1/7/25: Trudeau Resignation, Bannon Rips Elon, Zuckerberg Caves On Trump, Ski Resort Strike & MORE!
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I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey guys, Sagar and Crystal here. Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election and we are so excited about what that means for the future of this show. This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else. So if that is something that's important to you, please go to breakingpoints.com, become a member today, and you'll get access to our

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Good morning, everybody. Happy Tuesday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Yay, particularly amazing because Sagar made it back. Thank God. Yes, I'm back. I weathered the snowstorm. I weathered the south seas of the Caribbean for all of you to get here. The rough and tumble life of a cruise ship veteran, but I've made it. I've made it. I'm tanned. I'm rested.

And I'm ready and I'm back to be here. It's exciting to be here for the new year. Excellent. A lot of interesting stories to talk through today and a lot of interesting things that we've been wanting your thoughts on the H-1B fight. We managed to get, we got Bernie backing MAGA in the H-1B fight. So you can kind of weigh in on some of that stuff.

Justin Trudeau resigning. This has been a while in the making. So we'll tell you like the chain of events and what it means. It's pretty interesting moment in history, I would say. We've got more Elon news. He's now threatening an invasion of Britain and a bunch of European leaders sounding off as they become increasingly nervous that he thinks he can just like jump into their politics and sort of control their political process in similar ways as he did here.

Also, Mark Zuckerberg going on Fox News. Was this just this morning that this happened, Sagar? So it's actually Mark Zuckerberg didn't go on Fox News. His chief of policy, Joel Kaplan, did. Oh, OK. But he put out a video on Instagram. We're going to play some of it for everyone. It's...

genuinely one of the most crazy videos I've ever seen. He sounds like Elon. He literally sounds like Elon. So yeah, you guys are gonna... This is an interesting one. We also wanted to take a look at this big labor dispute happening at Vail Ski Resort. A bunch of...

wealthy people waiting in really long lines because Vail refuses to pay their personnel $2 an hour more. And there's a really interesting backstory here about corporate consolidation and these ski towns and the way they've been taken over. So get into some of that as well. And we're also taking a look at this big CNN lawsuit, lawsuit against CNN claiming defamation. They are actually going to trial, which is kind of unusual. Usually they settle in these sorts of situations, but they could be

Yeah, Jerry Poole has not been kind to CNN so far.

I think what's interesting about this case will be, I think it will turn into both a case about Donald, or sorry, both about the actual specifics, but also about CNN itself, because so many of the comments from the prospective jurors were literally about its own coverage. And so could certainly turn out to bite them. But yeah, I'm excited to be back. I really am.

All right. Why don't we get started with Justin Trudeau, Crystal? Yeah. Oh, should we note, by the way, we're at home because of the snowstorm. It is the roads are... People probably realize that, but yeah. Completely impassable here in the Washington, D.C. area, combined with the fact that D.C. is also now...

The green zone because of the scary January 6th that happened yesterday. So we had like military tanks occupying our streets as we also had 12 inches of... Not 12 inches, but close. A bunch of snow. So it's a mess out here. Please bear with us before we are able to get back to the studio. Hopefully on Thursday. Hopefully Thursday. Yeah, we're pretty snowed in down here in the country as well. So anyway, and I've got kiddos that are going to wake up at some point and animals running around. So it's just...

Bear with us, guys. Right. All right. Let's go ahead and get to Justin Trudeau, who, of course, is prime minister of Canada and deeply unpopular. He's been in power for like a decade there. So he's kind of overstayed his welcome at this point, facing blowback not only from the country at large, very low approval rating, but also blowback within his own party. So he made this announcement official yesterday. Let's go ahead and take a listen. So last night over dinner.

I told my kids about the decision that I'm sharing with you today. I intend to resign as party leader, as prime minister, after the party selects its next leader through a robust, nationwide, competitive process. Last night I asked the president of the Liberal Party to begin that process. This country deserves a real choice in the next election and it has become clear to me

that if I'm having to fight internal battles, I cannot be the best option in that election.

So he's referencing these internal battles within his own party. But as I said, he was deeply unpopular overall. I can go ahead and pull up this tear sheet from the Washington, the Wall Street Journal, rather, that sort of breaks down some of what was going on here. And, you know, a lot of this story is going to sound kind of familiar to those of you who have been following politics here or in many other European G7 events.

effectively, you know, overall, he came in kind of an Obama style figure, really embraced cultural liberalness and,

And some of the biggest hits he took were during the COVID era when they had significant shutdowns. You'll remember the big trucker protests and the uproar over that. They took some more draconian measures actually than we did here in the U.S. And in addition to that, they had high levels of inflation like many countries did around the world.

And he just came to be seen as sort of out of step with the pain that people were feeling in the country at large and more interested in these like cultural issues than he was in making sure that people were really, you know, okay in their day-to-day lives. So again, familiar story, similar to what's going on here and other European nations. But Sagar, you noted this is the, what, the last time

G7 leader to move out since the Trump era began. So it is kind of a significant turning point in terms of global politics. Yeah, I think we can put it in two separate stories. Like one, obviously, is the Canadian context. And as you said, I mean, Trudeau, and that's why I think I really note it, is Trudeau is the very last leader of a major G7 nation to step down, who predates Donald Trump coming down the escalator, kind of the political escalator.

earthquake, every single other G7 nation has experienced significant political turmoil. Germany, Japan, the United States, obviously, even if you look at the European Union, even if you think about it, Putin, who used to be called the G8. So yes, he may have been there during Obama, but let's just say things have changed, I think, in the last

Several years. The point really here that we have with Trudeau, as you said, is that he became someone who kind of embodied the quote unquote, like progressive cultural liberalism, while frankly, his country has been destroyed from the inside. I mean, the average home price in Canada now is some seven hundred thousand dollars for people with Canadian dollars.

It's not that different than U.S. dollars. People don't seem to understand that while, yes, the United States has a massive housing crisis and we cover it here all the time, Canada is 10 times worse. They also have had significant problems with immigration. They've had major turmoil. Remember, even internally, Trudeau has flipped on immigration, being like, listen, we've let too many people in here. They've had significant strains.

on their social welfare state. So they have major problems. And especially going into the Trump era, the Canadian economy is wholly reliant on the United States as a trading partner. And with tariffs and with a lot of the disputes that are going to happen, specifically around electric vehicle mandates and others of which they had been penalized,

under the IRA, over milk, over oil, timber, a few other things that significantly cross the border. They will have to manage their relationship with Donald Trump. The last thing is with the Canada is we shouldn't forget that on a foreign policy level, they've had significant issues trying to navigate

both kind of being a secondary state to the United States, pursuing its own policy with respect to NATO, Ukraine. They've had serious diplomatic crises with India, which relates to their own population. So it's a mess. Whoever inherits this from Trudeau is going to have a global... They have to define Canada's role abroad,

or define Canada's role with its major trading partner, the United States. And internally, they have to justify and to change the relationship, or at least justify and reset the relationship of the social welfare state to the Canadian populace, which is significantly very frustrated right now. So it's an interesting thing to happen. And I do think it's a world historical event in that his passing

It's kind of like when Angela Merkel, you know, stepped down like that. That is true. The true sign of like where we were in one age and now we're in a different age. Yeah. I mean, it's another sign of the end of the neoliberal era. Effectively, you know, global populations. This is not just specific to the U.S. rejecting this idea.

previous political framework that has really been ascendant since certainly since the 80s. You may even trace it back. I mean, it is ironic. We also you also, of course, miss the death of Jimmy Carter. And it is there is something fitting about him passing now, literally on the day his funeral, literally on the day that Trump is, you know, electorally certified because Carter is really the first that sort of in terms of the U.S. terms. So.

to initiate the neoliberal era. It sort of has one foot in both the New Deal era and the neoliberal era. And now as Trump, I think, closes the door definitively on that period of political dominance,

at that very same time as when Jimmy Carter leaves this world. Now, I would say that his advent, those pieces of the economic agenda that he brought in, all the deregulation and his embrace of this market-driven, value-free philosophy, I think that's been devastating ultimately to the country, certainly to the Democratic Party. So there's something to be said about that as well. But Trudeau being elected

leaving is another sign that this era is done and closed. People are searching for something different. And whether or not they've landed on it is another question and kind of the story that we'll be tracking over our time. I referenced the internal turmoil within his own party, which was kind of the final straw. And it really did break down over in particular Trudeau's response to Trump's

potential trade war and the threat of significant tariffs being marshaled against Canada. And Canada's finance minister, Chrystia Freeland, who is herself a very well-known figure in Canadian politics. I actually have a past personal history with her. She, back in the early days before I even was like a contributor on MSNBC, she went on the Dylan Rattigan show where I also was a regular guest all the time. So I've actually met her like way back in the day. But she's become quite a significant figure.

She's been the longtime finance minister under Trudeau. She resigned. And in particular, she took issue with she did not feel he was taking seriously enough the threats from Trump on tariffs. She did not feel that they were he was setting the Canadian economy up to be able to weather a potential storm coming from the United States of America. And, you know, it's easy to take for granted here the level of

fiscal flexibility that we can have being the world's reserve currency. But, you know, Canada doesn't benefit from that particular dynamic. So they really needed to kind of save for a rainy day. And she felt like he was, you know, instead throwing out kind of political political gimmicks is what she called it to try to save his own ass and rescue his approval rating, which was probably an impossible mission at this point.

So she had resigned. The other backstory is that he was also reportedly unhappy with her. He was going to remove her as finance minister and put her in this sort of like make work job with no official duties. So she resigned ahead of that. But again, just a sign of how unpopular he'd become even within his own party. I think his approval rating overall in Canada was something like 28 percent after having at one point had an approval rating well in the high 60s.

So a massive fall here. And the Liberal Party overall set for, based on the polling, set for potentially massive, massive lockdowns.

losses in Parliament. One of the big warning signs is there had been a special election, I believe in around in or around Toronto that, you know, should have been a safe seat for Trudeau's party. And they lost like it was narrow, but they should have won by like 20 points and they lost. And that was a real eye opening like

oh shit, like this is really bad. This is a political disaster. Freeland, for what it's worth, is also one of the people who is mentioned as a potential successor to Trudeau. She's one of the more popular figures in the party. So she's someone to watch as well. But it's also important to note, you know, they're going to have to go through these party elections before Trudeau officially steps down. So he will continue to be head of state for some period of time while that is all being resolved.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, people he's not immediately stepping down. He'll he's basically like a lame duck figure who will be in position until they elect that new leader who will then challenge in the next election. Now you and I were taking a look

at some of the polling that you mentioned. And it's just dismal for Justin Trudeau's party. The Conservative Party looks poised to at least get some gains. Remember- They're poised to get massive gains. Yeah. Right. And those gains, which will allow them to form a government, which of course would also change. I mean, it's been a long time. People don't remember. Trudeau has been a figure in Canada now

for so long, that this kind of reopens a lot of political opportunity in the country. So nonetheless, it's very important. And I think part of the reason that you and I really wanted to lead with it is that it just feels truly like a major, like a global event in that, you

You know, that period is over and we are certainly like in a new period. Yes. You know, I find interesting. I really do. It's interesting. Here is Donald Trump weighing in over on Truth Social. He says many people in Canada love being the 51st state. He's been doing this whole 51st state bit for a while and calling Trudeau the governor of Canada to in a nod to his, you know, whatever, trolling or whatever this is.

He says the United States can no longer suffer the massive trade deficits and subsidies that Canada needs to stay afloat. Justin Trudeau knew this and resigned. If Canada merged with the U S there would be no tariffs. Taxes would go way down and they would be totally secure from the threat of the Russian and Chinese ships that are constantly surrounding them together. What a great nation it would be. What do you think about that? Uh, I'm very against this project. I am very pro buying Greenland. I am very against annexing Canada. Um,

As you said, as we referenced earlier, Canada. Huge natural resources. I mean, that's what he's interested in. I'll tell you this. There's only one province of Canada that I would take, and that is Alberta, because it has a ton of oil and not enough people. But every other ones, and we'd be responsible for all of their population who are used to universal health care and social welfare state.

and all of that. We don't need to inherit all of that. Also, we already guarantee their security through NATO. So, you know, kind of works out already for them, if you were to ask me. You know, I think things are good as they are right now. Also, you know, you have all that vast territory. Oh, is that a Salem sighting? - That's a Salem appearance. - I've shut my door to keep the cat out. Let's see if he allows that or if he's gonna start beating on the glass at some point.

But yeah, in terms of this whole annexation thing, I guess it's just trolling. Probably it also, I mean, on a base, on like a literal level, there is truth to it. Like their economy is wholly reliant on us. Their security is wholly reliant on us.

on us. They are a vassal state and have been, you know, for quite some time. Sorry, Canadians is true. Um, you know, you were first vassal state of the UK and our vassal state of us. Uh, that's what your long history kind of has been. And, uh, I think Trump, he's either trolling or trying to put them in their place for future negotiations. If I had to guess, that's probably where it is. Um,

Remember, they do have, I mean, I just put them down, they do have a lot of leverage over us as well through their dairy farmers, through oil, through timber. There's a billion, hundreds of billions of dollars of

of goods that move across that border a lot of building materials I mean timber is one of them but a lot of building materials and obviously we have they have a huge cost of living crisis we obviously have a huge cost of living crisis as well and then the um the oil in particular was reading that a lot of Canadian oil comes down through Midwest refinery so that's really important to the economy in particular there so yeah it's not like they're without their own um bargaining chips

They've got plenty. Yeah. I mean, you know, there's a couple things that I think are interesting about this. Not that I really take it all that particularly seriously, but...

The interest in Canada and in Greenland are both sort of like tacit, tacit acknowledgements that climate change is real. It is literally reshaping the globe. And that's part of the interest in particular in Greenland is these new shipping lanes that are opening up because of so much ice melt in the Arctic. And then the other piece is like, I'm not interested in any new imperial projects from the US, but if Canada, you know, if Canada was interested in, if there are like some people that live

that live in Greenland. There's 57,000 people that live in Greenland. There are more people in my neighborhood than there are live in Greenland. Okay. Yeah. But anyway, there are people that live there. But with regards to Canada, I'm not interested in a new imperial project. But, you know, if they wanted to voluntarily join the country, I'd be open to that. I'd be open to it. We don't need any of their French bullshit, okay? Quebec, you guys can stay wherever the hell you are with whatever language you speak. I can make use of my high school French. Oh, God. No, no, no.

the Quebecois sorry Quebecois you guys have your own it's a beautiful major issue I love Canada I love western Canada in particular um you know Vancouver Island Victoria it's it's a lovely place lovely people you are absolutely correct it's a great place Montreal is a beautiful city even though I just shat all over it my father got his PhD there so everybody calm down but you guys can take your poutine and you can keep that shit up there all right it's disgusting

What else? Any other Canadian jokes? No, that's it. All right. Actually, remember, didn't we do a segment like a month ago where we tried to name Canadian provinces? We did. I think I got three. We did better with that than we did with Mexico, though. That's true. Yeah, it was bad. Mexico was bad. It was really humiliating. That was bad. I felt bad.

Anyway. I'm sorry, Mexico. Anyway, kind of an end of an era with Justin Trudeau moving aside. And, you know, conservative parties certainly set to make big gains. And we'll see, you know, we'll see what happens there and around the world next.

All right, guys, we got a bunch of Elon Musk updates in particular. We touched on this with Ryan yesterday, but I wanted to really dig into this latest change that he's at least announced that he's making to the algorithm. Can put this up on the screen. This is from Mr. Musk himself. He says, algorithm tweaked.

tweak coming soon to promote more informational and entertaining content. We will publish the changes to add X English. Our goal is to maximize unregarded user seconds. Too much negativity is being pushed that technically grows user time, but not unregarded user time. Many people noted that he is not exactly himself following this new encouragement of positive, informative content.

entertaining political content on Twitter. Here he is replying to someone, F you retard, and then immediately posting, please post a bit more positive, beautiful, informative content on this platform. And Ryan's point, which I think is an important one is like, oh yeah, now that you and your guy are coming into office, suddenly it's like,

Everybody calm down. Let's just be positive. Like the world's actually a beautiful place and things are going great. So we're going to use the algorithm to promote good news about the new incoming Trump administration. And, you know, I mean, it's just like another example of the way

Elon clearly bought Twitter to be an ideological weapon for himself and whatever political movements he align with, aligns with. So no one should be surprised when he's just out and out announcing the way that he's shaping the use of this platform in directions that he thinks will be beneficial to him and his goals.

it's also just a bad idea because let me break it for you down, folks. Good content and all of that doesn't engage. There's a reason that it did well because that's what the people engaged with the most. It's not because it was being amplified. People have tried this in the past. Both Crystal, you and I have been around

long enough to have seen algorithms when they were untweaked way back in the day, the before times. Um, and actually I would say it was even crazier and more chaotic then in

In terms of what the, you know, when real quote unquote free speech and all that would reign. There was some crazy shit that was going around on Twitter, on Facebook. I don't know. I don't know that my Twitter timeline has ever had more actual Nazis in it with the amount of engagement that they have as it does right now. That's only because they're pushing it to you. But again, that actually kind of shows what I'm saying is that they're pushing it to you because they want to piss you off and make sure that people are engaging with that.

I mean, I remember when ISIS had free reign on the internet and all of that. These were crazy times. So this experiment has been run and on an engagement level, it just doesn't work. I do think, I mean, I guess you're right in terms of electorally, the interesting point on it is about specifically that now that Donald Trump is president, trying to vibe and tone shift it towards something positive. Again, I just don't think that it's

that it's going to work. I also would note that this came after Elon himself found the very first time that he has truly pissed off a significant portion of the bag of political base. And since then has really been trying to retrench and move away from and engage with topics

that get those people back on his side. That is actually what I would say is behind all of this, is that for the very first time, Elon got really a taste of his own medicine, or not his medicine, but of what it's like to be engaged in politics online, which is, it's dirty, it's a nasty business. You took a position.

You insulted a significant portion of the people who voted for the political party and for the candidate that you pushed, who happened to just disagree with you on a policy. You call it, what did he say? They're idiots or mouth breathing morons or something like that. He said many things about, yeah, for disagreeing with them on H1B policy and,

And then all of a sudden he's like, oh, well, we just need to be positive. And it's like, well, does positive mean unlimited H-1Bs for the Tesla company? I think it might be. I think it might be. Yeah, his ego was clearly bruised in that fight. Exactly. And I mean, Vivek, what's happened to the guy? Where's he been? No one's seen him since he said white people are lazy. You know, it's like, Vivek, are you out there somewhere?

It's been a while. We haven't heard from you. Where's the truth, Vivek? Tell us more about Boy Meets World and Saved by the Bell. I was dying over that. Oh, did you see the clip of him literally in October? So we're talking like three months ago saying the polar opposite thing about H-1Bs. What did he say?

He, well, because his cope was like, no, I haven't changed my position. I've always wanted to reform the program. But there's a clip of him with Charlie Kirk at some Turning Points event where he is like, no, my belief is if there's a problem with the program, it needs to be destroyed entirely. And say, I mean, he sounded like, you know, the similar things that Steve Bannon and Colter have been saying about H-1Bs and that I'm sure you would probably echo in your comments. And I echo in some ways in my comments as well. He sounded exactly like that. And now, you know, three seconds

later when he's on Doge, when he's got, you know, in the Elon camp, suddenly there's a, suddenly white people are lazy and we need to have H1B labor, but. We need to stop. Corey from, you know, I'll save my commentary. I still, I'm going to do a long monologue about this. I know Vivek. I grew up with Vivek. These are deep seated wounds.

Some of us went one way, others went the other way, wanting to venerate the math Olympiad. That came out, actually, that this was a deep-seated wound. Oh, obvious, obvious. I mean, this has been sitting there for 30 years. I mean, who the hell still cares about boy meets world? What's wrong with you? I know, and talking about mole culture, I'm like, mole culture doesn't exist, and it was better when it did, by the way. Yeah.

That was actually the culture you're talking about is superior to what we have now. You just know there was a skinny math Olympia Vivek sitting at the food court and no girls were talking to him and he was staring across at limited to watching them gather. And he was like, man, you know, I just wish that they would acknowledge that.

My existence. Like I said, drafting this manifesto in his head as he sat there. I grew up with Vivek. I think I understand like with Viveks of the world. I think I understand him. They're very deep psychological. I know we're digressing, but the thing that I've been dying to talk to you about this. Yeah. The thing that was interesting to me is like, I actually didn't grow up with Viveks because I grew up in this like, you know, small town or whatever. But I grew, I,

what I have witnessed is when I lived in Manhattan and I got to see these like wealthy elites and the way they raise their kids, the way they raise their kids is like the model that the vague is. Yeah.

Pushing, which I always found to be really sort of like soulless and horrible because it was all like from the time the child is born, we have to get them in the right playgroup. We have to get them in the right preschool. We have to get them in the right tutoring. So they need to learn Latin. They need to be on the violin. Fencing is the best way to get into an Ivy League school. So they need to take up fencing. And it's like, Jesus, like, let these kids play.

have a life downside of your goals and aspirations and molding them into the perfect like market shareholder value driven machine. So that was the part of it that I was like, Oh, I actually, the culture I've seen that you're describing isn't an immigrant culture, uh, necessarily. It's this elite white culture that I saw in Manhattan, but well, I would say elite whites borrowed it from us. But, uh, the truth is, is that, uh, it is, uh, there's so much to say. It is terrible. Um,

I mean, there are some things you can learn from it, which are good. I would say Amy Chua herself, the original tiger mother, says she has huge regrets about the way that she raised her kids. Interesting. Yeah, which I think is important, you know, for people who actually follow that model. And by the way, let's look at the results. You know, our kids have turned out great. You know, I think they, what are they? Oh my.

Oh my God, we're going in such a tangent, but I think they both went to Harvard and they clerked for Kavanaugh or whatever, but you know, they're around my age. So it's like, well, what else have you done? You know, what's going on here? This is my problem too, is the, um,

The worldview that Vivek is espousing is effectively the one that was sold under neoliberalism, both by elite Republicans and Democrats. It's like if you're failing, it's your fault and you screwed up or you screwed up your kids or your culture is defective or whatever. And number one, only values people in so much as they go to Harvard and have a company and, you know, have this like very material based, you know, market based success and ignores any other values. And.

And part of why this was so such an incredible moment in the Trumpist movement is in some ways, at least the idea of Trumpism was a rejection of that was saying like, no, we shouldn't just be driven by like, oh, we can lift the GDP by a little bit. And that's what we should do. It's like, no, there are other values that.

That matter. And there are other human qualities, too, that matter. So that was part of what I found so extraordinary about it. Not to mention it was just like the sort of things that Republicans say all the time about like black culture or Latino culture or whatever. Now the gaze is turned on white people and there's a big uproar over it. But anyway, I think it was a very important actual moment.

In the you know, as the next Trump administration is forming and as we're getting a picture of what these divides are going to be and what these fights are going to be, because you and I have been talking about how there are these vast ideological divides between the Elon Musk view of the world and at least the Trump narrative that's been sold of the world. Now, Trump, of course, comes in and wholeheartedly backs Elon and had already him. He'd already taken this position. Right.

So, you know, it wasn't new, but, you know, it is in some ways that illustrated how that position is directly contradictory to the narrative that he has sold of the world that has made him such a political success. It'll also really manifest for what we're tracking right now is the Republicans are on track to try and get a major bill through Congress by April. One bill or two. They haven't decided yet which one it is, which is going to include immigration, taxes,

And, uh, I think there's a third one. Uh, I'm for, Oh, terrorists. So it's going to include three of the most contract. Now here's the big question. What is Donald J. Trump's white house going to push, which is going to include in that bill because the Republican party currently as is constituted in Congress, uh,

spans the gamut from we need unlimited legal migration, including a massive expansion of H-1B to immigration moratorium like where I am and all kinds of stuff that's in the middle. Now, it's going to be some sort of quote unquote compromise. We have no idea what that looks like. But is Donald J. Trump, for example, going to side with the Fortune 500, not just rhetorically, but be like, no, I won't pass a bill that doesn't include

uncapped H1B country quotas? You know, these are all like actually interesting questions.

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I'm Jason Alexander and I'm Peter Tilden and together on the Really No Really podcast our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does

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The other thing that Elon is doing on Twitter is apparently introduced these sort of like, I don't know, social credit scores that indicate like if you go on Twitter, your Twitter user and you ask rock, what is my X score? It will tell you and then it will give you some indication of like, well, you know, you're doing okay, but your content is just like not that engaging or whatever. And one

thing people have found is that there is a mass number of people, myself and yourself included. Many people have been tying it to like if you've posted about Israel's genocide in Gaza. I think that's a connective issue because I don't post about Israel. Right. But maybe you're too closely tied to me and

Ryan or what? I don't know. But in any case, we get a 38 out of 100. So it's not a good score, which means that we're effectively not really being super promoted by the algorithm. And Steve Bannon, who's always an interesting voice on these things and has been extremely adversarial towards Elon Musk for a while now, actually, and has been kind of consistent in it to his credit.

He weighed in and described these as effectively communist social credit scores. Let me just see where – let me pull up this video and start a little ways in so you can hear Bannett's comments about this. This is the danger of the guy. This is the CCP. This is a social credit score. This is what he's going to. He's got a glass jaw. He can't take – because of the – I don't know, the autism or where he's on the spectrum. He's clearly not – he's got the maturity of an 11-year-old. You can tell that. But he – it's obvious. Yeah.

He can't take criticism. One of his weaknesses is that he needs to be loved.

He needs the masses to love him. You can tell he's on the stage. He needs that glory. For instance, I don't give a damn, right? As long as the objective – that's why 12 O'Clock High is my movie. It's the objective. Whatever happens doesn't matter. It's the objective. It's the objective that counts and nothing else. They say it went at all costs, but hey, you have to win. You don't need anything else.

He must have adoration. You can tell that it lights him up. So then when the platform, when his apparatus turns against him and particularly people that cheered him saying, hey, we don't we hate what you're doing to this country. We know now that you're in your line to us. Bald face lie. These are not higher skilled people. When they turn all sudden he has to go to what is the Chinese credit score? This is to have a digital ghetto and to only have raised up what praises him.

That is like the little boys mentality. If I want to be the superhero, I want to put the cape on and kind of skip around.

So you get a sense there. But I mean, I think he's spot on in his analysis. Oh, Steve is the goat. Effectively, what you were saying as well with regard to, you know, the way now he's weighing in on all these global politics and pulling back up this grooming gang scandal from 10 years ago in the UK to try to rewind for curry favor with the right wing MAGA base that was pissed off at him over H1B tweet.

Tweaking the algorithm, instituting these scores, all of these things are attempt to use this tool that he purchased for his own ends. Sometimes those ends may have things that I agree with. They may be in line with things that you agree with. And sometimes they won't be. And that's why I've tried to consistently say the problem here is the principle of having oligarchs with so much power involved.

including power within media, obviously power within government. Now he feels like he can wade into politics in any number of countries and try to control the outcomes around the world. And that is something that on principle we should reject because it short circuits the actual functioning of democracy here. And so now that some portion of the MAGA base sees that,

Now they've become aware of like suddenly they're realizing, oh, it turns out X isn't a free speech platform. For example, it turns out Elon is perfectly willing to censor when he finds the content to be to be inconvenient for him. This is, again, long been the case.

But now on the right, there's increasingly more awareness of it because it's been trained at some of them. I mean, he's like banned Groypers and stuff like that who have been critical of him in this H-1B visa fight. He actually banned – I can put this up on the screen. I'll just get your reaction to this as well as Steve Bannon. He actually banned this journalist himself.

who did a deep dive into Adrian Dittman for people who are not initiated. There's been a whole theory that this character on Twitter, Adrian Dittman, who sounds a lot like Elon and is this massive Elon simp, that this was actually Elon's alt account.

So this journalist went and like actually found out, no, here is Adrian Dittman. He is an actual human being. Here's where he lives. Here's what he does. Not like his specific house, but like here's the country he lives in. And Elon apparently banned this journalist for revealing the truth about Adrian Dittman. And I guess the theory is quote unquote doxing, but it seemed like a perfectly legitimate journalistic enterprise. And again, it's not like this journalist posted Adrian's

or, you know, specific like address or anything of that nature. So anyway, it's kind of wild, especially because you would think that he would be happy that the truth about this was exposed. But I guess he kind of liked the game of people thinking that Adrian was him or whatever. I don't know. Look, Elon is like a king. He's like a capricious monarch.

And so actually, I think Curtis Yarvin, I heard him say this. He's like, you know, the law applies equally to all citizens except for the king. So if you come with the king, then the law no longer applies. And I mean, I think that's basically accurate for those who wanted Elon to be, you know, I mean, I think there's been pretty clear right on the show as to like what Elon is exactly. For the rest of those, sorry to burst your bubble. Nobody's perfect. Nobody's ever going to be, you know, some great king.

a selfless hero. Elon's in this game, you know, and also look, I mean, in the H-1B thing in particular, that might be the single biggest threat, you know, if there was a restriction to the Tesla business.

Tesla right now is not doing that well. Their stock has popped, but they have major problems going into this year with sales and they've had this price cut strategy and others right now, which has significantly put pressure on them to deliver and all these promotions and other things.

A lot of the great original sales of the company and the hype surrounding that, on top of Elon himself, his personal image, has been starting to show in some of their sales data. This is from literal Wall Street people that I've read.

who were analyzing the stock. So H1B and keeping labor costs and all of that down is actually vital to Tesla, the company, also to SpaceX, by the way, which are miraculously two companies which heavily rely on what? Engineers and on keeping and making sure that the talent of

of all of that is paid as little as possible. Well, miraculously, of course, he's going to use his tremendous wealth and his control of this platform to protect what is the most vital part of his entire network, which is the stock of Tesla. So I think people should also be very clear-eyed where all of that is. There have been times where Elon, as sometimes Elon will act in such a way which is beneficial to whatever, but at the same time, let's not forget where all of these people's bread

is butter. This applies to everybody, to Zuck, to Elon, to Jeff Bezos, to Tim Cook, and all these other folks.

What I do at least appreciate about this is that for years, so many of these people wanted to claim that their company's success and future and all of that is wholly divorced from the United States government. But what you are obviously seeing in real time is that the policy of trade, the policy of tax,

the policy and foreign policy of the United States government is the actual major determination of a lot of these companies' success and the opening of trade to China. I mean, why do you think Tim Cook has given a million dollars to Donald Trump's inauguration fund? Out of the goodness of his heart or because China is their number one market for iPhone?

and they're already having problems. Why do you think so many of these people are... Amazon, one of the companies most susceptible to tariff pressure is going to be Amazon because half the shit people buy off of there is... Not even half, probably more, is made in China crap.

The lithium that is in a Tesla battery. Giga Shanghai, one of the largest producers of Teslas in the world is located there. All of this, I could go on forever. Well, and I'm sure you took note too that in this whole spending fight, which Elon and Vivek postured like, oh, this is so principled, blah, blah, blah. One of the things that they got pulled out of the original bill was restrictions on

high-tech investment in China, which I'm sure that was the most important part of this fight for Elon when he saw that and was like, oh, we can't have this, so let me throw a fit about these and try to create an ideological point that conservatives can agree with in an effort to strip this out of the bill. And lo and behold, it's stripped out of the bill, and suddenly he likes the bill, and the bill passes. So yeah, he has his own

ideological and personal self-interest goals and everyone needs to keep their eye on that ball at the same time you know there's been we covered yesterday with Ryan the whole like going after Keir Starmer and bringing back up these grooming gangs from 10 years ago horrific scandal like don't I don't want to minimize it but it was a decade ago there have been you know lots of

reports analyzing what happened. And actually the criticism is that the recommendations of those reports have not been implemented either under Keir Starmer or under the previous conservative administration. But, you know, it's pretty clear what's going on here in terms of him trying to rescue his own reputation with Magan, not to mention, you know, the, um,

the other side of it as he gets to meddle in another country's politics and see how it goes for him there and see if he can get an administration that's more friendly to him there as well. So the latest in this battle, as he says this on X, he says America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government. Yes or no. You know, shit posting. But anyway, and I would say, yes, you know, see, and I don't know, I have a very soft spot for the UK.

I know you love the UK. I love the UK. So you take the UK, but not Canada? Oh, absolutely. The seed of our culture, the seed of Anglo culture. We owe it to a lot of them. My own history, my background, my wife is Irish too. We've all been colonized by the British, but then we came to America. So we have a lot of ties to the UK culturally. But

But in general, what I find again about this is his own capricious and frankly, now that he has real political power, someone made a good point. Now in, what is it, January 7th? So 13 days.

Elon Musk will be a United States official in all but name. He effectively will be like an envoy of Donald J. Trump, whether he's appointed by the US government or not, going out and interfering in the interneural politics of the UK, specifically with an ideological movement like Nigel Farage here calling for Nigel Farage

saying he doesn't have what it takes to be reform leader. I mean, that is one of the most insane statements I've ever heard. Nigel Farage is almost single-handedly responsible, not only for reform, but for being the OG on Brexit for calling so many of the anti-EU forces for coalescing the criticism of the conservative and liberal governments and of being anti-neoliberal itself. I mean, this is like

I don't know. I can't even think of a comp here in the... Honestly, the comp would be saying Donald J. Trump doesn't have what it takes. Like, are you serious? This is one of the most important political figures in UK history. And, like, to say he doesn't have what it takes whenever he was responsible for building this thing out of nothing...

for having UKIP be the force that it was, for criticizing, you know, for pushing Brexit, then criticizing the neoliberal Brexit that eventually happened is just ridiculous. He's the only person who has any sort of name ID, credentials, you know, credentials, and frankly, just like...

the credibility on all of these issues that these voters, you know, who have been betrayed by the conservative party and by the labor party for, for Elon to just, you know, decide willy nilly that these people, you know, that, that this guy doesn't have,

what it takes is ridiculous. I mean, Faraj himself came out and spoke against that. A lot of the people who've worked for him, people like Rahim Kassam and others have just been like, sorry, you on your moron. This is a real, this is just one of those arrogant parachuting in

and deciding that you think that you know better than others. And, you know, maybe it worked in America, but it didn't work with... Such a common trait with billionaires of, like, they think because they were good at something that they're going to be good at everything. And especially when they start dabbling in politics.

But yeah, I mean, in America, sure, it worked because he gave a quarter of a billion dollars to Donald Trump. And guess what? That's going to buy. And Donald Trump is an extremely transactional figure. And by the way, Elon is a lot more popular, although his popularity is kind of going like this in the U.S. at this point. But he's way more popular in the U.S. than he is in the U.K. So that gives him more cultural power as well. I mean, he's now a U.S. citizen. So that also gives him more power in terms of, say, of our politics. It's

It's a foreign national just popping into UK politics and trying to tell them what's what. Farage is in a position where he thinks he could achieve potentially in his party could achieve real power. So they don't want to embrace, for example, you know, not even controversial like criminal figures like Tommy Robinson, who that seems to be the source of.

of the rift between him and Elon, because Elon has also been going to the mat defending Tommy Robinson, who's in prison for lying about this 15-year-old Syrian refugee and claiming that he was part of these grooming gangs, which was found to be inaccurate. He kept doing it and then is ultimately thrown in prison for it. And you can debate whether that's an over-the-top reaction or not. I mean, I definitely think it is, but it's like,

Look, the whole grooming thing is just so annoying to me because I was telling you, I wrote a, this is one of the first stories I ever wrote about was the grooming scandal. The Rotterham cover up, so much of what has happened there. It was, by the way, a lot of people don't know this, but one of the precipitating things

that actually influenced Brexit and was one of those issues which was a sleeper with the British working class about immigration and about the refugee crisis, as we also saw with serious rape allegations and cover-ups, for example, in Germany and Sweden and elsewhere. You can debate that if you want to, but I'm telling you that it was very important.

The thing is with Ewan is they kind of like came out of nowhere. Well, it's just disgusting to pretend like you care about an issue when you only came to it because you think it serves your own personal ends. Like that means you don't actually care about it. Right. And for, you know, Barry Weiss, who's now writing articles about it on her website, like,

You only care about this now, 10 years later, because you want to use these people and their horror to make a political point. And that really is actually grotesque. It actually is disgusting to use it as a cudgel and displays that you don't actually and aren't actually serious about the issue. The other thing.

that's happened here that I wanted to quickly get to is a bunch of European leaders now reacting. You've had Emmanuel Macron weighed in.

to get rid of that. There we go. Emmanuel Macron joins growing criticism of Elon Musk in Europe. He's added his voice to a growing chorus of European criticisms of Elon Musk joined the Norwegian and British prime ministers and a German government spokesperson on Monday in responding to a barrage of hostile posts by Musk. Macron said specifically 10 years ago, who would have imagined that the owner of one of the world's largest social networks would be so

reporting a new international reactionary movement and intervening directly in elections, including in Germany. You also had the Norwegian leader saying, I find it worrying a man with enormous access to social media and huge economic resources involves himself so directly in the internal affairs of other countries. This is not the way things should be between democratic allies. In Germany, they had social

similar comments saying like hands off our democracy was one of the one of the comments here. So there's a huge backlash among European leaders who, of course, feel like, you know, they don't want they want to learn some of the lessons

from what happened here and the level of influence that Elon Musk has. The UK is moving to potentially block some of the contributions that he could theoretically make through a corporate entity into British politics so that they don't have the same level of corrupting influence of money that we have had here as well. And also the Europeans are more

open to the idea of we could just ban the platform. Like we could just take a harder line in terms of allowing Twitter, you know, our citizens to have Twitter access at all. So I think those are all things on the table. Now that Elon has made it quite clear, he wants to use Twitter to

as a weapon of, Ryan called it like a weapon of regime change in these various countries. Now, whether he'd have the same success in these countries as he has here is an open question, but clearly when you're talking about the richest man on the planet, he's going to have some influence. He's going to have some sway, especially when he has this very powerful social media platform. Yeah. Uh,

Look, I don't think the UK should ban Twitter or anything else. I don't think that, I think the EU is way too censorious. The Germans and others, too high-handed. People know of my disdain and hatred for Europe. All of that said, they are proud people in their own right. And in general, you know, I would say this about any country, us going and trying to, I mean, just imagine if there was like some British oligarch

who came over to here and was trying to tell us. I'd be like, shut the fuck up. Get out of my country. And look, the UK and Germany and others as beaten down and...

ridiculous to some of their populations. Maybe from time to time, they themselves are a proud people with their own long history. And I would not personally recommend it. I would never, you know, have the gall to go to the UK and be like, Nigel Farage, you don't have what it takes. You know, when you're a guest or something else in another country, I think you should act

that way. And especially now for Zuckerberg, for Elon and all of these other folks. I mean, this is part of the problem that they've always had. These are not just American companies. They're global. I mean, Meta has 3 billion daily active users. The United States population is only 330 million. That means that the vast majority of their user base is foreign. You have the same thing with, I

I think with Twitter, it's still a bit more skewed, but, you know, they have a very large percentage of the user base and others. So, you know, you also need to tread lightly. And this is also probably some of the problems that they themselves have faced. We'll see how it works out. I honestly have no idea. Yeah. All right. Let's go ahead and get to Mark Zuckerberg and what he's up to. Hi, I'm Cindy Crawford and I'm the founder of Meaningful Beauty.

When Dr. Sabah and I decided to do a skincare line together, he said to me, we are going to give women meaningful beauty. And I said, that's exactly right. We want to give women meaningful beauty, which means each and every product is meaningful. It has a reason to exist. It's efficacious. You're going to get results. And then you just go out and live your life. Meaningful beauty. Confidence is beautiful. Learn more at meaningfulbeauty.com.

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, is

Does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us tonight. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's what I'm talking about.

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Okay, some big news this morning, as Crystal alluded to. Mark Zuckerberg, in probably the biggest vibe shift knee bend video I've ever seen from one of these people, has released a new video, dropped around 7 a.m.,

this morning. We're going to watch it all together. I'll just give the top line for people who are wondering. Number one, Zuckerberg says they are ending their content moderation and censorship policies around quote unquote misinformation, including moving the team to Texas. Two is all political content will no longer be censored on the Instagram platform, meaning that previously people needed to opt

in to view accounts such as Crystal and I to engage with anything political that gate will be taken off. Um, he announces as well, uh, about what does he say? He says that a specific topics like gender and immigration will no longer be censored. Um, so it is a just totally, I want everybody to listen to this.

Because again, this is like the biggest vibe shift I have ever seen. Let's take a look. To get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram. I started building social media to give people a voice. I gave a speech at Georgetown five years ago about the importance of protecting free expression. And I still believe this today. But a lot has happened over the last several years. There's been widespread debate about potential harms from online content. Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more.

A lot of this is clearly political, but there's also a lot of legitimately bad stuff out there. Drugs, terrorism, child exploitation. These are things that we take very seriously, and I want to make sure that we handle responsibly. So we built a lot of complex systems to moderate content. But the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes. Even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that's millions of people. And we've reached a point where it's just too many mistakes and too much censorship.

The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech. So we're going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms. More specifically, here's what we're going to do. First, we're going to get rid of fact checkers. All right, so replacing fact checkers with community notes.

By the way, we've talked about this before. I'm very anti-community notes. I'm more pro-community notes. I think all content should float on its own. I do not, I'm not a fan of just like users deciding what's true and what's not. I actually was community noted and it was extremely stupid. I just want people to know it's not personal because I've said this way before I also was subject to the policy. That is true, yes. But I will note that it was a confirmation to me in that I

I got piled on by a bunch of Ukraine fanatics because I had put out a post being like, hey, you know, it's insane that Ukraine is assassinating Russian generals on the streets of Moscow. And the community note was like, this is a normal practice during war. And it cited the U.S. operation to kill Admiral Yamamoto.

in World War II. And I'd like to be like, yeah, that's the same, except for the US was not a client state of anyone else during World War II. And we weren't reliant on, I don't know, like the UK or whatever to supply all of our weapons when we were doing that. So I'm just saying, you know, it has bad context and I'm very against the policy. Well, just to defend community notes, since you're shitting on community notes, I'm not saying it's perfect, but I do think for me, it's helpful when

There's a community note there and you can just kind of like evaluate the note with regards to the content. And I also do enjoy, you know, some of the pylons and community notes are funny as well. So it's definitely fun, especially when people post stupid shit. I think it's I guess what I would say is I think it is superior to having some body of so-called experts post.

who are creating decisions from on high with no ability to input or fight back or whatever. I think that community notes are a superior innovation over that previous model. So I think this is an improvement in terms of the Facebook slash meta context. Definitely an improvement as opposed to straight up censorship, but still not the one I would like to see it all just let fly. Number two, he says they're simplifying their content policies.

Three, this was the new approach to policy enforcement. I'm going to play a little bit of this because this one was significant. Third, we're changing how we enforce our policies to reduce the mistakes that account for the vast majority of censorship on our platforms. We used to have filters that scanned for any policy violation. Now, we're going to focus those filters on tackling illegal and high severity violations. And for lower severity violations, we're going to rely on someone reporting an issue before we take action.

The problem is that the filters... Basically saying that the filter itself will no longer automatically remove content. Number four, this was what I was talking about, quote unquote, bringing back civic content. As we have explained before, and actually just personally, Crystal and I's accounts have seen this. We don't really care about our Instagram followings, but it was interesting. In the first two years of...

of us starting rising and all of that. Both of us amassed somewhere around 200,000 followers on Instagram. We have not gained a net follower in over three years because of this policy. Just to show what it means, which basically, if you post anything political, people have to opt in to seeing political content. So this effectively has removed political content from their algorithm. Here, Zuckerberg says they are reversing that policy. Back civic content.

For a while, the community asked to see less politics because it was making people stressed. So we stopped recommending these posts. But it feels like we're in a new era now, and we're starting to get feedback that people want to see this content again. So we're going to start phasing this back into Facebook, Instagram, and threads while working to keep the communities friendly and positive. Fifth, we're going to move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US-based content review is going to be based in Texas.

As we work to promote free expression, I think that will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams. Finally, we're going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more.

The U S has the strongest constitutional. All right. So there we go. Um, you know, I didn't, I didn't even play, uh, all of the amazing parts where he, uh, goes after the quote unquote legacy media, which I should note that he partnered with and listened to for, you know, basically the entirety of the Trump era. Um,

Look, you can read this in a variety of ways. I would read it in two. One is this is a company that rightfully should be scared of government policy and of antitrust lawsuits. It is under active litigation right now from the United States government over Department of Justice antitrust violations. So that's one. Two is obviously they also were on the different side of the literal popular vote of this election. One of the things that he notes here

in there is that the legacy media has constantly been pushing this narrative that you have this narrative that, you know, misinformation is a threat to democracy that he has said, he's like, clearly, you know, we are out of step. He says, quote, with the mainstream discourse on any even sites,

issues like gender and immigration, two of obviously the most hot button issues. So it is both like a retrenchment of a quote unquote, like woke content moderation. But I think obviously it fits also with his, you know, the company itself met as a multi hundred billion dollar or whatever market cap. I don't even know what it is right now.

This is a company tremendously vulnerable to Department of Justice policy, and he wants to get on the good side of Donald Trump. Remember, he's donating as well $1 million to the Donald Trump inaugural fund. So there's a confluence of personal interest, of cultural interest. And I mean, for me, it's just crazy. This is a man who I watched in real time go from giving a speech defending Trump

the ability of Holocaust deniers, which I agree with, by the way, as unpopular as that may sound to be able to post on a Facebook platform. He then reverses that policy some years later, giving into this, you know, legacy media stuff. Then five years later decides to give this Georgetown speech where he's like, actually we stand for free expression and that's why you should ban TikTok. Uh,

And now it's, you know, it's just the constant moving around shows both the influence of corporate these corporations are under both from their shareholders, from the media and others, but also just.

It can be so capricious. Yeah. And, you know, if they had just stuck with the first principles from the very beginning, they would have been better off. I truly believe that. That's the thing is they don't have principles. They're like, don't get confused to think that they have principles. They're trying to ride whatever political wave is ascending at the moment.

And so, you know, in the early days of social media and then algorithmic social media, there was all this promise of democracy in the Arab Spring and this idea under like the Obama era. You know, Obama was very close with all of these tech titans and they were kind of an integral part of the Democratic coalition. At that point, all of this.

sense of the coalition of the ascendant and how this like liberal democratic order was just going to grow and you know Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron and Barack Obama like this was the model for the world for the future.

And then in the Trump era, you know, in 2016, the sense from Zuckerberg and I think some of these other tech titans is that Trump is kind of this was kind of an aberration. Right. This is a weird moment in time. He doesn't win the popular vote. Hillary Clinton is a uniquely flawed candidate who runs a uniquely bad campaign. And so the bet is effectively on the resistance.

And, you know, there's all this concern about misinformation and Russia and foreign interference and all of these sorts of things. And, you know, and also the Trumpist movement did take a lot of energy and have a lot of sort of like, you know, far right Internet culture embedded into that initial Trump campaign. So there's a fear about that. And that's how they place their chips in that era. Yeah.

You know, that kind of continues through the Biden era. And now with Trump winning and you have the rise of the right in many countries around the country and the really the fall of the neoliberals in all kinds of countries around the world, the bet is being placed very differently. You layer on top of that. This was not just a bend the knee video to Trump. It was also bend the knee video to Elon.

which is, you know, adopting the community notes, moving to Texas, adopting some of Elon's sort of framing and language. So he's recognizing these two power centers in American politics.

both of whom can cause real problems for him personally, real problems for his company's bottom line, and he's doing what he can to get on the right side of both of them. And Donald Trump, being the uniquely, brazenly transactional person that he is, like if you're out there flattering him and say, I'm going to work with you and your noble mission to embrace free expression, which of course is bullshit. Trump is like wants to, you know, make it,

people it easier for to sue people for libel defamation. He wants to ban flag burning. I mean, he wants to deport anyone who says something he doesn't like about the country of the foreign country of Israel, et cetera, et cetera.

But he knows that if he flatters Trump and frames him in positive terms, that that's going to be better for him and that that may well short circuit some of the cases against him and certainly will help to undercut any additional enforcement action against him. So, yeah, I see this in a line with Tim Cook and Sam Altman. Altman is the one the other one who's a sort of prime example of doing the knee bend, not just to Trump, but also to Elon, with whom he has like personal grievance.

but has gone out of his way to be like, oh, I think Elon's going to do a great job at Doge. I know he would never use like personal animus or petty grudges against people. Of course he wouldn't do that. So this is kind of the story of this moment in time and of the way these corporate titans are reading the global political mood and certainly the American domestic political mood.

Yeah, it is genuinely amusing. I also think there's been a personal evolution with Mark Zuckerberg ever since he got into martial arts. For example, here we have...

Mark has announced that Dana White will be joining the board of Meta. He says, I am excited to kick off the year with some exciting news we've been working on for a while. Dana White and a few others are joining Meta's board of directors. We have massive opportunities. He is the president CEO of UFC built into one of the most popular, fastest growing, most popular sports enterprises in the world.

And he's also friends with Trump. Yes, that's right. He's also friends with Donald Trump. So two birds with one stone, I think they're with Zuck. You know, what I was fascinated by is like you said, it is clear to me that Bezos and Zuck, I think, I mean, jealous may be too. I think jealous is the correct word with Bezos. I don't know if that's the correct word with Zuck. But these guys are online and they're, you know, they're annoyed that Elon is soaking up the

the role that Zuckerberg, for example, once held under the Barack Obama administration, the pinnacle of American leadership, of innovation, of the next step for American GDP. And so Zuck is watching all of this happen. He also has the Hydra, which he frankly created by bending the knee to Sheryl Sandberg and all these other idiots who he hired for the

for the content moderation. I mean, do you remember how ridiculous things got, Crystal, where they had the independent Facebook board, like the Supreme Court? Yeah, like they were some sovereign nation that was going to pass judgment on all of us. But, well, you're right to, those names in particular. So...

All of these tech oligarchs that we're talking about, I think all of them, maybe not. Yeah, all of them, maybe not Bezos. And to be frank, we don't really totally know. But they're all engaged in an arms race right now over AI. Yeah, that's true. And the amount of money and corporate focus on AI really dwarfs that.

Pretty much anything else. And that is going to be critical decisions made with regard to government contracts and with regard to potential regulation, which company gets a leg up, which company doesn't, which company is favored in this job.

giant global arms race to achieve the best AI and to the arms race ultimately to achieve artificial general intelligence, AGI. That's the subtext of all of this as well. And so a lot of this jockeying and positioning and trying to curry favor is also about trying to obtain favored status vis-a-vis that race, which is going to be incredibly consequential for

all of our lives and is really kind of happening behind the scenes and is the context for a lot of these fights, including the H1B fight, by the way, is like a side event to the main event, which is this battle over the development of AI, which requires massive,

both electricity resources and what they call compute, like computer analytical resources. Altman is at odds with Microsoft right now, his partner, because of the amount of compute that he wants and the amount of corporate resources that that is required. So in any case, that's the other sort of underlying issue

piece, a business piece of this that, you know, we all need to keep our eyes on because it could end up being in the quite near term, extraordinarily impactful on human life, on the labor markets, on our country, on geopolitics, et cetera. Very true. Interesting. Nonetheless, vibe shifts indeed. Vibe shifts galore. I'm excited to see what the next one will be.

I can't even think of what a comp would be. To watch somebody just flip like this is just so astounding. And again, as you said, they don't have principles, but you would have been better off if you just hadn't done any of this crap in the first place because you frankly wouldn't look ridiculous whenever you reverse it overnight. So there you go. All right, let's go to the next one.

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I'm Jason Alexander and I'm Peter Tilden and together on the Really No Really podcast our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus is

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So guys, really interesting story that has been developing over the winter holiday season. So a bunch of wealthy ski holiday patrons have been complaining about massively long lines at ski lifts and diminished resources at Vail in Park City, Utah. And this is all because of a strike, a walkout by ski patrollers.

who are saying, hey, guys, these areas are extremely expensive to live in. We're asking for a couple of dollars wage increase so that we might have a prayer of being able to afford a life here. Here's an image of some of the workers here. They say, ask me about this pick a line. Wage $21, asking $23, burger $23.

$25 plus just speaking to the unbelievable cost of living, um, that, you know, in order to live in these ski towns that you're ultimately subjected to, that certainly goes for housing prices, even to a greater extent can show you some of the, um, images that are coming out because they're pretty interesting, uh, that, that people who are going to these resorts are sharing here. You can see, uh,

Long line, just an image here. You can see this video, too, of people waiting in line. I don't know. I guess that's for the ski lift just having to stand around. This person says, longest lines ever. No excuse. Operational and managerial fail during the busiest week of the year. $20,000 vacation.

With two to three hour lines for lifts, at least discount those who bought lift tickets while strike was occurring. Or you could just pay your workers a little better. How about that? And get them back and get them back on the job because this is insane. I've just got one more video for you so you can get a sense of the scale of the disruption here. This is a video you can see of the massive lines waiting again for the ski lift. So...

Let me give you some of the backstory on what's going on here. According to the Ski Patrollers Union, here is some local news coverage. Vail Resort sends in Colorado ski patrollers to break the strike. As Park City strike continues, the Park City, Utah professional ski patrols

Patrol Association went on strike December 27th at Vail Resorts Inc.'s largest U.S. ski area, vying for higher wages. A walkout of ski patrollers during the busy holiday period in Park City has yielded long lift lines, limited terrain and swelling crowds as the strike stretches into its second week.

They say that they are looking for higher wages starting at $23 an hour and better benefits. They also express frustration about the prolonged negotiation processing in a social media post. They are ready to get back to work as soon as Vail Resorts offers a fair contract.

So Sagar, a pretty fascinating labor dispute here. And some of the background story on this is also really important because even though this is, you know, very specific context of specific like recreational sport activity, you know, some of the broader themes here are really important.

$23 an hour may sound like, oh, that's a pretty good wage or the $21 an hour that they earn right now. You might think like, oh, that sounds pretty decent. But when you factor in the cost of living in these towns, like there's no way to make it.

And these giant companies have bought up a bunch of these different ski resorts in all kinds of towns across the country. And they've sort of pushed out it to the extent that, you know, certain of these ski towns had a local economy and local vitality to begin with. They've like pushed out the locals, a lot of out-of-towners coming in, buying up the property, making it insanely expensive. And

And then crowding out even things like, you know, local restaurant owners and local business owners so that the only game in town in terms of a workforce are these relatively low paid hourly jobs where you don't have a prayer of hoping to be able to like live and eat and exist in the town where your job actually is located. This may sound like a boohoo problem, but you know, it wasn't that long ago that Park City, Utah, yes, it has always been a bastion of the ultra wealthy, but

It didn't always cost $20,000 to go into ski in Park City, Utah. In fact, I know several people who are skiers who grew up in more of a middle class background. It used to be that you would be able to put the family in a hotel room, six or whatever. You could buy the ski passes for a little bit less. And yes, it'd be a bit of a pain, but you could make it work.

And it'd be one of those things that would be equivalent to taking the family to Disneyland, for example. So this was a sport that no, it has never been accessible to people who are lower middle class, but I would say middle class, upper middle class, historically has been something that is there. It has since moved to the bastions of the ultra wealthy and of people who are making over $500,000. We're about to show everybody a video, which actually shows explicitly how that's been the strategy.

Now, to what you just pointed out, this is obvious. I love Park City, Utah. I don't even skate. It's one of the most beautiful places I've ever been. Such a gorgeous town. As you just said, the local businesses and all that are exactly what make it nice and good. I can also attest that the $25 burger is in fact reality. But what it demonstrates is the same problem here of you

you both make the cost of anything fun and nice in America, you just make it outrageously expensive. And then you also treat the workers as shitty as humanly possible to roll up as much profit as you possibly can. This is a story of everything. And that's why I noted it, that it used to be a middle class thing. I think Disney is another perfect example of this, where you have

The cost of these Disney trips now costing tens of thousands of dollars. In some cases, if you have a large family, something that people have been doing in the past. I think Vegas is another one. We had the era in the old days, the Christmas family vacation and all that, the $60 hotel room. That's all gone.

And so really what we have is like, if you want to go on vacation in the continental America, you are just competing with a price war. And then the people themselves who are actually working and staffing and delivering this product are making absolutely nothing. It's not just me saying this. There are so many people, even rich people who are like, are they seriously destroying this entire experience just to not pay these people $2 more per hour? They're like, I can't even believe...

believe this. And that it just demonstrates their greed, you know, that they, that they're willing to hold the line on an extremely, extremely like it is not out of left field.

It's not too much of an ask. It barely even keeps pace with inflation. I mean, $23. I'm sure they probably even what they're asking for, $23 an hour. I don't know how you live in these towns because the rent and everything is so incredibly expensive. Let me go ahead and pull up this video. And I really recommend you guys watch all of this from Wendover Productions. It's quite excellent. The title here is How Corporate Consolidation is Killing Ski Towns.

But I just want to play a little bit of a portion of it that focuses on the cost of living and how impossible it is for workers in towns like Park City, Utah, where this labor dispute is occurring. What's left is the financial impossibility of minimum wage work in the Vail Valley.

There are no easy answers to where a Vail employee might start their day. The conglomerate's new minimum wage is $20 an hour, a near fortune compared to minimum wage at most entry-level jobs in America. But most entry-level jobs aren't located here, in a narrow mountain valley bounded by two often impassable sections of highway, hosting some of the highest living costs in the world.

Currently, the cheapest publicly listed apartment for rent within Vail City limits is going for $2,500 a month. Assuming 40 hours per week of work, which might come if the slopes are busy and the snow is abundant, a given lift operator might make $3,200 a month. Therefore, after tax, they might make ever so slightly more than what it costs to keep an apartment in the town in which they work.

But of course, in a small town environment like this, and considering the competitiveness of housing, most rentals never make it beyond the classifieds. There, one can find deals like this $1,150 a month room in an apartment in Edwards. A 20-minute drive away, assuming one pays for the $425 a year Vail employee parking pass. Think about that. So not only do you have to commute, but now you're going to have to pay for a parking pass. And Vail Resorts is one of the companies that, so they own this place.

Park City Resort, they're one of the large players in this space. So a lot of what is said in this video applies kind of across the board to all these ski towns, ski resort towns, and to the workers that are there. I mean, you've just turned these places... First of all, any local character that exists, gone. Locals cannot...

afford to live there. Housing stock bought up by people who are wealthy millionaires from all over the country, if not all over the world, who are there like twice a year. So town is effectively vacant when it's not peak season. Locals pushed out and workers treated as basically like indentured

servants who, you know, can't afford to live in the town and are even being gouged in terms of having to pay this like $400 monthly parking pass, which is totally completely insane. So yeah, it demonstrates the fact that they won't give them their fricking $2 an hour raise because they're afraid. What they would say is they're afraid.

that next holiday season, they're going to realize this was a successful tactic to go out during peak season and they're going to do it again and again. And I would just say like, okay, well, you know, you probably could afford to pay them well enough so that they'd be happy and they're not feeling like they have to like slit your throat every holiday season because this is their peak season as well. I don't ski, but as I understand it, a single ski ticket is $300 per person, right? So...

I'm pretty sure they could cover costs. People were pointing out it is actually cheaper to fly to Switzerland and to ski in the Alps, especially if you stay on the French side, apparently, than it is to go and ski in Park City, Utah. What the hell are we doing here? That's crazy. And just demonstrates again that the

The way that these private equity companies and others have rolled all this stuff up, milked as much as possible, is that they are making it impossible to have a good time in this country unless you are stupendously well. They've just turned the whole – they're turning the whole world, like the most beautiful – some of the most naturally beautiful places in the country. They just turn it into a completely inaccessible playground to the rich and rich.

Great for them, I guess, except when they have to deal with a long lift line because the workers don't feel like being indentured servants for the day. But yeah, in terms of an attainable vacation spot, in terms of a sustainable workforce that's actually able to live in terms of having any sort of local culture, like everything just Disney-fied, playground for the rich, that's what it is.

It is, and it is an ongoing trend. I hope it's reversed. I don't think it will be, for sure. Yeah. Like I said, with Disney, with Vegas, with so many of these other places, I don't know. Where do you go on a cheap vacation these days? Like your backyard, camping? That's it. My one hope is that private equity, please don't go after the national parks because that's the last place that we all currently have. So true. But I'm sure they'll find a way. Yeah. I'm sure they will find a way. So true. I mean, this is the, you know, this is the...

fall out from massive gilded age level inequality. These are businesses. They see the people who have money are at the very top. And so they cater to them because they're the ones that have $20,000 to spend on a vacation. And so they would rather their business bottom line dictates that they would rather create this ultra luxury experience than to try to cater to a vast middle class, which doesn't really exist anymore. So there you go.

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I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, is

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All right, let's talk about CNN. There is a pretty major defamation lawsuit going on right now that actually is going to trial in the state of Florida and haven't seen a lot of coverage on it. And considering how CNN could face a absolutely massive judgment and liability from this jury trial, it is certainly worth covering as it may be the biggest story in the space since the Fox News Smartmatic settlements that we'll all recall.

recall. So let's put this up there on the screen. A Florida jury will decide if CNN defamed a security contractor. So the details, everybody stick with me, goes back to 2021 from the US Afghan withdrawal. So basically in November of 2021, CNN ran a five minute long lawsuit, a segment about private contractors who were charging large sums of money to evacuate Afghans desperate to flee the country.

This was the direct quote from Jake Tapper. CNN's Alexander Marquette has discovered Afghans trying to get out of the country face a black market full of promises, demands of exorbitant fees, and no guarantee of safety or success. The only security contractor mentioned is this man, Navy veteran Zachary Young, whose operation had actually been paid by several large companies, including Audible, Bloomberg, etc. At one point in the segment, his face was shown on screen of

above the graphic referencing black markets and exorbitant fees. So that is the core of Young's defamation lawsuit. The reason why in particular that he's able to quote unquote at least alleged damages is because his business suffered significant monetary damage as a result of this CNN report.

Now, we should note that actually, CNN did issue a correction.

About four months later, Jake Tapper read or Jake Tapper and CNN read an on air correction to the story. And actually, some of the emails that have now been released show that inside of CNN, there was concern that this did not meet editorial standard. Nonetheless, CNN still alleges that it is not liable for defamation as they have.

issued a correction some four months later. However, it was enough to reach the standard for a judge to allow this to go through. Now, we should say that that is extraordinary already because it is

It is extremely rare for a news organization to be able to even, you know, to not have the case thrown out in terms of scrutiny. The judge, Florida Circuit Judge William Henry, ruled that Young's activities were legal, preventing the network from suggesting to jurors that he has been engaging in illicit activity. That's really important because...

because if the jury determines the term black market refers to illegal activity, CNN would be found to have quote, knowingly published false information as network journalists acknowledge their reporting did not find evidence that young had committed a crime. So, you know, on the merits crystal, they are facing some serious issues. And sociologically, when we think about the jury pool,

and all of that, they could have a real problem on their hands with this case. - Yeah, potentially. I mean, the other thing is,

what comes out in this case as well is going to be, it already is very unflattering because some of the emails from producers behind the scenes acknowledge that the segment is kind of sloppy, kind of sensationalist. They also acknowledge like they think this guy who's now suing them is like a shitty person and they have this sort of like personal animus against them that also could against him. Not that they knew him personally, but they thought he was sort of like sketchy and sleazy. And so that could have animated the,

some of the editorial direction of the segment as well. And so their star anchor, Jake Tapper is involved. He's having to be deposed. What is going to come out in discovery? What's going to come out in the trial? And,

even if they ultimately prevail here, just getting that little window into the behind the scenes of how CNN actually operates and actually puts together these stories could in and of itself be at the least embarrassing to them who like to hold themselves out as this like gold standard of journalism. Clearly, in this particular instance, they certainly fell short of that. Oh, there's no question about it with the emails in particular. And I wanted to know, too, that

really where I think CNN is screwed is on that legal standard

about, look, we all know black market means illegal. Can we all be honest? That's so obvious. Then, so on the standard itself that they narrowly have to rule, it's bad. But what's really important to me is how these jurors, these potential jurors, how we're revealing here, how you really can see where the actual editorial bias of CNN over years is now going to screw them with the jury poll. So for example, the first prospective juror

when asked if they could be fair, says, "I dislike the media, especially CNN." Another says, "I'm not a fan of CNN." But about a dozen in between said they had no issue. Another potential juror said he believes media outlets think they can say anything about anyone and pretend to be the victim when called out. And another said he could be impartial but added, "Nothing negative against CNN. I just don't see the way things that they do." You know, another, my personal favorite, says,

it's killing me sitting here, I'm hyperactive, and I smoke, plus I have to pee. Who is, I think, all of them. Relatable. Yeah, very relatable. That would be the jury of the peers, yes. Yeah, that's your jury of peers, folks. What I do think is interesting here is all the jurors were picked, apparently CNN's legal team picked off by asking prospective jurors if they'd ever served in the military. That was one of the ways that they were trying to screen people. They also said, how many of you believe CNN creates...

fake news, six prospective jurors raised their hands. Most though do insist they can be impartial when jurors are amazing. I know you served on a jury. You're much more of a believer, I think in jury trial than I am just in terms of your ability to get- - I saw people take it very seriously. - I know Crystal, but how can a person with a straight face say, I believe CNN creates fake news, but I can be impartial.

Like, come on. What are you doing here? All right. Look, I'm fine. I want CNN to be screwed, personally. But... I don't know. I think Fox News creates fake news and I think CNN creates fake news. I agree with you. I could be impartial on this. Yeah, but if somebody... I think I could just evaluate the facts of this particular case and decide whether in this particular instance, you know... Maybe you're right. You know, yeah, I...

That's a fair point. I mean, again, on the legal standard, I think they're screwed. I just don't see a single way that they could get around it because they literally put his face over the words black market. Yeah. And they did destroy his business. That is one of the things that like when you're first learning on air requirements, journalists requirements, they teach you is like you cannot picture someone while you're saying something. If that thing that you're saying is not about

that person and is not accurate. So it is pretty basic. On the other hand, I just know that it's CNN is going to have the best lawyers money can buy. And the standard for defamation is quite high. So I wouldn't bet against them prevailing in the case. I think it's possible that they do that they can, you know, prove enough, like just incompetence

versus some sort of intent here to be able to slide. I think that's entirely possible. And the amounts will be significant, but they'll be fine. This is a gigantic company and conglomerate, et cetera. I think probably more important is just what is learned in the context of this trial, whether it's embarrassing to the company itself, embarrassing to Jake Tapper, embarrassing to his team, et cetera. Nobody wants that peek behind the curtain. It's going to be

messy seeing how this sausage is made. That's the amazing part is one of the hardest things that you have to do is prove damaging. And so he has to prove that they wanted to harm his reputation. But when they have emails saying that they think he's a shitty person and that they acknowledge that the story is quote, a mess, flawed, full of holes, incomplete, 80% emotion, 20% observed fact, we're

We're getting to the place where it's on a knife's edge as to whether you can even argue any of this. And yeah, you just said, I mean, if Jake Tapper and his team are found liable here, that will be a massive blow to them. It also will show everybody else and others, including us in our business. I just don't understand how this ever got to air.

Because, you know, you and I both know the standard for saying somebody is doing something illegal or even sketchy is so high. Also, this guy, not a public figure. That's another one, which is very important. True. You know, look, we can talk about Elon, Mark Zuckerberg, all these other people. All of them fall under the public figure standard. This is just some random dude who's involved in business or whatever, private military contractor.

To name him, the newsworthy standard of that has to be very high. True. And you have to have dead to rights evidence that this is going on. I mean, I think clearly what happened is the reporter didn't like him and the editorial team also found it, I guess, gross that people were charging to get people out of Afghanistan. And they were like, screw him, we're going to go after him. But that is the exact reason you're supposed to have editorial standards to make sure something like this never happens.

So pretty extraordinary nonetheless. The jury did eventually get picked and they're going to trial. So it could be like Fox where they just settle before that. You know, if I've seen as legal team looking at this, you may, you know, you, you might need to pay, like you might need to pay big time to make this go away because Florida jury, I need to go and check how exactly it works with the damages.

and everything. But if I recall, the Gawker case also was out of Florida. And if we'll remember, that case basically shut down the entire website forever. I'm not saying that's going to happen to CNN, but nobody wants to pay half a billion, three quarters of a billion dollars out all because your reporters did a stupid job. But they may decide that that is the...

That that's the best course of action just to try and not set a standard. But that's why it's risky when you go to trial, a jury trial like this. Absolutely anything could happen. Yeah. Well, the last thing I'll note is reportedly part of why ABC slash Disney decided to settle with Trump.

Yeah.

Yep. And so, you know, here you've got the Florida jury and Florida, given how favorable they are to Donald Trump and how much they've shifted right and how much antipathy I'm sure there is towards CNN in the state that may create a bit of an uphill battle for them. So I wouldn't be surprised if.

to see them ultimately be like, you know, we really don't want to go through this. How much money do you need to make this go away? Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. Okay, guys, thank you so much for watching. It was great to be back. Hopefully going to be back in studio on we'll be back in studio on Thursday, the snow and the road conditions allow I can just tell you I'm still looking. I'm looking outside.

There's got to be six, seven inches of snow on the streets. So it's bad. It's bad out here. Washington, D.C. needs to wake up and learn how to actually deal with this. But we'll do our best to get there in the studio. And it's great to be back, Crystal. It's great to have you back. It's not the same without you here, Sagar. And there are all kinds of things I wanted to hear what you had to say about them. So I'm glad to have you back. It hurt. It hurt to be quiet. But that was the those were the orders that I got. And I did comply. So there we go. All right. We'll see you guys later.

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.