December 19, 2025 • 57 mins
The gang discuss escalation with Venezuela, an AI executive order, the trial of Judge Dugan, the mass shooting at Brown University, and a new travel ban.
Sources:
https://gothamist.com/news/ice-enters-nyc-shelters-armed-and-without-judicial-warrants-reports-show
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/70255703/united-states-v-dugan/
https://bsky.app/profile/klasfeldreports.com/post/3ma4gf7vm772z
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/71930356/pablo-pablo-v-lyons/
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g562vz34ro
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media. All right, I'm doing the intro.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
What are crackers and crack ats?
Speaker 1 (00:11):
Is that good? Perfect?
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Can we say that? I think?
Speaker 1 (00:14):
So?
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Okay, do you have.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
A non binary cracks crack thems? I think.
Speaker 3 (00:18):
I think I'm definitionly not a cracker.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
I just wanted to use the word crack ats. Yeah,
I understand it's not appropriate.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
That's reasonable.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Welcome to ed.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Yeah, we should just we should old. Sorry, James, So
let's just keep doing it.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Do the intro.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
This is it could happen.
Speaker 4 (00:41):
Here Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what is happening
in the White House, the crumbling of our world, and
what this means to you. I am James Stout and
I'm joined today by Robert Evans and Mia Wong and Sophie.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Sophie is also here.
Speaker 4 (00:57):
And this episode we are covering the week of December
eleventh to December seventeenth, a week before the week that
is Christmas.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
That's right, baby. So I hope you've done your shopping.
I hope you've got me a gift. Because I pay
attention to which of our listeners do and do not
buy me presents? Yeah, so do I you will never
find me and you shouldn't try.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
That's right.
Speaker 5 (01:22):
And it's currently Honkkah, happy honkah.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
Happy hony, right, yes, oh yeah, happy honekah. All the
holidays have a yeah, quasi Kwanza, have a solemn, dignified tet.
All the holidays have a good one of them.
Speaker 5 (01:36):
Happy Winter Solstice, which is.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
Happy Solstice more unhappy Solstice. It's kind of a bittersweet holiday. Yeah,
super Saturnalia. You know, it's a good one. So holidays
are nice, but we're going to talk about some things
that are less nice today. The government, Yes, the government,
(01:58):
and specific parts of the Let's start with some headlines.
Garthamis has obtained information about ICE being able to enter
private parts of New York City shelters without a judicial
warrant or being able to obtain private information about residents,
despite both of these, in theory being prohibited by sanctuary
city laws in New York. Right, thiss happened at least
(02:19):
five times.
Speaker 4 (02:20):
The way Gothamis found this is by making a public
records request for incident reports, which is a clever use
of public record law nice one. The city has already
aware of both jail and police officers violating these laws,
and I think this is a good example of how
people think of sanctuary city laws as inassailable, but in fact,
(02:43):
sanctuary laws be the city, state, whatever jurisdiction, are very
often violated, and it's good to see that being reported
on more. Last week, we talked about Faustino Pablo Pablo, right,
the guy who had been sent to Guatemala despite the
fact that he had protections under the Convention against Torture
for being returned there. The government has returned him to
the US, which is good.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
That is a rare, good immigration story. It did really
bum me out to see that, Like, there were dozens
of articles on him being sent there, right, and I
couldn't find anything any reporting on him being returned, which
is kind of like, we should be happy for these people.
We should.
Speaker 4 (03:22):
Yeah, we don't get many wins and we should take them.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Yeah, we should be happy that this guy is not
being likely to be tortured.
Speaker 4 (03:29):
At least it is still possible for them to remove
him to a third country, right, that is not outside
the realm of possibility. But right now he's not in
a place where a gidge A judicated he was likely
to be tortured, and that is good.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
Good. And Trump has designated fentanel as a weapon of
mass destruction, which is great. What are we doing here?
Speaker 6 (03:51):
Like, I.
Speaker 4 (03:55):
Am trained as a historian, and I probably should remind
you that we have been down this road before with
the weapons of mass destruction, and I hope this is
not leading where it did last time, but I am
very worried that it might.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
Yeah. Yeah, it's one of those things. I'm both We'll see,
we'll know before this episode ends whether or not I'm wrong.
Tucker Carlson stated recently that a source has told him
the presidential announcement coming up is Trump declaring war, right that, like,
we're doing a war with Venezuela full on, not just
some like air strikes and stuff, just not to minimize
(04:34):
a legal air strike in the sea or on Venezuela
or soil. I don't know if I think that that's
the likeliest thing. It just seems like such a huge jump.
But also at this point there's a whole armada blocking
off Venezuela from the rest of the world. And Trump
put out a statement saying that their oil is our
(04:55):
oil and belongs rightly to American companies. So very very
very possible when we're about to go to war with them.
I'm certainly not a I don't know what's gonna happen, y'all.
I'm white knuckling it like everybody else. Yeah, that fucking sucks.
I didn't know the thing about that oil.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
It's amazing.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
I'll read the exact quote to you, James. This is
from a trump a Truth social post which has twelve
point four thousand retruths and forty seven thousand likes. Venezuela
is completely surrounded by the largest armada ever assembled in
the history of South America. It will only get bigger,
and the shock to then will be like nothing they
have ever seen before until such time as they returned
to the United States of America all of the oil, land,
(05:33):
and other assets that they previously stole from US. The
illegitimate Maduro regime is using oil from these stolen oil
fields to finance themselves, drug terrorism, human trafficking, murder and kidnapping.
For the theft of our assets and many other reasons
including terrorism, drug smuggling, and human trafficking, the Venezuelan regime
has been designated a foreign terrorist organization. Therefore, today I'm
ordering a total and complete blockade of all sanctioned oil
(05:55):
tankers going into and out of Venezuela. The illegal aliens
and criminals that the Madeira regime has sent the United
States during the weekend and Biden administration are being returned
to Venezuela at a rapid pace. YadA, YadA, YadA. Yeah,
all of our oil, land and other assets have to
be returned to the United States, which, like he's talking
about oil that American companies have had at points like
contracts to exploit. Yeah, but he's phrasing it is like
(06:18):
their land and oil is our land and oil.
Speaker 4 (06:20):
Which yeah, that's a very colonial way of phrasing like
a contract.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
Again.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
A lot of times, you know, I would be like, Okay, well,
I don't know if war is the most reasonable thing
to expect. When the president's posting shit like that, it's
very reasonable to be like, I think we might go
to war. I think he might be about to invade Venezuela.
I don't know what's going to happen, but it's you're
no longer being like a kooky conspiracy theorist to be like, well,
(06:47):
maybe he's about to try to take over Venezuela, and
maybe that is what's coming.
Speaker 4 (06:51):
Yeah, I don't understand how in that instance they would
continue to get Venezuela to accept people. It's the US
is removing the sticking points that I see.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
Maybe he's found a third country, right that they've they've
been very fond of finding third countries. I guess I
should explain a little bit about oil leaving Venezuela, just
so like people are aware of that.
Speaker 4 (07:16):
So like Robert read the truth something someone says in church,
doesn't it? Yeah, yeah, here we are. So they're talking
about like blockading sanctioned oil tankers. Not necessarily every tanker
that enters Venezuela is sanctioned, Like I believe Chevron has
some contracts with Chevron.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
Tankers should be cruising.
Speaker 3 (07:35):
Yeah, there's a lot of chevroll.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
Yeah, that shouldn't be an issue, right, they should be
able to go back and forth. They're not sanctioned.
Speaker 4 (07:41):
It's the Venezuelan State Oil Company, which in English, I
guess you would say pdvsavasavasay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, what Venezuela
has done previously, And this is not by any means
unique to Venezuela, but this is generally how many of
these regimes that are kind kind of in the ambit
of Venezuela. I'm talking about Iran and Russia here have
(08:04):
avoided sanctions and sanctioned entities so far as by using
what are called ghost ships.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
I will link to an explainer on this.
Speaker 4 (08:13):
What they will do is use the names and identify
as the vessels that have been scrapped. They will change
the flags of vessels, often to these small island nations,
for whom allowing ships to use their flag as kind
of a source of income. Right, And they will often
use these to go out into international waters and then
(08:34):
offload cargo, in this case oil.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
Right.
Speaker 4 (08:37):
So it just happens pretty frequently with Venezuelan vessels. That
was one it was one such vessel called the Skipper
that the US Coast Guard boarded I think last week
as we're recording this. Yeah, sure, that is how Venezuela
has previously been evading these sanctions, right, And Iran does
this too.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
Russia does this too.
Speaker 4 (08:56):
They also do things like spoof their location or turn
off their They have like a locate to beacon the
ship they're supposed to use a transponder. Yeah, yeah, so
this is fairly common practice. But Obviously, the way to
stop that is a physical blockade, right, Like, that's not
going to be possible if these if the US is
effectively like inspecting ships leaving Venezuela, right or sort of
(09:18):
keeping a very close eye on them, So that will end,
and with that will end a very important source of
income for the Maduta regime if they keep doing this.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
Now, obviously one of the sort of issues we're trying
to work out what is going to happen here, especially
before whatever speech Trump is about to give, is that
we're trying to figure out state policy from Trump posting. Right, Yeah,
and there's a lot of this that is enormously incoherent.
So Okay, the thing about designating the government of Venezuela
as a foreign terrorist organization is one of the weirdest
(09:50):
things I've ever seen. And this was also unhinged. The
closest thing we've ever really gotten to that, I guess
was the IERGC. Yeah, and maybe you could go back
and say the Khmer Rouge, but like, they weren't really
a government by that point, so this is not This
is not a designation that has ever been given to
(10:11):
a government before. Right, it doesn't make any sense to
give it to a government. It doesn't make sense to
give to this government. I mean, you know, even if
you're working with in the logic of counter terrorism, which
is just you know, unhinged, murderous imperialism to begin with.
But all of the reporting on this has been assuming
that the blockade will be of you know, like of
these specifically sanctioned oil tankers. However, come The thing about
(10:36):
the Foreign Terrorist Organization designation is that it does things.
And one of the things that that Foreign Terrorist Organization
designation does is that if you do business with a
with a foreign terrorist organization, you are now immediately on
the line from material support of terrorism charges like chef run. So, yes,
there are lots of countries like Facebook.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
Does this fine with the US military carrying out air
strikes on Chevron executives and their property, Let's be clear
about that. I would I would salute the red, white,
and Blue if we dropped some hell fires on that
C suite.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
Yeah. I don't know.
Speaker 3 (11:15):
This is all very weird. My understanding of the FTO
designation process is that, well, how it's supposed to work
is that the President proposes it and then the Secretary
of State and Sectuary of the Treasurer, I think have
to improve it, and then there's a seven day period
where Congress has it an opportunity to say no, and
then it goes up. So right now we should be
(11:37):
theoretically in the seven day window, but it's also really
unclear what the illustration has actually been doing because again
we're being governed by post.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (11:47):
Like it's so it's not announced as an executive action
on White House dot gov, and I think normally it
goes there and then the seven day congressional period commences.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
Then it's not in the federal right to either. Right now,
all we have is a truth.
Speaker 3 (12:04):
So like, yeah, and like and this is this is
the problem is that this is this is sort of
the Calvin Ball War in that they're using they're using
the names of actual legal categories and things that have
material effects in the world, but they're just posts. And
I want to be very clear about this. Even just
doing a blockade on these sanctioned vessels is an active war. Yeah,
(12:26):
like that that's an that's very deliberately an active war.
It is an active imperial aggression. It is morally wrong.
It is also unbelievably illegal under the War Powers Act.
And this this is this has actually gotten a response
from Democrats in Congress. There's been a few measures. CBS
is reporting this has been if there's been a few
measures to stop the president from starting a war. Here,
(12:49):
I'm going to quote CBS. A second measure from Democratic Rep.
Jim mcgovernor in Massachusetts would remove the armed forces quote
from hostilities with or against Venezuela that have not been
authorized by Congress. McGovern's resolution could face the best chance
of potential adoption since it has three gop CO sponsors.
Rep's Marjory Taylor Green of Georgia, Thomas Massey of Kentucky,
(13:12):
and Don Bacon of Nebraska. Bacon says he would also
vote and f he or Meeks his measure. Bacon's taking
a very weird line here of Keen's congressional approval, and
also I support him doing this.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
So purely a procedural objection.
Speaker 3 (13:26):
Yeah, it's a I want my board, but I want
Congress to have a little shred of power.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
So I think it's alcial work. Noting what exactly is
going on here. I'm someone who's on the record as
talking about how political economy in Latin America and American
imperialism is usually slightly more complicated than they just want
to resource, but they just want a resource here.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
Yeah, this one, this one really is yeah.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
No, like so it's only like like like Bolivia, for example,
every everyone thinks that that that the whole coup Oblivia
was about lithium and it yes, I'm very mad about this,
it was not. If you look at the people of
you look at Camato, if you look at people who
were actually running that coup, they were all Bolivian agrobarons.
Because a huge part of what was going on there
was a rebellion by the sort of agro business like
agricultural elite who joined with parts of like a reactionary
(14:14):
every middle class.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
Okay, but this is not that.
Speaker 3 (14:17):
Venezuela has the world's largest oil preserves, but there were
significant problems extracting the oil right. Many of these problems
stem from the two thousand and two to two thousand
and three opposition general strike. This is back after Hugo
Chaves was elected. So in two thousand and two there
was a coup against Chaves that failed and was sort
of overturned famously. But later that year there was also
(14:41):
a sort of opposition general strike that lasted from late
two thousand and two to early two thousand and three,
and a huge part of that general strike was oil
workers specifically, and it was very specifically. One of the
things about the structure of oil production is that there
were a bunch of very very highly paid and highly
skilled technical workers who are are very very loyal to
the oil companies themselves and who are very loyal to
(15:03):
who are sort of tend to be very right wing.
These people went on strike and sort of got fired
on mass. Oil production requires both a huge amount of
heavy capital and a bunch of highly skilled workers, and
if you don't have both of those things, then you
can't do oil extraction. And this has sort of been
a recurring problem for the entire time both sort of
fugual Srofics and Majuro has been in office, is that
(15:26):
they haven't had the capacity to actually extract a bunch
of the oil, and also they've refused to turn the
oil over to more American companies that have already been contracted.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
And it's also worth noting there's a lot of talk
about like Venezuela having the world's largest reserves, and a
lot of that is like them jinking the numbers by
including a lot of like tire sands, that would be
that no one's going to try to get extract fuel
from because it's too expensive and too much of a
(15:55):
pain in the ass.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
It's just not worth it anyway.
Speaker 4 (15:58):
And also that claims to reserves not actually part of
Venezuela at this.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
Time, right right, Like we're not working with exact with
accurate information.
Speaker 3 (16:07):
Yeah, it's it's messy. And it's also worth noting that
like the oil numbers, I mean, obviously all oil numbers
are political, but the oil numbers here are extraordinarily political,
because these are numbers that are basically used as a
pitch by sort of like the opposition to try to
get a US backed too. And it's also sort of
word noting that the other thing that's happening here, and
the reason this is all going to probably cause really
(16:30):
significant economic problems and probably humanitarian disaster, both in Venezuela
and probably also in Cuba, which extensively relies on Venezuelan
oil to have their economy function, is that the Venezuelan
economy has been really structured around oil in a way
that they failed to transition out of multiple times. The
first big one I've done in a different episode about
(16:52):
this in the Neolipical List series a bunch of years ago.
But you know, there was a whole bunch of delivery
sabotage by American car companies over the attempt to build
it car industry. There's a long sort of history of this.
But it means that both of these countries' economies are
desperately reliant on oil. And the more of this is
just that is cut off, the more fucked it's going
to get for just everyone in Venezuela.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
Yeah. Yeah, And you can already see how much worse
it's got from the time I went to Venezuela to
to now. Like, they're very vulnerable to changes in crude
oil prices, right, and that has, along with corruption in
a government which doesn't really give a shit about the
material welfare of these people, has already made things unsustainably
(17:34):
hard for people in Venezuela, and that will only get worse.
Speaker 3 (17:37):
Yeah, So I want to conclude, basically on a couple
of things. Wonders that too, this is going to cause
more waves of migration and refugees fleeing the country, both
from potential realist military strikes and for the economic damage.
There's been some moves in the international stage, with China
and Mexico expressing support for the Venezuelan government. Shine Bomb
(17:59):
in Mexico is offered to facilitate negotiations and media negotiations
between the US and Venezuela. It's also kind of word
noting that right before this whole thing, there was a
giant Vanity Fair interview with Susie Wiles, who's Trump's chief
of staff.
Speaker 1 (18:15):
Who oh boy, this.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
Is for Roysberry Dubbs this week Coller here.
Speaker 3 (18:19):
God said Trump quote wants to keep blowing up boats
until Maduro Chris's uncle, which is one of the most
hideous things I've ever heard. Yeah, it's gangsters, it's literally terrorism.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
It's it's a highway.
Speaker 3 (18:34):
Yeah yeah, it is in Australia structurally, unless you resign,
we are going to keep killing civilians. But it's hatless
taker ship.
Speaker 1 (18:41):
Yeah yeah. It's also a fundamental misunderstanding of how the
regime operates.
Speaker 4 (18:45):
If that is the case. So because they don't care
if their people kept dying.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
I have seen Venezuelan people die in the Darian gap,
right because in part the government is incapable of providing
for their material needs. They don't care like killing some
other people with boats is not going to fundamentally change
the way that government works, because there's any one way
it can work.
Speaker 3 (19:07):
Yeah, and I think there's the one last thing I
want to say about this before we head out slash,
before whatever giant update comes after the speech.
Speaker 2 (19:14):
Yeah, yeah, I've got one after you finish here.
Speaker 3 (19:17):
One of the big problems here is if people in
the administration really do believe this, they actually do think
that you can knock off the governments with air strikes,
and no you can't, No, you can't. They thought this
about the Huthies too. It's wrong, It's never been right.
Speaker 2 (19:30):
It's hideous.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
We just finished doing like a five parter on bastards
about like the nuclear doom state device that also dealt
heavily with the work of that Italian Air Force General Duhey,
who was the first guy in nineteen twenty one to
be like, oh, you need are bombers. Nothing else is
necessary in militaries. Now it's nothing but bombers from here.
And if you have enough bombers, no one will ever
(19:51):
attack you. And this logic has always been wrong. And
it's also every new generation of like military leaders, especially
in the air power field, are like all we need
is air strikes. You don't need to send in ground.
You can accomplish all of your goals, all of your
power projection, just by bombing people or shooting missiles at them,
(20:12):
And they're always wrong.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
It doesn't work. It's just not effective.
Speaker 4 (20:17):
Yeah, Like, I think the Trump administration is somewhat I
don't want to say high on its own supply. They
had success in Syria with removing the territorial calipate, mostly
using US air power. Right, it wasn't a big US
that was the US part. There was still a shitload
of Kurdish, yes.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
But it's the and yeah, eleven twelve thousand Kurdish people
died to remove the Islamic extent. More have died since, right, Yeah,
And also a shipload of Iraqi soldiers, a mix of
Kurds and largely guys from in and around Baghdad.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
But like, yeah, like a lot.
Speaker 4 (20:53):
Of and a bunch of Arab Syrians. And I don't
feel like ethnically geeky this at all Assyrian people.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
No, But like a huge amount of the effort was
guys I mean literally I was in bed with some
of these guys a lot of Like the fighting tip
was like literally dudes with fucking knives and hand grenades,
clearing buildings in hand to hand comb Yeah, those are
the people who faced danger, right, like, and that's what
you need to Unfortunately, you can't do war with computers yet. Yeah,
(21:22):
but yeah, I think that that might be where this
this belief that and like the Marca Rubio lobby, right,
the Florida Cubans who are invested in this kind of
Trump corrollary to the Monroe doctrine right in the idea
that they can roll back leftist regimes in uh like
South and Central America.
Speaker 2 (21:40):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
I think that's where a lot of the pressure is
coming from.
Speaker 3 (21:44):
Yeah, speaking of pressure, we are being pressured to go
to ads.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
That's right, beautiful, and we're back. There's an update I
just came across as we're doing this. We talked about
how Tucker as an inside source saying that Trump's basically
(22:08):
go out of Claire War. There's another article that just
came out on Stitch Snitches by Gloria Shaw, citing a
pro Trump host on Real America's Voice who characterized the
upcoming Oval Office address as a pr thing meant basically
as an acknowledgment that a lot of Trump's voters are
frustrated that he keeps talking about like international issues like Venezuela,
(22:31):
while everything is more expensive for them and they continue
to lose their jobs and the economy is shit. To
quote from that article, and this is them quoting a
segment from that Real America's Voice podcast. The remarks came
during a segment on The water Cooler with co host
David Brody, who teas the nine pm Eastern address is
an elevated effort to regain the narrative on affordability. The
president is going to be in the Oval Office tonight
(22:53):
nine pm Eastern, Brody said, big address to the nation.
He's elevating this clearly, this is to regain the narrative
and explain more about the affordability issue America and what
this administration is doing. I think they're trying to seize
this right off the top and make sure it doesn't
get away from them. And the claims here is basically
like this is Trump trying to steal a night march
on the twenty twenty six election cycle and reset a
lot of what people are talking about around affordability, Like
(23:16):
this argument is that now he's basically acknowledging that it's
been kind of a mistake to focus so much on
his overseas policies, and he really needs to start promising
that that golden age is actually going to come for
his voters, which the numbers don't bear out right, Like
almost no jobs have been added in the US since April.
(23:38):
There's about seven hundred thousand more people unemployed now than
there were in November of twenty twenty four.
Speaker 2 (23:42):
Like things aren't yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
Good, Inflation is still wild, Inflation is real bad food,
and like the material things that we need are going
up in price faster than general inflation. Like it's no good,
and people like on his own side the thought. Jessica Tarlov,
who's a Fox News host of The five Quote, tweeted
a post about how like the hiring recession just with
(24:06):
the golden age attached, which is like what Trump has
been saying. You know, we're going to have a new
golden age if you make me president. So like the
fact that he hasn't done he hasn't followed through any
of his promises to actually improve life for his voters
or the economy is starting to hurt. And I guess
I'm hopeful that that's what it is, rather than the
(24:27):
Marines are about to be in Caracas, right, but I
guess we'll see very soon. Yeah, great stuff.
Speaker 4 (24:34):
Yeah, talking of international stuff Trump is doing. Let's talk
about the new travel ban. So this this travel band
dropped yesterday was Tuesday. So it previously had this nineteen
country travel band. Right, some of that was a complete
bar to entry if sits into those countries or to
new these entries. Some of it was a partial bar
(24:55):
to immigrant visas, not to not to non immigrant visas.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
Right.
Speaker 4 (24:59):
They have now expanded this to twenty more countries. So
totally banned now from getting new visas to enter the
USA a citizens of Burkina, Faso, Mahlei, Nicheere, South Sudan,
and Syria, as well as a Palestinian authority. The Syria
one is particularly wild because I'll share it justice to
the White House. There are like individual case by case exceptions.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
Right. It's not that they wouldn't block al Shara, I'm sure,
but like.
Speaker 4 (25:26):
It's interesting to look at the justifications that they use here.
What they are basically saying, I'll just read a couple
of them here to give you an example, right quote.
At least one country lacks mechanisms in hospitals to ensure
bursts are reported, and widespread corruption, combined with a general
lack of vecking and poor record keeping, result in any
non citizen being able to obtain any civil document from
(25:47):
that country, particularly if that person is willing to pay
a fee or engage an individual that specializes in assisting
in such fraud. They go on to basically document failures
in government bureaucracy that they talk about corruption.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
Right. They talk about places where birthy forgets are just
written by hand. They talk about places where the government
does not control all.
Speaker 4 (26:09):
The territory prevalence of crime, places which offer citizenship by
investment without physical residents. They also talk about some of
these countries not being willing to accept their nationals to
the US deports and again visa overstair rates, right, which
is what they spoke about last time. What is getting
less reporting, or at least was this morning when I looked,
(26:32):
was that they have removed exemptions which existed for the
previous nineteen These include family member visas right, So that
means that, for instance, someone who could themselves become a
permanent resident or even a citizen, now cannot bring a
family member, say a spouse, a sibling, etc. Across, even
(26:52):
though those people were people sly vetted. And it appears
some there is certain categories of SIVA exempt, but I
believe not all SIVs, so that's especially immigrant visa right.
The vast bulk of SIVs will be Afghan people who
worked with the US military in Afghanistan. The nineteen countries
(27:13):
who are now partially restricted are I'm just going to
read them of Angola, Antigram, Barbuda, Benin, Kuttivois, Dominica, Gabon,
the Gambia, Malawi, Mauritanian, Nigeria, senegauld Tanzania, Tonga, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
For some reason, the first five of these are underlined
on the White House website. I don't know if some
(27:35):
were copied and pisted them across with hyperlinks like.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (27:39):
I'm unable to work out why that they're not hyperlinked
in the document, but there doesn't seem to be any
explanation like this. There's no special set of sanctions for those,
and they're just in alphabetical order. They actually reduced restrictions
on Turkmenistan because quote suspension of entry into the United
States of Nationals of Turkmenistan as non immigrants B one,
(28:00):
B two, FM, and JVSS is lifted because some concerns remain.
The entry into the United States of nationals to Turkmenistan
as immigrants remain suspended. The last element of this that
I want to cover is that it would appear to
stop international adoptions from the listed countries, like all of
those thirty nine listed countries, which is wild and like
(28:24):
particularly unfortunate because I know, like people who who adopt
children from outside the United States, like that is a
process that takes years, and I can imagine it being
horrifically traumatic.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
To have it suddenly cut off like this. But consciously, unconsciously,
that is what this.
Speaker 4 (28:41):
UH executive action appears to do, So that is not great.
It seems that the United States is using this as
a kind of cudgel right to encourage those countries to
It's kind of a quid pro quote they get what
they want they got from Turkmenistan apparently then that they
will remove some of those restrictions. Otherwise they will continue them. So, yeah,
(29:03):
that's not great. So Judge Hannah Dougan's trial began this week.
Do you can if you're not familiar. She's not the judge
in New Mexico who was accused of providing firearms to
somebody who was not a permanent resident or citizen. She
is a judge who is accused of allowing a migrant
man named mister Flores Luise to leave her court room
(29:23):
from a door that is not the usual door. That
door led to a private corridor. In that private corridor,
there was one exit to a public area and also
a door to a fire escape. Mister Flora's ruiz took
the exit to the public area. He then took a
lift down I think to the ground floor with an
(29:45):
ICE officer. He then attempted to run away when Ice
officers attempted to detain him when he left the lift,
he was caught and detained. So we learned quite a
lot in this and it's just been interesting to follow.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
Right.
Speaker 4 (30:00):
First of all, we see that several of the people
who were taking part in the apprehension were reassigned FBI agents.
This is increasingly common, right, like all branches of the
federal law enforcement have had some of their capacity redirected
to doing this, right, to doing like this. This guy
(30:21):
I believe had misdemeanors the agents for using signal to communicate.
They had a group chat called frozen water. Obviously Jesus Christ. Yeah,
really funny. The FBI agent conceded in crust examination that's
not a NAP approved by the FBI, but according to
one the DHS apparently does approve it, according to a
(30:44):
CBP agent who has crossed damon there, which obviously creates
an issue for the retention of records right because signal,
if you're not familiar, auto deletes things after a period
of time that users can configure. It also appears that
when one of these DHS agents and to the courthouse,
court security officers told him that he needed an escort,
(31:05):
but then he appears.
Speaker 1 (31:06):
To have proceeded without worn. In a text of colleagues,
as DHS employees said, quote, this is gonna be a
pain in the dick. H So that's that. Yeah, what happens,
it seems like is Judge Dougan sent them to the
Chief Judge because it didn't have a judicial warrant. It's
had an administrative warrant.
Speaker 4 (31:26):
Right, another judge testified against Judge Dugan, a judge called
Judge Severa. So Judge Severa was with Judge Dugan when
they confronted the agents. Judge Jugan wore her judicial robes
when confronting them, which apparently is not usual. It's not
usual to wear them out.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
Of the courtroom, and Judge Severa seemed to disapprove of that,
and then she said, quote, Judge Dugan could quote have
been more diplomatic, and then she said, quote judges shouldn't
be helping defendants evade arrest. At the same time, Judge
Dugan's defense lawyer asked her if she had warned her
(32:05):
sister of the ice presence, which she had, and it
appears to her sister had a hearing at the courthouse
the next day, which Judge Severa said she was not
aware of. So there's like a lot still to be
unpacked here, right, this is just the first day. This
could go on past Christmas and into the new year,
and it probably will. But there's been some pretty good
(32:26):
reporting on this from a substack called all Rise Media,
and I will keep checking in on this and we'll
report it on it again after the New Year.
Speaker 6 (32:38):
Hello, this is Garrison Davis reporting from Tokyo. Unfortunately, I
was unable to attend the regular Executive Disorder Group recording
due to being halfway around the globe, so I'm recording
my section solo. This past week saw two devastating mass
shootings back to back. On Saturday afternoon, a masks sho
(33:00):
entered an economics class at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island,
and opened fire with a concealed handgun, killing two people
injuring nine others, all students. About thirty minutes after the
shooting started, the university police announced a suspect was in custody.
Twenty minutes later, they retracted that statement. Then university police
(33:23):
reported shots fired in another section of campus, which they
also later retracted. President Trump posted on truth Social quote,
I've been briefed on the shooting that took place at
Brown University in Rhode Island. The FBI is on the scene,
the suspect is in custody. God bless the victims and
the families of the victims. Quote. This too was untrue,
(33:46):
as the university released a statement about an hour later
clarifying that the shooter was not in custody and that
over four hundred officers were on the scene to assist
in the investigation. The next morning, Providence Mayor Brett Smiley
announced that a new person of interest was detained. The
Providence Police chief told NBC that they were confident that
(34:07):
the suspect was the shooter. Major news outlets later named
this individual, though later that evening this quote unquote person
of interest was released, with the Rhode Island Attorney General
saying that the evidence quote now points in a different
direction quote. The shooter currently remains unidentified and at large.
(34:30):
On Sunday night in Sydney, Australia, a father and son,
Sajid and Navid Akram, coordinated a targeted attack against Jewish
people attending a Hanukkah event on Bondi Beach. Fifteen people
were killed in the shooting. Victims include a ten year
old girl and a Holocaust survivor. Twenty four victims remain hospitalized.
(34:53):
A bystander named Ahmed al Ahmed, a son of Syrian refugees,
charged one of the gunman and wrestled his gun away.
Ahmed was later shot multiple times, but survived and has
been labeled a hero by the Australian Prime Minister. Police
say that a vehicle used by the gunman contained homemade
(35:14):
Islamic state flags and improvised explosive devices. The men were
not part of an official terror cell, though the Prime
Minister says that they were motivated by Islamic state extremist ideology.
Counter Terrorism officials believed the shooters received quote unquote military
style training in the Philippines a month before the attack.
On Tuesday, self styled online investigators in right wing social
(35:39):
media content Mills falsely identified the Brown University shooter as
an LGBTQ Palestinian studying at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies,
citing gate analysis based on surveillance footage of the unidentified
suspect released by police. The university removed this queer Palestinian
student's online profile file in an effort to prevent doxing,
(36:02):
though this itself was used by the online smerror campaign
as evidence of guilt. Brown University later published this statement
quote in the aftermath of the shooting, We've seen a
harmful doxing activity directed towards at least one member of
the Brown University community. It's important to make clear that
targeting individuals could do a revocable harm. Accusations, speculation, and
(36:23):
conspiracies were seeing on social media and in some news
reports are irresponsible, harmful, and in some cases dangerous for
the safety of individuals in our community. It is not
unusual as a safety measure to take steps to protect
an individual's safety when this kind of activity happens, including
in regard to their online presence. As law enforcement officials
(36:44):
stated clearly on Tuesday afternoon, if this individual's name had
any relevance to the current investigation, they would be actively
looking for this individual and providing information publicly. On a
final note, after the holiday break, we will be reporting
on the indictment against four alleged members of the Turtle
(37:06):
Island Liberation Front in California regarding a New Year's Eve
bombing plot.
Speaker 1 (37:23):
We're back and we have some news that's going to
be really sad for everybody here and it could happen
here and just all of you listening, which is friend
of the pod. Dan Bongino is stepping down from his
work as Deputy director of the FBI. I think it's
been a nice vacation for him, but you know, American
needs him in his much more important role. Whatever podcast
(37:48):
he was doing before he got brought in to the
deputy director of the FBI. You know, look, if he
was podcasting right now, they would have caught the mass
shooter at Brown.
Speaker 2 (37:58):
I think we can all agree.
Speaker 1 (37:59):
On that he to putcosting his way through it. Either
that or just him not being at the FBI would
have made the do their job.
Speaker 3 (38:09):
Look what we're learning from this is that you can
never escape the podcasting minds. No matter where else you
try to go, they will drag you back down.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
Oh look, if you make me director of the FBI,
I promise to stop podcasting and start being the most
corrupt director of the FBI we've ever had.
Speaker 3 (38:25):
That's a tough challenge.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
I know, I'm I think, I'm I'm in a task
prepared to work at it.
Speaker 2 (38:34):
Yeah. So, yeah, that's cool.
Speaker 1 (38:37):
I wanted to talk a little bit about an executive
order that our beloved President put out very recently. Some
of you may be aware of this, but on December eleventh,
twenty I mean this year, twenty twenty five, Trump released
yet another executive order, this one titled Ensuring a National
Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence, and basically, in this and
(39:00):
Trump stated that like, the reason he's doing this is
because it's absolutely critical to the US's future that we
be at the top of the game when it comes
to AI, that we be global leaders in this burgeoning
new field. He states in the EO, these efforts have
already delivered tremendous benefits to the American people and led
to trillions of dollars of investments across the country. Certainly haven't,
(39:21):
but we were made in the earliest days of the
technological revolution and in a race with adversaries for supremacy
within it. Trump stated in an interview that he expects
AI to be fifty to sixty percent of the US
economy in the near future, which is nuts.
Speaker 4 (39:34):
Maybe that's just because everything else will just go to
complete shit.
Speaker 1 (39:37):
You know. The reality is that like AI is not
even close to being that value in terms of like
what the economy produces, but nearly all of our growth
is related and like it is tied right now to
data center investments. So Trump absolutely needs AI because without
it the country is very obviously in a recession. Like
this is the only thing propping up the image of
(39:59):
the as not being in the shitter. Now, what does
this EO actually do well. The goal of this the
statement is that it is the policy of the United
States to sustain and enhance the United States is global
AI dominance through a minimally burden some national policy framework
for AI. This EO will establish an AI Litigation Task Force.
Within thirty days of this order going out, the Attorney
(40:20):
General is supposed to establish this task force whose responsibility
is to challenge state AI laws that are inconsistent with
the policy set forward above. Right that we need to
be globally dominant in AI. Right, So this task force
is supposed to go out and find state laws that
it believes are like an onerous burden on the development
of this technology. Going along with this, within ninety days
(40:42):
of the order, the Secretary of Commerce is supposed to
do an evaluation of all state AI laws in order
to point out which ones this task force should go after.
And then the stick that this EO establishes is that
if this task force decides that like a state AI
EYE law is in violation of our need to be
dominant in AI, we can restrict state funding to things
(41:06):
like the broadband Equity Access and Deployment program. Right. Basically,
they'll cut off federal funding for like broadband access, in
order to punish states that try to restrict or in
any way shape or form, govern what people can use
what companies can use AI for. And the primary thing
this is all about, I know, we all think about
(41:26):
the stuff that like most people have more direct experience with,
which is like all the slop flooding the Internet, the
disinformation that's continuing to cook the brains of a lot
of our peers and elders, and just the fact that
like it's making certain industries full of hardworking people a
lot harder to exist because companies are just trying to
replace quality work with absolute like slop trash. Yeah, but really,
(41:50):
what this is about, and the primary focus of most
of these state level laws regulating AI is the housing market.
Speaker 2 (41:57):
Right.
Speaker 1 (41:58):
There's a good article in Politico about this, written by
Cassandra Dumay, but she notes that per a National Conference
of State Legislatures analysis in July, there were more than
forty pending bills across the United States related to just
AI in the housing sector, and most of these bills
are attempting to stop landlords from using different AI programs
(42:19):
to coordinate pricing. Basically, there are a couple of different programs,
the most prominent, which is called Real Page, And what
they do is landlords join these programs and they share
information on like what their different properties cost, and then
the AI knows what everybody is charging and can suggest
(42:40):
that they charge higher prices right now. The way that
this is supposed to work is that you, as a landlord,
look out at what's publicly available about the prices of
your competitors and look at like what your customers are
currently willing to bear, and then try to set your
prices and future price increases based on that. What Real
Page is doing is a legal collusion, right, This is
(43:03):
price fixing. It's just the AI is doing the actual
active price fixing. The landlords are just sharing their data
and paying a fee to the service. And so a
bunch of states have tried to stop this because this
objectively makes the housing crisis worse. I know, there's some
annoying assholes who come out and be like, you shouldn't
talk about anything but in increasing the supply of housing,
and like that's that's idiot shit, Yes, we need to
(43:25):
increase the supply of housing. This objectively hurts people. These
programs subjectively increase the price of print, they do damage.
We should be mitigating or making it impossible for businesses
like this to exist. Anyone who disagrees is just being
a dummy. New York passed law in October that banned
the use of AI algorithms to allow landlords to do
price fixing. There's a similar bill in the Massachusetts legislation's
(43:49):
making its way forward right now. And this is fundamentally
what a lot of the opposition to like state level
AI regulation is about is that the landlord ward's basically uh,
think that this is a great way to make a
shitload of money, and tech companies like and we can continue.
We got to make a shitload of money selling them
the tools to do this, and states are trying to
(44:11):
push back on this, and like, that's fundamentally what a
lot of the impetus buying this executive order is is
an attempt to stop people from making this even more harmful.
There is some like in this that political article they
quote from Kevin Donnelly, who's the executive director of the
Real Estate Technology and Transformation Center, and he talks about like, well, actually,
(44:33):
we're currently using AI to identify buildable lots and promote
sustainable constructions so that we can actually like reduce some
of the cost of housing. And all of these bills,
could you know, undermine our ability to impure people's Like yeah,
it's just fucking go like literally jump off a bridge, man,
Fuck you. Yeah, no, we know that's not how it works.
We have data on this, Yo, this isn't theoretical.
Speaker 2 (44:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (44:57):
Yeah, anytime a landlord, anytime a landlord says anything or
to real estate developer that says anything that suggests the
thing they want to do is lower rent they are lying.
You can tell because they don't fucking lower rents unless
like a global pandemic happens.
Speaker 1 (45:13):
Yeah, like that's a honey of this works. And this
has been controversial. Trump, before putting out the EO, tried
to encourage the passage of a bill through Congress that
would have done the same thing as the EO right,
and would have actually had like more force of law
behind it, basically making it illegal for states to have
their own laws regulating AI. That didn't pass because even
(45:36):
Republicans don't really like that idea. For one thing, states'
rights is still supposed to be a pretty big.
Speaker 2 (45:42):
Part of the party.
Speaker 1 (45:44):
But for another thing, there's like a lot of things
that conservatives are really unhappy with in terms of AI.
For example, it keeps exposing children to pornography and other
things that kids shouldn't be exposed to. For another thing,
there's a lot of American jobs that are going to
be lost as a result of or potentially could be
lost as a result of the AI slop automation of
(46:05):
a bunch of industries. And so there's even a significant
amount of resistance among Republicans this, which is why the
bill didn't pass, right, and Trump when he announced this
EO basically sat down with like a chunk of the
conservatives who are more critical of this, and I think
basically bullied them into getting on board and saying no,
he promised us this won't restrict state levels to like
(46:28):
improve safety for children. Right, there's absolutely like no guarantee
of that, Like you just have David Sacks, it was
Trump's top AI advisor saying no, no, none of this
is about trying to stop state laws to make kids savor.
It's just trying to stop state laws that will make
rent less expensive. Yeah, there's Marjorie Taylor Green's come out
against this. She's basically said that you know this is
(46:50):
a violation of states, right, it's bullshit. Steve Bannon is
in the same place he had a good quote I
found in an article by The Hill. After two humiliating
face plants on a must pass legis now we attempt
an entirely unenforceable EO tech bros doing upmost to turn
potus megabase away from him while they line their pockets,
which is essentially accurate. Yeah, he's wrong, wrong about that.
(47:14):
So all this is like pretty annoying and fucked up.
We'll see what actually becomes of this. I tend to
agree with Bannon that it's pretty much unenforceable. Like the lawsuit,
the court battles that will come from this is just
going to be expensive and time consuming. But I actually
don't think this is going to work the way they want.
This is this is Trump making it very clear that
(47:35):
he has bought and paid for by the tech s
end that he understands that he is hanging on by
a thread in terms of popularity. One of the only
things stopping it from getting stopping the situation from getting
worse is that AI spending on data centers and ship
is propping up the image of the economy, Right, that's
what this is all about.
Speaker 3 (47:52):
Yeah, and this and this is something where he can
simultaneously shore shore up is tech based and shore up
his landlord base, yeah, which.
Speaker 1 (47:59):
Are like, yeah, it's great, two kinds of guys to
like Donald Trump. Yeah, I guess there's an end here
where I could. I wanted to make a note about
something also related to AI, which is that there's an
incredibly stupid article in Vox that came out this week.
In that case, like literally the title is like, America,
you've made it very clear that you hate AI, But
(48:21):
what if it's the only way to restart the idea machine?
Speaker 5 (48:24):
Right?
Speaker 1 (48:25):
Yeah, and this this dipshit Colonnist's argument is that like, well,
we're not running out of ideas and AI, like human
beings can't come up with ideas enough to create growth
at the level that the economy needs to be growing
and in order to take humanity into the future, really,
AI is the only way to generate more new ideas.
(48:47):
And I wanted to look at, like what is this
based off of? And I think I figured out what
like the fundamental source of all of this shit is,
which is back in twenty seventeen, there was a research
which paper put out by the National Bureau of Economic
Research by Nicholas Bloom, Charles Jones, John Van Reenan, and
Michael Webb. The kind of summary of that article reads
(49:10):
as follows. In many growth models, economic growth arises from
people creating ideas, and then the long run growth rate
is the product of two terms, the effective number of
researchers and their research productivity. We present a wide range
of evidence for various industries, products, and firms showing that
research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply. Right,
So basically, we're we have more people doing research, and
we're spending more money on research, but that research is
(49:33):
translating into economic gains at a lower level than ever before,
right to the point where we're not going to be
able to continue to make economic gains like we used
to be unless something changes. And if you're kind of
paying attention to this, you might notice that that study,
which is the underpinning of that Vox article and all
of these claims that we need AI for ideas, really
(49:53):
is not actually making an argument that people aren't having
more ideas. It's making an argument that it is harder
to profit from ideas than it used to be right now.
That is fundamentally different from people not having ideas for
one thing, it's reducing an idea to something that delivers
a return for venture capitalists. Yeah right, that's all an
(50:14):
idea is in. This is something that makes money, and
a lot of great ideas like the post office don't
generate a direct profit. And obviously it's a net benefit
to the economy that we have a post office, but
the post office runs at a loss, right, which is
why you have state funding for certain things, because they're
just not going to be the kind of ideas that
like a bunch of Silicon Valley investors want to throw
(50:36):
money into.
Speaker 2 (50:37):
Right now.
Speaker 1 (50:38):
The other part of the issue here is just a
very practical one, which is that a lot of the ideas,
the great ideas last century that were like most correlated
with massive gains and productivity, stuff like the introduction of
vaccines on a wide scale, indoor plumbing and electricity on
a wide scale phones. There's not ideas like that that
(50:59):
are like that big and that much of a game
changer left, right, the low hanging fruits, it's the low
hanging fruit has been picked. There's not another the telephone
waiting out there. We already did that. It was the smartphone.
There's not another indoor plumbing, right, There's not something that's
going to be as much of a sea change for
the economy and for the quality of human life as
(51:20):
those ideas, because those were really big things.
Speaker 3 (51:24):
Yeah, Like like maybe maybe you could put us something
like actually cleaning the air that we breathe.
Speaker 1 (51:28):
Yes, like, but again that's not profitable in a direct way, no, right,
like you, Yeah, that's an idea that would have a
change that big, but there's not a profit incentive for.
Speaker 2 (51:38):
It, right.
Speaker 1 (51:38):
We privatize the air, rob it right, Yeah, breathing fucking air. Yeah,
and there's a lot I again, I find this, this
whole discussion pattern, Like it's an example of the fact
that like, people like this fucking box article who I
don't feel like deserves to be named to this, have
been using CHATGBT so much that they're no longer thinking.
They're not really sentient in a meaning full way, right,
(52:01):
Like when you write something like that, it's because your
brain has been completely fucking cooked. I did find a
good article, ironically, from twenty seventeen from Vox EU that
is titled ideas aren't running out that they are getting
more expensive to find, which is making a lot of
the claims that like I've made, which is that, or
that I've been bringing up so far in this which
is that it's not that there's a lack of ideas,
(52:23):
that it costs more money to do stuff like that
now like the costs because everything's so much more complex.
Idea the big ideas we're looking at, artist simple is
indoor plumbing. They require a lot more computing power, they
require a lot more people working on them. Right, Like
we've plucked the low hanging fruit, and it ends with
a paragraph I find kind of valuable here, returning to
(52:44):
the oil metaphor, we are digging deeper into a trickier
part of the rock.
Speaker 2 (52:47):
Of course, we could be.
Speaker 1 (52:48):
Wrong, and humanity may have just been shipping away to a
particularly hard point that will soon give way, creating decades
of cheap ideas. This is the hope of those who
emphasize the revolutionary power of artificial intelligence and the singularity
and accumulation of technology that triggers runaway growth at some
point in the future. Although we all enjoy science fiction,
history books are usually a safer guide to the future.
In this case, history suggests that large increases in research
(53:09):
effort are need to offset its declining productivity. And again,
if you want to have the big ideas and the
Star Trek future that all of these billionaires like Elon
Musk pretend they want, what you actually have to do
is be willing to put a lot of money into
research and development without any promise of a profit. Your
motivation can't be well, now we have to get a
two hundred percent rate of return in our investments. Right,
(53:32):
it has to be well, this would improve people's lives
and make life more sustainable, right, like finding solutions to
a lot of problems with climate and cleaning the air,
Like dealing with lack of access to clean water, lack
of access to basic basic medical care. These are not
things where doing them means that your company gets an
immediate profit and evaluation in the tens of billions of dollars.
Speaker 2 (53:53):
Right.
Speaker 1 (53:53):
That's just not the way providing life saving aid to
people works. But the net value to the global economy
would be massive if, for example, kids weren't going without
food and access to clean water and had better access
to education, and thus we're able to go into fields
where they become researchers and generate ideas that eventually turn
(54:16):
into profit. Right, Like, these AI fucks aren't talking about ideas,
They're talking about cracking the human mind, right, That's what
they want to do. It's a good way to put it.
Speaker 3 (54:25):
Yeah, yeah, I think that there's another thing we're saying
here too. On there's a different, greater argument about this
where he makes an argument that I think is also
very compelling that part of the decline in the rate
of technological change has been the extent to which everyone
who was trying to do this stuff is just increasingly
dealing with more and more layers of bureaucracy instead of
(54:47):
actually doing the thing they're trying to do. And then,
you know, this is a huge problem in academia where
it's like, okay, so you have you know, you're teaching
in academia, but you're also spending like a quarter of
your time trying to get another job. You're spending another
quarter of your time dealing with all of the unhinged
whatever like accounting bullshit that your fucking supervisors have like
(55:08):
or like like university management has like put upon you.
And this is and this is something that's also true
for government researchers, where there's just like this, you know,
there's been this incredible increase in sort of the amount
of bureaucracy they have to jomp through it like largely
because of the right and because of all of the
like weird shit they do, where like they hate government fundings.
They're like, ah, everyone has to like justify their funding
literally every ten seconds. And I think I think, like
(55:30):
that's that's one of the other angles of this, and
it's something that's only gonna get worse because this administration
is just fucking annihilating the entire basis of American science.
Speaker 1 (55:37):
Yeah, there's killing it.
Speaker 3 (55:39):
The damage that they've done to the pipeline of people
that would produce these researchers right with with ways that
a suddenly like American science post docs just there's no
money for it. There's no money for grad students. They're
killing all of the pathways that would do this, and
then they're going, oh, the only solution is the fucking
tech boondoggle we've created to the problems that we created.
(56:00):
I just annihilating the capacity to do science.
Speaker 2 (56:03):
Mm hmm. It sucks.
Speaker 3 (56:04):
I hate them.
Speaker 1 (56:06):
If you want to email us. You can do so.
Speaker 4 (56:08):
It is cool Zone tips at proton dot me. If
you want it to be encrypted, you should use a
proton mataddress as well.
Speaker 1 (56:14):
They're free. All right, guys, I think that's that's the
podcast listeners, haters, lovers.
Speaker 6 (56:23):
It's our lasted of the year.
Speaker 1 (56:26):
It's our last da the year. Well, I don't know,
we'll see if those pills come in, but yeah.
Speaker 6 (56:31):
But I hate you.
Speaker 5 (56:34):
Happy holidays, everybody, put a trans girl on your couch.
Speaker 6 (56:39):
Put a trans girl on your couch, love it?
Speaker 1 (56:42):
Or a bed I mean yeah, yeah, mattress one of
those like chairs that leans back to where it's like
basically flat. Yeah, not a lazy instance, sure, a lot
of options in neutral lazy to Yeah.
Speaker 2 (56:58):
An inflatable mattress, why not? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (57:00):
When yeah? To bed a water bedded strong enough because
they are heavy. Yeah, generally you're not allowed to have them.
Speaker 5 (57:09):
But yes, anyways, we reported the news.
Speaker 1 (57:14):
Arguably, we reported the news.
Speaker 5 (57:24):
It could happen. Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
now find sources where it could happen here listened directly
in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
Also media. All right, I'm doing the intro.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
What are crackers and crack ats?
Speaker 1 (00:11):
Is that good? Perfect?
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Can we say that? I think?
Speaker 1 (00:14):
So?
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Okay, do you have.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
A non binary cracks crack thems? I think.
Speaker 3 (00:18):
I think I'm definitionly not a cracker.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
I just wanted to use the word crack ats. Yeah,
I understand it's not appropriate.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
That's reasonable.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Welcome to ed.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Yeah, we should just we should old. Sorry, James, So
let's just keep doing it.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Do the intro.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
This is it could happen.
Speaker 4 (00:41):
Here Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what is happening
in the White House, the crumbling of our world, and
what this means to you. I am James Stout and
I'm joined today by Robert Evans and Mia Wong and Sophie.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Sophie is also here.
Speaker 4 (00:57):
And this episode we are covering the week of December
eleventh to December seventeenth, a week before the week that
is Christmas.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
That's right, baby. So I hope you've done your shopping.
I hope you've got me a gift. Because I pay
attention to which of our listeners do and do not
buy me presents? Yeah, so do I you will never
find me and you shouldn't try.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
That's right.
Speaker 5 (01:22):
And it's currently Honkkah, happy honkah.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
Happy hony, right, yes, oh yeah, happy honekah. All the
holidays have a yeah, quasi Kwanza, have a solemn, dignified tet.
All the holidays have a good one of them.
Speaker 5 (01:36):
Happy Winter Solstice, which is.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
Happy Solstice more unhappy Solstice. It's kind of a bittersweet holiday. Yeah,
super Saturnalia. You know, it's a good one. So holidays
are nice, but we're going to talk about some things
that are less nice today. The government, Yes, the government,
(01:58):
and specific parts of the Let's start with some headlines.
Garthamis has obtained information about ICE being able to enter
private parts of New York City shelters without a judicial
warrant or being able to obtain private information about residents,
despite both of these, in theory being prohibited by sanctuary
city laws in New York. Right, thiss happened at least
(02:19):
five times.
Speaker 4 (02:20):
The way Gothamis found this is by making a public
records request for incident reports, which is a clever use
of public record law nice one. The city has already
aware of both jail and police officers violating these laws,
and I think this is a good example of how
people think of sanctuary city laws as inassailable, but in fact,
(02:43):
sanctuary laws be the city, state, whatever jurisdiction, are very
often violated, and it's good to see that being reported
on more. Last week, we talked about Faustino Pablo Pablo, right,
the guy who had been sent to Guatemala despite the
fact that he had protections under the Convention against Torture
for being returned there. The government has returned him to
the US, which is good.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
That is a rare, good immigration story. It did really
bum me out to see that, Like, there were dozens
of articles on him being sent there, right, and I
couldn't find anything any reporting on him being returned, which
is kind of like, we should be happy for these people.
We should.
Speaker 4 (03:22):
Yeah, we don't get many wins and we should take them.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Yeah, we should be happy that this guy is not
being likely to be tortured.
Speaker 4 (03:29):
At least it is still possible for them to remove
him to a third country, right, that is not outside
the realm of possibility. But right now he's not in
a place where a gidge A judicated he was likely
to be tortured, and that is good.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
Good. And Trump has designated fentanel as a weapon of
mass destruction, which is great. What are we doing here?
Speaker 6 (03:51):
Like, I.
Speaker 4 (03:55):
Am trained as a historian, and I probably should remind
you that we have been down this road before with
the weapons of mass destruction, and I hope this is
not leading where it did last time, but I am
very worried that it might.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
Yeah. Yeah, it's one of those things. I'm both We'll see,
we'll know before this episode ends whether or not I'm wrong.
Tucker Carlson stated recently that a source has told him
the presidential announcement coming up is Trump declaring war, right that, like,
we're doing a war with Venezuela full on, not just
some like air strikes and stuff, just not to minimize
(04:34):
a legal air strike in the sea or on Venezuela
or soil. I don't know if I think that that's
the likeliest thing. It just seems like such a huge jump.
But also at this point there's a whole armada blocking
off Venezuela from the rest of the world. And Trump
put out a statement saying that their oil is our
(04:55):
oil and belongs rightly to American companies. So very very
very possible when we're about to go to war with them.
I'm certainly not a I don't know what's gonna happen, y'all.
I'm white knuckling it like everybody else. Yeah, that fucking sucks.
I didn't know the thing about that oil.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
It's amazing.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
I'll read the exact quote to you, James. This is
from a trump a Truth social post which has twelve
point four thousand retruths and forty seven thousand likes. Venezuela
is completely surrounded by the largest armada ever assembled in
the history of South America. It will only get bigger,
and the shock to then will be like nothing they
have ever seen before until such time as they returned
to the United States of America all of the oil, land,
(05:33):
and other assets that they previously stole from US. The
illegitimate Maduro regime is using oil from these stolen oil
fields to finance themselves, drug terrorism, human trafficking, murder and kidnapping.
For the theft of our assets and many other reasons
including terrorism, drug smuggling, and human trafficking, the Venezuelan regime
has been designated a foreign terrorist organization. Therefore, today I'm
ordering a total and complete blockade of all sanctioned oil
(05:55):
tankers going into and out of Venezuela. The illegal aliens
and criminals that the Madeira regime has sent the United
States during the weekend and Biden administration are being returned
to Venezuela at a rapid pace. YadA, YadA, YadA. Yeah,
all of our oil, land and other assets have to
be returned to the United States, which, like he's talking
about oil that American companies have had at points like
contracts to exploit. Yeah, but he's phrasing it is like
(06:18):
their land and oil is our land and oil.
Speaker 4 (06:20):
Which yeah, that's a very colonial way of phrasing like
a contract.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
Again.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
A lot of times, you know, I would be like, Okay, well,
I don't know if war is the most reasonable thing
to expect. When the president's posting shit like that, it's
very reasonable to be like, I think we might go
to war. I think he might be about to invade Venezuela.
I don't know what's going to happen, but it's you're
no longer being like a kooky conspiracy theorist to be like, well,
(06:47):
maybe he's about to try to take over Venezuela, and
maybe that is what's coming.
Speaker 4 (06:51):
Yeah, I don't understand how in that instance they would
continue to get Venezuela to accept people. It's the US
is removing the sticking points that I see.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
Maybe he's found a third country, right that they've they've
been very fond of finding third countries. I guess I
should explain a little bit about oil leaving Venezuela, just
so like people are aware of that.
Speaker 4 (07:16):
So like Robert read the truth something someone says in church,
doesn't it? Yeah, yeah, here we are. So they're talking
about like blockading sanctioned oil tankers. Not necessarily every tanker
that enters Venezuela is sanctioned, Like I believe Chevron has
some contracts with Chevron.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
Tankers should be cruising.
Speaker 3 (07:35):
Yeah, there's a lot of chevroll.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
Yeah, that shouldn't be an issue, right, they should be
able to go back and forth. They're not sanctioned.
Speaker 4 (07:41):
It's the Venezuelan State Oil Company, which in English, I
guess you would say pdvsavasavasay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, what Venezuela
has done previously, And this is not by any means
unique to Venezuela, but this is generally how many of
these regimes that are kind kind of in the ambit
of Venezuela. I'm talking about Iran and Russia here have
(08:04):
avoided sanctions and sanctioned entities so far as by using
what are called ghost ships.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
I will link to an explainer on this.
Speaker 4 (08:13):
What they will do is use the names and identify
as the vessels that have been scrapped. They will change
the flags of vessels, often to these small island nations,
for whom allowing ships to use their flag as kind
of a source of income. Right, And they will often
use these to go out into international waters and then
(08:34):
offload cargo, in this case oil.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
Right.
Speaker 4 (08:37):
So it just happens pretty frequently with Venezuelan vessels. That
was one it was one such vessel called the Skipper
that the US Coast Guard boarded I think last week
as we're recording this. Yeah, sure, that is how Venezuela
has previously been evading these sanctions, right, And Iran does
this too.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
Russia does this too.
Speaker 4 (08:56):
They also do things like spoof their location or turn
off their They have like a locate to beacon the
ship they're supposed to use a transponder. Yeah, yeah, so
this is fairly common practice. But Obviously, the way to
stop that is a physical blockade, right, Like, that's not
going to be possible if these if the US is
effectively like inspecting ships leaving Venezuela, right or sort of
(09:18):
keeping a very close eye on them, So that will end,
and with that will end a very important source of
income for the Maduta regime if they keep doing this.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
Now, obviously one of the sort of issues we're trying
to work out what is going to happen here, especially
before whatever speech Trump is about to give, is that
we're trying to figure out state policy from Trump posting. Right, Yeah,
and there's a lot of this that is enormously incoherent.
So Okay, the thing about designating the government of Venezuela
as a foreign terrorist organization is one of the weirdest
(09:50):
things I've ever seen. And this was also unhinged. The
closest thing we've ever really gotten to that, I guess
was the IERGC. Yeah, and maybe you could go back
and say the Khmer Rouge, but like, they weren't really
a government by that point, so this is not This
is not a designation that has ever been given to
(10:11):
a government before. Right, it doesn't make any sense to
give it to a government. It doesn't make sense to
give to this government. I mean, you know, even if
you're working with in the logic of counter terrorism, which
is just you know, unhinged, murderous imperialism to begin with.
But all of the reporting on this has been assuming
that the blockade will be of you know, like of
these specifically sanctioned oil tankers. However, come The thing about
(10:36):
the Foreign Terrorist Organization designation is that it does things.
And one of the things that that Foreign Terrorist Organization
designation does is that if you do business with a
with a foreign terrorist organization, you are now immediately on
the line from material support of terrorism charges like chef run. So, yes,
there are lots of countries like Facebook.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
Does this fine with the US military carrying out air
strikes on Chevron executives and their property, Let's be clear
about that. I would I would salute the red, white,
and Blue if we dropped some hell fires on that
C suite.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
Yeah. I don't know.
Speaker 3 (11:15):
This is all very weird. My understanding of the FTO
designation process is that, well, how it's supposed to work
is that the President proposes it and then the Secretary
of State and Sectuary of the Treasurer, I think have
to improve it, and then there's a seven day period
where Congress has it an opportunity to say no, and
then it goes up. So right now we should be
(11:37):
theoretically in the seven day window, but it's also really
unclear what the illustration has actually been doing because again
we're being governed by post.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (11:47):
Like it's so it's not announced as an executive action
on White House dot gov, and I think normally it
goes there and then the seven day congressional period commences.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
Then it's not in the federal right to either. Right now,
all we have is a truth.
Speaker 3 (12:04):
So like, yeah, and like and this is this is
the problem is that this is this is sort of
the Calvin Ball War in that they're using they're using
the names of actual legal categories and things that have
material effects in the world, but they're just posts. And
I want to be very clear about this. Even just
doing a blockade on these sanctioned vessels is an active war. Yeah,
(12:26):
like that that's an that's very deliberately an active war.
It is an active imperial aggression. It is morally wrong.
It is also unbelievably illegal under the War Powers Act.
And this this is this has actually gotten a response
from Democrats in Congress. There's been a few measures. CBS
is reporting this has been if there's been a few
measures to stop the president from starting a war. Here,
(12:49):
I'm going to quote CBS. A second measure from Democratic Rep.
Jim mcgovernor in Massachusetts would remove the armed forces quote
from hostilities with or against Venezuela that have not been
authorized by Congress. McGovern's resolution could face the best chance
of potential adoption since it has three gop CO sponsors.
Rep's Marjory Taylor Green of Georgia, Thomas Massey of Kentucky,
(13:12):
and Don Bacon of Nebraska. Bacon says he would also
vote and f he or Meeks his measure. Bacon's taking
a very weird line here of Keen's congressional approval, and
also I support him doing this.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
So purely a procedural objection.
Speaker 3 (13:26):
Yeah, it's a I want my board, but I want
Congress to have a little shred of power.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
So I think it's alcial work. Noting what exactly is
going on here. I'm someone who's on the record as
talking about how political economy in Latin America and American
imperialism is usually slightly more complicated than they just want
to resource, but they just want a resource here.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
Yeah, this one, this one really is yeah.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
No, like so it's only like like like Bolivia, for example,
every everyone thinks that that that the whole coup Oblivia
was about lithium and it yes, I'm very mad about this,
it was not. If you look at the people of
you look at Camato, if you look at people who
were actually running that coup, they were all Bolivian agrobarons.
Because a huge part of what was going on there
was a rebellion by the sort of agro business like
agricultural elite who joined with parts of like a reactionary
(14:14):
every middle class.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
Okay, but this is not that.
Speaker 3 (14:17):
Venezuela has the world's largest oil preserves, but there were
significant problems extracting the oil right. Many of these problems
stem from the two thousand and two to two thousand
and three opposition general strike. This is back after Hugo
Chaves was elected. So in two thousand and two there
was a coup against Chaves that failed and was sort
of overturned famously. But later that year there was also
(14:41):
a sort of opposition general strike that lasted from late
two thousand and two to early two thousand and three,
and a huge part of that general strike was oil
workers specifically, and it was very specifically. One of the
things about the structure of oil production is that there
were a bunch of very very highly paid and highly
skilled technical workers who are are very very loyal to
the oil companies themselves and who are very loyal to
(15:03):
who are sort of tend to be very right wing.
These people went on strike and sort of got fired
on mass. Oil production requires both a huge amount of
heavy capital and a bunch of highly skilled workers, and
if you don't have both of those things, then you
can't do oil extraction. And this has sort of been
a recurring problem for the entire time both sort of
fugual Srofics and Majuro has been in office, is that
(15:26):
they haven't had the capacity to actually extract a bunch
of the oil, and also they've refused to turn the
oil over to more American companies that have already been contracted.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
And it's also worth noting there's a lot of talk
about like Venezuela having the world's largest reserves, and a
lot of that is like them jinking the numbers by
including a lot of like tire sands, that would be
that no one's going to try to get extract fuel
from because it's too expensive and too much of a
(15:55):
pain in the ass.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
It's just not worth it anyway.
Speaker 4 (15:58):
And also that claims to reserves not actually part of
Venezuela at this.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
Time, right right, Like we're not working with exact with
accurate information.
Speaker 3 (16:07):
Yeah, it's it's messy. And it's also worth noting that
like the oil numbers, I mean, obviously all oil numbers
are political, but the oil numbers here are extraordinarily political,
because these are numbers that are basically used as a
pitch by sort of like the opposition to try to
get a US backed too. And it's also sort of
word noting that the other thing that's happening here, and
the reason this is all going to probably cause really
(16:30):
significant economic problems and probably humanitarian disaster, both in Venezuela
and probably also in Cuba, which extensively relies on Venezuelan
oil to have their economy function, is that the Venezuelan
economy has been really structured around oil in a way
that they failed to transition out of multiple times. The
first big one I've done in a different episode about
(16:52):
this in the Neolipical List series a bunch of years ago.
But you know, there was a whole bunch of delivery
sabotage by American car companies over the attempt to build
it car industry. There's a long sort of history of this.
But it means that both of these countries' economies are
desperately reliant on oil. And the more of this is
just that is cut off, the more fucked it's going
to get for just everyone in Venezuela.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
Yeah. Yeah, And you can already see how much worse
it's got from the time I went to Venezuela to
to now. Like, they're very vulnerable to changes in crude
oil prices, right, and that has, along with corruption in
a government which doesn't really give a shit about the
material welfare of these people, has already made things unsustainably
(17:34):
hard for people in Venezuela, and that will only get worse.
Speaker 3 (17:37):
Yeah, So I want to conclude, basically on a couple
of things. Wonders that too, this is going to cause
more waves of migration and refugees fleeing the country, both
from potential realist military strikes and for the economic damage.
There's been some moves in the international stage, with China
and Mexico expressing support for the Venezuelan government. Shine Bomb
(17:59):
in Mexico is offered to facilitate negotiations and media negotiations
between the US and Venezuela. It's also kind of word
noting that right before this whole thing, there was a
giant Vanity Fair interview with Susie Wiles, who's Trump's chief
of staff.
Speaker 1 (18:15):
Who oh boy, this.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
Is for Roysberry Dubbs this week Coller here.
Speaker 3 (18:19):
God said Trump quote wants to keep blowing up boats
until Maduro Chris's uncle, which is one of the most
hideous things I've ever heard. Yeah, it's gangsters, it's literally terrorism.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
It's it's a highway.
Speaker 3 (18:34):
Yeah yeah, it is in Australia structurally, unless you resign,
we are going to keep killing civilians. But it's hatless
taker ship.
Speaker 1 (18:41):
Yeah yeah. It's also a fundamental misunderstanding of how the
regime operates.
Speaker 4 (18:45):
If that is the case. So because they don't care
if their people kept dying.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
I have seen Venezuelan people die in the Darian gap,
right because in part the government is incapable of providing
for their material needs. They don't care like killing some
other people with boats is not going to fundamentally change
the way that government works, because there's any one way
it can work.
Speaker 3 (19:07):
Yeah, and I think there's the one last thing I
want to say about this before we head out slash,
before whatever giant update comes after the speech.
Speaker 2 (19:14):
Yeah, yeah, I've got one after you finish here.
Speaker 3 (19:17):
One of the big problems here is if people in
the administration really do believe this, they actually do think
that you can knock off the governments with air strikes,
and no you can't, No, you can't. They thought this
about the Huthies too. It's wrong, It's never been right.
Speaker 2 (19:30):
It's hideous.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
We just finished doing like a five parter on bastards
about like the nuclear doom state device that also dealt
heavily with the work of that Italian Air Force General Duhey,
who was the first guy in nineteen twenty one to
be like, oh, you need are bombers. Nothing else is
necessary in militaries. Now it's nothing but bombers from here.
And if you have enough bombers, no one will ever
(19:51):
attack you. And this logic has always been wrong. And
it's also every new generation of like military leaders, especially
in the air power field, are like all we need
is air strikes. You don't need to send in ground.
You can accomplish all of your goals, all of your
power projection, just by bombing people or shooting missiles at them,
(20:12):
And they're always wrong.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
It doesn't work. It's just not effective.
Speaker 4 (20:17):
Yeah, Like, I think the Trump administration is somewhat I
don't want to say high on its own supply. They
had success in Syria with removing the territorial calipate, mostly
using US air power. Right, it wasn't a big US
that was the US part. There was still a shitload
of Kurdish, yes.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
But it's the and yeah, eleven twelve thousand Kurdish people
died to remove the Islamic extent. More have died since, right, Yeah,
And also a shipload of Iraqi soldiers, a mix of
Kurds and largely guys from in and around Baghdad.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
But like, yeah, like a lot.
Speaker 4 (20:53):
Of and a bunch of Arab Syrians. And I don't
feel like ethnically geeky this at all Assyrian people.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
No, But like a huge amount of the effort was
guys I mean literally I was in bed with some
of these guys a lot of Like the fighting tip
was like literally dudes with fucking knives and hand grenades,
clearing buildings in hand to hand comb Yeah, those are
the people who faced danger, right, like, and that's what
you need to Unfortunately, you can't do war with computers yet. Yeah,
(21:22):
but yeah, I think that that might be where this
this belief that and like the Marca Rubio lobby, right,
the Florida Cubans who are invested in this kind of
Trump corrollary to the Monroe doctrine right in the idea
that they can roll back leftist regimes in uh like
South and Central America.
Speaker 2 (21:40):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
I think that's where a lot of the pressure is
coming from.
Speaker 3 (21:44):
Yeah, speaking of pressure, we are being pressured to go
to ads.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
That's right, beautiful, and we're back. There's an update I
just came across as we're doing this. We talked about
how Tucker as an inside source saying that Trump's basically
(22:08):
go out of Claire War. There's another article that just
came out on Stitch Snitches by Gloria Shaw, citing a
pro Trump host on Real America's Voice who characterized the
upcoming Oval Office address as a pr thing meant basically
as an acknowledgment that a lot of Trump's voters are
frustrated that he keeps talking about like international issues like Venezuela,
(22:31):
while everything is more expensive for them and they continue
to lose their jobs and the economy is shit. To
quote from that article, and this is them quoting a
segment from that Real America's Voice podcast. The remarks came
during a segment on The water Cooler with co host
David Brody, who teas the nine pm Eastern address is
an elevated effort to regain the narrative on affordability. The
president is going to be in the Oval Office tonight
(22:53):
nine pm Eastern, Brody said, big address to the nation.
He's elevating this clearly, this is to regain the narrative
and explain more about the affordability issue America and what
this administration is doing. I think they're trying to seize
this right off the top and make sure it doesn't
get away from them. And the claims here is basically
like this is Trump trying to steal a night march
on the twenty twenty six election cycle and reset a
lot of what people are talking about around affordability, Like
(23:16):
this argument is that now he's basically acknowledging that it's
been kind of a mistake to focus so much on
his overseas policies, and he really needs to start promising
that that golden age is actually going to come for
his voters, which the numbers don't bear out right, Like
almost no jobs have been added in the US since April.
(23:38):
There's about seven hundred thousand more people unemployed now than
there were in November of twenty twenty four.
Speaker 2 (23:42):
Like things aren't yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
Good, Inflation is still wild, Inflation is real bad food,
and like the material things that we need are going
up in price faster than general inflation. Like it's no good,
and people like on his own side the thought. Jessica Tarlov,
who's a Fox News host of The five Quote, tweeted
a post about how like the hiring recession just with
(24:06):
the golden age attached, which is like what Trump has
been saying. You know, we're going to have a new
golden age if you make me president. So like the
fact that he hasn't done he hasn't followed through any
of his promises to actually improve life for his voters
or the economy is starting to hurt. And I guess
I'm hopeful that that's what it is, rather than the
(24:27):
Marines are about to be in Caracas, right, but I
guess we'll see very soon. Yeah, great stuff.
Speaker 4 (24:34):
Yeah, talking of international stuff Trump is doing. Let's talk
about the new travel ban. So this this travel band
dropped yesterday was Tuesday. So it previously had this nineteen
country travel band. Right, some of that was a complete
bar to entry if sits into those countries or to
new these entries. Some of it was a partial bar
(24:55):
to immigrant visas, not to not to non immigrant visas.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
Right.
Speaker 4 (24:59):
They have now expanded this to twenty more countries. So
totally banned now from getting new visas to enter the
USA a citizens of Burkina, Faso, Mahlei, Nicheere, South Sudan,
and Syria, as well as a Palestinian authority. The Syria
one is particularly wild because I'll share it justice to
the White House. There are like individual case by case exceptions.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
Right. It's not that they wouldn't block al Shara, I'm sure,
but like.
Speaker 4 (25:26):
It's interesting to look at the justifications that they use here.
What they are basically saying, I'll just read a couple
of them here to give you an example, right quote.
At least one country lacks mechanisms in hospitals to ensure
bursts are reported, and widespread corruption, combined with a general
lack of vecking and poor record keeping, result in any
non citizen being able to obtain any civil document from
(25:47):
that country, particularly if that person is willing to pay
a fee or engage an individual that specializes in assisting
in such fraud. They go on to basically document failures
in government bureaucracy that they talk about corruption.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
Right. They talk about places where birthy forgets are just
written by hand. They talk about places where the government
does not control all.
Speaker 4 (26:09):
The territory prevalence of crime, places which offer citizenship by
investment without physical residents. They also talk about some of
these countries not being willing to accept their nationals to
the US deports and again visa overstair rates, right, which
is what they spoke about last time. What is getting
less reporting, or at least was this morning when I looked,
(26:32):
was that they have removed exemptions which existed for the
previous nineteen These include family member visas right, So that
means that, for instance, someone who could themselves become a
permanent resident or even a citizen, now cannot bring a
family member, say a spouse, a sibling, etc. Across, even
(26:52):
though those people were people sly vetted. And it appears
some there is certain categories of SIVA exempt, but I
believe not all SIVs, so that's especially immigrant visa right.
The vast bulk of SIVs will be Afghan people who
worked with the US military in Afghanistan. The nineteen countries
(27:13):
who are now partially restricted are I'm just going to
read them of Angola, Antigram, Barbuda, Benin, Kuttivois, Dominica, Gabon,
the Gambia, Malawi, Mauritanian, Nigeria, senegauld Tanzania, Tonga, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
For some reason, the first five of these are underlined
on the White House website. I don't know if some
(27:35):
were copied and pisted them across with hyperlinks like.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (27:39):
I'm unable to work out why that they're not hyperlinked
in the document, but there doesn't seem to be any
explanation like this. There's no special set of sanctions for those,
and they're just in alphabetical order. They actually reduced restrictions
on Turkmenistan because quote suspension of entry into the United
States of Nationals of Turkmenistan as non immigrants B one,
(28:00):
B two, FM, and JVSS is lifted because some concerns remain.
The entry into the United States of nationals to Turkmenistan
as immigrants remain suspended. The last element of this that
I want to cover is that it would appear to
stop international adoptions from the listed countries, like all of
those thirty nine listed countries, which is wild and like
(28:24):
particularly unfortunate because I know, like people who who adopt
children from outside the United States, like that is a
process that takes years, and I can imagine it being
horrifically traumatic.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
To have it suddenly cut off like this. But consciously, unconsciously,
that is what this.
Speaker 4 (28:41):
UH executive action appears to do, So that is not great.
It seems that the United States is using this as
a kind of cudgel right to encourage those countries to
It's kind of a quid pro quote they get what
they want they got from Turkmenistan apparently then that they
will remove some of those restrictions. Otherwise they will continue them. So, yeah,
(29:03):
that's not great. So Judge Hannah Dougan's trial began this week.
Do you can if you're not familiar. She's not the judge
in New Mexico who was accused of providing firearms to
somebody who was not a permanent resident or citizen. She
is a judge who is accused of allowing a migrant
man named mister Flores Luise to leave her court room
(29:23):
from a door that is not the usual door. That
door led to a private corridor. In that private corridor,
there was one exit to a public area and also
a door to a fire escape. Mister Flora's ruiz took
the exit to the public area. He then took a
lift down I think to the ground floor with an
(29:45):
ICE officer. He then attempted to run away when Ice
officers attempted to detain him when he left the lift,
he was caught and detained. So we learned quite a
lot in this and it's just been interesting to follow.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
Right.
Speaker 4 (30:00):
First of all, we see that several of the people
who were taking part in the apprehension were reassigned FBI agents.
This is increasingly common, right, like all branches of the
federal law enforcement have had some of their capacity redirected
to doing this, right, to doing like this. This guy
(30:21):
I believe had misdemeanors the agents for using signal to communicate.
They had a group chat called frozen water. Obviously Jesus Christ. Yeah,
really funny. The FBI agent conceded in crust examination that's
not a NAP approved by the FBI, but according to
one the DHS apparently does approve it, according to a
(30:44):
CBP agent who has crossed damon there, which obviously creates
an issue for the retention of records right because signal,
if you're not familiar, auto deletes things after a period
of time that users can configure. It also appears that
when one of these DHS agents and to the courthouse,
court security officers told him that he needed an escort,
(31:05):
but then he appears.
Speaker 1 (31:06):
To have proceeded without worn. In a text of colleagues,
as DHS employees said, quote, this is gonna be a
pain in the dick. H So that's that. Yeah, what happens,
it seems like is Judge Dougan sent them to the
Chief Judge because it didn't have a judicial warrant. It's
had an administrative warrant.
Speaker 4 (31:26):
Right, another judge testified against Judge Dugan, a judge called
Judge Severa. So Judge Severa was with Judge Dugan when
they confronted the agents. Judge Jugan wore her judicial robes
when confronting them, which apparently is not usual. It's not
usual to wear them out.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
Of the courtroom, and Judge Severa seemed to disapprove of that,
and then she said, quote, Judge Dugan could quote have
been more diplomatic, and then she said, quote judges shouldn't
be helping defendants evade arrest. At the same time, Judge
Dugan's defense lawyer asked her if she had warned her
(32:05):
sister of the ice presence, which she had, and it
appears to her sister had a hearing at the courthouse
the next day, which Judge Severa said she was not
aware of. So there's like a lot still to be
unpacked here, right, this is just the first day. This
could go on past Christmas and into the new year,
and it probably will. But there's been some pretty good
(32:26):
reporting on this from a substack called all Rise Media,
and I will keep checking in on this and we'll
report it on it again after the New Year.
Speaker 6 (32:38):
Hello, this is Garrison Davis reporting from Tokyo. Unfortunately, I
was unable to attend the regular Executive Disorder Group recording
due to being halfway around the globe, so I'm recording
my section solo. This past week saw two devastating mass
shootings back to back. On Saturday afternoon, a masks sho
(33:00):
entered an economics class at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island,
and opened fire with a concealed handgun, killing two people
injuring nine others, all students. About thirty minutes after the
shooting started, the university police announced a suspect was in custody.
Twenty minutes later, they retracted that statement. Then university police
(33:23):
reported shots fired in another section of campus, which they
also later retracted. President Trump posted on truth Social quote,
I've been briefed on the shooting that took place at
Brown University in Rhode Island. The FBI is on the scene,
the suspect is in custody. God bless the victims and
the families of the victims. Quote. This too was untrue,
(33:46):
as the university released a statement about an hour later
clarifying that the shooter was not in custody and that
over four hundred officers were on the scene to assist
in the investigation. The next morning, Providence Mayor Brett Smiley
announced that a new person of interest was detained. The
Providence Police chief told NBC that they were confident that
(34:07):
the suspect was the shooter. Major news outlets later named
this individual, though later that evening this quote unquote person
of interest was released, with the Rhode Island Attorney General
saying that the evidence quote now points in a different
direction quote. The shooter currently remains unidentified and at large.
(34:30):
On Sunday night in Sydney, Australia, a father and son,
Sajid and Navid Akram, coordinated a targeted attack against Jewish
people attending a Hanukkah event on Bondi Beach. Fifteen people
were killed in the shooting. Victims include a ten year
old girl and a Holocaust survivor. Twenty four victims remain hospitalized.
(34:53):
A bystander named Ahmed al Ahmed, a son of Syrian refugees,
charged one of the gunman and wrestled his gun away.
Ahmed was later shot multiple times, but survived and has
been labeled a hero by the Australian Prime Minister. Police
say that a vehicle used by the gunman contained homemade
(35:14):
Islamic state flags and improvised explosive devices. The men were
not part of an official terror cell, though the Prime
Minister says that they were motivated by Islamic state extremist ideology.
Counter Terrorism officials believed the shooters received quote unquote military
style training in the Philippines a month before the attack.
On Tuesday, self styled online investigators in right wing social
(35:39):
media content Mills falsely identified the Brown University shooter as
an LGBTQ Palestinian studying at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies,
citing gate analysis based on surveillance footage of the unidentified
suspect released by police. The university removed this queer Palestinian
student's online profile file in an effort to prevent doxing,
(36:02):
though this itself was used by the online smerror campaign
as evidence of guilt. Brown University later published this statement
quote in the aftermath of the shooting, We've seen a
harmful doxing activity directed towards at least one member of
the Brown University community. It's important to make clear that
targeting individuals could do a revocable harm. Accusations, speculation, and
(36:23):
conspiracies were seeing on social media and in some news
reports are irresponsible, harmful, and in some cases dangerous for
the safety of individuals in our community. It is not
unusual as a safety measure to take steps to protect
an individual's safety when this kind of activity happens, including
in regard to their online presence. As law enforcement officials
(36:44):
stated clearly on Tuesday afternoon, if this individual's name had
any relevance to the current investigation, they would be actively
looking for this individual and providing information publicly. On a
final note, after the holiday break, we will be reporting
on the indictment against four alleged members of the Turtle
(37:06):
Island Liberation Front in California regarding a New Year's Eve
bombing plot.
Speaker 1 (37:23):
We're back and we have some news that's going to
be really sad for everybody here and it could happen
here and just all of you listening, which is friend
of the pod. Dan Bongino is stepping down from his
work as Deputy director of the FBI. I think it's
been a nice vacation for him, but you know, American
needs him in his much more important role. Whatever podcast
(37:48):
he was doing before he got brought in to the
deputy director of the FBI. You know, look, if he
was podcasting right now, they would have caught the mass
shooter at Brown.
Speaker 2 (37:58):
I think we can all agree.
Speaker 1 (37:59):
On that he to putcosting his way through it. Either
that or just him not being at the FBI would
have made the do their job.
Speaker 3 (38:09):
Look what we're learning from this is that you can
never escape the podcasting minds. No matter where else you
try to go, they will drag you back down.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
Oh look, if you make me director of the FBI,
I promise to stop podcasting and start being the most
corrupt director of the FBI we've ever had.
Speaker 3 (38:25):
That's a tough challenge.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
I know, I'm I think, I'm I'm in a task
prepared to work at it.
Speaker 2 (38:34):
Yeah. So, yeah, that's cool.
Speaker 1 (38:37):
I wanted to talk a little bit about an executive
order that our beloved President put out very recently. Some
of you may be aware of this, but on December eleventh,
twenty I mean this year, twenty twenty five, Trump released
yet another executive order, this one titled Ensuring a National
Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence, and basically, in this and
(39:00):
Trump stated that like, the reason he's doing this is
because it's absolutely critical to the US's future that we
be at the top of the game when it comes
to AI, that we be global leaders in this burgeoning
new field. He states in the EO, these efforts have
already delivered tremendous benefits to the American people and led
to trillions of dollars of investments across the country. Certainly haven't,
(39:21):
but we were made in the earliest days of the
technological revolution and in a race with adversaries for supremacy
within it. Trump stated in an interview that he expects
AI to be fifty to sixty percent of the US
economy in the near future, which is nuts.
Speaker 4 (39:34):
Maybe that's just because everything else will just go to
complete shit.
Speaker 1 (39:37):
You know. The reality is that like AI is not
even close to being that value in terms of like
what the economy produces, but nearly all of our growth
is related and like it is tied right now to
data center investments. So Trump absolutely needs AI because without
it the country is very obviously in a recession. Like
this is the only thing propping up the image of
(39:59):
the as not being in the shitter. Now, what does
this EO actually do well. The goal of this the
statement is that it is the policy of the United
States to sustain and enhance the United States is global
AI dominance through a minimally burden some national policy framework
for AI. This EO will establish an AI Litigation Task Force.
Within thirty days of this order going out, the Attorney
(40:20):
General is supposed to establish this task force whose responsibility
is to challenge state AI laws that are inconsistent with
the policy set forward above. Right that we need to
be globally dominant in AI. Right, So this task force
is supposed to go out and find state laws that
it believes are like an onerous burden on the development
of this technology. Going along with this, within ninety days
(40:42):
of the order, the Secretary of Commerce is supposed to
do an evaluation of all state AI laws in order
to point out which ones this task force should go after.
And then the stick that this EO establishes is that
if this task force decides that like a state AI
EYE law is in violation of our need to be
dominant in AI, we can restrict state funding to things
(41:06):
like the broadband Equity Access and Deployment program. Right. Basically,
they'll cut off federal funding for like broadband access, in
order to punish states that try to restrict or in
any way shape or form, govern what people can use
what companies can use AI for. And the primary thing
this is all about, I know, we all think about
(41:26):
the stuff that like most people have more direct experience with,
which is like all the slop flooding the Internet, the
disinformation that's continuing to cook the brains of a lot
of our peers and elders, and just the fact that
like it's making certain industries full of hardworking people a
lot harder to exist because companies are just trying to
replace quality work with absolute like slop trash. Yeah, but really,
(41:50):
what this is about, and the primary focus of most
of these state level laws regulating AI is the housing market.
Speaker 2 (41:57):
Right.
Speaker 1 (41:58):
There's a good article in Politico about this, written by
Cassandra Dumay, but she notes that per a National Conference
of State Legislatures analysis in July, there were more than
forty pending bills across the United States related to just
AI in the housing sector, and most of these bills
are attempting to stop landlords from using different AI programs
(42:19):
to coordinate pricing. Basically, there are a couple of different programs,
the most prominent, which is called Real Page, And what
they do is landlords join these programs and they share
information on like what their different properties cost, and then
the AI knows what everybody is charging and can suggest
(42:40):
that they charge higher prices right now. The way that
this is supposed to work is that you, as a landlord,
look out at what's publicly available about the prices of
your competitors and look at like what your customers are
currently willing to bear, and then try to set your
prices and future price increases based on that. What Real
Page is doing is a legal collusion, right, This is
(43:03):
price fixing. It's just the AI is doing the actual
active price fixing. The landlords are just sharing their data
and paying a fee to the service. And so a
bunch of states have tried to stop this because this
objectively makes the housing crisis worse. I know, there's some
annoying assholes who come out and be like, you shouldn't
talk about anything but in increasing the supply of housing,
and like that's that's idiot shit, Yes, we need to
(43:25):
increase the supply of housing. This objectively hurts people. These
programs subjectively increase the price of print, they do damage.
We should be mitigating or making it impossible for businesses
like this to exist. Anyone who disagrees is just being
a dummy. New York passed law in October that banned
the use of AI algorithms to allow landlords to do
price fixing. There's a similar bill in the Massachusetts legislation's
(43:49):
making its way forward right now. And this is fundamentally
what a lot of the opposition to like state level
AI regulation is about is that the landlord ward's basically uh,
think that this is a great way to make a
shitload of money, and tech companies like and we can continue.
We got to make a shitload of money selling them
the tools to do this, and states are trying to
(44:11):
push back on this, and like, that's fundamentally what a
lot of the impetus buying this executive order is is
an attempt to stop people from making this even more harmful.
There is some like in this that political article they
quote from Kevin Donnelly, who's the executive director of the
Real Estate Technology and Transformation Center, and he talks about like, well, actually,
(44:33):
we're currently using AI to identify buildable lots and promote
sustainable constructions so that we can actually like reduce some
of the cost of housing. And all of these bills,
could you know, undermine our ability to impure people's Like yeah,
it's just fucking go like literally jump off a bridge, man,
Fuck you. Yeah, no, we know that's not how it works.
We have data on this, Yo, this isn't theoretical.
Speaker 2 (44:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (44:57):
Yeah, anytime a landlord, anytime a landlord says anything or
to real estate developer that says anything that suggests the
thing they want to do is lower rent they are lying.
You can tell because they don't fucking lower rents unless
like a global pandemic happens.
Speaker 1 (45:13):
Yeah, like that's a honey of this works. And this
has been controversial. Trump, before putting out the EO, tried
to encourage the passage of a bill through Congress that
would have done the same thing as the EO right,
and would have actually had like more force of law
behind it, basically making it illegal for states to have
their own laws regulating AI. That didn't pass because even
(45:36):
Republicans don't really like that idea. For one thing, states'
rights is still supposed to be a pretty big.
Speaker 2 (45:42):
Part of the party.
Speaker 1 (45:44):
But for another thing, there's like a lot of things
that conservatives are really unhappy with in terms of AI.
For example, it keeps exposing children to pornography and other
things that kids shouldn't be exposed to. For another thing,
there's a lot of American jobs that are going to
be lost as a result of or potentially could be
lost as a result of the AI slop automation of
(46:05):
a bunch of industries. And so there's even a significant
amount of resistance among Republicans this, which is why the
bill didn't pass, right, and Trump when he announced this
EO basically sat down with like a chunk of the
conservatives who are more critical of this, and I think
basically bullied them into getting on board and saying no,
he promised us this won't restrict state levels to like
(46:28):
improve safety for children. Right, there's absolutely like no guarantee
of that, Like you just have David Sacks, it was
Trump's top AI advisor saying no, no, none of this
is about trying to stop state laws to make kids savor.
It's just trying to stop state laws that will make
rent less expensive. Yeah, there's Marjorie Taylor Green's come out
against this. She's basically said that you know this is
(46:50):
a violation of states, right, it's bullshit. Steve Bannon is
in the same place he had a good quote I
found in an article by The Hill. After two humiliating
face plants on a must pass legis now we attempt
an entirely unenforceable EO tech bros doing upmost to turn
potus megabase away from him while they line their pockets,
which is essentially accurate. Yeah, he's wrong, wrong about that.
(47:14):
So all this is like pretty annoying and fucked up.
We'll see what actually becomes of this. I tend to
agree with Bannon that it's pretty much unenforceable. Like the lawsuit,
the court battles that will come from this is just
going to be expensive and time consuming. But I actually
don't think this is going to work the way they want.
This is this is Trump making it very clear that
(47:35):
he has bought and paid for by the tech s
end that he understands that he is hanging on by
a thread in terms of popularity. One of the only
things stopping it from getting stopping the situation from getting
worse is that AI spending on data centers and ship
is propping up the image of the economy, Right, that's
what this is all about.
Speaker 3 (47:52):
Yeah, and this and this is something where he can
simultaneously shore shore up is tech based and shore up
his landlord base, yeah, which.
Speaker 1 (47:59):
Are like, yeah, it's great, two kinds of guys to
like Donald Trump. Yeah, I guess there's an end here
where I could. I wanted to make a note about
something also related to AI, which is that there's an
incredibly stupid article in Vox that came out this week.
In that case, like literally the title is like, America,
you've made it very clear that you hate AI, But
(48:21):
what if it's the only way to restart the idea machine?
Speaker 5 (48:24):
Right?
Speaker 1 (48:25):
Yeah, and this this dipshit Colonnist's argument is that like, well,
we're not running out of ideas and AI, like human
beings can't come up with ideas enough to create growth
at the level that the economy needs to be growing
and in order to take humanity into the future, really,
AI is the only way to generate more new ideas.
(48:47):
And I wanted to look at, like what is this
based off of? And I think I figured out what
like the fundamental source of all of this shit is,
which is back in twenty seventeen, there was a research
which paper put out by the National Bureau of Economic
Research by Nicholas Bloom, Charles Jones, John Van Reenan, and
Michael Webb. The kind of summary of that article reads
(49:10):
as follows. In many growth models, economic growth arises from
people creating ideas, and then the long run growth rate
is the product of two terms, the effective number of
researchers and their research productivity. We present a wide range
of evidence for various industries, products, and firms showing that
research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply. Right,
So basically, we're we have more people doing research, and
we're spending more money on research, but that research is
(49:33):
translating into economic gains at a lower level than ever before,
right to the point where we're not going to be
able to continue to make economic gains like we used
to be unless something changes. And if you're kind of
paying attention to this, you might notice that that study,
which is the underpinning of that Vox article and all
of these claims that we need AI for ideas, really
(49:53):
is not actually making an argument that people aren't having
more ideas. It's making an argument that it is harder
to profit from ideas than it used to be right now.
That is fundamentally different from people not having ideas for
one thing, it's reducing an idea to something that delivers
a return for venture capitalists. Yeah right, that's all an
(50:14):
idea is in. This is something that makes money, and
a lot of great ideas like the post office don't
generate a direct profit. And obviously it's a net benefit
to the economy that we have a post office, but
the post office runs at a loss, right, which is
why you have state funding for certain things, because they're
just not going to be the kind of ideas that
like a bunch of Silicon Valley investors want to throw
(50:36):
money into.
Speaker 2 (50:37):
Right now.
Speaker 1 (50:38):
The other part of the issue here is just a
very practical one, which is that a lot of the ideas,
the great ideas last century that were like most correlated
with massive gains and productivity, stuff like the introduction of
vaccines on a wide scale, indoor plumbing and electricity on
a wide scale phones. There's not ideas like that that
(50:59):
are like that big and that much of a game
changer left, right, the low hanging fruits, it's the low
hanging fruit has been picked. There's not another the telephone
waiting out there. We already did that. It was the smartphone.
There's not another indoor plumbing, right, There's not something that's
going to be as much of a sea change for
the economy and for the quality of human life as
(51:20):
those ideas, because those were really big things.
Speaker 3 (51:24):
Yeah, Like like maybe maybe you could put us something
like actually cleaning the air that we breathe.
Speaker 1 (51:28):
Yes, like, but again that's not profitable in a direct way, no, right,
like you, Yeah, that's an idea that would have a
change that big, but there's not a profit incentive for.
Speaker 2 (51:38):
It, right.
Speaker 1 (51:38):
We privatize the air, rob it right, Yeah, breathing fucking air. Yeah,
and there's a lot I again, I find this, this
whole discussion pattern, Like it's an example of the fact
that like, people like this fucking box article who I
don't feel like deserves to be named to this, have
been using CHATGBT so much that they're no longer thinking.
They're not really sentient in a meaning full way, right,
(52:01):
Like when you write something like that, it's because your
brain has been completely fucking cooked. I did find a
good article, ironically, from twenty seventeen from Vox EU that
is titled ideas aren't running out that they are getting
more expensive to find, which is making a lot of
the claims that like I've made, which is that, or
that I've been bringing up so far in this which
is that it's not that there's a lack of ideas,
(52:23):
that it costs more money to do stuff like that
now like the costs because everything's so much more complex.
Idea the big ideas we're looking at, artist simple is
indoor plumbing. They require a lot more computing power, they
require a lot more people working on them. Right, Like
we've plucked the low hanging fruit, and it ends with
a paragraph I find kind of valuable here, returning to
(52:44):
the oil metaphor, we are digging deeper into a trickier
part of the rock.
Speaker 2 (52:47):
Of course, we could be.
Speaker 1 (52:48):
Wrong, and humanity may have just been shipping away to a
particularly hard point that will soon give way, creating decades
of cheap ideas. This is the hope of those who
emphasize the revolutionary power of artificial intelligence and the singularity
and accumulation of technology that triggers runaway growth at some
point in the future. Although we all enjoy science fiction,
history books are usually a safer guide to the future.
In this case, history suggests that large increases in research
(53:09):
effort are need to offset its declining productivity. And again,
if you want to have the big ideas and the
Star Trek future that all of these billionaires like Elon
Musk pretend they want, what you actually have to do
is be willing to put a lot of money into
research and development without any promise of a profit. Your
motivation can't be well, now we have to get a
two hundred percent rate of return in our investments. Right,
(53:32):
it has to be well, this would improve people's lives
and make life more sustainable, right, like finding solutions to
a lot of problems with climate and cleaning the air,
Like dealing with lack of access to clean water, lack
of access to basic basic medical care. These are not
things where doing them means that your company gets an
immediate profit and evaluation in the tens of billions of dollars.
Speaker 2 (53:53):
Right.
Speaker 1 (53:53):
That's just not the way providing life saving aid to
people works. But the net value to the global economy
would be massive if, for example, kids weren't going without
food and access to clean water and had better access
to education, and thus we're able to go into fields
where they become researchers and generate ideas that eventually turn
(54:16):
into profit. Right, Like, these AI fucks aren't talking about ideas,
They're talking about cracking the human mind, right, That's what
they want to do. It's a good way to put it.
Speaker 3 (54:25):
Yeah, yeah, I think that there's another thing we're saying
here too. On there's a different, greater argument about this
where he makes an argument that I think is also
very compelling that part of the decline in the rate
of technological change has been the extent to which everyone
who was trying to do this stuff is just increasingly
dealing with more and more layers of bureaucracy instead of
(54:47):
actually doing the thing they're trying to do. And then,
you know, this is a huge problem in academia where
it's like, okay, so you have you know, you're teaching
in academia, but you're also spending like a quarter of
your time trying to get another job. You're spending another
quarter of your time dealing with all of the unhinged
whatever like accounting bullshit that your fucking supervisors have like
(55:08):
or like like university management has like put upon you.
And this is and this is something that's also true
for government researchers, where there's just like this, you know,
there's been this incredible increase in sort of the amount
of bureaucracy they have to jomp through it like largely
because of the right and because of all of the
like weird shit they do, where like they hate government fundings.
They're like, ah, everyone has to like justify their funding
literally every ten seconds. And I think I think, like
(55:30):
that's that's one of the other angles of this, and
it's something that's only gonna get worse because this administration
is just fucking annihilating the entire basis of American science.
Speaker 1 (55:37):
Yeah, there's killing it.
Speaker 3 (55:39):
The damage that they've done to the pipeline of people
that would produce these researchers right with with ways that
a suddenly like American science post docs just there's no
money for it. There's no money for grad students. They're
killing all of the pathways that would do this, and
then they're going, oh, the only solution is the fucking
tech boondoggle we've created to the problems that we created.
(56:00):
I just annihilating the capacity to do science.
Speaker 2 (56:03):
Mm hmm. It sucks.
Speaker 3 (56:04):
I hate them.
Speaker 1 (56:06):
If you want to email us. You can do so.
Speaker 4 (56:08):
It is cool Zone tips at proton dot me. If
you want it to be encrypted, you should use a
proton mataddress as well.
Speaker 1 (56:14):
They're free. All right, guys, I think that's that's the
podcast listeners, haters, lovers.
Speaker 6 (56:23):
It's our lasted of the year.
Speaker 1 (56:26):
It's our last da the year. Well, I don't know,
we'll see if those pills come in, but yeah.
Speaker 6 (56:31):
But I hate you.
Speaker 5 (56:34):
Happy holidays, everybody, put a trans girl on your couch.
Speaker 6 (56:39):
Put a trans girl on your couch, love it?
Speaker 1 (56:42):
Or a bed I mean yeah, yeah, mattress one of
those like chairs that leans back to where it's like
basically flat. Yeah, not a lazy instance, sure, a lot
of options in neutral lazy to Yeah.
Speaker 2 (56:58):
An inflatable mattress, why not? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (57:00):
When yeah? To bed a water bedded strong enough because
they are heavy. Yeah, generally you're not allowed to have them.
Speaker 5 (57:09):
But yes, anyways, we reported the news.
Speaker 1 (57:14):
Arguably, we reported the news.
Speaker 5 (57:24):
It could happen. Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
now find sources where it could happen here listened directly
in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
It Could Happen Here News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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