In the first half, bestselling author Ben Mezrich discussed playing blackjack and counting cards in casinos with the infamous MIT students (the basis for the hit movie 21), how he came to write about the origins of Facebook, and his latest work on the mega-wealthy Russian oligarchs, who put Putin in power, and how Putin turned on them. A group of ambitious men made incredible amounts of money in Russia in the 1990s in a kind of Wild West scenario, in the wake of communism's fall, as thousands of other businessmen were getting murdered left and right, he reported. At one point, just seven men owned 50% of Russia's GDP, Mezrich marveled.

The rise of the oligarchs occurred when Putin's predecessor Boris Yeltsin, who feared the return of communism, sought to quickly privatize all the resources that were once owned by the state, such as gas and aluminum companies, Mezrich explained. Regarding his book about Facebook-- "The Accidental Billionaires," (which served as basis for the film The Social Network), he described meeting Mark Zuckerberg's former partner Eduardo Saverin, before the story about their falling out/dispute was publicly known. Mezrich also shared a blackjack card counting technique which involves subtracting and adding single points for smaller and higher cards that are dealt out, and modulating one's bets accordingly.

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In the latter half, investigative journalist and author of "The True Story of the Bilderberg Group," Daniel Estulin, talked about the current meeting of the Biderberg Group taking place in Austria this week. The group of global elite (list) at the secretive meeting includes CEOs and politicians, and has a particularly powerful roster of individuals this year, along with higher levels of security surrounding the conference, Estulin noted. Groups like the Bilderbergs and the CFR seek to consolidate power under a central government, he said.

Cybersecurity, nanotechnology, and transhumanism are among the topics the Bilderberg group is addressing this year. The spectacular rise in technological advances will soon transform the very nature of humanity itself, Estulin remarked. The children alive now are surely the last generation of 100% humans, he commented, and "their children are going to be transhuman, post-human, nano-machines, and cyborgs,"-- the result of the amazing revolution in synthetic biology, which is advancing exponentially. Such technologies will be used by elite groups like the Bilderbergs to control humanity, he cautioned.

News segment guests: Jerome Corsi, Howard Bloom