. Greenwald: Because the government intervened. But had the government not intervened, they would have been wiped out. 

 

M. Stoller:  No, no, no. The government comes in and sells off the assets of the bank and then pays back the uninsured depositors with whatever they get for that. And Silicon Valley Bank, though, it lost money on bonds – those bonds are still high quality, they just dropped in value somewhat. So, what would have happened is the FDIC would have come in and taken those bonds, sold them off and then, today, people would have gotten between 30% and 60% of their uninsured deposits back. Then, over the next 2 to 6 months, they would have gotten whatever remained from the FDIC selling whatever they could for whatever they could get. And it's likely that people would have gotten 80 to 100 cents on the dollar of uninsured deposits back. 

So, there was no way that people were going to be wiped out by this. What might have been some problems getting access to all of their funding immediately? They would have gotten access to some of it immediately, but not all of it. So really, like the panic here and it was panic, it was, I think, kind of silly the idea that you need to backstop so people get 100% of their deposits immediately was just regulators panicking. And that's all this was. 

 

G. Greenwald:  But their argument was, look, even if down the line we get a good amount back, in the meantime, we can't pay our payroll, our businesses are going to go out of business. They're going to lose tons of start-up in them. And the technology they would develop that would drive the future gross domestic product to the United States. That was the argument. 

 

M. Stoller:  No, no, I know. And you've been feeding it to me all day to get me angrier and angrier. So, I appreciate that. 

 

G. Greenwald: (laughs). But what's the answer to that argument? 

 

M. Stoller: Well, these are not innocent people, right? These are rich people. These are powerful people. They know there's a $250,000 limit. So why have they been violating that when in a lot of cases you have treasuries that don't do that? There are services that you can get at banks called cash sweeps, which let you chop up your $10 million into 40 different $250,000 FDIC-insured accounts. Why didn't they use that? 

Well, the answer is because Silicon Valley Bank was not just an innocent bank. What they were doing is they were saying, if you leave the money from your firm or from – if you're a venture capitalist – the firms that you fund, if you leave them as uninsured deposits with us so that we can gamble with them, we will give you what's called “white collar banking services”, which is to say below cost personal lines of credit, below cost mortgages – essentially the kinds of things that politicians are criticized for because it's essentially bribery.  

The Silicon Valley Bank was essentially giving stakeholders in Silicon Valley bribes to keep their money as uninsured deposits so that they could gamble with it. And that's why these guys took a risk. They were also getting much higher interest rates on their uninsured deposits – they were getting more for taking more risks. So, they should bear the costs of that. And not just that but Silicon Valley Bank was also a co-investor in a lot of these firms. So, Silicon Valley Bank had stakes in over 3000 different tech companies and as a condition of those stakes, it was saying you have to have that firm deposit its cash with us in uninsured. So, there were a lot of elements here where there was self-dealing, there was a bad regulatory system, and then there was the Silicon Valley Bank bribing the people who were in charge of other people's money. So, this is a nasty situation. These people do deserve to have a minor haircut off of their deposits. And it would be – it is – completely crazy what the administration has done – and I blame Janet Yellen for this and I blame the Federal Reserve and I blame Joe Biden and I blame Donald Trump – It is absolutely outrageous that they have made these guys whole. All this was just panic and corruption and greed. And it was totally outrageous and disgusting and I am disgusted by it. 

 

G. Greenwald:  So, let me ask you, Matt, if you talk to the people in Silicon Valley who wanted this, this is their argument. Their argument is this: look, there is nothing special about Silicon Valley Bank. The reality is there are a ton of regional banks and community banks in the United States that are suffering in large part because the Fed raised interest rates. So, I don't really get that argument since the Fed always telegraphs, and especially in this case, telegraphed it very loudly they were going to do that. But their argument is we're not any different. And if you don't back this up and if you don't protect depositors, the thing that's going to happen in the next 48 hours, which seems kind of reasonable to me as a prediction, is everyone's going to get spooked towards their money – you heard Roe O'Connor. This is his argument – in a regional bank or in a community bank. And they're all going to say, you know what, I'm getting my money out of there as quickly as I possibly can. I'm going to put it in one of the big four and every regional bank in the United States is going to collapse. And the only thing that's going to prevent that is if Janet Yellen comes in and says, don't worry, we're here to ensure every penny of your deposits. 

Why isn't that a valid argument? 

 

M. Stoller: It's not a valid argument because we have a system that's set up to address that problem. One question that we have to ask is why didn't Silicon Valley Bank have the cash to give to depositors. Well, one reason is that they weren't keeping enough cash on hand because of the deregulatory choices and bad regulatory decisions by the San Francisco Federal Reserve. 

Another reason is that they just didn't have the assets they needed, right? The Federal Reserve is a bank of banks, and if you need a bunch of cash, you can just go to the Federal Reserve and say, I have a bunch of Treasury bonds or loans or mortgage-backed securities or whatever I need to borrow from you. I'll give you these as collateral. You give me the cash and I'll give it to my depositors, when things blow over, they'll come back and redeposited the money. And we have a system that's set up to deal with large demands for cash. 

The reason Silicon Valley Bank couldn't take advantage of that system is they didn't have the necessary collateral because they were insolvent. Most of these regional banks are not insolvent. And also, most of these regional banks are funded by insured deposits, so, people with less than $250,000 who have no reason to move their money. Silicon Valley Bank was funded 97% with uninsured deposits. Signature Bank, which is the other one – that was Barney Frank's bank and Ivanka Trump was on the board of that one before Barney Frank was – that was 90% uninsured deposits. The next most likely bank to fail,  called First Republic, which has about 67% uninsured deposits. And from there, it goes way down. So, we're really not dealing with a system that is – I mean, there's some trouble because the Fed keeps raising rates – but, as you put it, the Fed has telegraphed this. These guys just chose not to hedge because it would – actually their own employees were telling them, you got to hedge. This is really dangerous as interest rates rise. And the bankers were like, yeah, we don't want to, we won't make as much money. They were making these choices, they were remitting some of the extra profits to the uninsured depositors in the form of – what I've said before, these quasi-bribes. And they're pretty unusual bank. Most regional banks are not like this. So, you might have an initial panic. You might take down one or two or three other banks, but it'll blow over and then you will have re-imposed market discipline. Instead, what we did is we said everyone's going to be made whole; Silicon Valley bank depositors who took these massive risks, they're going to be made whole; all banks except for Silicon Valley Bank and Signature, their funding costs are going to go down and we're going to hand them all the full faith and credit of the United States that they can go off and gamble with. And there we go. Problem solved. Like that's what we did. Instead, this is just like a panic. And instead of dealing with banking panics the way that we should, which is to just use sort of like take out the bad banks that are insolvent, you let them go insolvent and everybody else –you lend them to tide over the panic. They freaked out and did a giant bank bailout and I think the reason this is different from 2008 is there are losses [...] 

 

G. Greenwald:  Oh, hold on. I'll probably get there before we get there. I just want to address my audience for one second because people are telling me in my ear that they’re treating you and cheering for you like you're some kind of Huey Long populist and wondering why I've suddenly transformed into Tim Geithner performing Propagandistic Services on behalf of Silicon Valley oligarchs. So, I just want to be very clear that the format of the show, on purpose, and I thought I said this at the beginning, was I was going to have Matt on – whom I know for certain, and somebody very vigorously opposed, in fact, angrily opposed to what the Treasury Department is doing – and I'm presenting him the arguments in favor of this bailout, not because I share those arguments or believe in those arguments, but because I think the best way to  have this show be the most informative, is to allow you to hear Matt responding to the arguments of the people defending this, which are not necessarily my arguments just because they're coming out of my mouth. 

So, let me ask you, Matt, now that I've taken off my Tim Geithner costume – although I'm going to put it back on, the proviso that I'm wearing it on purpose, what about 2008? Because that obviously is the thing that I think a lot of people are thinking about. I've seen lots of debates. Is this a 2008-style bailout? Is this something different? Obviously, the magnitude is a completely different universe but, in terms of the mentality, it seems like what this is, is the government stepping in and defending and protecting the assets of rich people as they did in 2008, because that's whom they serve, because that's who funds them. Is that one of the right ways to think about what's happening here? 

 

M. Stoller:  Yeah, there's a couple of differences between 2018 and then some similarities. I feel like this is like a high school essay. There are similarities and differences. So, the difference is that, in 2008, people were freaking out because the banks had invested in a bunch of crappy mortgages and nobody knew what anything was worth. So it wasn't that there were losses, it was that nobody knew how big the losses were or whether anybody was solvent. So, it was a panic, but it was a panic that was like – it was a very rational reason to panic because you didn't actually know what anything was worth and you didn't know if any institution was worth anything. And neither did any regulators. And it took a while to sort that out.  

In this situation, there are losses, but we know what those losses are. It's pretty open and it's not like we're going to be that surprised. The Fed has been telegraphing that it's raising rates. Everybody knew that Silicon Valley Bank had losses on the books. And then, there’s these other regional banks. We know what they've lost. So, this is not that big a deal. There is some panic in the markets, it's a serious situation but it's not a crisis situation. 

But in terms of the similarities, I think what you see is exactly the same attitude of 2008, in 2023. I mean, one of the differences is, in this case, the stockholders and the bondholders are not getting bailed out, but the uninsured depositors are. So, in that sense, it's, I guess, a little bit better than 2008, because, in 2008, they bailed out the stockholders and the bondholders and then the executives got bonuses. This time, at least they have to give the bonuses before the bailout. But yeah, the attitude is similar. And that is why I'm angry because we've seen this movie before. And in this case, they didn't need to do it. In 2008, I think that they needed to do something, there needed to be capital injections – the way they did it was problematic – but in this case, they didn't actually need to do it. And that was pretty obvious. 

 

G. Greenwald:  Okay, so that's one point. The next thing I want to ask you about, is, as I said, there does seem to be an addiction on the part of the political class to blame anything and everything that happens instantly on Donald Trump and only on him. It absolutely is true that there were rollbacks of Dodd-Frank, in 2018. We played the bill signing where Trump announced the rationale that led him to sign this. It definitely ended up excluding Silicon Valley Bank because, by raising the threshold to $250 billion, from $50 billion, they would have been subject to this scrutiny. And with this change, they ended up excluded. 

What I'm wondering is this: what it seemed to me like in real time – and I've read the accounts of some of these people who are extremely wealthy individuals who tried to take their money out of Silicon Valley Bank on Friday to find that they couldn't do so – but it seemed to me what happened was panic – as you said, in 2008, it was kind of rational, you looked at the markets and there is reason to think these institutions might be insolvent or at least have no idea whether or not they were – in the case of Silicon Valley Bank, they definitely had losses on their balance sheet, but it doesn't seem to me that they had the kind of losses that warranted a panic or a bank run. 

What instead happened is that you have this very incestuous group in Silicon Valley that started whispering to each other “you better take your money out”, “you better take your money out”. That spread very rapidly. It proliferated and everybody took their money out. Of course, Silicon Valley Bank didn't have the liquidity to cover that. If that's true, or some version of that is true, what I'm wondering is let's assume that there hadn't been this rollback of the Dodd-Frank regulations in 2018, that you had the regulators subjecting Silicon Valley Bank to the same stress test that it would have gotten before the rollback in 2018. Is it really that clear that the federal regulators would have blown the whistle on Silicon Valley Bank said its balance sheet is way too risky or way too far away from what is safe or would they have looked at it and said, you probably should do what they ended up doing, selling off some mortgage-backed securities, doing some stuff that you talked about with the Fed in order to bring in more liquidity, unload some longer-term assets – which is what they did, that, in turn, further fueled the fear. I'm just wondering, is it really that clear that if regulators had taken a look at it under the hood, they would have freaked out the way that these depositors did? 

 

M. Stoller: I don't know that it's clear. Yeah, sure, they engineered a bank run, but I don't put it on the depositors – they freaked out for a rational reason which is that the bank might be insolvent and probably what they did was smart. If you think that the bank is not going to have your money and your money's not insured, you should pull it out and get it out before everybody else. That's what causes a bank run. 

So, it was sitting there like it was kindling waiting to go up in flames. And, you know, it just so happened that it was a group of people, I don't know, slack or whatever, or signal, that lit the flames, but that was going to go. I don't know that you can definitively claim that bank or bank regulators would have forced Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank to have more liquidity on hand and to not have made so many egregious bets. I just don't think you could say that definitively. But I do think you can say that it's more likely they would have definitively. However, the other point here is I think there's a sort of 1, 2 problem here because – I worked on Dodd-Frank – and so, first of all, you're welcome. We fixed everything as everybody […] 

 

G. Greenwald:  Including Barney Frank’s bank. 

 

M. Stoller: The dirty secret of Barney Frank is he didn't actually know anything about banking, which was, like, kind of hilarious. But […] 

 

G. Greenwald:  But he had a lot of friends in banking. 

 

M. Stoller:  Right. Well, we could go into a whole thing on Barney Frank. 

But in 2009 and 2010, what we effectively did is we institutionalize too-big-to-fail banks. So, the four or five big banks that are too big to fail, we said we're going to make it too big to fail, and maybe we're going to regulate it a little bit more aggressively. And then there's them and then there's everybody else. 

Then, you move forward and the regional banks, who are very large but not as large as the big banks, they say, well, we want to be able to gamble a little bit more aggressively and then they convince the Republicans to go along. The Republicans never like bank regulators or banks – there was like a really interesting rethinking of significant parts of the Republican orthodoxy agenda like trade and antitrust. But one thing that the rethinking didn't get to, the realignment didn't get to, was banking rules, although I will note that on March 3, a bunch of Senate Republicans sent a letter to the Federal Reserve being like, you better not regulate more aggressively. We passed a bill in 2018 to make sure you don't. And J.D. Vance was not on that letter. There is some reason to think that some of the younger Republicans are changing their thinking. But it is certainly true that, in terms of bank regulation, this is still George W Bush's party, right? It didn't change. 

But I think that this was kind of like a twofer. Like we created the too-big-to-fail problem in the 1990s and 2000 and we institutionalized it with Dodd-Frank and then, we allowed these regional banks to go crazy, in 2018, and created this situation, in 2023, when these regional banks had gambled with other people's money and kind of had this collusive arrangement with these uninsured depositors. 

There was an argument, ‘oh, everybody's going to just go to move their money to JPMorgan because it's essentially a government bank’. It's a somewhat reasonable argument. I think it's overstated. I just don't think there was panic in most places in this country – this was a very online sort of echo chamber. But it's not an unreasonable argument. I think what we have to do now is look at the banking system and say, banks unless you're really small – In which case we can just kick you around because you have no political power – unless you're really small, you are effectively a government bank. And we need to just treat you like you are a government employee. You're a GS-15. You don't get to gamble with taxpayer money and pay yourself large amounts of money in bonuses or share buybacks or whatever. That's kind of where we are and if we want to move away from what is effectively a socialized system, which I think we should, then we should do that but right now, we are at a kind of socialized system, and it is the Democrats under Obama, it was the Republicans under Trump. And then, it's also the Democrats under Biden and Yellen. Although I'll say this, some of the things that Biden was trying to do, like he was trying to put this bank regular name, Saule Omarova, who opposed the 2018 bank deregulation, and she got blocked by essentially the same coalition of people who passed the 2018 bills, which is all the Republicans and then some Democrats. So, it's not totally clear here but what is 100% clear is that, broadly speaking, the political class, entirely in the Republican Party and then some of the Democrats and certainly at Treasury and the Federal Reserve are wholly in favor of bank bailouts for the wealthy and the powerful. You can argue about when they're necessary and when they're not. There were certainly some innocent people who were going to get hurt here but broadly speaking, what just happened was very bad and is an indictment of our regulators and our political class. 

 

G. Greenwald:  In terms of the last question, I mean, I think if you're listening to that and you're Republican, first of all, there's probably a lot of Republicans who want the party to move more in the direction of the J. D. Vance of the world and get away from the Mitch McConnell and the kind of where we're serving the lobbyist class, right? But, nonetheless, even going back to 2008 – with Hank Paulson and George Bush's bailout that both McCain and Obama and Canada had signed on to – the reason it failed at first was that a lot of Republicans voted no. Not a good number, Democrats and Republicans. And their attitude was exactly that, which is like, ‘No, we don't want the banking system nationalized’. We don't want it socialized; we don't want it federalized. But what we also don't want is, when it does fail, you look to the government and we come in and save you. Too bad, you're not getting our help. 

Is that a viable alternative to saying to the banks you're now under federal control? Or will it always be the case that at the end of the day the government's going to have to come in and save the banks because if they don't, the harm is going to be too widespread? 

 

M. Stoller:  Banking is always a public business, right? I mean, that's just that the bankers like to pretend that banking is private and bankers are running private businesses. But the reality is that when you get a bank charter, it's a government license and you get access to a whole social safety net. That is the thousand Federal Home Loan Banks, the FDIC, and all bankers take advantage of it. They want to take advantage of it. And they just bristle at the oversighted regulations because they can't gamble as much. So, it is a public system. But within that context, they have to do or they should do risk management.

 And the question is, how do they get penalized when they don't do adequate risk management? And the way we used to penalize them is their shareholders, their bondholders, uninsured depositors and bankers themselves got penalized. And today, it seems like where we've moved to is that if you're rich and powerful, you get profits, but no losses. Those are just fundamentally different systems, even though both of them are public systems. This last one, I think the one where we've socialized all the losses, I think, it's far more of a step towards kind of a nationalized system. It's just a very terrible nationalized system versus the kind of earlier, hybrid one where they did take losses sometimes. So, I think what we need to just acknowledge is that this is a public-private system and that we have to impose some form of market discipline, but also allow for stability. So, allow for insured deposits, but make sure that if, you're not insured, that you have to do risk management. And then, I would also say that a lot of business people just want a place to put their money that is safe. That's all they want. And why should we force them to be effective what is a government bank like J. P. Morgan or something like that? They should just be able to get an account at the Federal Reserve, right? If they're going to have a government bank, it's either going to have an implicit backstop or it's just going to be explicit. And why not just like it's a public service? So, let's just have it go through the government itself versus what we have now, which is, you know, we're having government banks. It's just we're paying the people, running them way too much and they get to gamble with our money. So, I don't know if I answered your questions, like there are inherently public characteristics of a banking system, but it doesn't have to be sort of a totally nationalizing of the downside, which is what we've been doing over the last 10 or 15 years or so. 

 

G. Greenwald:  But in this case, just to conclude, if you were the Treasury secretary or if you're the president, what would have happened is you would have let Silicon Valley Bank be on its own, have the FDIC come in and take it over, sell off its assets, give the depositors as much as possible over the amount of time and hope that you're right, that it would have only been a couple of banks that would have gone down in the resulting panic but in the system in large, the banking system is fundamentally sound. That's your view. 

 

M. Stoller:  Yeah. And look, if there had been like a broader crisis and, all of a sudden, there was this massive solvency problem – like then you come in and you go to Congress and you say there is going to be a serious banking crisis and we need capital injections and we're going to attach really serious strings to that – but you don't just start with the 16th largest bank in the country, that's just $200 billion of assets and a bunch of venture capitalists. And Larry Summers starts to say, “oh, you have to make my buddies whole”. You don't just respond to that. You have to have real evidence that there is a systemic crisis. Otherwise, it's illegal, right? I mean, the logic is clear. So, that's just where you have to have some ability to stand up to panic. And that's like what these guys don't have, they're just like, you would say boo and they they're like, Oh, where do I write the check? 

 

G. Greenwald:  So, I said in my introduction, that one of the things you study is the capture of government by finance. Is it your view and I know it's hard sometimes to kind of talk about people as a monolith and to know people's motives. But Janet Yellen's been around for a long time, as you can see. If you listen to her, watch her, she obviously is aware of both sides of this argument. 

Is it your view that she wasn't willing to let this panic spread out of fear that it was more systemic and she thought it would be better to capture it, just stop it when it first started? Or do you have the more cynical view that these rich people have tons of power inside the office of these decision-makers – which, of course, they do –  and that's why they ended up getting their way? 

 

M. Stoller:  Well, I don't think those two stories are mutually exclusive. I don't think that any of these actors were acting in bad faith. It would be easier if they were, right? If they were just scheming corruption and they were just like, “aha, I'm going to bail out my rich friends”. It's much worse than that. It's like they actually believe they're their rich friends when they say everything is going to collapse. That's what actually is going on here. They were like, “oh, my gosh, if Larry Summers says that everything's going to collapse, I better act”, right?  They believe, they get spooked easily, and the people that don't are the people that get blocked from being put into office. They bring up Saule Omarova. She would not have stood for this if the Senate had confirmed her at the Office of Comptroller of the Currency, she would have been like, no, this is bullshit. And so, I think that part of the problem here is that the people that you – Janet Yellen has been terrible for a really long time. And, you know, she got bipartisan confirmation and the rest of it ends like you can go back to the the Trump administration and you'd find the same thing. It's the people who are actually really courageous and willing to stand up to the financial power that have a tough time getting confirmed. And so that's kind of, you know, they intentionally select people who are weak, right?, for these positions. 

 

G. Greenwald:  Yeah. All right, Matt. Well, unless there's anything else you feel I need to get off your chest and, you know, you'll always have a welcome spot here to do it. It's like a massage therapy spot. I want to thank you so much for taking the time. It was super enlightening. Gave me a lot of arms to talk to David Sachs tomorrow when I do, about his side of the story. So, if you don't have anything else, let me say goodnight and thank you again for taking the time. 

 

M. Stoller:  All right. Thanks so much, Tim Geithner. 

 

G. Greenwald:  All right. (laughs).


Monologue

 

So last night was the Academy Awards, if you're like most people these days, actually, in America, you did not watch it, even though it used to be one of the events that brought all of Americans together. Increasingly, the ratings are collapsing for all sorts of reasons that we can go into. At some other point, I bet the number of people who could actually name the film that won best film in the 2022 Oscar ceremony is under 4% or 5%. I actually read it this morning and I've already forgotten it. I was about to tell you I'm proud of myself for having done that research, and yet it's already out of my brain. I didn't see that film. I don't think I saw any of the nominees. That's increasingly true for a lot of people. 

So clearly the Oscars have lost a lot of cultural impacts and I nonetheless want to talk about it for a very specific reason. And I'm going to just spend a little bit of time on it because that's all I really deserve. And I'm much less interested in the issue of the Oscars itself than the broader issue that I think it highlights. So just to give you the setup and the issue that I want to talk about is the category of best documentary. And I do have a personal stake in this somewhat, which is that my friend Laura Poitras – who directed Citizenfour, which was the film, a documentary about the work that I did with Edward Snowden in Hong Kong that won the best Documentary Oscar in 2015, was nominated for a film about the opioid crisis that I actually expected was going to win. I haven't seen any of these films other than hers, including the film talk about, so I want to put that card on the table as well. That film that Laura did, which would have been her second Oscar win, ended up not winning. I honestly don't care. Laura has won every award there is in this world, basically, and she didn't need a second Oscar. 

Anyway, the film that did win is a film called Navalny, which is a documentary about the Russian dissident who is currently imprisoned because he is an opponent of the government of Vladimir Putin and you can imagine how popular he is, even though he has said things his whole life that should make him completely anathema to liberal America. He has said some of the most vicious and bigoted denunciations of the Muslims of the world. He was taken off the list of a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty because of some of his most recent statements that he refused to recant. But that doesn't matter. Just like liberals are eager to arm actual neo-Nazi militias in Ukraine. All that it takes these days to be a hero is to either be opposed to Donald Trump or be opposed to Vladimir Putin, and everything else is completely irrelevant. And that's the reason they gave this Oscar for this film about Navalny. And I just want to show you what happened in the two and a half minutes that resulted in them winning (Video). 

 

Presenter: And the Oscar goes to… Navalny. […]Diane Becker, Melanie Miller, Shane Boris…

 

OFF: Director Daniel Roher and his team filmed Alexei Navalny while he was in hiding from the Russian government at a remote location in Germany. 

 

Daniel Roher: Thank you to the Academy. We are humbled to be in the company of such an extraordinary crop of documentary filmmakers. These films redefine what it is to make a documentary. To everyone who helped make our film, you know who you are, your bravery and courage made this film possible. We owe so much to our Bulgarian nerd with his laptop, Christo Grozev. Christo, you risked everything to tell this story, and it's investigative journalists like you and Maria Pevichikh that empower our work. To the Navalny family. Yulia, Dasha and Zakhar, thank you for your courage. The world is with you. 

And there's one person who couldn't be with us here tonight. Alexei Navalny, the leader of the Russian opposition, remains in solitary confinement for what he calls – I want to make sure we get his words exactly right – Vladimir Putin's unjust war of aggression in Ukraine. I would like to dedicate this award to Navalny, to all political prisoners around the world. Alexei, the world has not forgotten your vital message to us all. We cannot, we must not be afraid to oppose dictators and authoritarianism wherever rears its head. I want to invite Yulia to say a few quick remarks. Yulia. 

 

Yulia Navalnaya: Thank you, Daniel. And thank you to everybody. The everybody here. My husband is in prison just for telling the truth. My husband is in prison just for defending democracy. Alexei, I am dreaming the day when you will be free and our country will be free. Stay strong, my love. Thank you. 

 

 

Okay. All incredibly moving, and emotional and obviously, I'm sure people in that room, the people who voted for this film, felt very good about themselves. They were taking a stand against Russia, against the Russian dictatorship. They all were cheering. The person who directed the film that won the Oscar said, “We need to stand up to dictatorship wherever it rears its head”. 

I think one of the things that makes us so notable is that during the Cold War, the idea of whataboutism was often denounced by the U.S. government, and the way they define that was that they would always claim that any time you criticized the Soviet Union and its abridgment of basic liberties and rights, the Soviet government would try and distract attention away from that critique by saying, “well, what about your problem over there in the United States with how you treat black people? Or what about the internment of Japanese Americans?” So, they would kind of distract their own citizens’ attention away from the critiques of their human rights abuses by pointing way over to the other side of the world, the United States. And they would always say, what about this? What about that? What about this? 

Now, the idea that some sort of Soviet practice that they invented is lunacy. Humans have been doing that from the time that they could speak. You say, well, you have this fault and they say, no, what about my neighbor? My neighbor has it far worse. There's a very human practice. The Soviets did not invent theirs, but that was always the framework. That was the idea was the governments do, in fact, use this tactic to distract attention away from their own abuses. 

It's not just the Soviet Union that does that or the Russian government that does that, it's also the United States that does that, we're experts at it. We love to say things like we will stand up for democracy, despotism and tyranny wherever we find it. We will stand up to Navalny, to this person over here in China who's imprisoned unjustly, or this person here in Iran. And, of course, the United States has always had and still does have its own dissidents in prison and one of the leading ones, for example, is Julian Assange. 

And so, it seems very strange to me, very strange, to have a room full of people cheering not just the film, but themselves, for very – it's a very empty and cowardly thing to do, to denounce the government on the other side of the world over which you have absolutely no influence. Denouncing Vladimir Putin or President Xi or the Iranian mullah is really doesn't do anything to change those governments. You have no influence there. It's not a brave thing to do. You're not in danger there. You don't live in those countries. It's always been the case that foreign countries that are enemies of one another criticize each other. That's all this is.

What makes a lot more bravery and that's a lot more consequential, is criticizing the human rights abuses of your own government. And if you don’t ever do that, if instead you're constantly focused on the human rights abuses of other governments, it actually empowers your own government to engage in the same human rights abuses because you're constantly reaffirming its narrative that it's only those bad countries over there that imprison political dissidents and political opponents. We absolutely do the same. Julian Assange is in prison, in part because he exposed the crimes of the United States government, but also because – and I think this is really the bigger part – is, in 2016, he published documents that helped Donald Trump win the election and Hillary Clinton lose the election. Because before that, many Democrats and people on the liberal left are very much in support of Julian Assange and now it's almost impossible to find anyone on the liberal left willing to stand up in defense of Julian Assange. And the only thing that changed was that he did journalism that helped defeat Hillary Clinton. That is the classic case of being a political prisoner. The Biden administration is doing everything possible to keep him in prison for as long as possible, despite never having been convicted of a crime. And it is unimaginable that these same Hollywood liberals would give an award to a dissident like Julian Assange. 

Now, when I said this earlier today, people pointed out that the same Hollywood liberals who vote did, in fact, give an award, the Oscar, to the best documentary that Laura Poitras produced about my work with Edward Snowden. I went up on the Oscars stage. We collected the Oscars, but they were for Laura and for the two producers of that film. But I think especially in the wake of Donald Trump, everything changed in terms of how American liberals think. They've become much more jingoistic and they never like to believe their own government engages in the kinds of abuses that the Russian government engages in. And not only is it just a vapid and cowardly thing to do – spend so much time focused on the bad acts of a government far away from you over which you have no control or you can't change it while ignoring the abuses of your own government – it actually makes it even more difficult to do anything about the abuses of those foreign governments, because if you try, other governments will look at you like you're crazy – like, who are you to lecture us on the rights of dissidents when you imprison your own dissidents yourself? Why would we possibly listen to your lectures? 

There was an incredibly powerful example of this when President Ilham Aliyev, of the above Azerbaijan, who for sure is a savage authoritarian, was confronted by a reporter from the BBC about Azerbaijan's imprisonment and other abuses towards dissidents. And you'll see how he used that argument. Listen to what he said: 

 

(Video. Nov. 9, 2020) 

 

President Ilham Aliyev: Why do you think the people question do not have free media and opposition? 

 

Orla Guerin, BBC:  Because this is what I'm told by independent sources in this country. 

 

President Ilham Aliyev: Which independence sources?  

 

Orla Guerin, BBC:  Many independent sources. 

 

President Ilham Aliyev: Tell me, which. 

 

Orla Guerin, BBC:  I certainly couldn't name sources. 

 

President Ilham Aliyev: If you could name that means you are just inventing this story. 

 

Orla Guerin, BBC:  So, you're saying the media is not under state control? 

 

President Ilham Aliyev: Not at all. 

 

Orla Guerin, BBC:  I mean NGOs are the subject of a crackdown. Journalists are the subject of a crackdown. 

 

President Ilham Aliyev: Not at all. 

 

Orla Guerin, BBC:  Critics are in jail. 

 

President Ilham Aliyev: No, no, 

 

Orla Guerin, BBC:  none of this is true?  

 

President Ilham Aliyev: Absolutely fake. Absolutely. We have free media. We have free Internet. And the number of Internet users in Azerbaijan is more than 80%. Can you imagine the restriction of media in a country where the Internet is free, there is no censorship and 80% of Internet users? This is, again, a biased approach. This is an attempt to create a perception in Western audiences about Azerbaijan. We have opposition, we have NGOs, we have free political activity, we are free media, and we have freedom of speech. But if you raise this question, can I ask you also, how do you assess what's happened to Mr. Assange? Is it a reflection of free media in your country? Let's talk about Assange, how many years he spent in the Ecuadorian embassy and for what? And where is he now? For journalistic activity you kept that person hostage, actually killing him, morally and physically. You did it, not us. And now he's in prison. So, you have no moral right to talk about free media when you do these things. 

 

 

No, no. It seems like a good argument to me. You do, in fact, lose your moral right to criticize the people for conduct in which you yourself engage. That seems basic. And if you are somebody who likes to spend a lot of time talking about the abuses of foreign governments while being indifferent to or even supportive of very similar abuses by your own – and it's absolutely a similar abuse to imprison Alexei Navalny and Julian Assange. I can make arguments just why they're different in favor of the Russian government but I won’t, let's assume that they're very similar. If you're somebody who does very little about that abuse or other abuses by the U.S. government, including cracking down on whistleblowers, putting January 6 defendants, including nonviolent ones in prison and in solitary confinement for months, even though most of them are not accused of using violence at all; keeping Edward Snowden in exile or refusing to let him come back to the country or step foot outside of Russia upon pain of imprisoning him for his courageous work and showing his fellow citizens how our own government was spying on us without warrants illegally and unconstitutionally, as federal courts in our country have ruled, then I think that argument is very valid that not only do you have no moral credibility, but your attempt to solve those problems elsewhere is severely diminished. 

So, as all of those Hollywood liberals clap for themselves, not for Navalny over the filmmakers, but for themselves, for having been so courageous in giving him that award, I think it's very worth thinking about why their focus is so intensely on the bad acts of another government all the way around the other side of the world that our own government tells us to hate, and so rarely on the abuses of our own government. 

 

So that concludes our show for this evening. Remember that we have System Update now available in podcast form on Spotify, Apple and other major platforms published 12 hours after we appear, live, here on Rumble. 

Remember as well that every Tuesday and Thursday we have our live aftershow on Locals where we take your questions, respond to your feedback, listen to your ideas and suggestions about who we should interview and what topics we should cover. To join our Locals community, where you also get free access to all of our journalism, just sign up the join button underneath the video on the Rumble page and that will take you to our Locals community, which we are in the process of building even further. 

As I said, tomorrow night we will have at 7 p.m. EST, our normal time, David Sachs, who's one of those venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, who was urging and who vehemently defends what the U.S. government did in protecting every penny of the depositors of Silicon Valley. So, you'll get to hear me ask the sort of anti-bailout questions to him to kind of complete the debate that we started tonight with Matt Stoller. 

Thank you, as always, for watching. We hope to see you back tomorrow night here and every night at 7 p.m. EST. 

Have a great evening, everybody. 

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QUICK: Ask Questions for Today's Mailbag on System Update!

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@ggreenwald I don't know if everyone has watched this already, but I'm going to post it on here anyway because it is such a fantastic conversation.
I'm a contractor who works construction. I work in what may be one of the last industries here in Canada that is completely free of gender or racial "equality" when it comes to hiring. My wife, friends, and most of the people I'm very close with, share a similar deep belief in liberty, freedom and individualism and the deep hatred of any kind of racial or gender politics I do. I really believe in Austrian economics and think socialism can't and has never worked. So clearly, Briahna and Glenn come from the opposite end of the political spectrum and also come from a much different world than I do, but hearing them talk about bringing the left and right together to form coalitions on all the important issues hits hard. I love it. I really think it's what Glenn tries do in his work and I find that so noble. And interesting, as I don't have much access to...

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Trump Mocks Concerns About Epstein; Trump Continues Biden's Policy of Arming Ukraine; Trump and Lula Exchange Barbs Over Brazil
System Update #483

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

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 Much of the MAGA world was in turmoil, confusion and anger yesterday –understandably so – after the Trump DOJ announced it was closing the Epstein files and its investigation with no further disclosures of any kind. After all this happened, some attempt was made to try and pin the blame or isolate the blame for all of this on Attorney General Pam Bondi. Yet, Donald Trump himself, today, when asked about all of this, went much further than anyone else when meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the White House again: President Trump actually mocked and angrily dismissed any concerns over the Epstein matter and how it was handled. 

On our second segment, one of the uniting views of Trump supporters over the last four years has been opposition to the Biden administration's policy of arming, funding, and fueling Ukraine in its war against Russia. Yesterday, however, at the same meeting with Netanyahu, Trump announced that he would continue the Biden policy that he had spent so many years criticizing by now providing defensive arms at least to Ukraine, and he did so based on the longstanding neocon/liberal view that Putin is completely untrustworthy and therefore Russia must be thought because of Putin. That's what Trump himself said. 

Then, we’ll comment on Trump’s lengthy tweet attacking Brazil for its ongoing prosecution of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, during the BRICS Summit being held in Rio de Janeiro. This was something we were going to cover last night and didn't have time to, but we will tonight. Brazil's President Lula da Silva quickly responded, very defiantly, by basically telling Trump to mind his own business. 

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Last night, we covered quite extensively the decision by the Trump Justice Department, not even six months into the administration, to completely shut down and close and stop all investigations into Jeffrey Epstein, as well as announcing that there will be no further disclosures of any documents of any kind, that whatever they've released so far, which has basically been nothing – not basically, has been nothing – is all you're going to get. 

This is a blatant betrayal of multiple promises made by key Trump officials over the last four years, before they were in the White House, but was also a complete 180 in terms of what key Trump influencers and pundits had been saying, including several pundits who are now running the FBI, such as Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, as well as the Justice Department, including Pam Bondi. 

We even showed you an interview that Alina Habba, the Trump attorney who is now the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, appointed by Donald Trump, did with Pierce Morgan while she was in the government, just in February, where she claimed they have a whole bunch of very incriminating lists with shocking names. She said there's video and there are all kinds of documents that are shocking, in her words, and she said they're going to be released over time because we've gone long enough where people who do these sorts of things, including are involved in the Epstein scandal, have no accountability. She said that is ending with the Trump administration. There's going to be accountability. 

Yesterday, the Trump Justice Department said, “No, there's nothing here. We looked. There's no such thing as a client list.” We know we've been promising and that JD Vance repeatedly said, “Where's the client list?” Donald Trump Jr. said, “Anyone hiding the client lists is a scumbag.” Dan Bongino, Kash Patel, Pam Bondi accused Biden officials of basically covering up predatory pedophilia by refusing to release the Jeffrey Epstein client list. Now, they're saying there's no client list, that thing we've been talking about and accusing Biden officials of hiding and promising to disclose, that doesn't exist. 

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Trump DOJ: There's Nothing to the Epstein Story; State Dept: Syria's Al-Qaeda are No Longer "Terrorists"
System Update #482

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

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One of the most significant scandals among MAGA pundits and operatives within pro-Trump discourse generally over the last four years has been the one involving Jeffrey Epstein. 

Now, in less than five months, the DOJ announced today, the one under Pam Bondi, that they are closing the investigation, given the certainty that they say they have that Epstein had no client list. There's no such thing as an Epstein client list, he never tried to blackmail anyone and no powerful people were involved whatsoever with his sexual abuse of minors. They also say that he undoubtedly killed himself: there's no question about that. 

All of this is such a blatant betrayal of what was promised all of these years, such that all but the most blindly loyal Trump followers – like the real cult numbers, a lot of them almost certainly paid to be that – are reacting with understandable confusion and anger over what happened today and over the last several months. We'll delve into all of this and what this means. 

Then, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced today that the group that al-Golani once led, long known as al-Qaeda's affiliate in Syria, is no longer officially a designated terrorist group. This is al-Qaeda. We'll explore what all of this shows about the utterly vacant and manipulated propaganda terms, terrorist and terrorism. 

As a note, we did not have enough time, so we’ll talk about President Trump’s tweet attacking Brazil and its government, on the day of the BRICS Summit in Rio de Janeiro, some other time soon.

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Earlier today, the Justice Department issued a statement, essentially announcing that they no longer consider any of the questions surrounding what had long been the Epstein scandal to be worthwhile investigation; that essentially all of these questions have been answered, that there's really nothing to look into. 

You can read the Justice Department's statement here.

They're saying this client list that most Trump supporters, I would say, have been accusing the U.S. government, of hiding to protect all the powerful people on this list, now, that they're in power – people like Pam Bondi, Dan Bongino and Kash Patel, now they're in charge – they're saying, no, actually there is no client list at all. There's at least no incriminating client list, whatever that means. 

I don't know if there is a client list or not, but according to them, there's no incriminating client list. I don't know how you can have a client list that's not incriminating: to be a client of Jeffrey Epstein seems inherently incriminating. They seem to have said what the White House briefing said today when asked about this, because as we'll show you, Pam Bondi went on Fox News and was asked, “Are you going to release the client list?” And she said, “It's sitting on my desk for review.” 

Trump had strongly suggested he would order it released. Now they're saying, “You know what? There is no client list.” 

So, all these claims that Jeffrey Epstein had recordings of prominent individuals who he invited to his island, who had sex with minors, evidently, there's no incriminating material of any kind that would implicate any powerful person. Just not there, they checked. They checked the storage closets, they looked under the beds, just couldn't find anything. All the stuff they had been claiming was there for years, screaming and pounding the table on podcasts, making a lot of money over it, too, accusing Biden officials of hiding this all for corrupt ends, just not there. They looked, couldn't find it. 

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Glenn Takes Your Questions on the Ukraine War, Peter Thiel and Transhumanism, Trump’s Middle East Policies, the New Budget Bill, and More
System Update #481

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

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I don't know if you heard, but there's some breaking news, and that is that tomorrow is July 4, which in the United States is a major holiday. The Fourth of July is the day that we celebrate our independence from the tyranny of the British Crown. Tomorrow we will be taking the holiday off in large part because the appetite for watching political content or political news apps and some big political story on July 4 is quite reduced and so everyone can use a three-day weekend. 

What we usually do on Friday night is the Q&A session, something very important to us and something that we try to do at least once a week because it's one of the main benefits that we believe not only give to our Locals members but also receive from them. 

It's always kind of a hodgepodge, but it always ends up as one of our most interesting shows, we think, throughout the week, one of the shows that produces the best reaction. Since we're not doing a show on Friday, we're going to do it tonight instead. We have some excellent questions. There's one really confrontational question – I was going to say a bitchy question, but I want to be a little more professional in that – let's say confrontational questioning, critical. We're going to try to deal with that one as well. 

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So one of the things that shows throughout the week is that I happen to speak a lot. I analyze things, I dissect things, I read evidence, I show you videos, I talk to guests, I ask them questions. And what we try to do on our Q&A is to be respectful with the question and give an in-depth answer. 

I'd rather answer four or five by giving in-depth answers that I hope are thought-provoking than just speeding through them. I'd rather do a substantive response to four or five than a quick, superficial one to nine or 10. So let's go do that. 

The first one is from @If TruthBeTold and this is what they asked: 

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Well, let's begin with the fact that there is a reasonably effective instrument for preventing foreign interests and foreign lobbies from exerting influence in our country in a way that's stealthy or covert; that’s the FARA registration, which requires foreign agents acting on behalf of other countries to register as such so that everybody knows if they're slinking around Congress, whispering in politicians' ears, asking for legislation on behalf of a foreign government because they've disclosed it. 

And so if you work for the Iranian government, they're paying you to influence members of the legislator, if you do that for Qatar, if you do it for Russia, if you do it for Saudi Arabia – and the premise of the question correct, huge numbers of foreign interests lobby in the United States, you're required to declare that publicly on a FARA registration form and you can go see those, they're publicly available, and you can see who's lobbying on behalf of foreign governments for pay. 

One of the problems is that, for some reason – and you can fill in the blanks here – AIPAC has become exempt from that requirement. AIPAC is a lobbying group that reports to the Israeli government, meets all the time with the Israeli government, and gets funding from Israeli sources. Ted Cruz tried to deny that AIPAC is operating on behalf of a foreign government. Tucker Carlson asked him, “Well, has there ever been a single position that AIPAC has taken that deviates from the Netanyahu government?” and Ted Cruz said, “Sure, they do it all the time.” And Tucker Carlson said, “Oh, that's great. Why don't you name one?” And of course, Ted Cruz couldn't because it never happens, because AIPAC is an arm of the Israeli government trying to exert influence in the United States. 

And yet, for some reason, for a lot of reasons, in contrast to all the other examples I just named, when you have to fill out a foreign agent registration form, people who work for AIPAC or on behalf of the Israel lobby don't. Their claim is, “Oh, we're not lobbying for Israel. We're lobbying for the United States. We just believe that if the United States does everything that Israel wants, that's good for the United States. We're an American group. We're patriotic. We're America first. We just think that America benefits when it does everything that the Israeli government tells it to do.” 

John F. Kennedy strongly advocated and started to demand that the predecessor group to AIPAC register as an agent of a foreign government. He couldn't understand why it didn't have to, alone among all the other groups. And it never ended up happening because JFK's presidency ended when he was killed. 

Again, I'm not drawing any kind of causal link there. I'm not even trying to imply it. I'm just giving you the chronology as to why that never came back. And since then, nobody has ever talked about that. So, that's one thing. The other is that AIPAC is uniquely well-financed in terms of being a lobby operating on behalf of foreign governments. It hides that in a lot of ways, but I'll just give you an example. In the last Congress, there were two members in particular who AIPAC identified as being too critical of Israel. They were both Black members of Congress who represented primarily Black, poor districts, and the rhetoric started to become, which is threatening to AIPAC, ‘Wait, why are we sending billions and billions and billions of dollars to Israel when Israelis enjoy things like better access to health care and more subsidies for college than our own citizens do, when millions of Israelis have better standards of living than millions of people in the United States, including in my district? Why are we sending the money there instead of keeping it at home and improving our lives? 

Two of the people they identified as highly vulnerable were Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush. I've certainly had criticisms of both of them, particularly Jamaal Bowman, but also Cori Bush – but that's not why AIPAC was interested in moving them from Congress. They poured $15 million – $15 million into a single house district in a Democratic primary – they found this Black politician in St. Louis to challenge Cori Bush, who promised to be an AIPAC puppet, and he has kept his promise. Wesley Bell is his name. He should put AIPAC in the middle of his name because it's much more descriptive of what he is now. And they just removed Cori Bush from Congress and put in this person who is basically the same as Cori Bush, except he loves and worships and devotes himself to Israel, never criticizes it. 

They did the same with Jamaal Bowman. They got George Latimer, who's white, but he was a county executive known in the district, and they poured $15 million into that. I don't know of any other interest group on behalf of a foreign government that has not just the ability, but the brazenness, the willingness, to be so open about destroying people’s careers in Congress that they're not sufficiently loyal to a foreign government. 

So the question is, well, what's the solution? Are you more willing to consider the problem of money in politics? I've never doubted the problems of big money in politics. I've always recognized that there are massive problems with huge amounts of money in politics. The founders did as well. They were capitalists. Obviously, they weren't opposed to financial inequality. They were often very rich themselves, property owners and the like, but they also warned that massive inequality in the financial realm can easily spill over into something they did want to avoid, which is inequality in the political realm or the legal realm. And clearly that's happening. 

The problem is, how do you restrict the expenditure of money for political purposes without running afoul of the First Amendment? Let me just give you an example of what this kind of law would entail. This was at the heart of Citizens United, which was the five-to-four Supreme Court decision in 2010 that invalidated certain amounts of financial campaign finance restrictions on the grounds that it violated the First Amendment. 

Let's say you're a group that wants to improve conditions for the homeless, and you want to bring attention to the problems of the homeless and solutions you really believe in as a citizen; you're just like trying to pursue a political cause that you believe in. You get together a bunch of money from your friends from other groups, you save your money and use that money to publish films, ads and documentaries about which politicians are helping the homeless and which ones are harming them. Then, you also may hire somebody who has influence in Congress, who can get you into doors to talk to members of Congress, to try to persuade them to enact legislation that will help the homeless. If you have laws that say that you can't lobby, you can’t spend money on political advocacy. It's not just going to mean that Israel and Raytheon can't go into Congress or that Facebook and Palantir can't; It's going to mean that nobody can. And that clearly is a restriction on your ability to, not your ability but your right under the Constitution to petition your government for redress, to speak freely about grievances you have against your government. 

I've always thought the better solution than trying to restrict First Amendment rights by eliminating money from politics is to equalize it through public campaign financing. So, if your opponent raises $10 million through billionaire spending or very rich people, the government will match your funds and give you $10 billion. 

We do have matching funds in certain places. We also have a better tradition and culture of small-dollar donors that compete with big-money donors. I mean Bernie Sanders' campaign drowned in money in 2016 because of small donors. AOC has insane amounts of money that largely come from small donors over the internet. Donald Trump had a ton of small donors, in addition to very big ones. Zohran Mamdani, actually, got so much money at the start of the campaign from grassroots donors that he actually asked them not to give anymore because, under the matching fund system of the city, where you can raise money up to a certain level and then they match it, he reached the maximum. He didn't need any more money because he wanted to get the matching funds. 

That has been encouraging; the internet and various fundraising networks enable small donor contributions to a huge amount, making people competitive, who aren't relying on big money. But once you start trying to regulate how people can spend their money for political causes, remember Citizens United grew out of an advocacy group, they were conservative, they produced a documentary, publishing, highlighting and documenting what they believed were the crimes and corruptions of the Clintons before the 2008 election. So, they made a film about one of the most powerful politicians on Earth and it contained information they wanted the general public to see before voting, potentially making her president. And that was, they were told, a violation of campaign finance laws because they were a nonprofit, and under the campaign finance laws in question, corporations, including nonprofits or unions, were banned from spending money 60 days before an election. 

That's why groups like the ACLU and labor unions sided with Citizens United and argued that this campaign finance law, which the court, by a 5-4 decision, overturned, is in fact unconstitutional. People forget the ACLU and labor unions that also would have been restricted, were also part of the urging of the majority decision, even though it's considered a conservative decision. 

I think there are much better ways to equalize the playing field when it comes to lobbying: make AIPAC and all of its operatives and the entire Israel lobby required to register under FARA, just like everybody else does. If they don't, they go to prison, just like anybody else does who doesn't file the FARA forms deliberately or intends to deceive. And then, also, find ways to make the playing field even without telling people, citizens, that they can't spend their money that they earn and that they make on political advocacy, on campaigns to convince the public of certain things against various other candidates. I think there are many better ways to do it than that. 

 

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All right, @TearDrinker asked the following. And this is somebody, I'm quite sure, that if you start crying, he gets so happy, he'll drink your tears. He looks for that. That's who asked this question. So, I think we do have a lot of very noble and benevolent people in our audience but we also have some very dark people in the audience and I think @TearDrinker is one of those. Nonetheless, the question is very good. We all have dark sides, good sides and bad sides. We're very complex. So is our audience. And here's his very good question: 

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I had several people on my show from the start who were vehement opponents of U.S. financing, NATO financing of the war in Ukraine. Jeffrey Sachs was one, John Mearsheimer was another and Stephen Walt was another. We had several people, we had members of Congress, Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, part of the MAGA movement, Rand Paul as well, RFK Jr., when he was running for president. We had a lot of people but Professor Mearsheimer, Jeffrey Sachs and Stephen Walt in particular were overwhelmingly prescient in predicting what would happen, even though at the time you weren't allowed to say this because if you said this, if you said reality, you would get accused of being a Russian propagandist or pro-Kremlin or all the things they use to smear people who are questioning the prevailing propaganda. Just like we saw in this last war, if you questioned U.S. bombing of Iran or the Israeli attack on Iran, you were accused of pro-Mullahs, loving the Ayatollahs, same thing every time. 

One of the things that they were saying is like, “Look, it doesn't matter how many weapons you give to Ukraine, it does matter how much money you hand to Kiev.” Even if it didn't get all sucked up in the massive corruption that has long governed Ukraine – which of course it will, but let's assume it didn’t, let's just say it was a very honest, well-accounted for country driven by integrity and principle and all the money was used for exactly what it was earmarked for – even if that happened and even if the Ukrainian people were incredibly courageous and they were at the beginning but even so… 

You know, there's a dog behavior that I've seen so many times. If you go to a dog park and two dogs are going to fight and they're on neutral ground, no one owns the dog park, the stronger dog is likely to win. But if you took those same dogs and the weaker dog in the dog park was at home and the stronger one in the park went to the house of the weaker dog, the weaker dog would suddenly become very strong. And typically, I'm not saying in all cases, obviously a Poodle and a Rottweiler, it's going to be the same result, but I'm saying when it's even remotely close, when you're defending your home – and this is definitely true in the canine world, they fight much more passionately, much more aggressively, much more confidently. And I think that's the same for human beings. 

And so the Ukrainians were very feisty, very punching above their weight at the beginning but even so, and all these people on my show said it, and I got convinced, that it was true from the very start, even if everything went right for the Ukrainians, even if you give them everything they want, the simple fact that Russia is so much bigger and that this is going to be a ground war of attrition between two neighboring countries, meant that inevitably Russia was going to win. It might take a year, it might take two years, it might take five years. The only possibility is that the Ukrainian population of young men, and as they expanded the draft, it became middle-aged, young to middle-aged men, were going to be obliterated, were going to disappear and obviously were huge numbers of young Russian men, but they have so many more that they can just keep replenishing them and losing that amount without having any real effect on Russia, which is like a gigantic country. And that's what's happened between the people who were killed in Ukraine, the people who fled and deserted, and there are a lot of them. There's basically a generation of Ukrainian men missing, which in turn means women aren't dating and aren't marrying. It just destroys the whole society.

The last time we really heard any promises that there was going to be a change was in 2023. There was going to be this great counterattack during the summer, like David Petraeus and Max Boot and all the people who promised the same thing was going to happen in Iraq with the surge were they telling us, “No, this counterattack is going to change everything.” It didn't change anything. Russia has maintained the 22%, 23%, 24% of Ukraine that they occupied, and they've been expanding more and more. There's no way to stop that unless you send in NATO troops or U.S. troops to have a direct war with Russia, which would by definition be World War III. 

The EU, has these – I'm going to say they're primarily women and I say that because a lot of left-wing parties in Europe ran explicitly on the idea that they were going to put women in foreign policy positions because women are less likely to be militaristic, warmongering, seeking conflict, they're much more likely to rely on diplomacy to resolve disputes because it's more in the woman nature. This was the feminist argument, a very essentialist and reductive view of how women and men resolve conflicts. 

But instead, you look at these warmongers, and you're up there like Ursula von der Leyen, who's the president of the EU. Nobody elected her. She's a maniac, a sociopath. The foreign affairs minister is the former prime minister of Estonia. It's like a million people. She's now like the foreign minister; she goes around demanding more and more war. And then the Green Party in Germany is the worst. They ran on this feminist foreign policy explicitly. And they have Annalena Baerbock as the Foreign Minister: she sounds like something out of 1939, talking about the glories of war. 

And even with all that, the Europeans are going to send in troops, the Americans are going to send in troops and so the more we prolong this war, the more we destroy Ukraine, the country, and the more we sacrifice the lives of Ukrainians. And that has been the neocon argument. It's like, you don't have to worry. Americans aren't dying. It's the Ukrainians who are dying. Remember, they're not fighting voluntarily. They're conscripted. A lot of them are fleeing, a lot of them are deserting. They just don't have the people to fight. 

Over the last couple of weeks, there have been announcements that the U.S. is going to slow down or stop certain weapons transfers that had previously been allocated under the Biden administration. One of the people who is announcing this, who's deciding this, is Elbridge Colby. You remember that Elbridge Colby was one that the neocons tried so hard to stop his confirmation to the high levels of the Pentagon because his view has long been that we have no interest in a lot of the wars we fight, including in Ukraine, including in the Middle East, we ought to be focusing on China and the Pacific. And neocon groups that obviously want the United States focused on fighting in the Middle East, funding Ukraine, were desperate to keep him out. 

There are a few others. Some of those non-interventionists who made the high levels of the Pentagon, like Dan Caldwell, who ended up getting fired because they fabricated leaks against him that were completely fake. We'll do a show on that one time. But there are still several of them. And so Elbridge Colby, when he announced this policy, like, Look, we were going to ship all these munitions and missiles to Ukraine, but now we can't. The reason we can, and we have gone over this before, is because U.S. stockpiles are dangerously low. We don't have these missiles and munitions to give, at least not consistently with making sure that we have enough in the case we want to fight another war. And the reasons are obvious. We've been sending missiles and munitions and drones and everything else we have to Ukraine and to Israel to fuel their wars. 

Israel has multiple wars, not just in Gaza, but also in the West Bank, in Lebanon, in Syria. It has bombed the Houthis many times and attacked Iran. The United States has been arming and funding and just sending huge amounts of weaponry to Ukraine. And also remember, President Trump re-instituted and escalated President Biden's campaign of bombing the Houthis. And the idea was we're going to obliterate the Houthis. After a month, President Trump got the report and saw how much money we were spending, how many weapons we were using, how much money it was costing, and nothing was really getting done. We were killing a bunch of civilians and not really degrading the Houthis at all. And they told him, “Oh, sir, we just need nine more months.” But he ended it because he saw he was being deceived again. And we're very low on military stockpile, even though we spend three times more than any other country on the planet and more than the next 15 countries combined. 

This was one of the reasons why, although we've been told that Israel and the United States together achieved this massive, glorious war victory, Netanyahu and Trump are war heroes, when Trump called on Netanyahu to be immediately pardoned or have his corruption trial stopped, it was like, “Look, he just, with me, won a historic war.” It's very important for Trump and Israel to insist to people that they won this great war, this historic war, in 12 days. 

The reality is that the Israelis really couldn't fight that war for much longer. You saw with fewer and fewer missiles shot by Iran, not even most sophisticated yet, that more and more of a landing. We don't know the full extent of the damage in Israel because journalists will tell you they were absolutely and aggressively censored by the military from showing any hits on government or military buildings. The only things they were allowed to show were the occasional hits by the Iranians on a civilian building here, a residential building there, to create the false impression that they were targeting and only hitting civilian buildings, but a lot of Israel suffered a lot of damage. President Trump said that himself, that Israel took a huge pounding. They didn't have air defenses any longer. They were running out and the United States couldn't continue to supply them. We were running out of our own missiles that we use to shoot down Iranian missiles. Israel and the United States didn't end to that war at least as much as Iran did because we were so low on our stock files because we're fighting so many wars or funding so many wars. And so the argument of the Pentagon and Elbridge Colby is, “Look, we just don't have these weapons to keep giving to Ukraine. We need them for ourselves. If we keep giving them to Ukraine, we're not going to have any on our own and our priority should be our military and our protection and not Ukraine's.” 

If this were really a difference between Ukraine winning the war, if we give them the weapons as defined by NATO, which was always a pipe dream. However, the definition was expelling every Russian troop from every inch of Ukraine, including Crimea, which the Russians would never ever allow to happen. If it were a difference between Ukraine winning or Ukraine just getting rolled over, then I would say, okay, maybe there's a debate to be had. But the reality is we've been feeding them weapons into the fourth year now. It's four whole years, coming up on four years, three and a half years of not just the United States sending billions and billions of dollars, but also Europe, and Ukraine hasn't been saved. Ukraine has been destroyed. Ukrainians haven't been freed. They've been slaughtered in mass numbers. And that's all that's going to happen if we keep sending weapons there. 

Of course, the Europeans are relying on this fearmongering that Putin is not going to stop with Ukraine. He wants to eat up all of Ukraine. He's demonstrated many times that he's willing to do a peace deal that secures a buffer zone in eastern Ukraine that protects the ethnic Russians who speak Russian and feel they've been aggressively discriminated against by the Kiev government. The people of Crimea and various provinces in the east feel closer to Moscow than they do to Kiev. They identify as Russians and not Ukrainians. So, as long as Russia feels that, A, they can protect those people, and B, create a buffer zone between NATO and the West on the one hand and Russia on the other so it can't go right up to their border, they've always said they're willing to reach a deal. 

And remember, Ukraine and Russia they almost reached a deal at the very beginning of the war that didn't call for the complete sacrifice of Ukrainian sovereignty, but only those kinds of buffer zones or semi-autonomous regions to letting them vote, and that was the deal that Victoria Nuland and Boris Johnson swept in and told Ukraine they can't keep and they wanted this war to be a prolonged war to destroy Russia. So this fearmongering that Putin's going to eat up all of Ukraine and he's going to move to Poland and then he's like Hitler, he's going to sweep through Eastern Europe and then Central Europe, back to Austria and Germany and then is going to go to Paris again, this is idiotic. 

The Russians have had a hard time defeating Ukraine, albeit with, obviously, Ukraine's being aggressively backed by NATO. But even if they weren't, they were willing to do a deal that just provides Russian security. But wars always are raw and fearmongering, and so they've convinced a lot of people if we don't back the Ukrainians, Russia is going to just roll over and take over, annex Ukraine and rebuild the Soviet Union under this kind of view of Greater Russia that Putin supposedly has in mind, the way Israel is actually doing, creating Greater Israel. There's so much evidence that contradicts that, so little evidence that supports it, but at the end of the day, where are these people going to come from who are going to fight on the front lines in Ukraine? There aren't many left. We can drown that country with billions of dollars in weapons and the war is still going to end up the way it's going to end up. You may not like it, it may be sad to you, you may wish it were a different way, but that is just the reality. 

There have been experts saying it very bravely, I mean, Jeffrey Sachs used to go on “Morning Joe” all the time, until he started saying this, and he hasn't been on again. People get booted out of mainstream platforms, they get called all sorts of names, Russian agents, Kremlin propaganda, etc., but who cares? Those people were the ones who were absolutely right, which is why we kept putting them on our show. They were by far the most convincing people. And that is the nature of the war in Ukraine and the U.S. role in it. Even if we wanted to keep supplying the weapons, we simply don't have them because we've been fueling and arming far too many wars: our own, Israel's and Ukraine's. That's what happens. 

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I think this is the third question, and it comes from @BookWench. And this person, I believe, is a wench, self-described, I'm not being insulting, they're a wench. And they really like books. And if you're going to be a wench, I think it’s better to be a well-read wench than some ignorant one. It's a good friend of the show, often asks some really great questions. And here's the one submitted by this wench tonight. 

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She’s talking about our show last night. If you haven't seen it, that's a great summary of it. But we talked about the integration of Big Tech companies like Meta, OpenAI and Palantir increasingly into the media, while at the same time, Trump and big media corporations are reaching all sorts of nefarious agreements about what their coverage should and shouldn't be.

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I'll give you a parallel example to make this point, rather than just addressing this one directly. Oftentimes people focus on what words apply, like what inflammatory words apply, what shocking or extreme political jargon applies, and even if that jargon is important, even if it has fixed meaning, even if deserves to be applied, traditionally, I've tried to avoid arguments over words or labels because so many people feel so strongly about them that even if they might be open to your argument on the substance and the merits, the minute you use that word, a lot of people just shut off. 

That was why it took me a few months to call what Israel was doing in Gaza a genocide, not because I doubted that the term applied but just because there are a lot of people open to hearing the facts about what Israel is doing in Gaza and seeing how horrific and criminal and atrocious it is, but the minute you use the word genocide, they just kind of instantly turn away from it. I often make the assessment, I'd rather have the channel open for communication than use a word that I know that's just going to close that channel. 

A lot of times, though, it does become necessary to use that term, I don't just mean genocide, but a term that can't have that effect because it's indispensable to understanding the situation. And that's how I came to see the word genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing, even more so. You can't really talk about Gaza without talking about that intent. It's not my guess about that; it's based on the statements that the Israelis have made about their war objectives and then their actions that align with it. But in general, I like to avoid those kinds of words. 

Fascism is definitely one of them. I promise fascism is similar to my problem with genocide and there are a lot of other words like this. There are a lot of words that get thrown around that even if they have a clear and fixed meaning, the people throwing them around aren't very capable of defining in a very concrete, specific way what the words mean. Fascism, to me, has almost become colloquial for just, like, Hitler-like or authoritarian or using aggressive racist themes combined with abuse of government power but the word and concept Fascism is a lot more complex than that, and it involves a lot more prongs than that. 

People study fascism for years in universities. There are graduate programs where you study fascism. It's a philosophy, it's an ideology that was developed in a very specific historical context. It ended up shaping the Italian government in the 1930s under Mussolini and then, of course, the Germans; you could argue Franco in Spain also was an expression of it. But I just feel like throwing the word fascism around at Trump or the Republicans, or especially, of all, it means a kind of aggressive authoritarianism. It just doesn't serve any purpose because I think the Biden administration was extremely authoritarian in lots of different ways. I think most administrations of the last 25 years have been. Very few people spent more time vocally, vehemently condemning Bush-Cheney than I did. I wrote books about it, including arguments that they ought to be prosecuted for things they did, spying on Americans without warrants, torturing people and kidnapping them off the streets of Europe. But I don't think I ever called them fascists. Not because someone had studied or done that, would have been offended or argued that it didn't apply, but just because I don't think it helps the conversation any. 

I think one of the worst things the Biden administration did is essentially commandeered the power of Big Tech to control political discourse in the United States, dictating to Big Tech what they ought to suppress and what they are to permit. In doing so, they absolutely warped and suppressed crucial debates about COVID, about Ukraine, about even election integrity that ought to have been aired. One of the things that bothered me about it so much was that you had the government on the one hand and corporate power on the other in the form of Big Tech and the Biden administration was basically annexing the power of Big Tech and corporate power to control free speech. 

I often pointed out that, ironically, the Democrats love to call Donald Trump a fascist, uniting state and corporate power, eliminating the separation between them, where they each have different objectives, sometimes overlapping, sometimes not, but uniting them as one entity working toward exactly the same goal. That was what Hitler did. There was no arms industry that wasn't under the control of the government. There was no private sector not under the control of the government, all working toward a common theme and a common unity. 

That is what's happening here as well as these major corporations like OpenAI, Palantir and Facebook more and more directly and expansively integrate into the military, into the intelligence community, into the government. But there are other factors, other prongs of fascism as well, and people debate it. And so if I were to say that, oh, this is fascism, the Trump government is fascist or the Biden administration is fascist, it might be satisfying to people who want to hear that and who believe that. But for a lot of people, they would just turn that off as Fox junk in the case of Biden or MSNBC junk in the case of Trump, and oftentimes that is what it is, just junk. It's people spewing it without having any idea what those terms mean, just to get maximum emotional catharsis or provoke emotional reactions. 

I would much rather do what we did last night, which is spend 45 or 50 minutes, maybe an hour, however much we spent, showing people exactly what's happening, showing this integration between corporate and state power for surveillance purposes, for military purposes, for intelligence gathering. Talk about the dangers of it in a way that I hope people are open-minded, because we're showing them the evidence. The minute you start using terms that they're kind of inherently going to repel or just recoil from, I feel like I can call it fascism and congratulate myself, but I don't feel like it does much good. I feel like actually does the reverse. If these terms were very clearly agreed to specific meanings that everyone understood, I wouldn't have a problem with using them when they applied, but since they don't at all, I think these words are obfuscated. 

But I did point out last night, and I will say again, that integrating corporate and state power is a hallmark of fascism and whether all the other hallmarks of fascism are present, it's extremely dangerous for the reasons we delved into extensively last night if you want to understand more how we think about that and what we said you can, if you haven't already, check out last night's show

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All right, next question @KKtowas, who says this:

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I don't want to be too cavalier about paraphrasing this. The question did do a good job of describing it. I'd rather show the actual words. If you haven't heard it, it's really worth watching. I definitely understand why it provoked this question. 

So, let me focus on the part that I do actually feel comfortable paraphrasing, which is Ross Douthat did ask Peter Thiel, “Do you favor the continuation of the human race? Is this something that you actually think is a good thing?” 

Elon Musk has been asked this before. Part of what Elon Musk wants to do is make sure humanity is multiplanetary, starting with life on Mars. A lot of people think, ‘Oh, you must think that's because humanity on Earth is doomed; otherwise, why is it so important to you to make humanity multiplanetary?’ There are other reasons why you might, but that's a suspicion, and not just to make it multiplanetary because the Earth is doomed, but also to transform what it means to be human. 

This kind of philosophy has been popular among these more extreme Silicon Valley types of Transhumanism, something that transcends humanity or fundamentally transforms it. Typically, I think merging humanity with technology or with a machine for a superior being, it's definitely how a lot of them think of artificial intelligence. I, one time, got a root canal, which I hate as much as anybody – I think I hate it more, but probably everyone hates it equally – but one of the only good things about it is that it lasts for two hours. I have the time to sit and listen to podcasts that ordinarily I wouldn't have time to listen to, or the inclination, just because I have to have my brain distracted. I can't, even if my mouth is totally numb and I don't feel it. I don't like hearing what the dentist is doing. I don't want to think about what tools he's using and why. There's almost no job I'd rather have least than being a dentist and just constantly being in someone's mouth every day looking at their teeth. But whatever. So, I try to distract myself and one of the ways I did so is I listening to Mark Zuckerberg's appearance on Joe Rogan. He was talking at length about his vision that soon we're going to take all these devices, virtual reality devices and AI devices, and they're no longer going to be exterior instruments that we wear, like Googles on our head or phones or earpieces or things in our phone. It's going to be part of our anatomy. He was talking about drilling into brains in order to have this technology part of the human brain, and at first he said the first use is going to medical, somebody has a neurological injury or some other serious neurological problem, this machine will help them with that functionality. But critically, he was talking as well about an ultimate merger between technology and human beings, which in one way may not change the nature of human beings in the beginning. It's just kind of another instrument. You can imagine this earpiece. Say you wear an earpiece of the kind people commonly use now to listen to things on a computer, connected by Bluetooth to their phones. Does it really change humanity if, instead of just having this come in and out, it's just now implanted in our ears? Does it change humanity? Well, when you start talking about the brain and changing how our brains think and produce thought, or having AI be the future of what a human being should be, but in a spiritual form, that's clearly transhumanistic. That's transforming what a human being fundamentally is. 

There are all kinds of questions that come with that. If you believe in a soul, does this have a soul? And the way Mark Zuckerberg was so cavalier in talking about it, I found very creepy. 

Let me just say one thing. I think the question referenced that Peter Thiel stuttered when he answered and kind of had big pauses. Peter Thiel always does that. The reason is – and he's talked about this before, he's autistic – and that means you don't have the same capacity for social interaction. 

One of the things he said that I found super interesting was what he thinks the benefit of being autistic, not severely autistic, where you aren't verbal, can't interact with people at all, but somewhere on the spectrum of where he places himself. When you don't have autism and you're very clued into social cues – and we are social and political animals, we do interact as groups, we are not solitary beings – that if you're so aware of social cues and you're constantly receiving what social cues are, in a way it's making you more conformist, kind of morphing you into society, you understand what society expects of you, you understand what the society thinks, you understand what you're supposed to say in most situations. And he was saying that that can really make you conformist. It can kind of just make you part of this blob. Whereas he sees his autism as almost a gift because feeling detached, excluded, or isolated from majoritarian societal sentiments, ethos and mores forces you to see things differently, to look at things differently. And then that, of course, is the kind of thing that can lead to innovation and invention. Steve Jobs was not autistic, but he actually has said in interviews, people don't talk about this, but it's so true, that had he not taken LSD and had experience with other hallucinogens, he never would have invented the iPad or various Apple products, that it was that kind of transcendent thought that enabled him to have this vision that he otherwise wouldn't have had. On some level, mind-altering drugs can be analogized to autism and so, yes, Peter Thiel stutters; he stumbles. Oftentimes, it seems like he's sweating or having difficulty answering the question, but in reality, it's autism and the way he speaks. But it does affect how people perceive him. 

Let me show you this clip that the question asked, because I think it's really worth hearing him in his own words. 

Video. Ross Douthat, Peter Thiel, TikTok.

Let me say a couple of things about this. People who think about changes in the future are often looked at as strange and weird because generally, the future is something we can't really imagine. 

I remember when I was young, I'm still young, but I remember when I was younger, when I was a child, and I used to go visit my grandparents. My grandfather was born in 1904. My grandmother was born in 1910. I spent a lot of time over there when I was younger and I constantly thought about how bizarre it was that they were born into a world that didn't have airplanes, didn't have radio, didn't have television, didn't really have phones and then during their lifetime, like all this technology that previously had been considered unthinkable – how is something going to fly in the air over the Earth? How are people going to talk to each other using weird connective machines? Or television that started off black and white and then became color, or film that started silent and then became with audio. All these things were unthinkable at the beginning and I kept thinking how strange to be born into a world where this unthinkable technology didn't exist, and then suddenly it arrives, and it just changes your world. All those technologies, obviously, had a major effect on the world. Then I had my own experience. I was born in 1967. I was 24, 25 when the internet started really being something that I used in my life, and, obviously, that's a major transformative innovation. If you had thought about the internet before it happened, it would seem inconceivable; people who describe the future in ways that seem inconceivable always come off as very strange and weird. So, I think we ought to acknowledge that. 

But I want to say two things on the other side, as kind of big caveats. One is the idea of a billionaire; until you really interact with billionaires, it's hard to explain what they're like, and I've had pretty close interactions with many of them. Obviously, I founded a media company with one of them, Pierre Omidyar, who I think is worth like $12 billion or whatever. A lot of other people in Silicon Valley whom – I've gotten to know some – ‘being rich’ doesn't describe that, like the amount of wealth that you have, like when you're a billionaire, you don't think of yourself as just rich, you start thinking about what you can do to change the world, change the government, change countries, change culture. It's so much power; it's so much money. 

With power and money comes, in almost every case, being surrounded by sycophants: people constantly flattering you, saying yes to everything that you think, say and want, because power means you can do so many things for people that benefit their lives and if they know that you have that, they're going to want to flatter you so that there's a chance you're going to give those things to them. Obviously, it makes people in that situation so detached from reality and so enamored of themselves just because all their influences tell them that they are brilliant, and that they're a genius and that they see things people don't see. 

Sometimes, that may be true, there are probably billionaires, I guess I know a couple, who I would consider extremely smart, but the majority of them, including ones I've worked with, I can tell you, I'm not going to say they're dumb. They're mediocre. Sometimes they have like an idiot savant skill that turned into a company that just exploded at the right time. Everyone's success has partly some luck. You have to be in the right place at the right time and a lot of these people who walk around thinking they're brilliant and have the power with their billions of dollars to bring those visions to fruition and to convince people that they should, are not even remotely close to as smart as they think. 

So, when they start getting these visions and everyone around them tells them how brilliant they are and everything about their lives is reinforcing their own brilliance, I do think that can be a very twisted and dangerous dynamic. Then there is this very specific billionaire culture, especially the ones that came out of Silicon Valley, that believes that they are the kind of people society ought to progress and evolve and transform into, and that the society just doesn't facilitate that. The society punishes success; it impedes a transformative kind of Übermensch, to use a Nietzschean expression. And they have ideas like they want to just start new societies, they want to buy a country, or buy so much land that it can become its own country and they just create a society from scratch where they're the overlords and they create rules. Obviously it then extends to like, maybe we shouldn't even do it on Earth, let's start our own society on Mars or wherever and it becomes this very utopian and dystopian vision driven by a tiny number of people who have no real pushback or tension between the things that come out of their mouths into their from their brains into their mouths and then try they can try and make reality and have the power to make reality. But a lot of that is, I think very alarming; we ought to be very, very, very skeptical of that, even in the cases where it might be promising. 

A lot of this just depends on what you think. If you're a complete nihilist and atheist, and you just believe everything is just kind of a nihilistic evolution, no purpose, no spirit, no soul, we just keep evolving over millions of years, and human beings are just where we are now, it’s just one stop along the way, and our next destination is something totally different, it probably wouldn't bother you. But if you have a kind of idea of something essentialist about being human that turning us into beings that exist in an AI vat and eliminating us, every part of us, except our intellect, may not be an advancement, that may be a destruction of humanity while maintaining the facade of it, this is the kind of stuff that I think requires a great deal of introspection, a great deal of thought, a great debate involving the whole society. 

But because billionaires have this ability to just push things along with no constraints, AI is just exploding really with no safeguards. I mean, there are some superficial safeguards, like if you use ChatGPT or the commercial ones, they don't let you do certain things that could easily be done, but you can imagine how it's actually being developed. And the people who don't want those safeguards to exist are using AI without those safeguards. None of this is being understood. None of it is being analyzed or studied. 

I'm not an alarmist at all about technology, even including AI. But I think it's more this kind of narcissism and this self-adoration that naturally develops in billionaires that gives them far too much confidence in their own ability to push humanity into directions that they think it should go and really don't need much debate to do it because their brains are sufficiently advanced to make those decisions and see those things on their own and the proof is that they became billionaires. That's how the reasoning works. That, I think, is the most dangerous dynamic rather than the specific things. 

And yeah, when Peter Thiel starts saying, “I'm not sure humanity should continue, okay, I'll say yes, just because you obviously think it's extremely creepy if I don't, but I'm going to add that maybe we should exist in some other form,” I hope people are disturbed by that. I'm not saying necessarily opposed to it, but I hope they're disturbed by it, in a way that they kind of demand some time and reflection in order to consider. 


 

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