As Los Angeles Hits "Breaking Point" Population Exodus, Houston's GDP Rockets Higher

California - which spends nearly 40% of taxpayer revenue ($95.5 billion, not including federal funds) on social services that's rife with  fraud - and which spends roughly 25% of its $95.5 billion Medi-Cal budget (free healthcare) on illegal immigrants, is in the midst of a massive population exodus due to housing affordability, crime, taxes, wildfires, parental rights, and homelessness. 

And while San Francisco and Los Angeles compete for the biggest cesspool in the country, LA county just took the crown when it comes to population loss.

According to the latest US Census data, Los Angeles county lost over 53,000 residents - marking the largest decline in any US city between July 1, 2024 and July 1, 2025 - while the overall population loss from 2020 to today is roughly 300,000 people.

"There is a real sense of burnout. They are paying insane taxes and getting absolutely nothing in return," according to real estate developer Robert Rivani in a comment to Fox Business. "People feel like they’re living in a place that’s draining them financially and in exchange they’re dealing with rising crime, shrinking services, and a sense that everyone around them is trying to leave too." 

"It isn’t just one factor, it’s the breaking point phenomenon. The taxes, the lack of safety, the red tape," Compass Real Estate agent Chad Carroll told the outlet. "I have a client from California whose home was broken into twice in the past six months. The whole political landscape there is destroying the state."

"These are individuals who have spent their lives building businesses and wealth," he added, "and they feel that California has become a place that takes everything and gives back very little in terms of safety, infrastructure and opportunity."

Houston We Have The Opposite Of A Problem

Meanwhile, Houston is undergoing a transformation. Not only can you actually get homeowner's insurance (13% of realtors said they've had at least one home fall out of escrow because a buyer couldn't find insurance), 

Let's compare to Los Angeles: 

• Housing Affordability & High Cost of Living: LA housing is 2.5–3× more expensive than Houston (median ~$900k+ vs ~$340k).
• High Taxes: Houston has no state income tax. Los Angeles has a top rate of 13.3%.
• Crime, Homelessness & Public Safety: Houston has far lower homelessness (~14× lower rate) and better recent crime trends.
• Parental Rights & Education Policies: Houston/Texas has stronger parental notification and consent laws.
• Wildfires, Natural Disasters & Insurance Crisis: Los Angeles faces severe wildfire insurance non-renewals and premium spikes. Houston does not.
• Jobs, Wages & Economic Opportunity: Houston has stronger job growth and better cost-of-living-adjusted wages.
• Traffic, Congestion & Infrastructure: Los Angeles has significantly worse traffic (83 vs 56 hours lost per year).
• Broader Quality-of-Life: Houston has lighter regulations, faster permitting, and lower energy costs.

About that job growth: Houston real estate experts @Houstonomics just revealed that Houston became the 6th largest metro economy in 2024 (most recent data), and became the second fastest growing city out of the country's 20 largest metro economies. 

In a Saturday post on X (via Capital.news), they note: The numbers are in, and they demand attention.

Metro Houston's GDP hit $758.3 billion in 2024, crossing three-quarters of a trillion dollars in real, inflation-adjusted terms for the first time on record. That makes Houston the 6th largest metro economy in the United States, ahead of Washington D.C. and closing in fast on the cities above it.

But the size of the number is not the real story. The velocity is.

Houston grew at 4.1% in 2024, nearly double the national rate of 2.8%. Over the prior two years, only Seattle grew faster among the 20 largest metro economies. In absolute dollar terms, Houston added $72.6 billion in output, second only to New York City. That is not an oil town riding a commodity cycle. That is a diversified industrial powerhouse firing on all cylinders.

The conventional wisdom about Houston has always centered on energy. And yes, energy is still woven into the fabric of this city. But oil and gas extraction has fallen from 7.7% of GDP in 2014 to just 3.8% today, even as total output has grown. The city has not abandoned energy. It has grown everything else around it faster.

Manufacturing tells that story best. Houston produced $126.9 billion in manufactured goods in 2024, leading every metro in the country for the third straight year. More than Los Angeles. More than Chicago. More than double Detroit. Recent project announcements from Foxconn, Eli Lilly, and Tesla signal that this base is expanding well beyond its petrochemical roots.

Worker productivity reinforces the picture. The average Houston worker generates $221,000 in economic output per year, nearly 19% above the national average. That figure has risen 11.1% since 2019, outpacing the 7.9% national gain. Houston achieves this not through a narrow concentration of tech billionaires, but through the rare combination of skilled blue-collar workers and world-class industrial capital operating at scale.

Then there is trade. Nearly one in four dollars produced in Houston gets exported to global markets. No other major metro comes close. Dallas and Chicago export roughly 6% of their output. Houston exports 24%. The Port of Houston connects this industrial base to the world, and the world keeps buying.

The investment community is paying attention. In 2025, the Greater Houston Partnership recorded 683 new business announcements, a 26.5% increase over the prior year. Of the 683 announcements tracked in ’25:

• 35 disclosed employment figures totaling 14,834 new jobs.

• 42 reported $10.5B in capital investment.

• 665 disclosed 602.8M SF in space occupancy.

Of those, 117 came from foreign-owned firms, the highest volume on record. Companies from around the world are choosing Houston not as a backup plan, but as a primary destination.

The Purchasing Managers Index has shown continuous expansion for 68 consecutive months. Vehicle sales hit an all-time regional record. Sales tax revenues rose 5.9% in 2025, even after adjusting for inflation. The macro data and the street-level data are telling the same story.

Houston is not having a moment. It is building a permanent position at the top tier of American economic geography. The city that the coastal consensus once dismissed as a boom-bust energy town has quietly become one of the most productive, most export-oriented, most globally connected industrial economies on the planet.

The data is out. The question is whether the rest of the country is paying attention.

Data sourced from the Greater Houston Partnership, "Houston:The Economy at a Glance," March 2026.

It is in population growth. Wait until Elon Musk gets that Chip plant up and running. https://t.co/Fnt8u9v7aW

— Houstonomics (@Houstonomics) April 4, 2026

 

Tyler Durden Tue, 04/07/2026 - 22:10

Why Military Bases Should Never Have Been Gun-Free Zones

Authored by John R. Lott Jr. via RealClearPolitics,

It may sound hard to believe, but except for a very limited group of personnel, the military has treated its bases as gun-free zones. Until Thursday, only designated security forces – such as military police – could carry firearms while on duty. Commanders punished any other soldier caught carrying a weapon severely, with penalties ranging from rank reduction and forfeiture of pay to court-martial, dishonorable discharge, criminal conviction, and even imprisonment.

That changed with a statement from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.

“Before today, it was virtually impossible. Most people probably don’t know this. It is virtually impossible for War Department personnel to get permission to carry and store their own personal weapons aligned with state laws where we operate our installations. I mean effectively our bases are gun-free zones unless you’re training or unless you are a military policeman.”

Consider the attacks at Holloman Air Force Base (2026), Fort Stewart (2025), Naval Air Station Pensacola (2019), the Chattanooga recruiting station (2015), both Fort Hood shootings (2014 and 2009), and Navy Yard (2013). Across these attacks, 24 people were murdered and 38 wounded. In each case, unarmed personnel – including JAG officers, Marines, and soldiers – had to hide while the attacker continued firing.

Yet when the military deployed U.S. troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, it required them to carry their weapons at all times – even on base. Those soldiers needed to defend themselves against real threats, and there are no known cases of them turning those weapons on each other. The policy worked. Soldiers carried firearms without creating internal violence.

So why make it easier for attackers to target troops at home? Why force soldiers – like those at Fort Stewart – to confront armed attackers with their bare hands?

It wasn’t always this way. In 1992, the George H.W. Bush administration started reshaping the military into a more “professional, business-like environment.” That shift led to tighter restrictions on firearms. In 1993, President Clinton rewrote and implemented those restrictions, effectively banning soldiers from carrying personal firearms on base.

If civilians can be trusted to carry firearms, military personnel certainly can. As Hegseth noted, “Uniformed service members are trained at the highest and unwavering standards.”

Why would a soldier risk such severe penalties? Because those penalties do not deter attackers. Someone planning to murder fellow soldiers will not stop because of gun laws. Most mass attackers expect to die during the assault, so the threat of additional punishment carries no weight. Even if they survive, they already face multiple life sentences or the death penalty.

But those same rules weigh heavily on law-abiding soldiers. A soldier who carries a firearm for self-defense risks becoming a felon and destroying his or her future. These policies disarm the innocent while signaling to a determined attacker that no one else will be armed.

Military police guard base entrances, but like civilian police, they cannot be everywhere. Military bases function like cities, and MPs face the same limitations as police responding to mass shootings off base.

Uniformed officers are easy to identify, and that gives attackers a real tactical advantage. Attackers can wait for an officer to leave the area or move on to another target – either choice reduces the chance that an officer will be present to stop the attack. And if the attacker strikes anyway, whom do you think they target first?

Research shows that civilians with concealed handgun permits are more likely to stop active shooting attacks. By contrast, although police stop fewer attacks, attackers kill them at much higher rates – police are twelve times more likely to be killed.

After the second Fort Hood terrorist attack, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley – then commander of Thirds Corps at that base – testified to Congress: “We have adequate law enforcement on those bases to respond … those police responded within eight minutes and that guy was dead.” But those eight minutes proved far too long for the three soldiers who were murdered and the 12 others who were wounded.

Time after time, murderers exploit regulations that guarantee they’ll face no armed resistance. Diaries and manifestos of mass public shooters show a chilling trend: They deliberately choose gun-free zones, knowing their victims can’t fight back. While we don’t yet know if the Fort Stewart shooter made that same calculation, his actions fit a pattern seen in dozens of other cases. It’s no coincidence that 93% of mass public shootings happen in places where guns are banned.

Ironically, soldiers with a concealed handgun permit can carry a concealed handgun whenever they are off base so that they can protect themselves and others. But on the base, they and their fellow soldiers had been defenseless. Fortunately, that has all now changed.

Allowing trained service members to carry on base restores a basic ability to defend themselves and others when seconds matter most. Policies that disarm the very people we trust in combat do not enhance safety – they leave our troops unnecessarily vulnerable where they should be most secure.

John R. Lott Jr. is a contributor to RealClearInvestigations, focusing on voting and gun rights. His articles have appeared in publications such as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, USA Today, and Chicago Tribune. Lott is an economist who has held research and/or teaching positions at the University of Chicago, Yale University, Stanford, UCLA, Wharton, and Rice.

Tyler Durden Tue, 04/07/2026 - 21:45

Living In Any New York Borough Now Requires A Six Figure Income

Living in New York City without financial assistance now requires a six-figure income in every borough, according to Bloomberg.

The Fund for the City of New York’s latest “self-sufficiency standard” shows that in 2026, a family of four with two school-age children needs about $133,000 a year to cover basic expenses without outside help. Still, 46% of households fall short of that level.

A separate report from Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s office found that economic strain is even more widespread. In 2022, more than 5 million residents—62% of the population—were unable to both meet essential costs and save for emergencies. For families with children, the median income required rises to $159,197.

Together, the findings point to a deepening affordability crisis. Mamdani has proposed measures such as free universal childcare, fare-free buses, and rent freezes to ease the burden. He also noted that Black and Latino communities are disproportionately affected.

Costs have surged dramatically over time. In the Bronx, a two-parent household with two children now needs about $125,814 annually—up 162% from 2000. In Northwest Brooklyn, that figure reaches roughly $154,000, more than triple the borough’s earlier benchmark. Every borough has seen similar triple-digit increases.

Having children significantly raises expenses. Nearly half of married couples with kids earn below what they need, while households with two adults and no children were the only group consistently meeting costs in 2022.

Bloomberg writes that the impact is especially severe for younger residents. About 1.2 million children—73% of those under 18—live in families below the true cost-of-living threshold. Rising expenses have also driven families out: the number of children under five dropped 18% between 2020 and 2024.

Single parents face the greatest financial pressure. In 2022, 84% of those with one child fell short of the income needed to get by, rising to 94% for two children and 99% for three.

Recall, Zero Hedge contributor Quoth the Raven recently wrote about exactly how Mamdani's "tax fantasy" has already failed elsewhere in the United States. Now it looks like it's failing in New York. 

Tyler Durden Tue, 04/07/2026 - 21:20

Education Department Ditches Title IX Agreements That Pushed 'Transgender Agenda' In Multiple Schools

Authored by Troy Myers via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The Department of Education announced April 6 that it rescinded agreements between previous administrations and multiple school districts that aimed to enforce civil rights laws with regard to students who identify as transgender.

The Department of Education building in Washington on Nov. 18, 2024. Jose Luis Magana/AP Photo

Previous administrations had distorted the law to police discrimination based on gender identity, instead of sex, for which it was intended, saddling schools with potential violations of Title IX for not using students’ preferred pronouns or questioning a student’s preferred gender, the department said in a news release.

“Today, the Trump Administration is removing the unnecessary and unlawful burdens that prior Administrations imposed on schools in [their] relentless pursuit of a radical transgender agenda,” Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Kimberly Richey said in the news release.

Resolution agreements are used by the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights to require schools to enforce compliance with federal civil rights laws such as Title IX, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any school, program, or activity that receives federal funding.

With the termination of the agreements—made with the Cape Henlopen School District in Delaware; Delaware Valley School District in Pennsylvania; Fife School District in Washington state; and La Mesa-Spring Valley School District, Sacramento City Unified, and Taft College in California—the Education Department will no longer play a role in policing discrimination on gender identity.

The resolutions with those schools were based on ideologically driven, illegal, and heavy-handed manipulations of Title IX under previous administrations, the news release stated.

“While prior Admins distorted Title IX to pander to political ideology and police ‘misgendering,' we’re investigating allegations of girls injured by men on their sports team or feeling violated by men in their intimate spaces,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon wrote in a post on X.

Monday’s decision to terminate the agreements is another step in protecting students and restoring common sense, Richey added in the news release.

In 2024, the Biden administration expanded the scope of Title IX to enforce discrimination based on gender identity. A federal court in January 2025 found that change to be illegal.

Once President Donald Trump took office for his second term in January 2025, he returned to enforcing his first administration’s enforcement of Title IX on the basis of sex.

The Trump administration has filed lawsuits against California, Oregon, and Minnesota over the states’ policies on transgender students, including those allowing transgender-identifying male students to participate in women’s sports and to access women’s locker rooms.

Investigations were also opened against other states, such as New Jersey, over concerns that boys are being allowed to use girls’ restrooms and locker rooms.

“Young women should not have to sacrifice their rights to compete for scholarships, opportunities, and awards on the altar of woke gender ideology,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon previously said.

Tyler Durden Tue, 04/07/2026 - 20:55

CIA Used "Ghost Murmur" To Locate Missing F-15 Airman From 40-Miles Away

In combination with the downed F-15 weapons systems officer, known publicly only as "Dude 44 Bravo," activating Boeing's Combat Survivor Evader Locator, or CSEL, U.S. forces were reportedly able to narrow the search area and then locate the second crew member shot down over southern Iran using a secret CIA reconnaissance tool known as "Ghost Murmur."

The New York Post reports that the long-range quantum magnetometry surveillance tool, powered by AI, was used in the U.S. search-and-rescue operation for the second crew member from the downed F-15 fighter jet.

Sources described Ghost Murmur as able to detect something as faint as a human heartbeat's magnetic signal at long distances in complex environments using AI to filter through the noise.

President Trump and CIA Director John Ratcliffe hinted at the new super-surveillance tool at a White House press conference on Monday afternoon. This was Ghost Murmur's first operational field use, or at least the first publicly known one.

"It's like hearing a voice in a stadium, except the stadium is a thousand square miles of desert," a source briefed on Ghost Murmur told the NYPost. "In the right conditions, if your heart is beating, we will find you."

Ghost Murmur was reportedly developed by Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works and has been tested on Black Hawk helicopters, with possible future use on F-35 stealth fighter jets.

"The name is deliberate. 'Murmur' is a clinical term for a heart rhythm. 'Ghost' refers to finding someone who, for all practical purposes, has disappeared," another source said.

The source continued:

It was "about as clean an environment as you could ask for" because of low electromagnetic interference, "almost no competing human signatures, and at night the thermal contrast between a living body and the desert floor," which "gave operators a secondary confirmation layer."

"Normally this signal is so weak that it can only be measured in a hospital setting with sensors pressed nearly against the chest."

"But advances in a field known as quantum magnetometry — specifically sensors built around microscopic defects in synthetic diamonds — have apparently made it possible to detect these signals at dramatically greater distances."

"The capability is not omniscient. It works best in remote, low-clutter environments and requires significant processing time." 

Before Ghost Murmur went operational, Dude 44 Bravo activated Boeing's Combat Survivor Evader Locator, or CSEL, a secure communications device that can transmit encrypted location and status bursts without exposing his position to enemy forces.

"It's like finding a needle in a haystack, finding this pilot, and the CIA was unbelievable," Trump said Monday, referring to Ghost Murmur. 

Trump: I'm going to introduce the head of the CIA and he is a man who is central casting. If we cast a movie, he's gonna play the head of the CIA. The CIA was very responsible for finding this little speck. They use an expression. It's like finding a needle in a haystack pic.twitter.com/LZg22AJgSv

— Headquarters (@HQNewsNow) April 6, 2026

"The CIA was very responsible for finding this little speck," the president said, adding that the CIA spotted the missing American from "40 miles away."

Tyler Durden Tue, 04/07/2026 - 20:30

Cyber Crimes Costing Americans Nearly $21 Billion: FBI

Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times,

The FBI released its 2025 Internet Crime Report, revealing that Americans were being defrauded to the tune of nearly $21 billion, with artificial intelligence (AI) and cryptocurrency crimes behind some of the massive losses.

“Americans who submitted complaints involving cryptocurrency reported the highest losses, with 181,565 complaints totaling more than $11 billion,” the agency said in an April 6 statement.

Roughly 70 million American adults, around 30 percent of the country’s adult population, own a cryptocurrency, with one in three owners being between the ages of 30 and 44, according to Security.org.

The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) said that total losses of $20.87 billion in 2025 are more than 20 times higher than the $1 billion loss reported in 2015. The number of complaints has also surged during this period, rising from 288,012 complaints to more than a million.

“For the first time in its nearly 25-year history, the IC3 report features a section on artificial intelligence, which accounts for 22,364 complaints, costing Americans nearly $893 million,” the report said.

The losses reported in 2025 were 26 percent higher than in the previous year, with the average loss at $20,699.

The FBI noted that scammers rely on pressure techniques to defraud Americans. The agency advised people to assess the situation carefully before turning over money or personal information.

“IC3 receives nearly 3,000 complaints per day. If you believe you or someone you know may have been a victim of a fraud or scam, contact your local FBI office or submit a complaint at ic3.gov as soon as possible,” the FBI advised.

“You should document the name of the scammer/company, methods of contact, dates of contact, methods of payment, where funds have been sent, and a thorough description of the interactions.”

Artificial Intelligence

The FBI report said that AI-enabled synthetic content is now becoming more difficult to detect and easier to make.

This allows criminal actors to “potentially conduct successful fraud schemes against individuals, businesses, and financial institutions,” it said.

In business email scams, malicious actors use AI chat generators to create official-sounding emails mimicking a company’s CEO or other officials. These emails may contain phishing links or directions to wire funds.

The technology can also be used in romance or investment scams to dupe people into transferring their money.

Crypto Fraud

Complaints involving cryptocurrency were up 21 percent from 2024, with the average loss being $62,604. People may be targeted by scammers who direct them to make payments via crypto ATMs. In some cases, fictitious law firms target cryptocurrency scam victims and exploit them with fake offers of recovering funds.

In January 2024, the FBI and the U.S. Secret Service initiated Operation Level Up to identify victims of cryptocurrency investment fraud and notify them about the scam.

As of December 2025, the FBI has notified 8,103 victims of cryptocurrency investment fraud, with 77 percent of them unaware that they were being scammed.

The timely notification by the FBI is estimated to have resulted in more than $511 million in savings to victims, the agency said.

Elder Fraud

The IC3 report also highlighted the issue of elder fraud, listing 201,266 complaints from individuals aged over 60 last year, which is the highest number of complaints filed by any age group.

This age group suffered more than $7.7 billion in losses, up 59 percent from 2024. The average loss was $38,500, with nearly 12,500 individuals losing more than $100,000 in funds each.

In November 2025, the Department of Justice reported charging 608 defendants between July 1, 2024, and June 30, 2025, for allegedly stealing more than $2.36 billion from more than 1 million elderly American victims.

Some of the top schemes targeting elders involved investment fraud, government impersonations, and romance scams, the department said.

To avoid being a victim of elder fraud schemes, the U.S. Secret Service advises people to be wary of unsolicited communications from unknown people or businesses.

The agency warned against handing over personally identifiable information, online passwords, or bank access codes to individuals or businesses they have not verified as legitimate.

Regarding scams involving impersonation of government agencies, the Secret Service said: “Note that government agencies will never call you on the phone to threaten you or your loved ones with arrest or legal action if you do not agree to remit payment for things like debt collections, release from jail, or immigration status issues.

“Official notification from U.S. government agencies will almost always initially involve an official letter sent via regular mail.”

Tyler Durden Tue, 04/07/2026 - 20:05

Iraqi Protesters Overrun Kuwait Consulate, Angry Over Role In US Actions

Close US ally Kuwait finds itself under growing political pressure from its neighbor Iraq, related to the ongoing Iran war.

Angry crowds stormed the Kuwaiti consulate in Iraq's southern Basra governorate on Tuesday after rockets which came from the direction of Kuwait killed three people, according to police sources cited by Reuters and Al Arabiya.

BREAKING: Supporters of Iraq’s pro-Iranian Popular Mobilization Militias storm the Kuwaiti Consulate in Basra Province, Iraq, in protest against Kuwait's role with the U.S. in the war with Iran. pic.twitter.com/pyxtxjlzeU

— Ariel Oseran أريئل أوسيران (@ariel_oseran) April 7, 2026

Neither Kuwaiti nor Iraqi officials issued immediate public statements, and the rocket incident remains a mystery in terms of its origin or the motives behind the attack.

It may have been a missile fired on Kuwait from Iran, which errantly crossed the border and landed on Iraqi homes:

At least three ​people were killed ​and five others wounded when ‌rockets ⁠fired from the direction of Kuwait hit a house in ​Khor ​al-Zubair ⁠near Basra, security and health officials ​told Reuters.

Protesters are angry at Kuwait's role in the war, as it has played host to American forces, and reportedly has been a staging ground for US raids into Iran.

The crowds seem to have effective control over the Kuwaiti consulate in Basra...

NOW: Pro-Iran protestors in Iraq STORM Kuwait’s Consulate and remove Kuwaiti flag pic.twitter.com/EtBeSeQwfk

— Rapid Report (@RapidReport2025) April 7, 2026

This marks a sharp escalation along the sensitive Iraq-Kuwait border as the wider Gulf region faces sustained fallout from weeks of Iranian drone and missile strikes targeting neighboring states, including Kuwait. Iraq has a majority Shia population, and its major political players remain sympathetic to the plight of Iran.

Meanwhile Kuwait is telling its some 5 million citizens to shelter in place amid President Trump's threat to obliterate civilian infrastructure inside Iran:

The Kuwaiti Ministry of Interior urged those in the country to shelter in place for six hours early Wednesday, which overlaps with President Trump’s 8 p.m. EDT Tuesday deadline for the Iranian government to lift restrictions on the Strait of Hormuz.

In a Tuesday post on social platform X, the ministry instructed Kuwaiti citizens and residents to “remain in their homes and avoid going out, except in cases of utmost necessity” from midnight to 6 a.m. local time Wednesday. Trump’s deadline hits at 3 a.m. in Kuwait.

The Gulf states have bore the brunt of Iran's retaliation, along with Israel, after over a month since the start of Operation Epic Fury. Tehran says that if its critical infrastructure is hit, such as water desalination plants, then it will do the same to America's allies in the region.

Tyler Durden Tue, 04/07/2026 - 19:40

Massive "Treasure Trove" 3,000-Year-Old Silk Road City Discovered In Uzbekistan

Authored by Maria Mocerino via Interesting Engineering (emphasis ours),

A Chinese-Uzbek archaeological team has discovered a remarkable 3,000-year-old city along the Silk Road that is rich with artifacts, providing new insights into urban development during the early Iron Age in Central Asia.

Surkhan State Reserve. Sherobod District, Surxondaryo Region, Uzbekistan. (Wikimedia)

Originally discovered in 1969, the expansive Bandikhan II site, covering 107,639 square feet, is located in the Bandikhan oasis. The Surxondaryo region in southern Uzbekistan is known as an archaeological treasure trove, containing multiple ancient settlement mounds. It was only recently, in 2023, that a team began excavations at Bandikhan II, which served as a crucial hub on the legendary Silk Road.

During the excavation, archaeologists uncovered remnants of an eastern wall, numerous structures, and interconnected rooms, along with a wealth of artifacts. These findings enabled researchers to identify the city as belonging to the Yaz culture, further enhancing our understanding of their role within ancient Bactria, according to TV Brics.

Though a section of this major urban center of the ancient Bactrian kingdom has been excavated thus far, the findings are providing key evidence “for understanding the form of early Iron Age city-states in southern Central Asia and the evolution of urban layouts from Bronze Age to the early Iron Age,” as per Global Times.

A Silk Road city

So far, archaeologists have explored only 3,229 square feet of the 107,639-square-foot site in the eastern section of the ancient city. However, they have confirmed that it is the largest and best-preserved settlement in the Bandikhan oasis, with foundations dating back to the early Iron Age. Researchers have begun to understand the city’s layout and how it was constructed and used during that time.

The well-preserved eastern wall features a trapezoidal cross-section, demonstrating the construction techniques employed. Inside the city, they found a detailed snapshot of daily life, including five interconnected rooms. One of these rooms was used for sleeping and contained a niche where a lamp was placed, as reported by Heritage Daily. This conclusion was drawn from the hardened interior, which indicated repeated burning and revealed the niche’s function.

Among the recovered artifacts were pottery pieces, including carinated jars, bowls, and flat-bottomed dishes. The forms and decorations of these items matched those found at other Yaz sites, such as Kuchuktepa and Yaztepa, clarifying who built this advanced urban center. While Bandikhan II shares structural similarities with these sites, it also displays notable differences, particularly in the absence of semicircular defense towers along its exterior walls.

An assortment of stone tools, including grinding slabs, mullers, pestles, and mortars, suggested that grain was processed on-site. Additionally, bronze knives and arrowheads were identified, along with seashells.

What will they find next?

The initial excavations at this Silk Road city have yielded impressive findings, generating excitement for future digs as researchers plan to expand their work in upcoming seasons. This flourishing city, with its enduring legacy, continues to be uncovered.

In response to these discoveries, a two-week training program on Silk Road archaeology has been established, aimed at promoting the protection and transmission of Silk Road cultural heritage, as concluded by The Global Times.

Tyler Durden Tue, 04/07/2026 - 19:15

Synagogue In Tehran 'Completely Destroyed' In US-Israeli Strikes On Area

The AP, AFP, and others have cited Iranian state media to say that US-Israeli strikes have "completely destroyed" a synagogue in Tehran, as attacks have intensified overnight and into Tuesday.

"According to preliminary information, the Rafi-Nia Synagogue … was completely destroyed in this morning's attacks," the Shargh newspaper reported. Mehr news agency describes the synagogue was destroyed when an adjacent residential building in central Tehran was bombed in an aerial attacks.

Jerusalem Post: A reported photo of the damage to the Rafi Niya Synagogue as the result of a strike in Tehran.

Footage from the scene showed Hebrew-language books scattered on the ground and amid the rubble. Rescue efforts searching for bystanders ensued in the area. There have been no initial reports of casualties.

Israeli media, specifically the Jerusalem Post, has actually confirmed the destruction, noting that both Iran's Jewish parliament representative as well as the synagogue's Persian Jewish rabbi have condemned the attack in visits to the scene:

The report said that due to the narrowness of the streets surrounding the building attacked, the exterior and interior of the nearby buildings were also “severely damaged”. There was no immediate report on casualties.

In a video published on Telegram by Iran’s official IRIB News outlet, Homayoun Sameh, a Jewish representative in the country’s Islamic Consultative Assembly, said “the Zionist regime showed no mercy to this community during the Jewish holidays and targeted one of our ancient and holy synagogues.

“Unfortunately, during this attack, the synagogue building was completely destroyed and our Torah scrolls were left under the rubble,” he said.

via Middle East Eye/IRNA

According to more confirmation from JPost, "Footage and reports circulated by Iranian outlets and social media accounts identified the site as the Rafi Niya Synagogue, located near Palestine Square in central Tehran, an area that has seen repeated strikes in recent days."

A US-Israel strike has caused extensive damage to a synagogue in Tehran, according to a video published by Iran's semi-official Mehr News Agency.

Footage shows civil defence workers amid the rubble, with Hebrew-language books scattered on the ground. pic.twitter.com/Vpvn2dfjw9

— Al Jazeera Breaking News (@AJENews) April 7, 2026

"This was confirmed to The Jerusalem Post by independent sources, who told the Post that a member of the Tehran Beit Din, Rabbi David Sasani, had been seen at the site, evaluating the damage," it adds.

Judaism, alongside Christianity, is a minority in Iran but has protected status and even enjoys representation in Iranian parliament. There are over 30 synagogues in Tehran alone, and some 100 throughout the country, with estimates of around 10,000 Iranian Jews. The Rafi-Nia synagogue was built in the 20th century.

A few hours ago, the Jewish synagogue near Palestine Street in Tehran was targeted by Israeli fighter jets.

This synagogue, located near Palestine Square, is known as "Rafi Niya Synagogue," and a significant part of it has been destroyed as a result of the Israeli attack. pic.twitter.com/dBXApQ3omi

— IRNA News Agency ☫ (@IrnaEnglish) April 7, 2026

IRNA English, Iran’s official state news agency, has accused Israel of actually targeting it: "a few hours ago, the Jewish synagogue near Palestine Street in Tehran was targeted by Israeli fighter jets," it said.

Tyler Durden Tue, 04/07/2026 - 18:50

No Kings - Except Moloch And Marx And Everyone Else

Authored by Anthony Esolen via American Greatness,

No kings? But millions of little queens of both sexes, tyrants in both public and private life, who would make sure, if they were in the position to do so, that I would pay dearly for the very sentence I am writing right now; who police both what you say and what you would very much like to be left alone not to say; who use exceptional cases to justify surveillance over people who teach their children at home, and who agitate to make that choice more difficult if not illegal; who have in fact made it illegal, by the agency of the national government, for people to refrain, without suffering a stiff financial penalty, from buying health insurance which they may not need or want.

No kings, but millions of people dancing with glee at the assassination of Charlie Kirk and hoping that that’ll teach those rednecks from getting uppity; headsmen glad to lop off inconvenient lives at their beginning, exercising total and tyrannical power against the most vulnerable, whose very existence is owing to the voluntary actions of those who would slay them; shedding crocodilian tears of sympathy if someone who is sad and lonely at any age decides to end his life, corralling a doctor or nurse to assist in suicide, and thus corrupting the profession; eager to embroil the nation in a war with Russia, yet crying out in rage at the prospect that Cuba and Venezuela might now have the chance to pick themselves up out of their socialist miseries; no kings but Moloch and Marx.

Photo: ST PAUL, MINNESOTA - MARCH 28: People gather for a “No Kings” protest outside the State Capitol building on March 28, 2026 in St Paul, Minnesota. This is the third nationwide "No Kings" protest held against the Trump administration. (Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

No kings, but fantasy queens, all the touchier and more vindictive if anyone should laugh at the fantasy, or even say, hat in hand, scraping and ducking, that maybe, well, maybe, the fantasy isn’t real; wrenching the very definition of marriage away from common law and common sense; glad to compel girls to compete against mentally ill boys in sports, and even gladder to have them invade their locker rooms; continuing, with all the might and weight of schools, colleges, and the media, to thrust upon a still-hesitating populace one experiment after another against sexual reality and against the most reliable means for climbing out of poverty, the family; no king and queen but Baal and Astarte.

No kings, but people with the souls, though not the courage, of tyrants, who, if someone in a favored group is murdered or is alleged to have been murdered by a policeman, will organize en masse to shut down your city, vandalize businesses that get in their way, and block traffic on major highways, stranding ambulances and the desperate people they are carrying, and who will in general carry on so as to make a fair trial impossible; people, including some who hold political office, who issue open threats to judges, demanding the judgment they approve and saying that they will pay for it if they judge otherwise; no kings, but wannabe dictators everywhere, armed with organizational money and power, going after an ordinary fellow with a bakery, making a federal case of it if he declines politely to contribute his efforts toward the celebration of perversion.

No kings, no kings, but people eager to suppress the native population by conniving at the non-enforcement of immigration laws, laws duly passed by the people’s own representatives in Congress; no kings, but people content to make it trivially easy to cast a vote by mail, which you are not authorized to cast; no kings, but people who hate the less populous states and would overwhelm them with the might of numbers, by eliminating one of their few frail signs and guardians of autonomy, the Electoral College.

No kings, whose appetites for wealth were kept in check in old times by the charters they gave to townsmen and their merchants and who could only take what actually existed, but grubby politicians ready to tax notional wealth, which does not even exist but only might exist, wealth not even on paper but floating in the air of suppositions; no kings, but despisers of intergenerational family wealth, ready to soak up all your assets when you die, on the grounds that every generation should begin from scratch, that it is not “fair” for your children to inherit what you have worked so hard to give them after you are gone; no kings, but Jabba the State.

No kings, but NGOs everywhere, with vast resources in wealth and no legal directives or oversight as to how it is spent, and spent not in charity but in political action, orchestrating demonstrations; no kings, but a million verminous thought-controllers in high technology, invisibly promoting or suppressing what they wish, via the algorithms that would govern our collective thoughts; no kings, but Google, and its court jester Disney.

No kings, but schoolteachers and principals who think it is all right to do with a large classroom of boys and girls what would get the creepy man down the street arrested if he did exactly the same thing with but one; no kings, but people who bar the door against parents who want to find out what is going on in school behind them; no kings, but Kinsey set free from all restraint.

No kings, but a tangle of human resource personnel, lawyers, judges, and political interest groups ranged against you if you attempted to hire a Thomas Edison without formal schooling, thus driving up the costs of higher schooling and higher indoctrination, saddling families with exorbitant debt while providing, in return, very little in the way of a truly human education.

No kings, but haters of religion and people of religious faith, the main obstacle to their power, as the family is the fundamental social unit of possible opposition to the ambitions of the non-religious and their aims to mold the minds of other people’s children, especially since they have rather few of their own; no kings but the murderous and atheistical Mao Zedong and his even crueler wife Jiang Qing; Charlemagne, no, Confucius, hell no, but Mao, yes; Washington, no, but Castro, yes.

No kings, no one to join with the middle class in a flanking action against innumerable rapacious aristocrats; insulation for the exercisers of real political and economic power, whatever they happen to call themselves, but exposure of everyone else; no kings from one horizon to the other, but you will hit a duke or duchess wherever you spit, and God help you when you do.

No kings, but politicians and their wealthy or addle-pated enablers, who would, to “save the planet,” compel everyone to draw their power from centralized electrical grids, even the power to travel by car from Mayfield to Springfield; no kings, then, but controllers of artificially established turnpikes, bottlenecks, and checkpoints, with the power to bring an entire nation to its knees; no kings, but a new kind of Andrew Carnegie with ten thousand times the power and none of the bracing experiences of hard manual labor.

No kings, but censors in everyone’s hair, like lice, not to police public morals and keep obscenity from the eyes of children, but to police people who object to the obscenity; Cato everywhere, on the lookout for demands for decency, to punish those who dare to demand it.

No kings, not even God Almighty, but everyone to be a king or a queen only in those matters that enervate and corrupt; free to be weaklings, slaves, louts, and harlots, all true self-reliance lost, along with the nobility of the divine image; “Non serviam,” cries the slave as he submits his hands to the state, ready to clap them in irons; no king but the Self, and the driver of the Self without God, a driver sometimes called Satan.

No kings indeed.

Tyler Durden Tue, 04/07/2026 - 18:25

Helicopters And Poison? 32 Charged In $20M Mount Everest Rescue Scam

Nepal’s Central Investigation Bureau investigates a large-scale insurance fraud operation in the Himalayan trekking sector. Authorities charge 32 individuals - including trekking company operators, guides, helicopter rescue coordinators, hospital owners, and doctors - with organized crime and fraud. The scheme allegedly triggers unnecessary and expensive helicopter evacuations that insurers foot the bill for.

According to The Independent, the probe focuses on activities between 2022 and 2025 across popular routes that include the path to Everest Base Camp, Annapurna, Manaslu, and Langtang. Investigators examine more than 4,700 international patient cases at implicated Kathmandu hospitals and review thousands of helicopter flights. They identify hundreds of rescues as fraudulent or exaggerated, with operators allegedly inflating symptoms, forging medical records, and billing single flights as multiple separate emergencies to multiply payouts.

Between 2022 and 2025, investigators identified 4,782 foreign patients treated across the implicated hospitals. Of these, 171 cases were confirmed as fake rescues. Over that period, Era International Hospital received deposits of more than $15.87 million linked to these activities. Shreedhi International Hospital received over $1.22 million.

Among rescue operators, Mountain Rescue Service conducted 171 fraudulent rescues out of 1,248 total charter flights, claiming approximately $10.31 million from insurers. Nepal Charter Service carried out 75 fake rescues from 471 flights, claiming $8.2 million. Everest Experience and Assistance was linked to 71 suspicious rescues from 601 flights, with insurance claims totalling $11.04 million.

In one instance that illustrates the brazenness of the scheme, police documented a case in which four tourists were rescued on a single helicopter flight, on the same date, using the same helicopter and manifest. Insurance claims were nonetheless submitted as multiple separate rescues, with the total rescue bill reaching $31,100, plus a separate hospital bill of $11,890. -Kathmandu Post

According to the report, the rescue companies "managed to extract nearly $20m in payouts from international insurance companies for rescues that were unnecessary or, in some cases, completely fabricated."

The fraud centers on paperwork manipulation and kickback arrangements among trekking firms, hospitals, and helicopter companies. A common tactic involves claiming routine ailments - mild fatigue, stomach issues, or early signs of altitude discomfort - as acute emergencies that require immediate airlift. One documented pattern shows four trekkers on a single charter flight billed as four distinct rescue missions, turning a modest private flight cost into a $30,000-plus insurance claim. Hospitals submit charges for treatments that never occur or prove unnecessary. The scheme primarily targets travelers from countries with straightforward insurance policies, such as the UK, Australia, and Canada.

Some witness statements mention guides adding baking powder to food or giving clients excessive medication and water to induce nausea and symptoms that mimic altitude sickness. Media reports highlight these details and fuel speculation about deliberate poisoning on Everest routes. Nepal police, however, state clearly that the official investigation uncovers no evidence of actual poisoning. In their April 2026 public statement, the Central Investigation Bureau declares: “To date, the official investigation has not found any evidence of ‘poisoning.’ No facts have been found to suggest that poisonous substances were mixed into food.”

The distinction matters. The scam primarily affects trekkers on lower-altitude trails rather than the roughly 500 technical climbers who attempt the Everest summit each year. High-altitude summit expeditions operate under stricter medical protocols, oxygen support, and professional oversight that make staged emergencies far more difficult to execute undetected. The Everest name draws global attention, but the bulk of the documented fraud occurs on approach hikes and other regional circuits where helicopter access remains relatively straightforward.

The investigation highlights systemic weaknesses in Nepal’s rapidly growing adventure tourism industry. Helicopter services, essential for genuine high-altitude emergencies, expand quickly but operate with limited oversight. Earlier government attempts to require tourism authority approval for rescues fail to curb the practice. Insurers now face pressure to tighten verification, while legitimate rescues risk greater scrutiny and delays.

Tyler Durden Tue, 04/07/2026 - 18:00

Texas Investigating Islamic Tribunal For Allegedly Operating Sharia Law Court

Authored by Darlene McCormick Sanchez via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced Monday an investigation into a Dallas-based group accused of operating as a sharia law court.

Protester David Wright (L) speaks with counterprotester Vincent Simon, a Muslim, as Melissa Yassini holds a sign across the street from a mosque in Richardson, Texas, on Dec. 12, 2015. LM Otero/AP Photo

​In a press release, Paxton said he requested documents from the group, known as the Islamic Tribunal, regarding allegations that it was issuing rulings based on sharia law.

According to the release, the Islamic Tribunal has “reportedly sought to replace actual courts of law and to evade neutral, generally applicable state and federal laws.”

Paxton warned, “Anyone or any entity that seeks to subvert the codified state and federal laws of this country will be stopped dead in their tracks. If the Islamic Tribunal is undermining the rule of law or misleading Texans about the legal authority it claims to hold, my office will ensure its operation is shut down.”

​“This is America, and we will not be governed by sharia law,” he added.

The Epoch Times reached out to the Islamic Tribunal for comment.

The organization described itself on its website in April 2025 as a “unique institution” in America. It said its 2014 establishment aimed “to set a precedence [sic] that will be emulated and duplicated throughout the country.”

The organization has since changed the wording on its website, saying it wanted to clarify its operations amid the controversy.

“The Islamic Tribunal wishes to clarify the nature of its work in light of recent public statements,” the group stated. “The Tribunal does not function as a court of law and does not issue legally binding judgments.”

​The website noted the group’s role was limited to mediation and religious arbitration requested by members of the Muslim community.

​“Our experienced imams are here to listen, support, and offer faith-based, non-binding spiritual guidance to anyone seeking clarity or comfort. We provide a welcoming and confidential space rooted in Islamic ethics and in full respect of U.S. and Texas law.”

​Paxton claims the Islamic Tribunal asserts jurisdiction over all aspects of Muslim life, seeks to impose sharia law for Texas Muslims’ disputes, and misrepresents its decisions as final judgments endorsed by the Texas judicial system.

​While the First Amendment allows religious organizations the right to govern themselves, it doesn’t allow a religious organization to act as a court, apply foreign laws that conflict with Texas or federal law, or issue rulings that imply government authority, according to Paxton.

​Doing so would violate Texas law, he added.

The demand for documents is the latest move in targeting what many fear as the establishment of Muslim enclaves and sharia law, which is based on the religion of Islam.

​Paxton has taken a series of legal actions against Islamic groups and Muslim-centric developments in recent months. In December, he filed a lawsuit against a 400-acre Muslim enclave known as EPIC City, named after the East Plano Islamic Center, which is one of its developers.

​EPIC’s developers have denied an intent to establish sharia law or break fair housing laws.

​In the previous year, Gov. Greg Abbott signed House Bill 4211 and Senate Bill 17 into law. The first bans residential property developers from creating exclusionary compounds, and specifically cited the EPIC project during the signing. The second prohibits transnational criminal organizations and foreign adversaries, including Iran, from purchasing land.

​Abbott also signed a proclamation designating the Muslim Brotherhood, which has ties to the Hamas terrorist group, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) as foreign terrorist organizations and transnational criminal organizations.

​CAIR filed a lawsuit against Abbott and Paxton in response, calling Abbott’s proclamation “unconstitutional and defamatory.”

Tyler Durden Tue, 04/07/2026 - 17:40

The Left Is Baffled - But Still Repulsed - By The White Working Class

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,

After failing to win Congress and the presidency in 2024, the Democrats conducted an internal postmortem of what went wrong.

While they predictably did not divulge the full results, everyone knew what they had found.

Their obsessions with the low side of 30/70 issues had especially alienated Democrats from white middle- and working-class voters. Yet middle-class whites still comprise about 40–50 percent of the population and are perhaps overrepresented in voter turnout.

Democrats realize that their fixations on biological males competing in women’s sports, open borders and millions of illegal entries, radical green agendas, DEI-driven racial essentialism, and massive government entitlements rife with fraud have alienated the middle classes in general and white middle- and working-class voters in particular.

But since Democrat ideologues cannot shed their ideological straitjackets, they have instead tried to finesse the very problem that cost them the 2024 election.

They recall, in particular, the successful blueprint that won them the 2020 election. During that campaign, Joe Biden largely remained out of public view, hiding in his basement, while his handlers reconstructed him as a kind of waxen effigy of “good ol’ Joe from Scranton,” a throwback to the 1970s.

Once the cognitively diminished Biden was elected, his hard-left, Obama-era operatives behind that ossified, working-man veneer enacted the most radical four-year agenda in modern American history.

On the one hand, Democrats claim they will field candidates who can at least playact as good ol’ boy farmers and salt-of-the-earth welders.

The 2024 Democratic vice presidential candidate, Humpty Dumpty lookalike Tim Walz, talked incessantly about driving a pickup truck. He assured us he could change its oil and tried to portray himself as a genuine hunter. Yet these claims often came across as inauthentic, strained, and condescending; the more Walz tried to present himself as a man of the people, the more he appeared buffoonish.

The 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, Pete Buttigieg, became a caricature of the sanctimonious, credentialed technocrat—self-righteously and arrogantly projecting expertise without much humility or even a shred of the common touch. As transportation secretary, Buttigieg used to pontificate about racist freeway clover leaves, rather than addressing the more immediate problems posed by the gridlocked and decrepit condition of the nation’s highways.

Now, as the 2028 election looms, Buttigieg has followed Democratic central casting and undergone a complete reboot, reemerging with a beard, a trucker cap, and a flannel shirt.

No matter, he still sounds as pedantic as ever in his riff on green energy and “diversity.”

Wannabe president and lame-duck California governor Gavin Newsom is also suddenly reinventing himself. He is now surrealistically claiming that, as the son of an appellate court judge, and raised as an intimate of the billionaire Getty family, that he scarcely survived on Wonder Bread and macaroni, was disabled by dyslexia, and struggled in a broken home typical of the poor white working classes.

To win back the white working class this time around, Democratic insiders are apparently not content merely to recycle—or astroturf—familiar, anemic candidates into veritable Obama-era “clingers.”

Now they are seeking out brand new faces to present as supposedly more authentic white working men. They believe that they have at last found the real thing in traditionally red Texas state legislator and Presbyterian minister James Talarico.

He talks nonstop like a left-winger, but with the voice of an evangelical Bible thumper. Talarico just won the Texas Democratic Senate primary over radical, racialist bomb thrower Jasmine Crockett. Surely, his handlers believe, he will do the impossible and flip the good old boys of Texas to the new Democratic agenda?

He may yet, but the Harvard-educated Talarico’s Christianity seems more like Latin American left-wing “liberation theology” than Texas-style evangelicalism. Talarico certainly has a long history of radical elite social media commentary, and he urges Texans not to demonize trans people and illegal aliens but instead go after “billionaires and their puppet politicians.”

Perhaps such class warfare is seen as a good start for the Left’s new, supposedly working-man’s radical populist. But it turns out Pastor Talarico is actually to the left of radical left Democrats. In the past, he had pandered to the very wing of the party that had lost its elections, with offerings like “God is non-binary” or notions that Christians have divine guidance to let transgender males play in women’s sports.

But the damning pièce de résistance of this supposedly authentic, blue-collar, white evangelical preacher was a previous post from Talarico: “Radicalized white men are the greatest domestic terrorist threat in our country.”

Democrat politicos and handlers also perhaps thought they had finally found the real thing in current Maine Senate primary candidate Graham Platner. Despite growing up in affluence and attending the tony Hotchkiss preparatory school, Platner’s makeover seemed far more genuine.

Indeed, The Washington Post gushed about him, saying he was “a rugged guy,” while Politico bragged that at last Democrats had found a MAGA everyman but—better yet—to the left of Bernie Sanders.

Platner joined the Marines, saw combat tours, and was variously a bartender and oysterman. But Platner may have gone a bit too far to serve as the Democrats’ new white working-class poster boy.

It was recently revealed that he had been tattooed with a skull that was the exact insignia of the SS-Totenkopfverbände (“Death’s Head Units”). These particular SS units were the worst of the worst of the psychopathic paramilitary organizations of Hitler’s Third Reich, often having been chosen to serve as guards in Nazi extermination camps.

Platner’s past social media postings didn’t help his often-lame excuses for the tattoo—although he knew as a leftist he would survive the brouhaha, given the antisemitic saturation of the new Democrat Party, and the exemptions provided to the “right people.” Indeed, he trumped Talarico’s disdain for the very demographic he was supposed to sew up, with the revelation that he had once described white rural Americans as “racists and stupid” while claiming that he was a communist and calling for armed resistance.

The reason why these white working-class veneers will likely not work is not just that they are strained facades, designed to make palatable an otherwise unpalatable agenda to Middle America.

They also ring untrue because the white working class has been so demonized by the Left that it will likely never return to the Democratic Party.

Consider just the pejoratives that Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden have employed to stereotype and ridicule Trump supporters and the social-economical-rural environment that supposedly produced them: clingers, deplorables, irredeemables, dregs, chumps, semi-fascists, and garbage.

In other words, the hatred of and the condescension toward the white working class is baked into the new bicoastal and elitist Left and Democratic Party. It cannot be finessed or masked—as the postings of even their supposedly new working-class heroes attest.

Just recently, liberal comedian Jimmy Kimmel went off on the new Homeland Security Secretary, former Oklahoma senator Markwayne Mullin, blasting him as a mere “plumber”: “We have a plumber protecting us from terrorism now. It worked for Super Mario. Why not Markwayne?”

Aside from the fact that plumbers are among the most skilled and important of all the critical tradesmen, plumbing was just one chapter in Mullin’s rich and varied career. He has an impressive record as a former ten-year congressman and a U.S. senator. He also helped turn his family business into one of the largest plumbing supply services in Oklahoma. But to Kimmel, all that was condensed to being a “plumber,” as if his left-wing audience would likewise see a plumber reaching the highest levels of government as a joke.

The View cohost Joy Behar just trashed Trump by claiming his supporters (half the country) were “poorly educated”—an odd thing to say when her liberal cohost, Whoopi Goldberg, is a high school dropout.

While it is true that leftist news and commentary outlets have greater percentages of college graduates in their audiences, that fact hardly translates into them being better-informed listeners.

Some polls, like the 2021 Heartland Institute’s survey, showed that the conservative talk radio followers, on average, were better at answering factual questions about politics than their leftist counterparts. That sounds reasonable given the current epidemic of campus grade inflation, nonmeritocratic admissions, therapeutic curricula, and the ubiquity of off-topic, left-wing faculty propagandists on campus.

In truth, the new radical left-wing Democratic Party is an elitist entity with a poorly disguised contempt for the white working class. That hatred is omnipresent and so emerges in the most unexpected fashion.

Remember the private text exchanges between disgraced FBI paramours Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, in which Trump voters were casually caricatured as Walmart shoppers defined by their supposed stench?

Or recall CNN reporter Marc Caputo’s snide jab at Trump rally attendees: “If you put everyone’s mouths together in this video, you’d get a full set of teeth.”

The locus classicus target of this bias was the vice-presidential candidacy of Sarah Palin, who, throughout the 2008 campaign, was smeared by leftists as “poor white trash.”

To New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, Palin was nothing more than a “gun-toting hockey mom.” Talk show host David Letterman joked that Palin had bought makeup from Bloomingdale’s to update her “slutty flight attendant look.” The smug Letterman then added, “One awkward moment for Sarah Palin at the Yankee game, during the seventh inning, her daughter was knocked up by Alex Rodriguez.” Palin’s daughter Willow was 14 years old at the time.

The Left simply does not get it, or rather, has it backward. You do not need to look or act like the white working class to feel genuine affinity with it. Billionaire and former Manhattanite Donald Trump is proof enough of that.

The key is not whether you wear a suit or a trucker’s hat or grow a beard, but whether you show sincere concern for an often now-demonized demographic long written off by coastal elites as losers during globalization’s heyday.

So far, the smugness and lack of any such genuine empathy will doom the latest silly Democrat gambit. Sincerity cannot be finessed with tattoos, beards, or trucker caps—not by the media or Hollywood, and certainly not by the likes of Pete Buttigieg, Tim Walz, or James Talarico.

Tyler Durden Tue, 04/07/2026 - 16:20

Consumer Credit Grows Less Than Expected On Subdued Credit Card Usage

While the monthly jobs report has become a veritable economic random number generator, with every monthly print coming either well below or above the forecast stack, the weekly initial claims report has become its foil - a study in boring reporting, with numbers barely budging week to week, and usually falling right on top of Wall Street estimates. A similar dynamic is emerging for the monthly consumer credit report: following a volatile 2025, when revolving credit swung around wildly in unexpected ways dragging the broader print with it, the last few months have been surprisingly steady, printing right around the consensus expectations with barely any volatility.

The latest, February, report published minutes ago by the Fed was no surprise: with expectations for a modest increase from last month's $8.05 billion to $10.25 billion, the reported number was just shy of the estimate, printing $9.484 billion, up from a downward revised $7.665 billion.

Revolving credit rose a modest $709 million - the weakest monthly increase since November - to $1.328 trillion, the highest since November 2024. 

Non-revolving credit (student and auto loans) rose a more substantial $9.2 billion to a record $3.789 trillion.

Broken down by its two core components, Student Loans were $1.838 trillion as of Dec 2025, up $5.4 billion for the quarter, while Auto Loans rose a modest $1.5 billion to $1.562 trillion.

Finally, and this may come as a surprise, following 1.75% in rate cuts by the Fed since September 2024, a move which did nothing for the average rates on credit card accounts through Dec 31, 2025, there was finally a notable drop in the average credit card interest rate, which dropped to 21.52% on March 31, 2026 down from 22.30% three months ago. It appears that all the noise surrounding exorbitant credit card rates in recent months is starting to have an impact. 

 

Tyler Durden Tue, 04/07/2026 - 15:52

Tehran-Aligned Militia In Iraq Frees American Journalist In Prisoner Swap

An Iran-backed militia in Iraq has announced it will release an American freelance journalist kidnapped in Baghdad a week ago. Shelly Kittleson was abducted on March 31, and her captors in Kataib Hezbollah announced Tuesday that she can go free as long as she exits Iraq immediately.

Abu Mujahid al-Assaf, a security official in the group, has been cited in international reports as saying, "In recognition of the national stances of the outgoing prime minister, we have decided to release the American defendant Shelly Kittleson."

Image source: Wausau Pilot & Review

This constitutes direct confirmation that the group is indeed responsible for her kidnapping, which happened after weeks of the US-Israeli attacks in Iran.

At the time of the 49-year-old’' abduction, Iraqi authorities said security forces pursued the suspects, resulting in one of the kidnappers’ vehicles overturning and one arrest.

Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shiaa al-Sudani days ago intensified the search, ordering security forces to track down those responsible for abducting foreigners.

Kataib Hezbollah has claimed that it has a recording it is ready to release, supposedly showing Kittleson’s "role and activities in Iraq" - and at least one such video while in captivity has appeared.

In the past when Westerners or Israelis have been abducted in Iraq, they are typically accused of spying on behalf of foreign governments.

The NY Times says she has gone free, after an exchange:

Ms. Kittleson, who has reported on the Middle East for more than a decade for various outlets, was set free in exchange for the release of several imprisoned Kataib Hezbollah members, according to the two Iraqi security officials. They asked not to be identified in order to discuss sensitive negotiations.

AMERICAN JOURNALIST KIDNAPPED IN BAGHDAD

Rapid Report footage/Iraq Interior Ministry confirms Shelly Kittleson abducted pic.twitter.com/XzdPkEHT0s

— SilencedSirs◼️ (@SilentlySirs) March 31, 2026

Starting in March the State Department urged all Americans to leave the country immediately, after which the US Embassy in Baghdad came under repeat drone fire. Other US sites, as well as oil facilities, have come under fire either from Iran or its allied groups in Iraq.

Tyler Durden Tue, 04/07/2026 - 15:40

Antares Earns DoE's First Ever Microreactor Approval As Modi Heralds 'Defining Step In India's Nuclear Energy Journey'

Antares Nuclear reached the most significant regulatory milestone to date for a microreactor. The company announced that its Mark-0 reactor became the first advanced reactor to receive Department of Energy approval for a Documented Safety Analysis under the new DOE-STD-1271. 

DSA approved. ✅

Antares is the first advanced reactor to receive DOE approval of a Documented Safety Analysis under DOE-STD-1271.

Our Mark-0 reactor now moves to Readiness Review.

Onward. pic.twitter.com/DovqJsVVwz

— Antares (@AntaresNuclear) April 6, 2026

The company will now proceed with preparations for taking the reactor critical for the first time. This includes forming a joint test group to oversee the startup planning and execution. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright holds permission for starting up the reactor as the Startup Approval Authority. 

Bob Boston, manager of the DOE Idaho Operations Office, granted the approval of the DSA on Monday afternoon and clarified “The Department of Energy DSA is equivalent to an NRC license”.

We have closely tracked Antares and other reactor developers in the rapidly advancing microreactor race. The company's R1 design is a sodium heat pipe cooled microreactor engineered to provide up to one megawatt of flexible, carbon-free power. It targets applications including remote communities and military installations where conventional power infrastructure is limited. BWXT is completing TRISO fuel fabrication for the pilot with a planned criticality date before July 4th.

The company stands out as an early leader in securing formal safety analysis approval ahead of other contenders such as Radiant, Valar, Aalo Atomics, and Oklo.

This development occurs just after we highlighted the Department of Energy’s requested $45 billion in nuclear funding for fiscal year 2027, and recent discussions from Jay Yu of Nano Nuclear pointing out nuclear energy's new spotlight in light of the Iran conflict. 

Today, India takes a defining step in its civil nuclear journey, advancing the second stage of its nuclear programme.

The indigenously designed and built Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor at Kalpakkam has attained criticality.

This advanced reactor, capable of producing more fuel…

— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) April 6, 2026

In related international news, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that India's 500 megawatt Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor at Kalpakkam has attained criticality. The sodium-cooled fast reactor designed by BHAVINI advances the second stage of India's three-stage nuclear program and brings the country closer to utilizing its large thorium reserves in the final phase.

These advancements in both advanced microreactors and large-scale fast breeder technology reflect growing worldwide interest in expanding reliable clean baseload nuclear capacity.
 

Tyler Durden Tue, 04/07/2026 - 15:20

Stellar 3Y Auction: 2nd Most Foreign Buyers On Record, Highest Stop Through Since Feb 2025

After several weeks of decidedly ugly auction which saw a notable drop in foreign demand amid what we reported a week ago was rampant selling of US debt by foreign central banks, moments ago the Treasury sold 3Y notes in what may have been the best auction since the start of the war.

Just after 1pm, the US treasury sold $58BN in 3Y notes at a high yield of 3.897%, up sharply from 3.579% a month ago and the highest since last June's 3.972%. More importantly, the auction stopped through the When Issued 3.909% by 1.2bps, the biggest stop through since Feb 2025 and the 7th stop through in the past 8 auctions.

The bid to cover bounced nicely from last month's 2.546 to 2.682, the highest since November. 

The internals were even stronger: indirects, or foreign central banks, came back in droves after aggressively selling US paper in recent week, and were allotted 74.8% of the auction - the highest since Sept 2024, and the second highest on record.

And with Directs awarded just 11.9%, the lowest since Sept 2024, Dealers were left holdings 13.3% or roughly in line with the recent average of 12.3%.

Overall this was a blockbuster 3Y auction, and one of the stronger for the tenor on record, although with every push higher in oil moving yields along with it, we doubt that the market cares much about the quality of today's issuance.

 

Tyler Durden Tue, 04/07/2026 - 13:33

Trump Endorses Steve Hilton In California Gubernatorial Primary

Authored by Dave Mason via The Center Square,

President Donald Trump has endorsed former Fox News anchor Steve Hilton in California’s Republican gubernatorial primary.

Trump picked Hilton over the other prominent GOP candidate – Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, who is an outspoken Trump supporter.

Sunday night’s endorsement on social media comes as Democrats face the risk of being shut out of the general election for the first time in the Golden State’s history.

Besides the two Republicans, there are eight prominent Democratic candidates. Under California law, the two candidates with the highest number of votes in the June 2 primary, regardless of party affiliation, will face off in the Nov. 3 election. Hilton and Bianco could get more votes if Democrats spread their votes among the eight candidates. 

And a recent University of California, Berkeley poll shows Hilton, a small business owner in addition to being a former commentator, and Bianco are ahead of the Democratic candidates.

According to the poll, Hilton has 17% of the vote, and Bianco, 16%. The leading Democratic candidates are U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell of San Francisco with 14%, former U.S. Rep. Katie Porter of Orange County with 13% and billionaire and consumer protection advocate Tom Steyer, who financed the successful campaign to pass congressional redistricting in California, with 10%.

The poll says none of the five remaining prominent Democrats – former Health Secretary Xavier Becerra, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, former state Controller Betty Yee and San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan – has more than 5% of the vote.

Prediction markets see it a different way to the polls...

The Democratic Party is taking the risk seriously, with California Democratic Party Chair Rusty Hicks urging Democrats with less support to drop out. So far, no one has budged. Hicks has said the risk of shutout is “relatively low but not impossible.”

Hicks wasn’t available for further comment on Monday, and the state Republican Party and Bianco or his campaign staff didn’t respond to The Center Square’s requests for comment. 

Hilton also wasn’t available for an interview, but his spokesperson Hector Barajas emailed The Center Square a statement saying Hilton was honored to be endorsed by Trump. The candidate’s statement noted California has the nation’s highest poverty, unemployment and cost-of-living rates after 16 years of “one-party rule” by Democrats. Hilton promised to cut electric bills by half, have no taxes on the first $100,000 of income, make house purchases more affordable and reduce the cost of gas to $3 a gallon.

California consistently has had the nation’s highest gas taxes for several years, and the tax has grown more than $1 a gallon since the Feb. 28 start of the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran. On Monday, California’s average price was $5.93 a gallon, above the national average of $4.12 a gallon, according to AAA.

Roxanne Hoge, chair of the Los Angeles County Republican Party, told The Center Square that under the top-two primary system, Democrats have spent a lot of money to help Republican candidates they think they can beat in November.

“We as a party have not gotten to choose our standard bearer for a long time, from state Senate all the way up to governor,” Hoge said in a phone interview Monday afternoon. ”The fact that for the first time in hundreds of races they [Democrats] might be shut down does not fill me with great empathy or concern.”

She added two Republicans and no Democrats in the general election’s gubernatorial race would be the best outcome for California.

“I’m firmly of the opinion that either Steve Hilton or Chad Bianco — or any Republican — would be a vast improvement over the public-sector-union puppets we have running our state now,” she said.

In his endorsement on his social media platform TruthSocial, Trump said he has known and respected Hilton for many years. 

“People are fleeing, crime is increasing, and Taxes are the highest of any State in the Country, maybe the World,” Trump’s post said.

“Steve can turn it around, before it is too late, and, as President, I will help him to do so! With Federal help, and a Great Governor, like Steve Hilton, California can be better than ever before!”

There’s the question of whether Trump’s endorsement of Hilton could pull enough votes away from Bianco to mean Hilton would face a Democrat in the general election. But Hoge isn’t willing to predict that would happen.

“Republicans are first and foremost rugged individuals,” Hoge said. “For me to know what they’re going to do would be a fool’s errand.”

Porter, one of the leading Democratic candidates, commented on Trump’s endorsement of Hilton on social media.

“If there was any doubt what this race is about, now it’s certain: It’s California values against MAGA,” Porter posted on X. “I’m running because voters are tired of the same old political games when the stakes are so much higher. They deserve a governor they can trust to fight for regular people, not just push policy agendas that only benefit corporate interests and the richest of the rich.”

Campaign staffs for some of the other leading Democratic gubernatorial candidates did not respond to The Center Square’s requests for comment Monday. 

Tyler Durden Tue, 04/07/2026 - 13:05

The post Mr. Arithmetic Helps Donald Trump on “Taking Iran’s Oil” appeared first on CEPR.

 

 

The transcript from this week’s MiB: Songyee Yoon, Principal Venture Partners, is below.

You can stream and download our full conversation, including azny podcast extras, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Bloomberg, YouTube (video), and YouTube (audio). All of our earlier podcasts on your favorite pod hosts can be found here.

 

~~~

Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio News. This is Masters in Business with Barry Ritholtz on Bloomberg Radio.

[00:00:15]  Barry Ritholtz:  On the latest Masters in Business podcast, my conversation with Songyee Yoon. She is founder and managing partner at Principal Ventures, an AI-focused venture capital investment firm. She has a fascinating background — MIT Corporation Advisory Board, 50 Women to Watch in Business from the Wall Street Journal, named to the advisory board for the Center for Asia Pacific Policy, as well as the National Academy of Engineering of Korea. She has a fascinating background in gaming, telecom, and AI.

[00:00:56]  Barry Ritholtz:  I found this conversation to be fascinating and I think you will also. With no further ado, my discussion with Songyee Yoon. That is quite a CV I went through. Let’s roll back though to where it all began. You get a Bachelor’s in Science from Korea’s Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and then a PhD in computational neuroscience from MIT. That’s such a fascinating area.

[00:01:27]  Barry Ritholtz:  What was the original career plan?

[00:01:31]  Songyee Yoon:  That’s a very good question. I mean, I think growing up in South Korea, I didn’t know what the career options were that I had. I just really enjoyed learning science and engineering subjects. So when I was young, I realized for some people, like singing is very natural. Some people dancing is natural. I cannot sing, I cannot dance, but speaking to computers and programming was very natural to me. So I started programming when I was nine, and that led me to major in electrical engineering as an undergrad at KAIST.

[00:02:18]  Songyee Yoon:  To be a better engineer, you need to understand how the human brain works. So for example, I was studying signal processing algorithms, and those algorithms look best to your eyes when it’s not necessarily mathematically the best, but takes into consideration what frequencies are most sensitive to human eyes. So understanding human brain and human perception will enable you to become a better engineer. That was kind of the exploration — what subject or major could I pursue to have a better understanding of both engineering and the human brain and perception.

[00:03:00]  Songyee Yoon:  That led me to study computational neuroscience at MIT.

[00:03:03]  Barry Ritholtz:  So computational neuroscience isn’t so much about using computers to understand people, as opposed to understanding neuroscience to create better software, better interfaces, better human interaction with technology. Is that fair?

[00:03:19]  Songyee Yoon:  That’s right. Exactly. Yeah, that’s right.

[00:03:21]  Barry Ritholtz:  Huh. So pretty fascinating — early in your career you’re at McKinsey for a few years, and then you eventually move into SK Telecom. Tell us your focus at both places.

[00:03:32]  Songyee Yoon:  Yeah, so I mean, I think after my PhD I wanted to go into the business world instead of staying in academia, and going to McKinsey was the best way to transition from being a PhD student to going into the real world. So it was a really fascinating experience — very fast-paced, able to work with big conglomerates and the leaders of businesses in the areas of strategy and corporate finance, et cetera. And SK was one of the firm’s clients, and I don’t want to date myself. It was a time that everyone was rushing into 3G rollout. If you remember —

[00:04:23]  Barry Ritholtz:  Oh, sure.

[00:04:24]  Songyee Yoon:  It was an interesting transition, just like we see today, because in 2G, telecommunication is all about voice communication, and 3G — what was promised — was data transmission, including videos and images and high-fidelity audio.

[00:04:41]  Barry Ritholtz:  If I’m remembering correctly, it was voice and text, and then it was image and some video. And then eventually, what was it — 4G or 5G — was full internet, right?

[00:04:52]  Songyee Yoon:  Right. Yeah, that’s right. So as telcos are one of the big CapEx investors in making that transition, we were thinking about how we could do content delivery in the most personalized way — because personalized content delivery was one of the challenges that requires artificial intelligence and a data-driven delivery system. So I thought that was an interesting challenge to take on. So I moved to SK Telecom to lead that effort.

[00:05:26]  Barry Ritholtz:  And then you end up at NCSoft where you’re president and chief strategy officer. I’m curious what those experiences taught you, not just about corporate governance and culture, but about these big institutions that tend to have legacy technology. There tends to be some group that really wants to move forward rapidly and adopt all the latest greatest tech, and then another group that says, hey, this is expensive — what’s the ROI? How did you find yourself navigating a big telecom like SK or a smaller, more nimble gaming company like NCSoft?

[00:06:09]  Songyee Yoon:  Yeah, I mean, that’s a really great question. I think it’s about learning to be persistent and resilient and patient in both places. I was criticized for suggesting something that was not the norm at the time. So for example, when I was at NCSoft, one of the things that was very obvious to me was that it was full of data. The gaming business was offered entirely in a digitized form — you have transaction data, you have behavior data of the gamers and everything. So it was possible to do a lot of things in a data-driven way, which — it’s a lot of companies doing it today, but back then it was not very common to have understanding in both gaming business and AI and data-driven business process modeling.

[00:06:41]  Songyee Yoon:  So when I suggested things like churn prediction — because you can see the customer player behavior within the game, see how much they’re engaged, and predict if that player is about to churn out or continue — and that some interventions could help them stay engaged. That was one application area I identified, which could be very straightforward, but I was told there was strong pushback from the developers and even the business people. They said, ‘Oh, you’re saying it because you don’t understand the gaming business.’ You’re not a heavy gamer enough, or whatever. But —

[00:07:48]  Barry Ritholtz:  But you understand: hey, it costs us this much to acquire a client or a gamer. And if we see this behavior, a high percentage of those folks are tapping out. What can we do to keep them in and paying monthly fees?

[00:08:01]  Songyee Yoon:  Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So even with very clear data and the case presented, it was not an easy task to get everyone’s buy-in. But I think it gradually — the reason I mentioned that tangible example: it was a small, very tangible area where we could apply technology. And once you show success, gradually, one by one, we were able to adopt and integrate that into our business process, ending up with a large AI lab that does all of those things in a more centralized way.

[00:08:36]  Barry Ritholtz:  So what I’m hearing from you is a very systems-oriented framework, both for gaming and telecom, right? I know the big mobile companies in the US are constantly fighting their own churn rate. So having a top-down systems approach sounds like you could be really proactive in terms of maintaining clients. You would think there’s buy-in from everybody, but it sounds like there’s a little salesmanship involved to get everybody behind that approach, right?

[00:09:09]  Songyee Yoon:  Yeah. Right. Yeah.

[00:09:11]  Barry Ritholtz:  So let’s talk a little bit about what’s going on in the world of AI. I’ve heard you discuss various things that are just short-term hype. How do you figure out, when you’re evaluating an AI system — either for an investment or just to use the technology in a company — how do you figure out what’s valuable and what’s just hype?

[00:09:39]  Songyee Yoon:  I mean, I think we talk a lot about the hype cycle and bubble being built up in this AI era, but I think it’s not unheard of in every platform shift. There was overcapacity built, not just in AI infrastructure, but it happened with the internet, with fiber optics — you remember the railroad?

[00:10:02]  Barry Ritholtz:  Yeah. Railroad, electrics, telegram — wherever you go.

[00:10:04]  Songyee Yoon:  So there is always excess capacity that gets built. But on the other hand, if you talk about application of the technology, if you find the application and real business problems that you can apply this technology to solve — to be more efficient or bring out insights that humans were not able to — I think there is a great area to apply the technology, and there are so many of them out there. So that’s why we are so excited about the development of this technology and the prospect of it going forward.

[00:10:47]  Barry Ritholtz:  So I’ve heard you discuss various priorities — durability, defensibility, real-world impact. Explain what those three things mean.

[00:11:10]  Songyee Yoon:  In making that adoption of the technology, there are two ways to think about it. One is adopting the technology without really changing the current work process — for example, there’s a lot of talk about copilot, or augmenting what we do, making it faster. That’s one way of applying it, and there will be some ROI realized from such approaches. The other is a complete redesign of the workflow. And I think that’s — we’re at a very early stage of witnessing that, but I think that will be the more interesting area to look out for, and could produce more tremendous transformation and value.

[00:12:15]  Barry Ritholtz:  So tell us what you did at NCSoft, because a lot of the work you put in there was about transforming them to use AI. Was it, hey, we’re just going to make all our developers and gamers a little more efficient? Or did this require a clean-sheet rethink of everything the company was doing?

[00:12:37]  Songyee Yoon:  Yeah, I mean, it was like 15 years ago, and back then the technology was not ready to fully redesign the game development workflow. It was more about augmenting the existing process — things like churn prediction, NLP specialized for gamer language, an animation tool that helped animators animate four-legged monsters as efficiently as bipedal creatures. So it was more focused on augmenting existing processes back then. But the technology has advanced today to the point where there are more opportunities to completely redesign and come up with new AI-native companies — AI-native entertainment firms rethinking what new types of entertainment and engagement look like.

[00:13:56]  Barry Ritholtz:  So I keep reading that Claude is writing its own code and updating its own code. If you were at a gaming shop today — do you replace coders? Do you have copilot work with coders? There was a Wall Street Journal article last week about coders in Silicon Valley just sitting around watching Claude rewrite their code. What is going on in the world of software development now that Claude is capable of updating itself?

[00:14:34]  Songyee Yoon:  Yeah, I think it’s really fascinating. A lot of the coding is done using tools like Claude, and it certainly makes things more efficient and productive, which means we need a lot less people in the loop in certain areas — such as reviewing code and detecting errors. But there are other areas that need more heavy involvement, like redesigning the schema and structure and how things are going to work and how it’s going to provide an engaging experience for gamers.

[00:15:26]  Barry Ritholtz:  So my bias is that humans are very creative and very innovative. I’m thinking in terms of the storylines we see on streaming shows and interesting novel gaming narratives. Is that what people are going to focus on, and just the blocking and tackling of putting code in place — we’re going to let AI do? Is that a today thing or is that going to change over the next couple of decades?

[00:16:05]  Songyee Yoon:  I think that’s a really good question. If you look at today, a lot of jobs — like YouTubers, podcasters — these are types of jobs that didn’t exist 10 years ago. I don’t know what other jobs are going to be created in a world where things that needed a hundred people’s attention can be done with a fraction of those people. There could be other types of jobs, other types of roles. But that’s an evolution we’ll have to see how it rolls out — I can’t predict exactly what types of jobs will exist 10 years from now.

[00:16:42]  Barry Ritholtz:  Huh. Really, really interesting. Coming up, we continue our conversation with Songyee Yoon, managing partner at Principal Ventures, discussing AI and the modern economy. I’m Barry Ritholtz, you’re listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

[00:17:10]  Barry Ritholtz:  I am Barry Ritholtz, you’re listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guest today is Songyee Yoon, founder and managing partner at Principal Venture Partners, an AI-focused venture capital firm. Previously she was president and chief strategy officer at gaming company NCSoft.

[00:17:30]  Barry Ritholtz:  So before we start talking about AI in more depth, I just have to mention your book, Push Play: Gaming for a Better World. I love the concept that — let’s not forget about play. It’s really significant in terms of innovation and being an engine of change. Tell us a little bit about what motivated Push Play.

[00:17:56]  Songyee Yoon:  Right. I mean, as you just mentioned, I think we have a tendency of not appreciating the role of play in our everyday life. My motto is: we don’t live to work, we live to play — we live to explore. When you have extra time, are you going to do one more line of work or are you going to play? I think play is our natural tendency — homo ludens as opposed to homo sapiens. Play is very important, not only for computer games, but in general play has played a very significant role in human evolution. Whenever there is a new artifact introduced in our culture, we start by playing with it.

[00:19:04]  Songyee Yoon:  And when we have a good understanding of the material and its utility, then we turn that into utility. I think gaming has been playing that role very diligently over the last couple of decades. Gaming has always been the platform brave enough to incorporate new technology and have players try it out. We had a VP of AI since the early 2000s. AI technology was not mature enough for driverless cars 20 years ago, but it was okay in gaming because gaming is a low-risk environment and gamers are inherently early adopters. Not just AI, but Kubernetes, cloud, even freemium business models — all tried out in gaming first before being adopted in other businesses.

[00:20:33]  Barry Ritholtz:  Let me throw you a little bit of a curveball about gaming. When I was growing up, play was totally unstructured — you’d go down to the schoolyard. Computer games like Pong and Space Invaders were very rudimentary. Now it seems kids’ lives are much more scheduled, their play is more structured. How does that affect the sort of experience you want to provide from a gaming company?

[00:21:02]  Songyee Yoon:  That’s a very good question, and there are many aspects to it. One is about what gaming is for today. The reason there’s so much opportunity to play games as a novelty is because computers happen to be the most sophisticated and advanced devices we have today. I think we’re still trying to figure out their limitations and what they can do, and we’re in awe of the experience they can provide. So there are a lot of online digital games out there, and the size of the catalog means kids end up choosing a game or two from that. And a game is not just one thing — there are sandbox games, building games, quiz games, story-based games. Depending on your preference, you can choose different games.

[00:22:18]  Barry Ritholtz:  So let’s stay with kids, with children, and in particular students. There’s been a lot of concern about the impact of AI on education, on learning, on training people to get jobs in the real world. There’s a quote of yours I was intrigued with: ‘Rather than competing with AI, students should be prepared to leverage uniquely human capabilities.’ Explain what that means in terms of the real world.

[00:22:46]  Songyee Yoon:  If you think about education — our education has been optimized over the last couple of hundred years for delivering knowledge. And I think we are witnessing that knowledge delivery and memorization is rapidly being commoditized. What our next generation needs is more creativity and problem-solving skills. We have to think about how we can redesign the classroom to really enhance those skills instead of helping them acquire one more piece of knowledge.

[00:23:31]  Barry Ritholtz:  So there’s a very different set of targets — acquiring skills versus just learning or memorizing things. I’m a big fan of teaching children how to problem solve. How should schools be using AI to teach children new skills — developing expertise, developing problem-solving? What’s the proper role of AI for educational institutions?

[00:24:05]  Songyee Yoon:  I think what I would like to say is that we have to educate and prepare our students to thrive in a world where AI is more prevalent. But the solution to that is not just AI — it could be redesigning the curriculum, redesigning the school system, thinking about how we evaluate their achievement and how we retrain our teachers. AI could be a tool for doing that, but it’s not the solution for everything. I think there is a huge difference there.

[00:24:48]  Barry Ritholtz:  Alright, so let’s bring this out to the world of the economy and business. Successful companies have wide moats and we’re starting to see AI compress those moats over time. Think about industries like lawyers, tax preparers, accountants. There’s a lot of stuff AI can do in a fraction of the time and with greater accuracy. Everybody knows about reading X-rays and MRIs. So if we know our moats are going to get compressed, how should companies be using AI either to protect and expand those moats, or use AI to expand their competitive advantages while they last?

[00:25:51]  Songyee Yoon:  I mean, I think there are some industries and professions that will become much more productive and need a lot fewer professionals to solve certain well-defined problems. But that doesn’t mean that as humanity we’re left with no problems to solve. We have so many other problems that AI cannot address — for example, politics, how we’re going to redistribute resources. What is our societal priority in enhancing the agency of everyone and helping them achieve their full potential? Those are things we don’t have good solutions for. While AI can take care of things in a well-defined workforce, we’ll have time to work on other problems to progress humanity forward.

[00:27:12]  Barry Ritholtz:  So I think we’re all in agreement it’s going to be a very disruptive technology. Am I hearing you say essentially: hey, it’s up to everybody to learn how to use these tools and adapt, but the change is coming — you have to be prepared?

[00:27:28]  Songyee Yoon:  Yes. Right. Exactly. Yeah.

[00:27:30]  Barry Ritholtz:  So you’ve operated at the intersection of artificial intelligence, gaming, telecommunication, and social platforms. That’s a great convergence of a lot of different technologies. How is that evolving, and how are both consumers and institutions really adapting to an AI-driven economy?

[00:27:56]  Songyee Yoon:  I mean, a lot of people recognize that this is one of the greatest platform shifts in our lifetime, and there’s a lot of excitement. But we are at the very early inning of how it’s going to fully pan out. We don’t even know what’s coming in the next three to five years. And I’m really excited to see all these use cases and applications of technology fully leveraging the creativity of the AI-native generation. The people who think with AI as part of their toolkit will come up with different ideas and apply their creativity.

[00:28:54]  Barry Ritholtz:  So you’ve founded Chameleon as a corporate venture arm, and now you run a fully independent early-stage venture fund. What are the differences between being part of a corporate venture fund versus being independent? What are the strengths and blind spots in each?

[00:29:18]  Songyee Yoon:  I think the objective is different depending on who is providing the capital and what the objective of the firm is. At PVP, I think we focus more on the type of investors who’d like to be at the forefront of innovation and capture the value being created — regardless of the area. It doesn’t have to be confined to entertainment and consumer space. I think we were able to look more broadly.

[00:29:59]  Barry Ritholtz:  So corporate is pure strategic and independent is strictly ROI. So let’s talk about some of the companies you’ve backed — Together AI, Cartia, Sesame. These all seem to be pretty core infrastructure plays. Tell us a little about those. What was it about each of those that made them so appealing?

[00:30:21]  Songyee Yoon:  I mean, it’s a really tricky time to make an investment because there is a lot of excitement about this technology and a kind of rushing mentality. So I try to invest in companies that are going to be durable in the coming decades. I really like companies that are building infrastructure technology that has multipurpose utility as this platform evolves. Together AI and Cartia both have great founders with a vision of building infrastructure and foundational technology. And Sesame was an interesting case because it’s building voice applications — and from my gaming experience I know the importance of focusing on certain features that provide certain experiences to users. The founders understood what was important, and their capabilities were singularly focused on making that technology push.

[00:31:36]  Songyee Yoon:  So I really liked what they were doing, and that’s one of the reasons I ended up investing in Sesame. But there are other types of companies as well that we’re excited about. Those are the companies that are in a position to build a data flywheel — because one of the undeniable characteristics of companies that will be durable in this environment are the ones who have appropriate access to data, understanding of customers and consumers and the business, and build unique technology on top of that. So we’re also investing in companies building this data flywheel that will over time build very defensible moats.

[00:32:27]  Barry Ritholtz:  Hmm, really, really interesting. Coming up, we continue our conversation with Songyee Yoon, co-founder and managing partner at Principal Ventures, discussing the state of venture investing into artificial intelligence today. I’m Barry Ritholtz, you’re listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

[00:33:03]  Barry Ritholtz:  I am Barry Ritholtz. You are listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guest today is Songyee Yoon, founder and managing partner at Principal Venture Partners, an AI-focused VC.

[00:33:21]  Barry Ritholtz:  What is the key problem Principal Venture Partners is trying to solve in the world of AI today?

[00:33:29]  Songyee Yoon:  So we started to back AI-native companies. When we first talked about AI-native companies, that was not a very common phrase — people asked me, ‘What do you mean by AI-native companies?’ I had to explain what it meant. And these days it’s a more widely used term. We’d like to back companies who are fully embracing the technology of today and tomorrow, led by founders who understand the technology and its limitations and are able to come up with an organizational design that reflects the importance of this. In terms of the size of departments, it will be very different from companies built upon last-generation technology stacks.

[00:34:21]  Songyee Yoon:  And I think the type of leaders and talents who are going to lead all these departments are going to be different in terms of the use of technology and their vision for solving problems that are relevant in the AI-native era. Those are the companies that really excite us, and those are the companies we’re focused on investing in.

[00:34:40]  Barry Ritholtz:  So every time there’s a new technology, everybody just kind of sprinkles a little bit on it to catch a little bit of the buzz. We had it with the dot-coms, we had it with the metaverse, we had it with crypto, and now everybody’s claiming they’re an AI company. How do you distinguish between what is truly AI-native and what is just ‘let’s put a little dash of AI salt on this’?

[00:35:06]  Songyee Yoon:  That’s a very good question. I think I have an unfair advantage from working in a gaming company. The gaming industry is like having a lens into the future, right? Because a lot of the technology and innovation happens in gaming first, and it gives us a sense of whether this type of technology is adoptable and whether consumers will accept it. So in terms of application and platform, that’s a really interesting guiding North Star for me. And companies that are fully AI-native are built around that tech stack, whereas if you’re trying to sprinkle AI, you ask: can you do the same thing without AI? Why do you need it? Why is it indispensable?

[00:36:05]  Songyee Yoon:  I think there are businesses using things like agent technology, but for a lot of applications you don’t need an agent — you just need good data analytics. So there are many ways we try to understand how businesses are operating and see their full potential and their strategy.

[00:36:30]  Barry Ritholtz:  So on the one hand, I know AI has been around a long time. When Deep Blue beat Kasparov, that was a big deal. And then the AI app that won Jeopardy — these are 10 and 20 years ago. So it’s not a brand-new technology. However, it feels like we took another level jump with ChatGPT, and — go down the list — Claude, Perplexity, whatever. How do you think about this moment in time? Is this similar to early broadband, early smartphones, early cloud use? For someone who’s a tech investor, they want to know: is it early, is it late? How do you think about where we are today?

[00:37:30]  Songyee Yoon:  That’s great. Actually, it’s older than that. Do you remember — in the sixties there was an application called Eliza? Eliza was a very early incarnation of a chatbot, and there was even a newspaper headline declaring the end of psychotherapists because it was doing so well rephrasing what people were asking. Since then there were a lot of AI winters and summers, ups and downs. And I think what’s surprising to many people about this time is that the AI shift is closer to the introduction of the railroad than the introduction of the PC or the internet. Because the biggest breakthrough that allowed us to get here was actually scale — not a new algorithm, not new software, but scale: let’s pour a lot of resources to make it really big. And that’s where we saw the tremendous jump in AI capability.

[00:39:34]  Songyee Yoon:  I think there will be interesting new businesses that emerge out of it. So yes, I think we are very early in terms of fully appreciating what’s possible on top of this.

[00:39:46]  Barry Ritholtz:  So I love the idea of interesting new businesses. I’m always fascinated with what the public markets know — they’re more or less eventually efficient, and very often when a new technology comes along, they very much underestimate where it can go. So what’s a use case that the public markets might be underestimating? Where might this go? You look at dozens and dozens of new companies — what direction is just mind-blowing that nobody is really anticipating?

[00:40:24]  Songyee Yoon:  I think there are a lot of things happening. One interesting thing is that while this technology has beaten many people’s expectations, there is a lot more innovation coming along in terms of architecture design and fundamental design of the framework. We are not done with what is the most efficient railroad design. I think there could be other types of railroads that come online that will allow faster and more comfortable ride experiences. And once there is a railroad, interesting businesses emerge — like mail order. It’s really hard to make that connection, but that type of new business was made possible because the railroad was in place.

[00:41:40]  Barry Ritholtz:  Well, broadband and fiber optic led to so many things — everything from YouTube to the build-out of Amazon Web Services and online games, online retail, all that stuff.

[00:41:53]  Songyee Yoon:  Exactly. Games, right? That’s why I am really excited about AI-native generations and creativity — what they’re going to build on top of this. I think there will be new types of businesses that we don’t comprehend today that will be enabled by this infrastructure.

[00:42:06]  Barry Ritholtz:  So when you’re sitting with a founder of a company that’s looking for financing, what sort of questions do you ask? What are you trying to figure out about their model, their direction, their team?

[00:42:24]  Songyee Yoon:  I mean, it depends on what they’re building. The set of questions I ask when they’re building infrastructure technology versus business applications are different. But especially when they’re building business applications or vertical applications, I always try to ask: what is the real value that’s going to be brought to end users? We’re not investing in companies building amazing tech demonstrations — we’re trying to find companies who are solving real-world business problems and doing it in a way that’s sustainable and more efficient than any other type of technology.

[00:43:11]  Barry Ritholtz:  So you’re looking at infrastructure-type companies. What other types of AI applications are you looking at?

[00:43:18]  Songyee Yoon:  We are looking at companies that are building vertical applications by developing data liabilities and data moats.

[00:43:27]  Barry Ritholtz:  So there’s been a little bit of a lightning rod from a regulatory standpoint — all the LLMs have copyright complaints and issues. When you look at a term sheet today, how do you think about the regulatory risks, the litigation risks? How do you think about the regulatory framework and geopolitics? It seems like there are a lot of novel moving parts.

[00:44:11]  Songyee Yoon:  Yeah, I think that’s a really great question. More than ever, understanding how regulatory bodies think and how policy is going to evolve over time is important in making these decisions — especially in the venture space. We’re making investments that should last over a decade. It comes from the belief and understanding that innovation and research are very precious for all of us as humanity. And the tradition of peer review and open forum has really propelled us to where we are today. It’s going to continue, and I think collaboration and openness will better serve our end customers. We don’t have a crystal ball to say what the policy framework or geopolitical tension will look like in the next one or two years, but we have the belief that humanity’s collective work will converge in a direction that serves humanity positively.

[00:46:15]  Barry Ritholtz:  Alright, so before we get to our speed round, let me ask you one last question: what do you think investors in the AI space are either not thinking about or not talking about, that is important and perhaps they really should be paying attention to?

[00:46:33]  Songyee Yoon:  I think the saying that ‘we are at the very early inning’ means a lot. I hear someone even saying we are still in the car getting to the stadium — we’re not even in the first inning yet. That means all the models and structures can change significantly and can evolve over time, and nothing can be seen as engraved in stone. So I think a lot of the investment decisions have to remain nimble and flexible because we should be able to adjust when those changes and new breakthroughs come around.

[00:47:26]  Barry Ritholtz:  Alright, so I only have you for a few minutes, so we’ll click through these really quickly — our speed round. Starting with: who are your early mentors who helped to shape your career?

[00:47:38]  Songyee Yoon:  I would say I was fortunate enough to have a lot of mentors, but one person that stands out is Dominic Barton, who was the global managing partner at McKinsey. When I first started out as an associate at McKinsey, his office was right next to mine, so he was literally my neighbor and I learned a lot from him as a leader and as a mentor. Still today I reach out to him if I have to make tough decisions, and he has always been very generous with his time. So I’m really appreciative.

[00:48:22]  Barry Ritholtz:  Let’s talk about books. What are some of your favorites? What are you reading right now?

[00:48:26]  Songyee Yoon:  Oh, so I read a lot of books, but I’m the type that reads many books simultaneously — one chapter here and then I jump to another book. But the books I recommend to everyone these days are two: one is The Empire of AI and the other is Power and Progress. And I think those books help us understand the dynamics of what’s happening and what we need to think about as a society.

[00:48:56]  Barry Ritholtz:  So let’s talk about streaming. What are you either listening to or watching these days?

[00:49:02]  Songyee Yoon:  So I listen to music through Spotify a lot. My son is a big fan of Taylor Swift, so I have to listen to Taylor Swift whenever I’m in the car. I also watch K-dramas on Netflix.

[00:49:23]  Barry Ritholtz:  Really, really interesting. Our final two questions. What sort of advice would you give to a recent college graduate interested in a career in either artificial intelligence, investing, or gaming?

[00:49:38]  Songyee Yoon:  I mean, I think for kids just graduating today — one thing that’s not going to change is that it’s going to be very bumpy and disruptive, and the world they’re going to be working in is not going to look like the world today — that’s the constant. And what I would like to remind them is: don’t try to follow the trend. You really have to stick to what you’re passionate about. You remember in the seventies the most popular major was material science, then chemical engineering, then electrical engineering, then computer science — just to see the popularity of those majors kind of plummeting. We’ve witnessed so many of those cases. So I don’t think it serves you well to follow that fashion or trend.

[00:50:46]  Barry Ritholtz:  So be a generalist and be flexible.

[00:50:50]  Songyee Yoon:  Could be. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

[00:50:52]  Barry Ritholtz:  Alright. And our final question: what do you know about the world of venture investing and artificial intelligence today that might have been useful to know 20 years ago?

[00:51:03]  Songyee Yoon:  I mean, I think patience. The power of compounding is not just in finance, but also in human capital, our understanding of technology, and also in relationships. It seems very slow today, but if you are persistent for 20 years, what you can achieve is really tremendous.

[00:51:29]  Barry Ritholtz:  Well, thank you Songyee for being so generous with your time. We have been speaking with Songyee Yoon, founder and managing partner at Principal Venture Partners. If you enjoyed this conversation, check out any of the 600-plus interviews we’ve done over the past 12 years. You can find those at iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, Bloomberg, wherever you find your favorite podcasts.

[00:51:58]  Barry Ritholtz:  I would be remiss if I didn’t thank the crack team that helps us put these conversations together each week. Alexis Noriega is my video producer, Anna Luke is my podcast producer, Sean Russo is my head of research. I’m Barry Ritholtz.

[00:52:14]  You’ve been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

 

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