transcript

[00:00] Hey guys, Saagar and Krystal 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 full shows, unedited, ad free, and all put together for you every morning in your inbox. We need your help to build the future of independent news media, and we hope to see you at breakingpoints.com. All right, let's talk here about Mythos. Because of the war, we haven't gotten to cover this topic, even though it is extremely important. So let me actually start here, guys, with D2 to give a little bit of backstory on what Mythos is. So this is Anthropix new AI model, and what they're saying is that Mythos has the ability to go out and scan all sorts of software and find vulnerabilities that previously, some of these vulnerabilities were unknown. So you can imagine, let's say you run a bank, and let's say Anthropix put Mythos out into the world, hacker uses Mythos to identify vulnerabilities in key banking systems, is able to hack in. You can see how this would be a total and complete potential disaster. So Anthropix decided we are actually not going to release this to the public because it's too powerful. Let me just read you a little bit from this tear sheet. They say, when Anthropix told the world this month it had built an artificial intelligence model so powerful it was too dangerous to release widely, the company named 11 organizations as partners to help mount a defense. All were from the United States. Within two weeks, the model called Mythos had set off a global scramble unlike anything yet seen in the AI era. Mythos, which Anthropix has said is uncannily capable of finding and exploiting hidden flaws in the software that runs the world's banks, power grids and governments had become a geopolitical chip and a US company held it. World leaders have struggled to figure out the scale of the security risks and how to fix them. With Anthropix sharing mythos with only Britain outside of the US., the Bank of England governor warned publicly Anthropix may have found a way to, quote, crack the whole cyber risk world open. The European Central Bank began quietly questioning banks about their defenses. Canada's finance minister compared the threat to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Interesting analogy there. So, that is mythos. Now, we have a new very unsettling development with regard to this very powerful AI model, put D1 up on the screen. According to Bloomberg and others, mythos has now been accessed by unauthorized users. You effectively have this hacker collective that is organized on Discord that was able to get in and gain access to this model. Now, we don't know that they have nefarious intentions, et cetera, but if we have confirmed that this group was able to get access, it raises the question of number one, obviously this thing was not as securely protected as it needs to be, and number two, who else may have gained access to this? Saagar, I just look at this and the whole thing is so insane, that you have these companies that are able basically with no checks to develop these models and then decide, is it too powerful to release? Well, we'll release it to this group, and then it's all on their own to determine how secure the model needs to be to keep other actors out, and we're really playing with fire here at this point. So the cope I have heard from the more pro-AI folks is basically that these companies make these catastrophic claims to prove how strong their models are. And at a certain point, I actually am willing to believe that. I don't think it would be the first time in human history a company is claiming extraordinary things about its product. But I think I have now seen enough evidence from the ownership of the company and the people inside those companies who believe the truth about what they're saying to be concerned. And I also think to follow the trail of some of these different things, we should really take it very seriously. Like with D2, when we put it up here on the screen, I think if we go through and we really scrutinize what they're saying, is that setting off the global alarms and emergency response from banks and intelligence agencies is outside evidence that their claims may actually be true. So when the bank is able to report infiltration and then an intelligence agency is able to say, hey, this is actually getting through a vital firewall, this is not an exaggeration of the AI model. It's actually a real concern that they have, which we are not grappling with. And the bigger problem, as you said, is no federal scrutiny. Here's the, like, you can't even bring, let's take drugs, right? Like a real drug, like a medical drug. You cannot bring a medical drug to market, which will affect, you can't even bring a medical drug to market, which will affect a few thousand people in a genetic subgroup without rigorous evidence, safety data and regulator approval. All of us agree with that. However, you can bring a phone to market, and basically, as long as you comply with a few different various consumer regulations, it's fine what the phone does. Let's take that to the AI. Let's take it seriously. They're saying this can, a piece of software, which will radically change security, and has so much danger that we have to selectively approve it. There's no regulatory body which says, signed off. Now, some of it is scary, right? Do you really want the CIA and others to be signing off? Because maybe they're signing off because they've been given a zero day. So I accept some of the more libertarian critiques here, but this is so globally important. It just seems to me like you've got to have, I don't know, a presidential advisory body or something, which is saying we've come, here's the standards, here's the transparent review that we've conducted, we believe that it is set to go. Even that, I would feel more comfortable with. A transparent review of experts. But you don't have to leave it in their hands because that's crazy. Because it's insane. I mean, so you've got Anthropic, which is run by the guy who positions himself as taking safety the most seriously. And I think with some, at this point, he has some credibility given that he refused to go along with some of the Pentagon's demands. They routinely publish papers that do research, not only into their own models, but other models to say, okay, this is what we were able to do. So I do think that they have some credibility there. At the end of the day, though, this is also a company that is self-interested and that wants to be the first and the best, etc. But we're lucky that it was Anthropic, I guess, that ended up with this extremely powerful AI, that they took these precautions and realized the problems here. I mean, that's the other possibility, is that you may have a limited amount of testing because there's such a rush to push out the next model and win the race and be ahead of the competitors. You could imagine a scenario where the testing is not as extensive and they don't even recognize the level of vulnerabilities that they're able to exploit with these models. But we're putting all of our faith in the hands of these handful of, I mean, it's completely insane. And to your point about the pushback being, they overhype these products and they claim they're so powerful when really this is just a marketing gimmick. I don't really see how it serves their interest to not release a model because it's too powerful to rule. That means you can't profit off of it. That means that you're really limited in what you're able to do with it. So I think it's hard to see how this really financially benefits them in the short or medium or long term to if they're really truly just overhyping this. And then another sign to your point of outside evidence of how significant this is, we put D3 up at the screen. So Dario Amadei, who of course head of Anthropic and who was blacklisted by the Pentagon and deemed like a national, you know, oh, Anthropic is this supply chain risk. So none of our contractors can even use it. The White House was concerned enough about this that they actually brought him in to discuss what was going on with Mythos and AI in general. It says, Anthropic CEO Dario Amadei visited the White House on Friday for a high-stakes meeting with the president's top advisor. While his AI company battles the Trump administration in court for blacklisting its Claude AI model, Amadei met with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, two sources familiar said. Meeting took place as the US government is trying to balance its hardline approach to Anthropic with the national security implications of turning its back on the company's breakthrough technology, including its Mythos tool that can identify cybersecurity threats, but also present a roadmap for hackers to attack companies or the government. White House said the meeting was introductory, calling it productive and constructive. So we're already here with some of the potential scary possibilities of AI, and yet this government has decided we just need to be completely hands off. We need to any minimal regulation. There was some very minimal regulation put in place during the Biden administration. That needs to be stripped away, and this is what our entire economy is effectively being bet on. I thought that's the scary part, I think. I mean, just generally, I think whenever you really look into the mythos thing, if, look, when they release it, we'll know whether they're full of shit or not. So yeah, whenever it gets released, we will see how powerful it all actually is. There has been a lot of freak out, and then with the bots and all of that stuff, but I think we should compare it to the inflation one that we just did. Change does not happen overnight. The iPhone was released in 2007, I want to say. Ubiquitous smartphone adoption took four years. It was not till 2011 that everybody really had an iPhone or a Galaxy, one of these smartphones, and the addiction data started to really show up even then in 2012. So it took five years. So I think AI will be very similar. You can see what the future may look like. You're never going to know 100%, but you've got to take some of these dangers very seriously. I just think as a generation, we have lived long enough, through technological change, to know almost certainly that the promises of how great things are going to be are almost certainly not true. And I think we should really grapple with that. Like, I lived through the iPhone. I was an adult whenever it came out. It was the first smartphone I ever had. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. And sitting here, what, 16 years or so, after I got my first iPhone 4, like, I don't think I'm better off with a smartphone. I can say that pretty clearly. I wonder what a lot of other people think, but that's why with the AI skepticism that you have to have, I've seen all these promises sometimes by the very same people about how much better off that we would be. And I'm like, I don't think I'm better off. Think about just on the banking piece. I mean, very few people are just keeping their cash under their mattress, or in gold bars or whatever. We all just rely on these ones and zeros in our bank account to be faithfully maintained. It only takes one significant instance where that's no longer the case and you can't rely on it. Think of the way that that changes people's mentality. Think of that way that upends the entire global financial system. I mean, just that one thing is completely catastrophic. I can't even stop getting spam calls. Do you, does this happen to you? Oh, a freaking text too. My iPhone now has the unknown calls list because there's so many spam. So now imagine with AI and they have the ability to have somebody who can perfectly spoof your relative's voice, especially a public figure like me. All you got to do is run it through the AI. You can get me to say whatever you want. And then you're going to call somebody, let's say who's a relative. These are not that sophisticated of scams, very easily doable. And then, like you said, you could set up something, some verification with the bank. It can hack your, maybe your two factor verification very easily. And then boom, you know, you could transfer like your entire estate in a matter of seconds if you actually wanted to. So I think, I don't know, I think we need a lot more consumer safety. And I also think the spam call thing is a good example because it's one of those which is an easily exploitable thing from outside actors using the internet. Spam on the internet and specifically targeting old people has been a problem for more than two decades, three decades, actually. The Nigerian scam goes back to the 1990s and is still not fixed. Like, think about that. With the whole might of the US government and technology and regulators, that still hasn't happened. So what makes you think it's gonna get better with AI? I think it's just gonna get 10 times worse. Yeah, there's gonna have to be some sort of, like, major incident that causes a massive public backlash to generate the energy for some significant change in our approach. Let's go ahead and take a quick look at the other thing our economy is built on, which is gambling and crypto. This is an interesting update from Kalshi. They say that they have cracked down on political insider trading, and they identify three instances of candidates for political office who were trading on their own races. So in one, you had it in the Minnesota Democratic primary, a candidate in the Democratic primary for Minnesota's second congressional district. You have one in the Texas Republican primary for Texas' 21st congressional district. And then you have a candidate for Democratic primary for Virginia's US. Senate election. Now, we've now identified who this individual is, and he's actually moved from running as a Democrat to running as an independent. And we'll give you his claim of what he was up to here. But, you know, I mean, glad to see Kalshi being like, oh, you shouldn't do this and let's crack down. But it also shows just how insane all of this is. Before I get to the specifics on the candidates, let me put D7 up on the screen because this is another insane example of the way that you can gain these things. So a hairdryer at a Paris airport broke polymarket weather markets and made someone $34,000 rich. So TLDR here is that you can bet on what the temperature, the highest temperature in Paris was going to be. Why? And someone realized that this was all based on this one sensor that was at the airport, close to the Charles de Gaulle airport. So they went up with a hairdryer and heated the air around the sensor. They did this on two separate occasions to 22 degrees Celsius, which seemed like a real long shot because it wasn't going to happen without dude showing up with a hairdryer. Market resolved in their favor and then they were able to pocket this cash, some $34,000 and they did it twice before ultimately they got caught. So this is, I mean, really my eyes were open, Saagar, when I realized you could bet on the color of the dildo being thrown at the WNBA game. That was like a real aha moment for me because it's so obvious in some of these things, how they can just be completely, completely rigged, and the political insider trading one is obviously really scary and detrimental too, that you have people who are in a position to impact who gets in and what date they get in, and how much money they spend, and in some ways, how well or poorly they perform, they can sort of point shave the same way that players can point shave in games. Yeah, but even accepting that frame validates the concept of a prediction market, and that's why what these companies want to do, like Polymarket, Kalshi, and others, is show how well they regulate stuff to prevent insider trading. So I'm sure Kalshi's response would be, we don't even allow such bets. It's like, okay, but what is the utility of the bets that you do allow? What is the utility of betting in our marketplace? They would say it allows people to resolve bigger questions, put your money where your mouth is. Like what possible utility is there in being able to bet on an election and its outcome? Be serious, like what, even in the most hyper-regulated market in the world where there's no insider trading, what societal utilitarian benefit to the American consumer is there? I would say nothing, all right? And then what they were- For being able to bet on the Paris airport weather. Thank you. Right, but they would say that we're not even allowed to have that one. Well, let's say we're not gonna do that. Let's say, what is an example of a prediction market which is supposed to resolve better than opinions? I would say politics is definitely another one. Usually oil futures, sophisticated derivatives and all of that and they're like, well, it's just an option to be able to trade derivatives without trading derivatives. Why? Why is that good? Can anyone tell me that? This is what happened more recently. Everything about their pitch is a deeply libertarian democratization of finance, which sounds good on paper, which is bad in practice. So the day trading thing, for example. Recently, the Trump administration removed a $25,000 cash limit that you have to have on hand to be able to place more than five trades in a day. A lot of retail day traders said, great, thank you for democratizing day trading. Let's look at the data. The absolute vast majority of consumer day traders will get wiped out within two to three months. That's empirical. You can actually go and look at that. If you're not a hedge fund, basically trading on quasi insider information with market moving trades, and you really, really have a real place in Wall Street, the absolute vast majority of you will get crushed and you will lose your money. That $25,000 limit was put into place after.com, specifically because a bunch of retail day traders during the.com crash in the 1990s were opening e-trade accounts and got destroyed at a consumer level. So we've just removed that. Same with Kalshi. Why are we betting on oil futures? Like right now, if you want to trade a real oil future, you need like $20,000, $30,000 in cash. Even then, I'm not really sure of the utility, but that's the truth is you need high liquidity to be able to make that work. And the real reasoning behind it is you basically need to be rich enough to be able to afford that level of loss. Even that makes me a little uncomfortable, but I can live with it from a regulator perspective. Why open up all of this stuff? The democratization libertarian theory is everyone should be allowed to profit, and the very, very rich are the ones who are only allowed. And I understand that, but the reality is you will not win. It's like sports betting. You will not win. The house is going to win. The house will win. And so it ends up just being another way to suck more cash out of ordinary people. Exactly. Bottom line. And that's why I get really frustrated is there's this whole TikTok pipeline about day trading and retail, rentals and Airbnbs and you will lose. Like there is almost certain, almost certain that you will lose whenever it comes to sports betting, day trading. You will not beat the market. Like there is so much data that is out there, but people want to get rich quick. And all we're doing is enabling these companies, which is why when you enable this democratization bullshit, your personal finance goes down, but the stock of Robinhood goes up because they get to take all those little percentages of those trades. And Kalshi, you know what, they're doing this shit for free. No, they're taking small percent here, small percent there. That's how they get rich and you lose. You lose. And for some reason, this diatribe, it doesn't break through because everybody thinks, but it could be me. I don't know what to do at a certain point, which is why we had regulators and others trying to protect people from themselves. But I don't know. I mean, this is what people want. That's mostly what the data bears out until things become so catastrophic. And then they're like, oh, how could I let this happen? Maybe I should be a libertarian. I'm like, okay, I should just buy Robinhood stock and get rich off of your doom. I don't know. I have become much less libertarian in these things because the fact of the matter is, there are vulnerabilities in human psychology that are easily exploited. And one of them is holding out the possibility of like, oh, this time you're going to get rich. And this is what casinos make millions and millions of dollars on every single day. And now when you've got it to the point where you not only have the casino and the gambling addictive nature, but then you have it on your phone and so accessible and algorithmically driven, all of this research that has gone in, to hacking your brain and figuring out how to make you do things that are really not in your best interest. It does require someone to come in and protect people. I mean, it really does require consumer protection because we are not built to be able to withstand those pressures every single day. And you see it with, you know, you see it with scrim time, you see it with social media. Payday loans. Remember that one? Remember, they always defended that. Can you really defend 80% interest? That's usury. Like, no. All right? Anybody who's broke enough to be fallen for something like that, somebody needs to protect you. Yeah. You will put yourself, you know, we've looked at the data on this. The number one cause of divorce in North America is money problems. One of the main reasons, unfortunately, in this country that people take their own life is money problems. And you can look consistently over all of these data sets to see the actual effect that bankruptcy has, like during 2008 and the recession, the suicide rate in this country went up, right? It costs real lives. So yeah, I do think we have a societal thing. But you're so right about the libertarian point where they sell this dream that, oh, people should just be allowed to do what they want. And it's like, yes, in a great world, like in a corporate world where, like if you ever read those studies about slot machines and how they bleed you, they can't bleed you immediately. They have to bleed you over time to give you enough dopamine reward where you will willingly hand your money over to them. Right, and then the social media companies studied that dopamine cycle and integrated that into their technology to keep you hooked the way that a slot machine does. Just very quickly, because he's an interesting character, one of the guys who got called out here for insider trading on his race is this guy, Marc Moran. But you guys might have seen, if you're too online, I don't think Saagar saw this, he's pulled back. But I saw this and I watched this video numerous times because it's very strange. So this guy was running as a Democrat, has a bunch of right wing views, decided to not be a Democrat anymore, now he's running as an independent, and he put out this video. I think this was the video that announced his shift from Democrat to independent. In any case, this is one of the dudes who was called out here for insider trading. So watch this video and then on the other side, I'll show you what his response is here, and you can decide whether or not you believe him or not. This is D5, let's watch. 250 years ago, right here at St. John's Church in Richmond, Virginia, Patrick Henry said, give me liberty or give me death. My name is Mark Moran. 250 years later, I'm saying the same thing. Today, I'm going to announce that I'm breaking free from the Democratic establishment. Now I'm going to run for United States Senate as an independent. I'm doing that because I'm putting our country first. I'm putting it above these divisive issues that the left, that the right and our corporate media control. I want to talk about big bold ideas that will save this country. We can't afford homes. We can't afford health care. We're dropping bombs on another country at the behest of another country. We're entirely controlled by corporate institutions. We make it so that when we take out a 30 year mortgage to buy a house, over 50% of what we pay over that 30 years, it goes to the bank. We're ripping off the middle class with our tax code that the elites who are controlling us get loopholes while we don't. We need to simplify everything in this government. But we need to fundamentally restructure and turn this around so that it works for the people. Everything is wrong and it's because money controls. That is not the system that our founding fathers designed. And I'm here to say that. So in any case, I think mostly what people paid attention to there is this weird hand movement. Saagar, since you were not privy to this online discourse, I will tell you some of my favorite analyses of what he was like there. I saw someone who was like, this is the longest anyone's been about to break into a Hamilton-style raft and actually breaking into it. That was a good one. I liked also this is like, you know, like alien inhabiting human body and trying to act natural. Another one I liked was this is like the guy who got already got bit by the zombie, but doesn't want to tell his friends yet and is trying to act like cool. We don't want to kind of sympathize. We're on camera every day, right? So we're natural. It's weird being in front of a camera. Yeah. Right. I sympathize a little bit. I've seen, you know, when normal people like have to like give a speech at a wedding or something. Yeah. Don't know what to do. I feel bad for them. I have a little bit of. Okay. Well, in any case, he says that this was all intentional. We can put this next piece up on the screen. So he posted this saying in response to the Kalshi insider trading allegations, finally, one of the moments I've been waiting for, yes, I did bet about $100 on myself, on Kalshi because I wanted to get caught. What he bet on was that he himself would get into this race. So that's what he was betting on here, which again, insane that you can bet on that, but whatever. So he says, after discovering potential manipulation on polymarket in the New York City mayoral race, I realized how rife with corruption Kalshi is. I mean, death markets, come on. I wanted to see one, if Kalshi would come after me, and two, what their path would be. Also noting this is after Kalshi had reached out to me for marketing partnerships on multiple occasions. I initially met with their compliance in February, then their first offer was to have me pay a roughly $800 fine, take a year of ban and be compelled to make a public statement. He goes on, but basically the TLDR here is that he's claiming Saagar, that he intentionally did this to draw attention to the problem of corruption and insider trading on Kalshi and polymarket. You believe him? Maybe, I mean $100, it's not that much money. To be honest with you, I kind of do believe him. I think, so originally I didn't believe him. Yeah. His explanation, I mean, he's a bit strange of an individual. Just my personal assessment from looking at the video. The vibes are a little off, yeah. Something's not exactly, synapses are not firing all 100%. It did kind of work in terms of the attention that he's seeking. He is like some random independent candidate, right? So this is a way to go viral, so maybe it was that way. I don't know. I'm not sure I do 100%, but the whole point is that it took months to catch him, and there's no way that you could implement this immediately at the beginning for all of the trades, and this is just in terms of political insider. It doesn't reflect in any way many of the other markets that exist on the website or on Polymarket where there's not nearly as much verifiable data. The only reason this was able to be caught was because it's directly the candidates themselves. What about their consultants who they may have contracts with or some other person tangentially, or their wife or their sister or their cousin, like any of these types of people in the way the traditional insider trading takes place. So in general, I don't think it really proves anything in terms of enforcement. Kalshi is democratizing insider trading. Right, yeah. Congratulations to them. Yeah, all right. Let's get to TMZ. So there is some big news here in DC. TMZ has officially set up shop, and when I heard that, I thought, we should really be friends with these people. So we're lucky to be joined in studio this morning by Jacob Wasserman. He is the co-managing editor of TMZ DC. So welcome to the studio and welcome to town. Thank you so much. It's such a treat to be here. I mean, you two have been such a foundation of my understanding of politics. I've been watching you guys since Rising. Wow. This is like a big deal for me. I had no idea. That's cool. That's really cool to hear. Well, thank you. So just give us a little bit of a sense of like why TMZ decided to open this DC Bureau and what you guys' plans are, what you've been up to. Well, first off, TMZ has been covering politics for years. I think that's lost on a lot of people. Like we have a national television show called TMZ Live that routinely has big politicians coming on. I myself have covered numerous campaign cycles. And I'm sure you saw the Lindsey Graham photos of him at DC World. And also Robert Garcia. So this was all born by our fearless leader Harvey Levin, who was calling out members of Congress for not passing DHS funding and told our audience like, hey, send us photos if you see members of Congress out and about during their recess. And our audience responded in a huge way. So we decided to kind of, yeah, we decided to roll with the momentum. And now I'm here on Capitol Hill. That's fun, man. We like it. So some of the first things that you guys have been doing, you have a very good eye, always have, TMZ has, for what the public wants. You covered some of this feud with Tucker Carlson. So more recently, Tucker went on his show and issued an apology, basically, not just voting for Trump, but for advocating for Trump. Let's take a listen and then we're gonna take a look at what you got in terms of member of Congress reaction. Let's take a listen. Looking back, because you and I and everyone else who supported him, you wrote speeches for him, I campaigned for him, I mean, we're implicated in this for sure. Yes. It's not enough to say, well, I changed my mind or like, oh, this is bad, I'm out. It's like in very small ways, but in real ways, you and me and millions of people like us are the reason this is happening right now. Yes. So I do think it's like a moment to wrestle with our own consciences. You know, we'll be tormented by it for a long time. I will be. And I want to say I'm sorry for misleading people. It was not intentional. That's all I'll say. But anyway, but the question does present itself immediately. Like what is this? Was this always the plan? You don't want to be a conspiracy nut, but like clearly there were signs of low character. We knew that. So that was very big and you got this reaction from Randy Fine. Let's take a listen. Is Tucker Carlson? He's apologizing to his supporters and his fans, saying that, you know, he was a big reason why Donald Trump got elected and due to the Iran war, he's kind of reeling back, saying, hey, you know, I'm taking accountability. That's got to be a kind of a big blow to the Republican Party, considering he's like, if not the biggest influencer. You know, what do you make of all that? I think he was. I don't think he is anymore. Look, I called Tucker Carlson the most dangerous anti-Semite in America last October, and I don't know that I would say that anymore. I think be careful. Don't get. Yeah, I'm good. I think he's lost so much credibility within the party. I wouldn't I wouldn't make that statement that he's the most, you know, whatever you described him as the most dangerous anti-Semite. He was in December, sure, because he was espousing anti-Semitic views, trading on a reputation that he created over all of his time in Fox News. My father was someone was that we're going to go this way. My dad was someone who would hang up the phone with me when Tucker was on. He loved him. And, you know, watching his sort of descent into the mental sickness that he has is very... Okay, well, clearly you're not a fan. All right, so that's what you got there, Jacob. So talk to us about how you guys choose stories, like, and what you decide. So that's, as I'm sure you've seen now, there's hundreds of reporters on Capitol Hill. One of the fun things about Capitol Hill is you can go stick an iPhone in everybody's face. How do you choose what to ask different people? Well, there's not much of a science to it. We just are paying attention to what's online and seeing what the big stories are. That day, it was Tucker Carlson going against Trump. So we're gonna ask someone about it. And I mean, that's where I think TMZ really fits in well here. To your point, like, as I've been on Capitol Hill now for a week, I see two groups of people. I see traditional media and I see TikTokers. And I think we're right perfectly in between because we have a really good understanding of social media and how to connect with people online. And we also pride ourselves on fact-checking and I think and handling ourselves like journalists. So in this case, I saw Randy Fine. I knew his beef with Tucker Carlson, so it was just a natural fit. Yes. Yeah. Have you studied up on like, because I feel like some of these characters I would recognize, but not all of them. In fact, I'm not even sure I would have recognized Randy Fine. He's got the beard going, clearly on some sort of weight loss regimen from his peak. So have you like studied up? Do you have like a Facebook that you're trying to memorize? Well, to your point, I mean, my colleague, Charlie Cotton, he actually printed out full sheets of everyone's faces. So we do look through it because we're just getting our feet wet here. I moved to DC. I actually don't even have a place here yet. I'm living in an Airbnb. So it's all very new and yeah, we want to get familiar with everyone. Of course, we're going to talk to the big names, but we want to get to know all 300 plus people in Congress. So I do want to ask you, there was some speculation. I know TMZ has paid for stories in the past. Is that still a practice that you guys are going to employ here in Washington? No, and I'm happy you brought that up. That's not a practice. We pay for photos and we pay for videos. In the same way that other news outlets do too. It's like if you're a news channel and you throw up a Getty photo, that's not free, you pay for that. So yeah, we pay for footage, but we do not pay for information. I mean, we dog stories. That's how TMZ works. And we have an incredible office in Los Angeles full of reporters, you know, Harvey Levin, who we just get on the phone. And we bang out calls, we do Foyer requests, we do all the things I think good journalists do. And I just think unfortunately people try to sometimes like discredit us. No, no, I don't. No, I'm not saying you, I see it in the ether too. So yeah, we definitely do not pay for information and we are a hundred percent not doing that here. Well, one of the things to your point that I think is different is you've always had people on Capitol Hill trying to chase down representatives, because you can, right? They have to come in and out of their offices, there's an opportunity there, the office buildings are open to the public, so you can just come in. But we haven't had a lot of outlets that are in independent media, which you guys aren't exactly, but that have that connectivity to what people are actually talking about online. And so more of that grass roots feel, and our colleagues and friends over at DropSite News, they now have someone on Capitol Hill, and it's so different, the questions that he's going to ask an AOC or who he encounters versus what the mainstream press would be asking them. I think that's part of what you guys could really, will really be in a position to exploit. Definitely. And I think what we're just trying to do is pull back the curtain on DC, and that can be found in a variety of ways. We're asking people, sometimes it could be funny, we can keep it light, we can keep it pop culture, and then we can also be straight shooters. I think TMZ is a personality, and it's like it could be funny, and it can also be really serious too. So that's kind of the balance that we're trying to find. And I think it's a great opportunity for people on the Hill who want to show off their personality. And I mean, isn't the point of politics, or not the point, but part of it to show like, you could get a beer with someone, like isn't that what the saying goes? As you're finding out, that's not actually me. No, exactly, but what a great opportunity for people to kind of shoot the shit with us, and again, serious issues, fun issues, and show you are. What has the reception been from most members? Have they mostly like run away from you, or are they engaged? Absolutely not, it's actually been incredible. Yeah, they weren't. And we're working with people on both sides of the aisle. I mean, that's what's really important to us, is we are non-partisan, and we've seen a huge reception from politicians. Politicians are actually like, yeah, they're happy to see us. Sometimes it's like the staff that's a little bit tougher, but they've been great. People are usually pretty chill, at least personally. Yeah, we'll see. What's the press corps been like? How have they treated you? Cool. You actually just mentioned that guy from DropSite News. I met him yesterday. He's great, like super nice guy. And people in general have been really nice and encouraging. All right. Any scoops, anything you're working on? What do you got? Well, we're definitely working on scoops. I know people know us maybe for the clips that you see when we're on the Hill, but that's only a fraction of what we're doing. We're definitely here to work on tips and to compete. We did a story yesterday, a very sensitive one. I mean, it had to do with Max Miller and his ongoing custody battle with his wife. I mean, that's a serious as it gets. Yeah. And isn't her wife is the daughter of a senator? It's a Bernie Moraine's daughter. Yeah. So again, on the flip side, you'll see us talking to Shamari figures about the basketball game between members of Congress. So that's what I'm saying. There's a spectrum, and we can really play in both sides of the field. Yeah. I think there's a lot to be exposed. Yeah. Welcome you to town. We're excited to see what you are able to turn up. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, listen, contact me on Twitter at JacobWass. You can also just email me at jacob.wasserman.tmz.com. I want to talk to everyone. Great. There's a lot of Congressional staff who listen to this. So everybody take them up on it. All right. Contact Jacob. We're happy to have a lifeline to TMZ. Yeah. Happy to have you on the show. Thank you very much. Thank you guys so much for watching. We appreciate it. See you all later.