7/30/26: Iran Claims Fighter Jets Struck, Munitions Shortage, Fauci Pleads Fifth, AI Bubble Watch

23:02economy, And perhaps like most importantly, actually revealing this, you know, basically tearing, showing the entire world what the U.S. military is actually capable of. To have this happen is the greatest blow to U.S. prestige and perceived power, which ultimately is power in and of itself, in my entire life. More than Iraq. Yeah. More than Afghanistan. I agree. To have a declaration that we will overthrow your regime and not, and then to have the strait closed despite the fact that it was open and shown zero ability. I mean, America, CENTCOM is bragging. They're like, we put 500 million barrels out of this Strait of Hormuz.

23:41Sounds like a lot. But they did the math. That's only 5 million barrels per day on average. There were 20 million, 25 million moving before the strait. So it's like, wow, you know, the full might of the empire, hundreds of billions of dollars, and that's all you could get? I mean, no, I would not have thought that. And I'm a huge pessimist on the military. We're much weaker than even I thought. Yeah, no, absolutely. Like, we showed our ass to the whole world. There's just no doubt about it. The whole strategy is flawed. We're about to talk about, you know, the munitions stockpile and interceptor inventories.

24:10And that is a crucial immediate term problem. But I think the bigger problem is just the entire system and the entire strategy. Because, and I saw Policy Tensor talking about this. Like, let's say that the cupboards were full, to use some Trumpian terminology here, that we hadn't given a bunch of stuff to Ukraine, that we had everything that we need. Do you really think that that was going to be sufficient versus China? When you just think about they have something like 95 percent of the entire drone industry is in China. How does their industrial base compare to ours at this point? You guys tell me which which side has more industrial capacity, spin up whatever they want.

24:47And, you know, Iran, they are a middle power. They are certainly rising in power and prestige, but we can't even compete against them. They've been much smarter, much more strategic, and had a military that was much more prepared, better prepared for waging modern warfare. You know, this whole approach that we have is just completely hollow. And so, yeah, that has been thoroughly revealed in this war in a way that it really wasn't in the Iraq war or in the Afghanistan war, which were also obviously embarrassing and humiliating for us in their own ways.

25:25Betrayal Weekly is back with brand new stories from threatening text messages disturbing a small Midwestern town. It was from an unknown number. Who else is getting these messages? Why did it start with us? To long cons and stolen identities. Who lies about being this sick? This was the last time I ever believed a word she said. New voices, each with the courage to tell their own story. He said, I have been kidnapped. Okay, just trying that normal. He was essentially on the run. Every family has secrets. The rug had been pulled from underneath me. Oh my God. It was right in front of my face and I didn't even see it.

26:13Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, Paul Verzi here and I want to talk to you about Paul's best podcast Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio I sit down each week with a special guest and we discuss the absolute best of things Pete Davidson It's that and then there's everything else He would just shout one line and it would murder Marie! Lunch! Bill Burr Let's talk about the best moments that we had on the road I would love a cocktail Do Joker get last row middle seat on a Southwest Airlines flight. Joe, how was your flight?

26:52It was great. The guy on Penn State, we were on the field, and the player thought Joe was his former coach. And he hugged him. And he hugged him, and Joe just went with it. And the guy goes, what are you doing here, coach? And Joe just goes, yeah! And you walk in, and it is bananas. I mean, it's a feast for the eyes. And I was like, it's not my thing either, but we're here. When in Rome. Top athletes, chefs, musicians, everybody. Listen to Paul's Best Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 2015, teenager Joy Morgan discovered strangely compelling YouTube sermons from the religious group Israel United in Christ, or IUIC.

27:32Her initial curiosity developed into devotion. She distanced herself from friends and family, embraced new identity, immersed herself in the IUIC, and believed she'd found the truth. IUIC is the best family that I've ever had. In fact, she had found what many called a cult. And on Boxing Day 2018, Joy disappeared forever. In the new six-part investigative podcast, The Missing Sister, Charlie Brinkhurst Cuff and Free Turn explore Joy's story, the family she left, and the religious group she found. You know when you get that freedom, like, you just, I don't want to be here. I want to get out. Like, I want to go ahead and out.

28:08It's a story about truth, lies, a young woman yearning to belong, and a family still waiting for answers. All episodes available now to binge. Listen to The Missing Sister on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's go ahead and turn to those inventories, because this is a significant part of the near-term story, especially I keep going back to that NBC News report, that we are already, already rationing interceptors, having to pick and choose. OK, we see an Iranian ballistic missile coming in. Is this a really important target? our service member lives at risk.

28:46Are we going to bother to actually try to take down these missiles or are we going to just accept the damage here? We're already in this place. So let's go ahead and put a six up on the screen here. This has some of the numbers. And Sagar, why don't you go ahead and explain what we're seeing here with the Patriot and the THAAD interceptors? Right. And so CSI, first of all, can I just debunk some Ben Shapiro level lunacy? So the The latest COPE by the neocons is, well, missile stockpiles are classified. Again, CSIS, the irony is that CSIS here is basically an arm of the Pentagon. They're like the most pro-defense think tank in all of Washington.

29:24So when they're publishing these assessments, if they were completely BS, the Pentagon, many other people would say, oh, this is wrong. They have an entire page on their methodology. I recommend that you go read it. The TLDR, if you're skeptical especially, the TLDR is basically that because all of these weapons have to be paid for, Congress is the person who funds or the people who fund the Pentagon. So the Pentagon have to make annual reports to Congress about what it's buying and what the general inventory levels. This can give you an extraordinary amount of confidence about where the stockpiles were.

29:54So pre-war – and by the way, when we say pre-war, we're saying February 27th. It's actually very important to say those pre-war numbers were already catastrophically low because of what was going on in Ukraine and because of what happened both under Biden and Trump when we were shooting down a bunch of Iranian missiles that were going after Israel. So all of that being said, before the war, February 27th, the number of patriots in the U.S. arsenal was 2 ,330. They can say this with absolute confidence. Now, the current number as of July 27th is between 759 and 827. Just think about what a dramatic drop that is in the overall stockpile.

30:36And just to give you an idea of what it means now for choices by the United States, President Zelensky, while he was in the Oval Office, said that just to get Ukraine through the summer, they need 300 patriots to be given to them, which would be almost half of the stockpile that currently exists just in the U.S. inventory alone. Also, for those who are complaining about these numbers, these numbers include the replenishment that have come since the beginning of the war, just again to show you all how disastrous this has been. But that number is actually worse. So 452 dads in the U.S. arsenal before the war on February 27th.

31:15That was already 25 % lower than where it was back in last June, I believe, under Operation Midnight Hammer, when the United States in the 12-day war fired 25 % of all THAADs that we had in the U.S. stockpile just to protect Israel. Not to protect America, to protect Israel. The current number is now between 234 and 278. Now, remember that the number of new THAADs that are coming online into the system, 12. According to the Pentagon, they take forever to build, and they have massive contracts now, but you can try and crash the defense base and all of that. It's not going to work unless it's like World War II total inventory.

31:55This is, I mean, there's no other way to say it. This is terrifying for the world because, and look, Taiwan, let's put that aside. Because at that point, I don't even, even before all of this, the CSIS war games from two years ago when the stockpile was much higher, CSIS again had a war game where they concluded the United States would lose. So that was then. We're long past that. We're at a point where South Korea, Japan, the Strait of Malacca, you know, you think you care about Hormuz, go and take a look at Malacca and what moves through there on a daily basis. Like we are now at a point where I'm talking about extremely critical situations, ones of either NATO or quasi NATO type allies, where it starts to get on the table.

32:40And somebody made a good point. The actual impact of this in the near term, we can keep this piddly stuff going with Iran for potentially another year or two. That's not the problem. The problem is that when the next president gets sworn in in January 2029, he's going to get a briefing by the Indo-PACOM, by the people who are responsible for that region. And they're going to be like, look, sir, this is how many we got. This is how many that's going to come online. You could try and throw money at the problem. The Trump administration certainly is, but the reality is that if this X and Y happens, there's not a fucking thing you can do about it.

33:16I mean, that's not my language. That's Trump's language, whatever it comes to Taiwan. He said that in 2020. So just to give people an example of what this means for the retrenchment of the United States and part of why this war has been so absolutely catastrophic. And we've seen it already. Let's put A8 up on the screen, for example, which we've talked about previously, the military has to now start rationing. If anybody watched that movie that was on Netflix about the nuclear strike, you know, there was a nuclear missile is the whole plot is that it's incoming to the United States and they only fire two ground-based interceptors to shoot down the missile and they fail.

33:54And somebody in the control room or situation room is like, why don't we fire another one? They're like, we can't. We have to ration because we only have 48. So in case we have to save it for future. So you have to sit there and let 10 million people die. That's the most extreme example of what rationing looks like. This is what rationing looks like on a much more micro scale. We have all these bases spread out across the world. And what is Iran telling us? We can hit you in Jordan. We can hit you in Saudi. We can hit you in Bahrain. We can hit you in Kuwait. Even in Egypt, you are not safe. You are not safe anywhere around this world.

34:25And then what does that mean? It means that you also have this Ukraine situation, which is happening. They're begging for 300 missiles. By the way, just this morning in the Black Sea, they lighten up a bunch of Russian tankers, right? So you could see the globalization of this conflict, the extreme rationing which is happening. And I have not even mentioned Asia, you know, in what's actually breaking out, which is where any of this would actually be important. So, you know, it's not hyperbolic to say that this has destroyed the ability in the near term of the United States to project power around the world.

34:57It has actually removed it in a dramatic sense. Even if we are to throw money at the problem, which we are, it will take years to replenish just to where we are, where we were, and where we were was already a disaster. And here's the thing, that it appears that the Iranian strategy was to use their older, more outdated missiles in the beginning of the conflict so that we would burn up our interceptor stockpiles dealing with those. And now they're starting to deploy their more advanced, which is highly sophisticated weaponry, when we are in the position of having to ration. So they've been very intelligent about that.

35:33They also we've talked long about how they go after the radar systems so that we have less ability to know what they're doing and be able to intercept their missiles as they're coming in. They've sort of, you know, in a very systematic fashion, degraded our capacity there. And then if you look at that chart of what we have in terms of patriots and THAADs, the number of THAADs hasn't changed at all since the ceasefire, which would indicate – I mean not only did we not replenish, it would indicate we haven't been firing any – we basically stopped firing THAADs because we are so limited in our inventory of them at this point.

36:11And the radar was hit by the Iranians, I think on day one of the conflict. And this, you know, just to underscore, like, the total number is the whole world. It's not just about what's happening in CENTCOM. Remember how we had to strip all those thads out of South Korea? I look at this. It's never coming back. It's not coming back anytime soon. They should be real nervous up there, you know, being neighbors 45 minutes away from the fourth largest military in the world with a bunch of nuclear-tipped missiles. I mean, that's terrifying. And it's not going to just be like Jordan and the Gulf Arab allies that are rethinking their whole approach to how they deal with the U.S.

36:48and how they deal with China and the level of antagonism that they have towards China, Russia, Iran. All of our allies are looking at this and rethinking their entire approach. And at the same time, let's put A9 up on the screen. You know, it's been very, very difficult to accurately cover what is happening, how much damage. We're having to rely on these OSINT accounts and satellite data that is frequently out of date or looking at what the Iranians say and what they claim. And part of it is that you are now having an even more aggressive crackdown on information coming out of the region. So CENTCOM commander reportedly said videos like this one that was shared previously, that was someone, a service member that was at that base in Jordan when it was hit, that we shared last time can help Iran with targeting during missile and drone attacks and deployed U.S.

37:37soldiers could soon be ordered to surrender their phones. So they are really trying to crack down on any sort of footage or documentation of the damage that Iran has been able to inflict across the region, both because of, you know, I guess, helping with targeting, although it seems to me like Iran is doing just fine with targeting, doesn't really need the service members' videos. But in addition, just for propaganda values, because when you see this coming out, yeah, you don't want the American public seeing that Iran is able to strike these bases and the fear and terror of our service members and the amount of damage being done to our equipment.

38:15There is a total blackout on information coming out of the entire region, very Israeli coded, actually. Yeah, they do. They literally do not want us to see what our men and women are having to go, you know, honestly, it is more equally terrifying when you look at that because that video, it's like an office, you know? It's like sitting in an office, like any normal, but then you run out and there's sirens going off and you're running to a bomb shelter. I mean, you have a vision of service members who get killed in combat as like being on a front line or engaged in a battle. No, that's not how it works anymore.

38:48It's coming from a terrifying threat in the air from thousands of miles away or, you know, thousands of kilometers away. That is what's scary about this entire thing. And we can feel the terror and try and put ourselves in that situation and say, oh, my God, I cannot believe that our people are going through this. Last thing I just want to highlight, just to show you all, you know, what they spend all our money on. Let's put this next one up here on the screen. I mean, this is bonkers. So just yesterday, the Pentagon has now committed over$120 billion for Patriot missiles and for submarines. This includes half of this is just for Patriot missiles from Lockheed Martin,$59 billion.

39:33Don't forget, this is on top of an additional$35 billion multi-year contract for THAAD interceptors that Lockheed had already signed. So let's put together$100 billion just to be able to rebuild many of the munitions that we were just fired already in the Iran war and potentially stock up for the years to come. But even if you were to look deeply inside of this, the contract, which, by the way, is going to extend now for multi-years because that's how long it takes to be able to build, you also would have to take a look and say, are we even getting our money's worth? Remember, the new Patriots cost$4 million apiece and take years to produce just one of those missiles.

40:17So we're paying top dog. Just in case you're wondering, both Lockheed Martin and RTX, which is a submarine builder, this month raised their 2026 profit and revenue projections on the strength of their munition sales. This is what America— Congratulations to them. And that's in their terms and their profit, right? So their profit's going up. We're getting bilked. Every time you pay your taxes, we pay our quarterly taxes as business owners. this is the shit that it's going to. I was telling you about my Amtrak experience. I'm not a huge national rail guy or whatever, but on the Estella Corridor, yeah, I think it makes sense in these highly connected cities.

40:52So yesterday, I was in New York. I'm coming home. I'm on the new Amtrak, the next-gen Amtrak, which, by the way, I paid more for to go from New York to Washington, D.C. than I paid to go from Tokyo to Kyoto on a much better train, which was built in the 1990s. The train broke down in the middle of nowhere. We had to get off the train, literally in the middle of nowhere, and go from one train to another train on a rinky-dink little bridge and then sit on our suitcases in the aisle. That happened here in the United States of America yesterday, not just me, to a lot, hundreds of other people. That's on a nationally funded Amtrak with the next gen and hundreds of billions of dollars from the United States government, from New York government, all these municipalities.

41:35of these. This is what we spend our money on. We spend our money on these missiles. And then even when we do spend our money on rail or innovation or anything, shit literally breaks down. Would never happen. In Japan, they give you an apology if something happens. If you're five minutes late or five seconds late, something like that, they give you a letter saying, we're very sorry for the disruption in our service. I'm just giving an example of like, it's not woe is me, but that's the state of our infrastructure of our country, not to mention all of our other economic problems. And this is where it's been$120 billion.

42:02Nobody even blinks an eye. $120 billion. Do you have any idea how many Amtrak you could build if that's what you wanted to do? Yeah. Cars, investment, whatever. I don't care. Here's some examples. So for$120 billion, you could fund all of SNAP for a year. All of SNAP. You could institute universal pre-K for the majority of three - and four-year-olds. Right. You could fully expand Head Start. If you want to build housing, you could build somewhere around 600 ,000 affordable apartment units or 461 ,000 basic housing units like a standalone single home variety. So that's what we're talking about here.

42:41And we just throw this around. Oh,$120 billion. Of course, the military is getting even more money. And then you look at the results. It genuinely is mind boggling. What is the money going for? What are we accomplishing with this money? And then you have Trump out there making comments like, yeah, we can't have nice things. You know, it'd be nice to have affordable child care. We can't do that because we got to find our military. Really? Why? What is our military doing? It's just, you know, revealing to the world that we have spent all of this is thrown at these defense industrial contractors.

43:13They are making money hand over fist. And the whole strategy is rotten to its core. But that won't stop them from continuing. We need 100 billion more and 100 billion more. The whole defense budget's got to go up to$1.5 trillion. Pete Hegseth tells us that the greatest threat to America is that we don't fund the Defense Department to a$1.5 trillion price tag. That is so incredibly insane. And think about your town. Think about what a tiny fraction of that money could mean for your town. It's crazy. As our infrastructure crumbles, as our airports are disgusting, as our bridges degrade, all that stuff, the trains, the schools, all of it.

43:52And, you know, and very minimal bare bones social safety net that's constantly being attacked and made even more threadbare and just money hand over fist to into this gaping maw, which is the Pentagon. It's so, so absolutely insane. And yeah, look, I'm not a dove. I just think that we could build a much more effective. I think we could have both. I really do. We're so phenomenally rich as a country. You could have, I mean, look at the around$20 ,000 drones,$30 ,000 drones. If we had to rethink of the entire thing, yeah, we could be safe. We could have a better strategy. It would be cheaper, and we could have cool trains.

44:28We could have cool roads. We could have cool cars. We could have all of it if we wanted. Just don't start a war. Don't have bases in the middle of nowhere for literally no reason that are just sitting there, ready to be sitting ducks. But yeah, this is where nobody in DC will say one word about the eye-popping number here. They won't even question how much it actually costs, the delivery timeline. Are we actually getting, you know, what we want from it? It is like that is the true bipartisan consensus where, oh, it's all good. And it's just. Yeah. Well, they see it as like a jobs program in their districts.

44:57It is a jobs program. And that's, yeah, I mean, that's increasingly what our economy is like building, making bombs and AI and gambling. That's what our economy is, basically. So that's what our show is focused on. All right. Let's get to Fauci.

45:16Betrayal Weekly is back with brand new stories from threatening text messages disturbing a small Midwestern town. It was from an unknown number. Who else is getting these messages? Why did it start with us? To long cons and stolen identities. Who lies about being this sick? This was the last time I ever believed a word she said. New voices, each with the courage to tell their own story. He said I had been kidnapped. Okay, just trying out normal. He was essentially on the run. Every family has secrets. The rug had been pulled from underneath me. Oh my God. It was right in front of my face and I didn't even see it.

46:03Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

46:32Let's talk about the best moments that we had on the road. I would love a cocktail. Dude, Joe could get last row middle seat on a Southwest Airlines flight. Joe, how was your flight? It was great. The guy on Penn State, we were on the field, and the player thought Joe was his former coach. And he hugged him. And he hugged him, and Joe just went with it. And the guy goes, what are you doing here, coach? And Joe just goes, man. And you walk in, and it is bananas. I mean, it's a feast for the eyes. And I was like, it's not my thing either, but we're here. When in Rome. Top athletes, chefs, musicians, everybody.

47:07Listen to Paul's Best Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 2015, teenager Joy Morgan discovered strangely compelling YouTube sermons from the religious group Israel United in Christ, or IUIC. Her initial curiosity developed into devotion. She distanced herself from friends and family, embraced new identity, immersed herself in the IUIC, and believed she'd found the truth. IUIC is the best family that I've ever had. In fact, she had found what many called a cult. And on Boxing Day 2018, Joy disappeared forever. In the new six-part investigative podcast, The Missing Sister, Charlie Brinkhurst Cuff and Free Turn explore Joy's story, the family she left, and the religious group she found.

47:54You know when you get out of feed, I'm like, you just, I don't want to be here. I want to get out. I can't want to go home now. It's a story about truth, lies, a young woman yearning to belong, and a family still waiting for answers. All episodes available now to binge. Listen to The Missing Sister on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, everybody, trip down memory lane. Dr. Anthony Fauci of COVID fame returned to Capitol Hill to testify before the United States Senate, specifically after the release of his new diary, which he apparently was keeping on a laptop computer owned by the federal government.

48:35In 1 ,100 pages, he reveled in his own fame that was currently going on. He gave his thoughts about the pandemic, about the president, about himself, about members of the press. But also, and I think most importantly, about whether COVID-19 leaked from the Wuhan lab in 2019 or whether it emerged naturally via the wet market or some other natural phenomenon out of China. So what we're going to start with here is Dr. Fauci testifying before Congress. When I say testifying, he delivered only an opening statement attacking Senator Rand Paul, who had called him to testify before then saying he intended to plead the fifth to protect himself from criminally incriminating himself before Congress.

49:17So let's take a listen. Given Senator Paul's obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution, his repeated slanderous comments about me, and recently his publicly releasing my unredacted personal diary aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me, the only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something, anything that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up in his words, quote, behind bars, unquote. Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion.

50:17Therefore, although it pains me to do so because of the respect I have for the legislative branch of government and my decades-long record of cooperating with Congress, under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions. Do you have that in front of you? On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution. Let the record record that the witness has refused to answer whether there's a folder in front of him based on his Fifth Amendment right.

51:03Have you refused this pardon or do you have any reason to believe this full and unconditional pardon, this grant of immunity, would somehow require you to plead the Fifth Amendment? On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution. Do you still refuse to answer the questions? On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer, based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution. Were you ever made aware of gain-of-function research on monkeypox being conducted at the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center and back at Fort Detrick?

51:49On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer, based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution. So that was the entire thing. You could see his opening statement there. He still believes he's being unfairly prosecuted, specifically around what happened with COVID-19, whether it leaked from the lab or not. And there actually were a lot of clues in Fauci's diary. So let's go ahead and put this up here on the screen. All of these have been released from Fauci's own diary, which, again, he wrote on a federal government laptop, 1 ,100 pages or so. This is actually probably the single most important quote.

52:24And for everyone who is currently joining us for the subject, I know that this can all get quite a bit tedious. We used to have all the details completely memorized in here on LabLeaks. So I'll try to simplify it as much as I can. So here, Senator Paul writes that from Fauci's own diary, he says, quote, Now we know the market was not the source. It was the amplifier. So to make that very clear, what Fauci was writing there was, quote, now we know that the wet market, a.k.a. the wet market where allegedly the bats and the other animals and, forget, the pangolins and all that were being sold, was not the source of COVID-19.

53:02Quote, it was the amplifier. The amplifier, by the way, that theory makes sense if you trace back the timeline of when COVID-19, in my belief, leaked from the Wuhan lab. Now, what this also explains already is that as of January 2020, in this initial entry, he says that the wet market was off the table in his own private notes. In his defense, if you read the totality of the diary, what he's saying is now we know the market was not the source. It was the amplifier in the context of wrestling of whether it leaked from the lab or not. He says, having said that, somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans.

53:37Exactly. So he's just indicating here, OK, the timeline doesn't work out for it to be the wet market. But in his diary, he's claiming he still believes that it was zoonotic transmission from animal to human and not a lab leak. Right. And so then this is where getting to the timeline. And again, I apologize if this is a bit tedious, but it does matter for whether any of this happened and what the actual cover up was, which, in my opinion, is the actual crime, if you were to say, of all of this. So what happened is that as of January 31st, so five days after he makes this entry, he says that there are now conspiracy theories that the virus was given gain of function via inserted mutations and released in Wuhan, as in he was aware of and naming the engineered hypothesis.

54:19The next day on February 1st, he has a secret call. Again, none of this was disclosed to the American people at the time of leading virologists. There were some, let's say, there were 12 virologists that were on this call. 10 out of the 12 did not believe entirely in the natural origin hypothesis. Two of them did. So what Fauci did is suggest to one of those scientists, Anderson, to draft a paper called Proximal Origin, which is then published nationally in a leading medical magazine. That paper then becomes the basis through which Fauci is able to come before the American people in February and in March and to say that independent scientific research has now backed up the claim that COVID-19 came from the wet market, a.k.a.

55:10zoonotic transmission, a.k.a. not from the Wuhan lab. He also, and we can actually show this before if we want to, please, had several instances in which he spoke with the head of China's own CDC and, in fact, had been transmitted very incorrect information, or sorry, correct information, which he then did not distribute to the public. For example, Gao confirmed that asymptomatic people with COVID could transmit. Fauci wrote that the Wuhan health officials did not tell him this, and thus he gave out false information, a lapse, quote, that likely allowed the outbreak to take hold. This all reflects back on the original discourse in Fauci's own testimony and guidance to the American people about whether they should or should not wear a mask.

55:54There's also, in my opinion, when we really look at a lot of the lab leak coverage, the fact is that inside of this diary, it details even more of what we knew previously about the cover-up of the potential lab leak hypothesis. And I will say here, again, I cannot say with 100 % uncertainty that COVID leaked from the lab. I could give you 95%. The only reason that I can't give you 100 % is because China destroyed most of the evidence. And I think ultimately what this comes down to is this general like there's I get it. It's so part. You know, one of the Republican senators, what did he say? He's like, who the fuck do you think you are?

56:31I'm like, OK, man, like, you know, it's like we're doing the dance six years later. In a certain respect, I do. And pretending that it wasn't Trump who was. And it wasn't during this time, by the way, totally fair. And I just think, you know, with with the lab leak, we had Annie Jacobson on about biological war. And if you're a lib, you want RFK Jr. running all these BSL-4 laboratories? You want Pete Hegsek in charge of military anthrax and all these other bioweapons that are in our— Like, this is not partisan. The point is, is that we got lucky with COVID. This sounds crazy to say. Had a 1%, you know, fatality rate, mostly old people and fat people.

57:09If this was the Spanish flu or something like that, and it actually affected young adults and children, I mean, it would have been madness and we would have had millions more people that would have been killed. So the point is, is like we actually have to reconcile with lab leak and what happened here just to be able to deal with whatever the next pandemic is. And instead, we've had total partisan retrenchment on what I, again, think is a very basic issue of it leaked from the lab. We've done multiple monologues and segments here on the show over the years. Fauci definitely covered it up. And on top of that, he gave a lot of incorrect information, which in my opinion, the crime was, is he never admitted it, you know, whenever it came to mass, whenever it came to school closures and many of these other things.

57:52He retrenched entirely in that he acted very nobly. And what's also obvious from his diary entry is he reveled in the media attention. He said crazy ass things like, I am the science. I mean, he was a total egomaniac. And, you know, you don't have to be a crazy right winger to be like, yeah, this person really destroyed a lot of public faith in the CDC and the NIH and the entire scientific establishment from running a lot of his response during COVID. There are many other criminals that are involved. But, you know, in my opinion, Fauci is primarily one of them. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think that comment about I am science or I am the science is very revealing because what you see with, I think the most charitable interpretation you could give to Fauci is that he thought it was probably zoonotic transmission, but rather than putting out to the public, like, here are the competing theories, here's evidence on this side, here's evidence on that side, and allowing the public to live in some measure of uncertainty, he wanted to have, no, here's the definitive answer I can point to, case closed.

58:56And maybe he just wanted that because we see in other examples where he, you know, had a similar approach of, let me put something out there that is not technically correct, but I think is a better thing for the public that to manage their emotions. He saw that more as his role than actually reading the public in on the totality and the messiness and the, you know, especially this is a new virus pandemic. You're gathering signs. You're figuring out what's going on. There's going to inherently be messiness and uncertainty in that. And he didn't think the public could handle that. But the other piece, obviously, with the lab leak in particular, is that there's also a self-interested motive of NIH's funding.

59:35Some of this research are directly connected to this lab. Some of the other characters involved are directly implicated in terms of the research that was being done. And so you also have the self-interested motive of, I don't want the finger pointed at us and what we're doing, and we want to continue to do this gain-of-function research, even though it is profoundly dangerous. When we talked to Annie Jacobson, I asked her the question, biological weapons are illegal, right? They're completely banned. And yet what we do in these labs is messing around with things that could be bioweapons. How do they draw the line between bioweapons development and, quote-unquote, gain-of-function research?

1:00:16And it's basically a gigantic loophole. So that's, you know, that's the way people should think about this. And, you know, in terms of this proximal origin paper, which really becomes this linchpin in saying it was do not extrinsic, it was not a lab leak. All of these scientists agree. Very, like, definitive language that was used. You can see behind the scenes, the lead author just before this was published said that a lab leak was, quote, friggin likely, wrote that the main issue is that accidental escape is, in fact, highly likely. It's not some fringe issue. Another co-author wrote that the virus easily could have leaked from a lab.

1:00:58Now, they claim, oh, well, that was a little earlier. And then we looked into it. We decided, no, it is Zunata. It is, you know, from an animal to a human. And so that's why it was so definitive in the paper. But it seems hard to believe that since there was no new information that had really come out to put your thumb on the scales in the direction of this is coming from an animal, that they still harbored at least some doubts. And yet what was presented in this paper was very concrete. And then what happens from there? It becomes pushed out to a lot of scientific journalists. Just accept this.

1:01:30OK, well, we've settled this question. It came from an animal. We're moving forward. All of that research into the actual origins then gets pushed out to the fringes. And meanwhile, as Sagar is pointing out, the discourse on this is just so poison and so toxic at this point. It's almost hopelessly damaged beyond repair, even though, you know, it continues to matter how this happened. And maybe we should change our policies and our approach here so that it doesn't ultimately happen again. Let's talk about school closure. I mean, that was the second to lab leak, the most consequential thing that will affect this nation.

1:02:00Test scores have never recovered from the pandemic. It still remains a literal lost generation, not to mention drug use, alcohol abuse, all kinds of things that happen sociologically as a result of this. In his diary, Fauci says that he convinced the New York City mayor to close schools and he influenced California school closures. In 2022, in an ABC News interview, he said, quote, I had nothing to do with school closures. It's literally a lie. It's a bald-faced lie. He told multiple times Francis Collins, for example, to please delete his emails after you read it, which is directly in contravention of his need to preserve records for Congress and for FOIA, by the way, and for future historians.

1:02:41He said, quote, if anybody is lying, Senator, it is you. Whenever Paul directly asked him about deleting information, he said he redefined. Remember when he redefined gain a function by saying that we no longer did gain a function? It's a total lie. And ultimately, what this is, is he became a genuine egomaniac. Let's put B5 up here on the screen in his diaries. Quote, the press is going wild with me. He talks about how flattering it is. He talks about how cool it was for him that when he shows up to the White House, he no longer has to give his ID because the Secret Service recognized who he was.

1:03:20He revels in Oprah and all of these other celebrities coming to his defense. You can go through and read all of this for yourself. It's all public knowledge. This is who the guy became, embodied in the I am the science question. And that's why, I mean, it's a tragedy what has happened. As I said, we got entirely lucky and really we blew our stack with lockdowns, vaccine development, Trump and all of that, the loss of public faith. Just imagine if we had another pandemic. If we had Spanish flu today, what is going to happen? And with RFK Jr. in charge, it's terrifying. We have RFK Jr. We have Fauci in charge.

1:03:59Are we going to close schools or not? I mean, that's got to be a serious question. What are we going to do? Is there a vaccine to do it or not? Who's going to publish the information? Should we wear a mask? Should we not wear a mask? I mean, just imagine, like, 15 days to stop the spread. Anybody going to believe that? Like, which scientists do we turn to? Do we turn to Fauci and all the other officials over the CDC who lied to us? Do we trust RFK Jr. and Dr. Marty Macri? This is a serious problem that we all have, right? And that's kind of my point. And just overarching to the Annie Jacobson point, you know, screw the Wall Street Journal.

1:04:34I don't know why, but they did not credit her book. They ran an entire piece about how with AI, biological weapons are now much easier to manufacture and that many AI models have no guardrails in place to tell you how to, in a high school chemistry set, be able to manufacture a highly infectious either disease or gain function like some type of thing. They gave her zero credit, even though she literally lays that out in her entire book. It can happen. It can happen very, very easily. And now what? I mean, that with this public health infrastructure, in my opinion, because of him, you know, we really are in a very, very bad place.

1:05:11And that's just my last thing is with Fauci is he literally got a pardon, a blanket pardon from Biden, which he had said publicly, I will have no problem testifying before the U.S. Senate. So he has no potential criminal liability. He has a federal blanket pardon from the United States president. He literally, you know, got, he said previously, I had nothing to hide. And then ultimately, after his diary and all that is submitted, he has to plead the fifth. So look, pleading the fifth is not technically, you know, that you're hiding something. But in my opinion, it does demonstrate like very clearly that on his own merits, he cannot stand by much of what he said in the middle of the pandemic.

1:05:52That's not even just a partisan point. I just think that's a fact at this point. All right, let's move on, shall we?

1:06:00Betrayal Weekly is back with brand new stories from threatening text messages disturbing a small Midwestern town. It was from an unknown number. Who else is getting these messages? Why did it start with us? To long cons and stolen identities. Who lies about being this sick? This was the last time I ever believed a word she said. New voices, each with the courage to tell their own story. He said, I have been kidnapped. Okay, just trying that normal. He was essentially on the run. Every family has secrets. The rug had been pulled from underneath me. Oh my God. It was right in front of my face and I didn't even see it.

1:06:48Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, Paul Verzi here and I want to talk to you about Paul's best podcast Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio I sit down each week with a special guest and we discuss the absolute best of things Pete Davidson It's that and then there's everything else He would just shout one line and it would murder Marie! Lunch! Bill Burr Let's talk about the best moments that we had on the road Shut up! I would love a cocktail Do Joker get last row middle seat on a Southwest Airlines flight.

1:07:26Joe, how was your flight? It was great. The guy on Penn State, we were on the field, and the player thought Joe was his former coach. And he hugged him. And he hugged him, and Joe just went with it. And the guy goes, what are you doing here, coach? And Joe just goes, yeah! And you walk in, and it is bananas. I mean, it's a feast for the eyes. And I was like, it's not my thing either, but we're here. When in Rome. Top athletes, chefs, musicians, everybody. Listen to Paul's Best Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You said to me, yo, you know, keep at it, because you let me rap for you.

1:08:01It was magical for all of us. We made it, we made it. Yeah, I'm like, we? You know, I'm like, I know these guys, but who are you? I'm MC Jin, and this is Laugh But Not Lease. I'll be chatting with guests from all walks of life about the power of humor when it comes to facing difficult times, like the co-founder of Rough Riders, Darren D. Dean. talking about as a kid. Do you remember that we met even way before that? Let me think. Did you walk up to the gate? That was me, D. That was you? That was me. The day we found out that you and the whole crew was at Hit Factory, the mission was to get me to go to the gate, start freestyling, and see if I could get in the studio.

1:08:38I'm rapping, and then suddenly I hear a voice. Hey, open the gate. Let him in. The gate slowly went. They all, they're watching this, and they watch me walk into there, and that is a moment that I will remember for the rest of my life. Listen to last but not least with MC Jin on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Turning now to some crazy rumblings going on in the stock market, including South Korea, many chip manufacturers, our own tech companies, and perhaps here the very first glaring sign of margin gone wrong with AI stocks and a potential bubble collapse.

1:09:14Let's put this up here on the screen. Leopold, I'm not going to try and say his last name. I think it's going to say Ashenberger's, his situational awareness hedge fund, is now, quote, seeking to raise capital after an AI rout. The reason why this is important is that this hedge fund,$20 billion hedge fund, was founded by a former OpenAI employee who now needs, quote, fresh capital after heavy losses in recent AI stock sell-offs. The fund had previously posted a 439 % net return for the year through the end of June, which means now that it is July 30th, he has now lost nearly the entirety of the fund, was hurt by a July downturn, amplified by its use of leverage to magnify returns.

1:10:01Its hardest hit large positions include Oracle and AMD, which are each down 20 % for the month, along with the smaller bets like Nebius, Sharon, AI, Bloom Energy, and SanDisk. For context, the NASDAQ 100 has downed 10 % in July, and South Korea's KOSPI has lost roughly a third of its value. He says now that the fund was not immune to the turbulence, but framed the sell-off as creating attractive buying opportunities, inviting investors now to add cash so that he continue the strategy. And he says the Anthropic IPO is a potential catalyst for his recovery. So why does that matter? This is the first person to actually get wiped out, at least so far, if nobody gives him any more money, on these leveraged bets on AI.

1:10:46The initial downturn is indicative of a dramatically changing geopolitical situation, not just to mention a financial market situation. Let's start with South Korea. We'll put C3 up here on the screen. South Korea has now had a stock market at a three-month low with a massive AI sell-off. Samsung and SK Hynix have fell by more than 10%, quote, renewed fears over AI spending and Chinese competition. Investors were ditching their chip stocks on Tuesday, rising concern about the huge amount of borrowing from AI companies. And South Korean semiconductor companies specifically fell by more than 10 % with their entire index down by 11.5 % back to mid-April.

1:11:29But the stock sell-off itself is more indicative of what is going on behind the scenes in terms of the rising problems with the amount of debt that these AI companies have, the amount that they have to invest in these chips, and China. This is actually the big one that a lot of the Western press just doesn't want to deal with. And that's when I'll get your take here, Crystal, with C4 on the screen. Chinese chip champion, CXMT, whenever it debuted, came out with 466 % pop on the Chinese stock exchange because of their ability basically to prove not only with their AI fever gripping their own stock market, but it was about domestic chip manufacture, which has always been their biggest problem.

1:12:13America relies both on Taiwan and these South Korean companies to boost our chip manufacturing, basically the Western alliance, kind of, if you will. The dream for the Chinese has been to disaggregate themselves from reliance on NVIDIA chip design in Taiwan as well. And this is one of the first times that they have the ability to build out their own infrastructure. A lot of this is very reductive and, like, it's very complicated, et cetera. But the bottom line is the South Korean and Asian markets, Western markets, Western allied markets not doing very well. American companies like Meta, as of this morning, posting a 10 percent loss.

1:12:47You have significant losses by this hedge fund. Chinese chip manufacturer going up. And a lot of it portends very badly for any potential bubble conversation. The question is, are these canaries in the coal mine? And it looks very much like it because the South Korean stock market, which has collapsed and taken down. I mean, retail investors are just like utterly screwed because, of course, they saw the stock market going crazy. They got in on the action, many of them around its peak. Then it's been nothing but destruction since then. In any case, the South Korean stock market is heavily dependent on these chip stocks.

1:13:21Like they it's like half of the stock market is represented in these chip stocks. So when they take a tumble, the whole thing goes down and it's a disaster. So is that a canary in the coal mine? And then this guy with his hedge fund, his whole thing was, I am betting on the AI revolution. I'm betting on the need for all of this compute, all of these chips. I'm betting against software companies because I think AI is going to come in and displace them. So now with him basically saying, OK, those bets didn't work out. I may have to unwind this whole thing. Well, what do you think our entire economy is a bet on at this point?

1:13:56It's a very similar bet that our whole economy is making on the AI revolution. So that's why these things are incredibly important to take a look at. And now in South Korea, with their stock market woes, you've also, because you had so many retail investors get in and so many of them buy them using debt basically on margin. Now, as those stock prices go down and they're experiencing those margin calls, then they have to sell more and more and more. And that creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. But to Sagar's point, a lot of this does come back to China. China, they have made this extraordinary push, partly because of our own chips export controls that forced them into the direction of, OK, we're going to have to be self-reliant.

1:14:41Now they haven't caught up, but they're getting a lot closer. And I think no one would bet against them. I mean, just look surely at the human capital, the number of engineers that they graduate versus us. Like, it's not even comparable. And they have a nationwide strategic emphasis as part of their five-year plan on this sector. They are going to continue to develop. They are going to continue to get better. And then when you look at the way that their AI models have basically nearly or, you know, have matched the frontier models here, they do it requiring a lot less compute. It's much more efficient.

1:15:16It's kind of destroying and undermining the entire business model that OpenAI, Anthropic, and our other, you know, big AI development companies here have pursued. Yeah, this is the ground shifting. These are the canaries in the coal mine. This is the quicksand that this whole thing could sink into ultimately. Let's put C5 up here on the screen to bolster that point. This is about chip lithography. So again, I'm not an expert. I'm doing my best. This is all very complicated. But this was one of the major bottlenecks for China. So what they write is that China has now potentially made a significant breakthrough in chip-making equipment.

1:15:51The information, a state-backed firm in Shanghai, has now figured out how to build immersion-deep ultraviolet, known as DUV, lithography tools, which is capable of manufacturing the most widely used chips. This is technology which was long been dominated by the Netherlands' ASML, which means that China is now progressing faster than outsiders expected in a push for semiconductor self-efficiency. If you compare this DUV chip-making advance with China to the CXMT stock that I talked about very previously, you pair those two things together, what you see is that you basically have a situation where you have chip manufacture, which is now becoming one of the bull areas of Chinese investment.

1:16:35And it also means that what they're creating is the ability to compete both with the United States, with South Korea, all at a time of immense speculation from the United States and or immense speculation in the United States and a potential bubble burst, which could rip a lot of the capital out of this. That is the big picture problem as to why I think all of this matters. And generally, I mean, you can see here, let's put C1, for example, up on the screen. I mean, Sandisk got absolutely wiped out in terms of a 30 % loss over the week. I think it's down, yeah, 54 % in July, the S &P 500's biggest loser.

1:17:16They continue to look at a lot of these different stocks. And just to be fair, let's see, stocks are a little bit up this morning. So it's not really about our own S &P 500. We're looking specifically at the technology sector and these chip manufacturers. But you had Meta that also posted a significant loss. Let's put C7, please, up on the screen. This stuff really matters. Their stock, I think, is down by about 10 % as of this morning. All of this because of weaker-than-expected revenue forecasts, and it took a big hit to its cash pile. So basically, what they said, analysts were expecting a guidance of$63 billion in revenue.

1:17:53The company had said that assumes foreign currency, et cetera. But the biggest capital expenditure is that their guidance for the year to between$130 and$145 billion from a prior range of$125 to$145 billion. Basically, what they're saying is that they are going to spend billions more dollars on capital expenditure than they previously had admitted, and that their free cash flow is now down actually this quarter from what they previously had expected for a lot of these analysts, a.k.a. chip or data center construction and AI investment is going up and up and up. And we don't see that reflected in the revenue.

1:18:32They have a long-term bet, which we're going to talk in a little bit, that the open models, et cetera, and all that will come. But we're still talking about hundreds of billions a year, trillions totally, if you look at all of it. And if it doesn't work out, all of it goes bust completely. And not just if it doesn't work out, because sometimes two things are conflated. Will the technology be transformational? That's one question. A totally separate question is what happens with the revenue and the economics and whether the stock market crashes. Those two things that you could have a scenario where, you know, the models work out, it's transformational and the stock market does really well.

1:19:11and all these companies, you know, become larger than anything that's ever existed on the planet. You could have where, you know, it kind of sucks, but they continue to pump the stock market. You could have where both things fail and you could have a situation where it's transformational. But they bet on the wrong model. And that's the thing that increasingly looks likely to me as, you know, someone who's looking at this from the outside, trying to read and understand as much as I can, that our companies bet on this model of we're just going to churn and burn, hyperscale, build down all of these data centers, throw as much compute as possible, bring in, suck in all of this investor cash endlessly, and hope that the productivity gains, translation, replacing of human beings at their work, that that is valuable enough, that it all ends up being justified.

1:19:54But when China comes in with cheaper, more efficient models and open source, meaning that a company can just download that and run it themselves, They don't have to give their data to anyone else. It's cheaper. Why wouldn't you do that? That undercuts their entire business model. So even if the tech ends up being transformational, does it work out from their business model perspective? And that is what I mean. You look at the data center construction across the country. So many of the jobs that are that are being created right now are like electricians and in construction for specifically these data centers.

1:20:31If that goes down, it's I mean, it is really dire. We actually just had a GDP number come in that was weaker than expected. It was like one percent growth, you know, and some of that is because of government spending going down due to a variety of reasons, et cetera. But a lot of the economy is built on this A.I. build out. That's where all of the money is going. And so when you see these canaries in the coal mine of this guy that bet everything on exactly that direction on the South Korean stock market, which is all bet on the chips and the continuing increased demand for chips, you have to pay attention to that.

1:21:04Yeah, exactly. So we'll continue to monitor how it's all going. And look, to again, be fair, many tech companies, their stock is up as well. So it's not like this is exactly an entire industry-wide phenomenon. But generally, with South Korea, this is their worst crash since 97. It's worse than 97, and it's worse than 08. This is one of the greatest stock market calamities in their history. I don't think that we can ignore that, especially on a country whose whole, at least market, was bet on these chip stocks. We are not as exposed, but we are exposed broadly to all of the AI sector for all of our growth.

1:21:39Oh, and not to mention gas is$4 a gallon. So grocery prices are up like 50%. Consumer spending is very high for the top 10%, but for most people, it continues to crunch. So in terms of our real production, it's not looking that great.

1:22:08I'm Mange Shachikadur and I'm back with a new season of my podcast, Skyline Drive. This time I talk to scientists, biopunks, curmudgeons, blues owners, super seniors, and Goa's top cryotherapy lab to try to understand this obsession with living forever and what it means for all of us. And I get into a bit of trouble along the way. I'd say probably start bone smashing. That doesn't work. Make it look more defined. They say it works. I don't know. Listen to Skyline Drive, How to Live Forever on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Can superstars even exist the way they used to?

1:22:422016 was sort of that last era of monoculture where we still consumed things in community. Everybody wanted to be Beyonce at that point. I don't think we'll ever see another Riyadh. What does it mean to be Black and eat in America? You will never make me feel bad for being a Black girl, for being a Black American girl, ever. From music to food to the conversations shaping Black culture right now, Therapy for Black Girls is bringing it all to the mic. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, my love. I'm Ryan Weiss. And for the past 15 years, I've been an emotional intelligence coach and a spiritual guide.

1:23:23And I'm sharing with you my new podcast, Waking Up With Ryan. Waking Up With Ryan is a daily audio video podcast here to help you connect with yourself before the noise of the day takes over. So let's start our days together with a moment of calm that's just for you. Listen to Waking Up With Ryan on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.