1/8/25: LA Fires, Trump Threatens Canada, CNN Meltdown Over Zuck, TikTok Ban & MORE!

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
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Speaker 3 (00:33):
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to Counterpoints. Ryan. How are
you doing. You're in the studio making me look bad?

Speaker 4 (00:40):
Well, I didn't read the memo, so here I am
in the studio and making sure everything is locked down
and ready for us when we get back in here
officially next week. Got some crew in here too, so
we're in good shape.

Speaker 3 (00:52):
Thanks for checking in on things.

Speaker 5 (00:54):
But it's a great shot actually, and you still have
the winter monitors behind you, so it really works out well.
Because there's about seven inches of snow in DC, which
usually it's really warm outside when we have the winter
monitors on. Yes indeed, all right, so we have a
big packed show for everyone today. We're going to be
starting with the tragic wildfire that broke out in Palisades

(01:16):
yesterday outside of Los Angeles. Then Donald Trump held a
wild press conference. Will break down all of the key
elements from it for you. Mark Zuckerberg obviously, as Crystal
ow Ands Sager covered yesterday, changed the free speech policy
on Meta and so other things as well. But the
reaction to it is what we're going to cover today

(01:37):
because it's been very, very interesting. Kevin O'Leary is poised
to by TikTok. Obviously, oral arguments in the case at
the Supreme Court will begin on Friday, so this is
a very high stakes game. Congestion pricing has gone into
effect in New York City, and man, the reactions there,
and there is a lot to talk about actually with
that entire story, and I'm curious to get your thoughts

(01:59):
on it, Ryan, The reactions have been fascinating to watch,
and Ryan, we're also going to do updates from Gaza.
This is something that Donald Trump touched on at his
press conference, and there's a lot more going on with
the UAE and other countries as they look for some
type of settlement there.

Speaker 3 (02:15):
And we have a guest.

Speaker 4 (02:17):
Yeah, and it might not be in this show that
goes out on the podcast, but we're going to be
joined by Ahmed Khan again. If you may remember, a
few weeks ago, we had talked about how he had
spent something like six months and managed to get his
own shipment of aid into Gaza working with the on
the ground organization ARENA. We'll talk to him about and

(02:38):
he went in with the shipment, so we'll talk to
him about like what he saw on the ground there.
He also has been kind of at the forefront of
a what is kind of a considered to be a
niche issue, but it shouldn't be. There's something like twenty
five to fifty thousand people in Gaza who need kind
of critical medical care and all they need is permission

(02:59):
from is to leave, and they have a hospital that
is willing to treat them. Israel's blocking them and he's
working on a lot of those cases. He's also been
in Ukraine recently, so he's going to update us on
a bunch of what he's seen.

Speaker 5 (03:14):
Fantastic well, let's start with the tragedy outside of Los
Angeles and the Palisades, where thirty thousand people have been evacuated.
Around three thousand acres have already burned, and the fire,
as we come to everybody right now, is zero percent
zero percent contained.

Speaker 3 (03:31):
There are two other fires.

Speaker 5 (03:32):
Raging in the area as well, but this fire, the
images that are coming in are just We're going to
put some of them up on the screen for everybody
right now. Images are coming in right now and they
are stunning. So if you were listening to this, what
we're looking at here is just the hills in complete flames.

Speaker 3 (03:55):
People taking video.

Speaker 5 (03:56):
From Westalia, for example, just showing how close the blaze
is down Ryan this footage that we've been seeing come in.
I'm going to share another tab here. This is footage
from KTLA from the perimeter of the fire. They've actually
started clearing these. This is just shocking. People abandoned their

(04:16):
vehicles because of the gridlock. Obviously it's a very la thing.
They're now needing to get those cars, the abandoned vehicles
that people left as they fled on foot out of
the way by using a bulldozer, just so that the
firefighters can get in and have access to to actually
save lives and save property and contain the fire a

(04:40):
little bit. But as of right now, it's not contained
basically at all. What have you made of this just
in the last you know, honestly, Ryan, twenty four hours
as we started to see some of these horrifying images.

Speaker 4 (04:52):
Yeah, I was talking to a few friends who live
in Los Angeles last night and they said, you know,
the winds were unlike really anything that they had felt before.
These Santa Ana winds whipping through measurements have clocked them
up to ninety nine miles per hour. They're expected, you know,
to continue at that pace through much of today. It
seems like it's been at least ten years since there's

(05:14):
been there's there have been Santa Ana winds of that forest,
and so they're picking up embers from fires, tossing them
through the dry air, landing them on new rooftops, burning
burning new houses, new fires sparking in, you know, throughout
the Los Angeles area, creating a real kind of hell

(05:36):
on Earth situation. Like you said, zero percent contained, seems like,
you know, there were reports of a lot of fire
hydrants running, running out of water, and the traffic, you know,
on the best of days in Los Angeles is just brutal, absolute,
you know, the most poorly designed urban area you can

(05:59):
possibly imagine, and trying to imagine escaping raging fire with
those normal traffic patterns in your way turning into panicked
traffic patterns. You know, every one of those cars represents
a family or a person who was fleeing their home

(06:19):
and then believed that they couldn't make it anymore in
their car and just left it right in the middle
of the road, which of course then leads to you know,
complete and total gridlock.

Speaker 3 (06:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (06:29):
I do want to share one video of two men
escaping because I think it's a glimpse into the experiences
that a lot of people in California have had over
the last twenty four hours. And it's apocalyptic. It's like
a horror movie come to life. So let's take a
look at this video. Here, let's get out of here.

Speaker 6 (06:55):
We tried, We tried, bro, I'm sorry.

Speaker 7 (07:02):
Yeah, the mystery falls.

Speaker 3 (07:08):
Sorry brot oh true and right.

Speaker 5 (07:20):
What I think is especially horrifying about that video is
you can see in real time the fire is spreading
because they're obviously running through the embers that are falling
like snow onto trees, onto houses, and it really does
look like it looks like snow. It's snowing in hell essentially,
like it's raining fire onto them. And you can see

(07:43):
they're in the middle of How it's you know, spreading
so wildly and why it's not contained.

Speaker 3 (07:49):
Just like a horror movie. I mean, it really looks
like a scene from a horror movie.

Speaker 4 (07:53):
And it's unlike, unlike a lot of things, that's not
sparing the rich either. You know, it's going after you,
you know, properties worth you know, well well into the millions, uh,
really rocking the city. It's well, you know, hopefully this
these winds die down and they can get this under
control and we don't have kind of a apocalyptic level

(08:17):
damage despite the scenes that we're seeing, right.

Speaker 5 (08:21):
And so La Mayor Karen Bass is actually not in
town right now, but immediately people have started to wonder
about the twenty three million dollars that she had recently
proposed as a cut to the fire department. This is
the headline from back in April. You can see if
you go down here. She proposed a decrease of about

(08:41):
twenty three million dollars from.

Speaker 3 (08:43):
The LA Fire Department.

Speaker 5 (08:45):
And you know that for Karen Bass is going to
be a huge, huge problem going forward when she gets
back into town. Let me share another element here as well.
A lot of people wondering understand, wondering, uh, this is
a post on X where are our tax dollars going?

Speaker 3 (09:06):
As the city of Valet goes broke.

Speaker 5 (09:07):
One of the many questions we get this is from
the account of the La City Controller, Kenneth Metcha. He says,
the city just started a new fiscal year and if
you want to know how the mayor and a majority
of city council decreased her increased department's operational.

Speaker 3 (09:19):
Budgets see below.

Speaker 5 (09:21):
So what you're you're seeing on this chart, if you
can make it out as a huge increase in the
police budget. And as you go down you start to see,
you know, decreases that are going to now come under
the microscope. Public works is one of those that's uh,
you know, there's a there's a big cut there.

Speaker 3 (09:41):
Fire. You can see that down towards the end.

Speaker 5 (09:43):
That's the second if you're if you're listening to this,
indeed you see a significant cut out of the fire
budget and ran the other thing I wanted to mention
is you probably remember this. Obviously, the infamous company PG
and E Pacific Gas and Electric ended up being on
the under the microscope, just as Karen Bass's budget cuts

(10:07):
likely will be in the Dixie Fire. To you, you
were able to Wall Street Journal reporter wrote a whole
great book about how PG and E they had They
just had an updated all of their equipment, and that
was like the literal spark in the Dixie Fire. And oftentimes,
as we peel back the layers, this isn't just a

(10:27):
force of nature. It isn't just an accident, It isn't
just you know, there's there's usually some level as you're
appeeling back of incompetence or corruption or human error that
gets to the heart of this. And that's going to
be the question moving forward.

Speaker 4 (10:44):
And if you step back kind of out of the
it's it's I think it's very difficult to look at
Los Angeles in particular from inside of our of our
perspective as Americans, because it's sort of like fish and water,
like it just kind of is what it is. But
if you try to step back and look at it
from outside the United States or or in a in

(11:06):
a more objective way. What you see is a city
that spends tens of millions of dollars on individual homes
for individual people with the most you know, lavish artwork
and swimming pools and luxury. Is that anybody could you know,

(11:28):
possibly contemplate, say like two hundred, two hundred years ago,
while starving kind of the rest of the city of
needed public improvements so that they can so that people
can actually move around efficiently, and so that the and
so that public services are decently funded. And so we
often say, well, you know, can we afford you know,

(11:50):
an effective fire department, Can we afford you know, better schools.
The question that you might have to ask about Los
Angeles in particular, maybe the United States more generally, can
we afford this billionaire class? Because we are the ones
that have produced that billionaire class. It's our society, it's
our system. We are somehow deciding or through not deciding,

(12:13):
allowing this flourishing of this extraordinary inequality that is sucking
up all of the resources that could be put in
other directions. And the question is can we afford it?
And when you look at what's happening in Los Angeles now,
to me, it says, no, we can't afford it.

Speaker 5 (12:30):
I mean, it gets harder to afford it in that sense, Ran,
when you're also allowing the billionaires to corrupt the system
and to just live in a sheer state of oligarchy,
which is sort of it's tragic. It's tragic comedy in
California because you know, tragic comedy when there's not actual

(12:52):
human life on the line, because you look at it
and you're like, this is you have the system of referendums,
like you have as close to direct democracy as this
in the United States, and yet the billionaires really run
the show. So this may be a total force of
nature situation that would not be uncommon or crazy. But
California has seen some PGNE is a company that gets

(13:15):
just enormous benefits from the government.

Speaker 7 (13:18):
We've seen, you know.

Speaker 5 (13:19):
Massive slashing from Karen Bass fire was second to last
on that list of the highest cuts. So yeah, there's
there are going to be a lot of significant questions
I think asked here rightfully so about the oligarchy in California.

Speaker 3 (13:34):
Ran.

Speaker 4 (13:35):
Yeah, and we're entering a phase where the climate is
going to be more difficult for our human population to
live in and more expensive, and we're going to have
to decide whether or not we want to invest in
that or else, whether we want to see it just
burned down in front of us.

Speaker 5 (13:49):
Horrib Well, well, let's hope that things get better today,
although it's not looking like they will.

Speaker 3 (13:54):
But stay tuned. Will have a lot more to come
on this story, for sure.

Speaker 8 (14:00):
All right.

Speaker 4 (14:00):
Donald Trump met with a media for over an hour
yesterday describing his plans for military slash potentially economic coercion
against Panama, against Greenland, poked some fun at Canada along
the way. We're going to talk about a bunch of
what he said, but let's start by playing some of

(14:22):
the key clips and I'm going to share these. Bear
with me.

Speaker 5 (14:26):
I'm a bit news this was, by the way, this
was like a wild press conference that he held in
Palm Beach yesterday. It was like very I saw one
one journalist post on X like the Trump era is back.
It did remind me a lot of those press conferences
he held during the transition in twenty seventeen, before he
was inaugurated in twenty seventeen, and some of the early

(14:47):
press conferences in that administration too, even some of the
COVID press conferences. I mean, this is Donald Trump at
his trumpiest when he's interacting with reporters and just goes
for a really long time. We'll talk about literally anything.
So there's a wide range from these clips you're about
to see. But Ryan cued up a great one. This
is about Greenland, right, Canada?

Speaker 4 (15:07):
I think this was O Canada. Here we go.

Speaker 9 (15:09):
But why are we supporting a country two hundred billion
plus a year. Our military is at their disposal all
of these other things.

Speaker 7 (15:20):
They should be a state.

Speaker 9 (15:22):
That's why I told Trudeau when he came down, I said,
what would happen if we didn't do it?

Speaker 7 (15:26):
He said, Canada would dissolve.

Speaker 9 (15:28):
Canada wouldn't be able to function if we didn't take
that twenty percent of our car up market. You know,
we again, they send us hundreds of thousands of cars.
They make a lot of money with that. They send
us a lot of other things that we don't need.
We don't need their cars and we don't need the
other products.

Speaker 7 (15:43):
We don't need their milk.

Speaker 9 (15:45):
We got a lot of milk, We got a lot
of everything, and we don't need any of it. So
I said to him, well, why are we doing it.
He said, I don't really know. He was unable to
answer the question, but I can answer it. We're doing
it because of habit, and we're doing it because we
like our neighbors. We've been good neighbors. But we can't
do it forever. And it's a tremendous amount of money.

(16:07):
And why should we have a two hundred billion dollar deficit?
And add on to that many many other things that
we give them in terms of subsidy. And I said,
that's okay to have if you're a state, but if
you're another country, we don't want to have it. We're
not going to have it with European Union either.

Speaker 4 (16:23):
Love it, right, I.

Speaker 3 (16:24):
Always love it when he says not.

Speaker 5 (16:27):
Sometimes he just drops the in front of something, so
instead of saying the European Union, he just says a
European Union.

Speaker 3 (16:33):
We're not going to do it with European Union.

Speaker 4 (16:36):
Yeah, And I love that. He just talks about Canada
being one state, not you can imagine there might be
more than one state in that giant thing in there.
But we'll talk more about Canada because this is fun.
But let's let's look at some of his other good
times Greenland. Donald Trump Junior here visited Greenland a little provocation.

(16:58):
Maybe this is the you know, this is the effort
to plant the flag.

Speaker 5 (17:03):
He's been in Greenland for the last couple of days
with Sergio Gore and Charlie Kirk, and they've been posting
pictures and videos with the good people of Greenland. So
the timing of the press conference was quite interesting yesterday
because it was happening as these pictures were being posted
of Donald Trump Junior, you know, saying the people in
Charlie Kirk posting, you know, the people of Greenland just
want their freedom, etcetera, etcetera. I'm paraphrasing them, but they

(17:26):
actually made the trip. So it was good timing for
Donald Trump to make these remarks in a question after
a question he got yesterday.

Speaker 4 (17:34):
Yeah, here we go.

Speaker 6 (17:38):
D citing actions to draw plans and could you elaborate it.

Speaker 9 (17:42):
I think you didn't rule out a military perversion, and well,
we need Greenland for national security purposes. I've been told
that for a long time, long before I even ran.
I mean, people have been talking about it for a
long time. You have approximately forty five thousand people there.
People really don't even know if Denmark has an illegal
right to it. But if they do, they should give

(18:05):
it up because we needed for nancial security. That's for
the free world. I'm talking about protecting the free world.
You look at you don't even need binoculars. You look outside.
You have China ships all over the place. You have
Russian ships all over the place. We're not letting that happen.
We're not letting it happen.

Speaker 4 (18:24):
Okay, we're not letting that happen. Let's see where where's
the right on Greenland? While doing up the next.

Speaker 5 (18:33):
Clip entirely in favor, but the rights trolling of Canada
is what really has me confused recently. If you add
Canada to the United States as a state or as
individual states, you're you're adding actually by GDP, which is
not the best measure of these things, but it is
a measure of these things. One of the would be
one of the poorest states in the in the unions,

(18:55):
I guess, you know, national defense. Obviously, advantages that would
come with adding ended to controlling more of the Arctic.
But that one baffles me a little bit. I think
a lot of it is trolling. Greenland is not trolling.
That's that's completely serious. Goes back to obviously, Seward, the
people are Alaska panned out well, so maybe it wouldn't
be such a folly to take on Greenland.

Speaker 4 (19:18):
Yeah, fair point. Yes, Seward's folly was what the purchase
of Alaska, right, people said, it was absolutely ridiculous. That
seemed to work out pretty well for the US, and
Seward also wanted to get the other Alaska on the
other side. Here's Trudeau's response. There isn't a snowballs chance

(19:38):
in hell, Trudeau tweeted, true to who's now resigned, there
isn't a snowball's chance in hell that Canada would become
part of the United States. Workers and communities in both
our countries benefit from being each other's biggest trading and
security partners. I'd like to know how that conversation that
Trump described with Trudeau actually went. You know, I think

(20:00):
you know, I'm not somebody who's here to give the
United States advice on how to be a better global hedgemon,
because I think we're actually a genuinely destructive force in
the world, So anything that strengthens US is probably a
bad idea. But to me, it does actually seem that
the US as a hedgemon would be strengthened by basically
absorbing Canada into the United States, not just for the resources,

(20:23):
but also for you know, the number one thing that
the US kind of has going for it is it
is that it's the global reserve currency backed by the
US military. If you add Canada's currency to the US currency,
you know, the Canadian dollar goes away and they just
have American dollars. You know, it adds a non trivial

(20:44):
you know, circulation of currency around the world, which is
which would then counteract the efforts by bricks and and
you know generally by bricks, but by other countries to
start doing bilateral or multilateral trading that goes around the dollar,
which is the main threat because if we're not we're
not actually manufacturing anything, and we're just the center of capital.

(21:07):
But the but capital isn't circulating in US dollars anymore
because we've we've thrown away our kind of our you know,
imperial privilege that we have, then what do we have left?
Uh So, to that extent, I would say for the US,
it's probably a good thing. In Canada from its perspective,
does seem to have lost the plot, like there was

(21:29):
a there was a stretch where you could look at
Canada and say, they've they've got something interesting going on
up there. You know, they've they've got a little different
version here. Uh, They've got it. They've got a different culture,
they've got some stronger you know, communal politics. Now they
just there's nothing, nothing impressive going on up there. So

(21:49):
I think it's probably a wrap for Canada.

Speaker 5 (21:52):
People hate when we talk about Canada. They're really gonna hate.

Speaker 3 (21:55):
What you just said. Quote nothing impressive going.

Speaker 4 (21:59):
On there, grow me wrong.

Speaker 5 (22:03):
Yeah, the country is in dire straits right now, There's
no question about that. And actually your point about currency
is a really interesting one. In the natural resources in
Canada and Mexico, I mean Mexico, well we're just you know,
talking at the thirty thousand foot level.

Speaker 3 (22:17):
That would be I think a spectacular.

Speaker 5 (22:20):
Edition in terms of, like we like natural resources shipping,
and that's what a lot of this comes down to, shipping,
not just for commerce, but for defense. That's the conversation
that's being had about Panama. Donald Trump talked a little
bit about Panama and the press conference yesterday as well.
It's obviously very timely because of Jimmy Carter's funeral. And
I'm sure Ryan, you have a different perspective than I
do on Panama. But one of the things I will

(22:42):
say is the Overton window is shifting right now. And
this is something that Trump. I don't know if it's genius,
if it's incidental, but we've never ever it's only Trump
that broaches something like this and gets taken seriously. We
never ever had these conversations before. And just for the
I mean, we have, but you're not in recent contemporary politics.

(23:05):
You'd just sort of be laughed at if you talked
about adding Canada as the fifty first state, but.

Speaker 4 (23:11):
In kind of laughing.

Speaker 3 (23:13):
Well yeah, but.

Speaker 5 (23:13):
He's like, Canada is not laughing, and they really aren't laughing,
And you know, Denmark isn't finding this whole thing all
that amusing either. But that's like, this is going to
change the way that we talk about our neighbors, not
just in terms of.

Speaker 4 (23:31):
Trade, literally literally changed the way we talk about our neighbors.

Speaker 9 (23:34):
Speaking of laughing, steet trillion dollars worth of assets. We're
going to be changing the name of the Gulf of
Mexico to the Gulf of America, which has a beautiful
ring that covers a lot of territory.

Speaker 7 (23:49):
The Gulf of America.

Speaker 9 (23:50):
What a beautiful name, and it's appropriate, it's appropriate, and
Mexico has to stop allowing millions of people to pour
into our and.

Speaker 4 (24:00):
So yeah, that that that goes along with his kind
of Trumpian Monroe doctrine where you know, he, like you said,
he talked about how look, hey, we built the Panama Canal.
We built it for us basically, but let let Panama
take care of it. Now we've turned it over to
the Chinese, and that's outrageous. You know, I do think

(24:20):
from an American perspective, like the dominant power having influence,
you know, having the dominant influence in its sphere seems reasonable. Uh.
It seems also kind of hypocritical for us to then
tell China that, you know, they ought to have, you know,
no influence on on their side of the world. You

(24:44):
know that that that we're going to completely control this
and also we're going to completely control everything around China
as well. Like you can imagine from China like wait
a minute, okay, fine, Panama Canal, you want that thing back,
all right? Whatever? It's tiny, It's like you like, you know,
the big ships can't fit through it anymore. You need
to do a lot of upgrades on it. But then

(25:07):
get off our back about Chinese influence over in Asia.

Speaker 5 (25:12):
So the conversation Crystal and Soccer had yesterday about Trudeau
as the kind of symbol of the neoliberal arc over
the last ten years and that sort of winding down
as Trudeau is the beacon of the like new neoliberal
future and then is kind of unraveling as Donald Trump
comes back into office and has been selected by voters

(25:33):
again is interesting. And in the context of what you're
just saying, cold war Western politics where this like soft
imperialism or this like apologetic imperialism, where you have people
like Jimmy Carter negotiating the return of the Panama Canal to.

Speaker 4 (25:52):
Panama RD four in the press conference right right.

Speaker 5 (25:56):
While waging a Cold war and doing it, you know,
in different ways that I think are arguably very imperialists.
And you and I would definitely agree on that. And
so what Trump, I think Trump is like just shifting that.
It's like that is who knows. I mean, you go
from Carter to Reagan and things flip back and forth.
But Trump seems like he's ushering in this new era

(26:19):
of just like brash imperialism or return to brash imperialism,
which is like, this is hard power, this is our hemisphere,
this is it's the monro doctrine to your point, which
you do hear a lot of conservatives talking about.

Speaker 3 (26:34):
Now in a very reverent way.

Speaker 5 (26:37):
So I do think it's like just the conversation that
he's broached and brought into the overtin window or stretch
the overton window to bring it in is a pretty
fascinating one.

Speaker 4 (26:49):
It is nice to be at least able to you know,
talk about it out loud, right and talk about it
in clear terms, rather than smuggling it in through the
language of democracy promotion.

Speaker 5 (27:03):
Or right like would you rather have the CIA run
Panama or at least have like transparently out in the
open the United States is trying to run panel.

Speaker 4 (27:12):
Yeah, if these are our choices. Yeah, So in any event,
it's going to be interesting there that that at least
we will be gifted with.

Speaker 5 (27:20):
Yes, the Gulf of America, of which, by the way,
like we have a state called New Mexico.

Speaker 4 (27:27):
New Mexico.

Speaker 5 (27:29):
Well yeah, it wouldn't really work, but anyway, Yes, quite
a moment yesterday at that wild press conference, and we'll
see what happens going forward now.

Speaker 4 (27:38):
That wellkness that's going through and renaming everything.

Speaker 5 (27:40):
By the way, oh it is a sort of iconoclass, right,
not a bad point, right, Well, we have more meltdowns
to cover, Ryan, So let's move on to Brian Stalter.

Speaker 3 (27:55):
After Mark Zuckerberg.

Speaker 5 (27:56):
Made his major announcement yesterday that Meta would be changing
its approach to speech, actually reversing its approach to speech
policies on the platform, fact checking policies on the platform,
reactions have been pouring in from people on the left
and the right. Let's just start with in case you
missed it, part of this video Mark Zuckerberg posted soccer
and Crystal covered it yesterday. It actually sort of happened

(28:18):
early in the morning. This was posted right before seven
am East Coast time, and was accompanied by a statement
from Meta that kind of fleshed out their approach a
little bit, you know, getting rid of those third party
fact checkers. Moving towards community notes, Mark Zuckerberg mentioned Elon
Musk directly at least x directly, the platform that Musk
has started using for community notes. So let's take a
look just at a brief clip from Mark Zuckerberg statement

(28:42):
yesterday in case you missed it, so.

Speaker 10 (28:44):
Here it is, and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies,
and restoring free expression on our platforms. More specifically, we're
going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them
with community notes similar to X starting in the US.

Speaker 3 (29:00):
Ryan.

Speaker 5 (29:00):
One interesting thing there is he says back to our
roots and talks about how he had started Meta as
a way to give people a voice.

Speaker 3 (29:09):
So it's it's.

Speaker 5 (29:10):
Pretty interesting to see this like re recycling of the
ethos that there. They had a lot in that sort
of early Obama era when they were the cool kids
with the ping pong tables in their offices, and now
they're saying, listen, we're just getting back to Internet one
point zero ethos.

Speaker 3 (29:28):
This is all about free speech. I'm wearing a gold chain.

Speaker 5 (29:31):
I look like I would be, you know, sitting on
a UFC bench with you know, Elon and Trump even
even more like I fit in even more than Mike Johnson.

Speaker 4 (29:44):
Yeah, and there is some real truth that some of
the early tech DNA you know, had roots in kind
of an anarchist you know, information wants to be free
version of the world. In fact, going back to the
kind of you know, hippie acid creation of the Internet.
You know, in its early days, a lot of those
founders really believed that they were building kind of revolutionary

(30:07):
technology that was going to overthrow the powers that be.
Move fast and break things was you know for a
very long time, you know, Zuckerberg's motto for Facebook. And
so there is actually some truth that at some point
in tech's life it did have that ethos and did

(30:30):
move away from it.

Speaker 3 (30:31):
No, that's a I think a very worthy point.

Speaker 5 (30:33):
So Brian Stelter then appeared on CNN and had quite
an interesting conversation about it.

Speaker 3 (30:39):
So let's well a little bit of Steltzer here.

Speaker 6 (30:42):
It gets in this broader sense that when people like
zucker Elon Musk or mar Zuckerberg talk about free speech,
everybody wants free speech, but it oftentimes seems that these
tech CEOs actually are favoring or preferring a certain kind
of speech.

Speaker 7 (30:56):
Right, They're favoring.

Speaker 6 (30:57):
Their own speech or their own political preferences, and not
the actual entire user or the community's speech. You know,
the changes announced by Meta today are very much a
maga makeover, a pro Trump makeover, and that's gonna win
meta some conservative users, but it may repel some liberals.
That's the same thing we've seen happen on Elon Musk's

(31:17):
next he's turned into more of a right wing platform
where he's pro free speech when it's really pro Musk
or pro Trump speech.

Speaker 3 (31:25):
So right.

Speaker 5 (31:26):
And that's interesting because we just talked about how Facebook
is a was sort of informed by that early ethos
of the Internet, and now in twenty twenty five you
have Brian Stelter referring to that as a maga makeover,
And honestly, there's something of a point to that in
that it is the same argument that you started to

(31:46):
hear from people on the right who were skeptical of
these early Internet guys, conservatives, not libertarians so much.

Speaker 3 (31:52):
Obviously libertarians were always a part of that movement.

Speaker 5 (31:55):
But it's just to call that a maga makeover. It's
true in some sense, but also misses the broader context
that it's actually more of the traditional, like aclu old
left approach to speech that the right kind of happened
upon because it suddenly was turned against them.

Speaker 4 (32:14):
Yeah, and I think it's wrong for Stella to conflate
what's going on at Twitter X and what's going on
at Facebook. I think, you know, both are flowing from
the same kind of political project that we're seeing. You know,
Zuckerberg was very clear that he's explicitly making this change
because elections have consequences. Like one admirable thing about his
video is that it did not include corporate speak. It

(32:36):
was he was It was very direct. It's like and
it was very plain about what they're going to do.
We're going to shut down our trust in safety team
in California, We're going to move it to Texas. Just
straightforward things like that, which you can agree or disagree with,
but like, like, wow, that's that. This is This is
rarely blunt stuff. And he pinpointed it directly to the
election with Musk. You know, he kind of drove the

(32:59):
change more than responded to the change. And you know,
his champion of free speech has has become kind of
mockable in the face of his his demonetizing of a
whole bunch of his enemies that he engaged with on
the H one B controversy, and then all of a
sudden they all start losing their like blue jacks and

(33:20):
their promoted stuff. And their their subscribers and and everything else.
So it's like, all right, well, anybody who you know
really put their faith there, I guess found that to
be a little bit misplaced.

Speaker 5 (33:33):
It's oligarchy, however you slice it.

Speaker 4 (33:36):
It is. And actually, before we get to the next element,
I want to pull one up that's not on the rundown,
which I think is yeah, going on a little rogue here,
But we can do that because we've got this more
more nimble system here. So this was Lena Kahan on
CNBC with with a bit of a different take on
what the problem is here an.

Speaker 11 (33:57):
Economy where the decisions of a single company or a
single executive are not having extraordinary impact on speech online.
And I know that's a concern that we hear bipartisan
members of Congress talk about, and so it'll be interesting
to see what happens. We of course, have litigation ongoing.
There's going to be a trial starting this spring FTC

(34:19):
versus Facebook, alleging that their prior acquisitions were illegal.

Speaker 12 (34:23):
What do you think, though, of the relationship that we're
seeing between big tech and the next administration. What do
you make of the meetings and pilgrimages with which we're
seeing Mark Zuckerberg go to mar A Lago, or we're
seeing a Jeff Bezos or Tim Cook. I mean, this
is a very different kind of relationship than administration the

(34:45):
Biden administration had, and specifically what you represented to the
business community.

Speaker 11 (34:52):
So I approached my job with a focus on faithfully
enforcing the law and making sure we were doing that
across the economy without fear.

Speaker 4 (35:00):
Yeah, I mean, lead that for there. But basically what
she's saying is probably something that the right would have
agreed with several years ago, which is, Yep, we shouldn't
have to hope that Mark Zuckerberg wakes up one day
and makes the right decision. Yep, No, nobody elected Mark
Zuckerberg to be.

Speaker 5 (35:17):
And Elon Musk and Elon Musk right, we shouldn't have
to hope that Jack Dorsey wakes up one day and
you know, is looks favorably upon the conservative case when
The New York Times is coming down on you, and yeah,
Lena Kahn one favor on the right. I mean, she
continued a Trump administration suit against Google because that argument

(35:42):
it wasn't just that she was going after big tech,
it was that this very specific argument about single oligarchs
who control a wide swath of the public square with
private platforms, whether it's Instagram, Facebook, Meta as a whole,
or Twitter now x that that was always the problem,
and so yes, it's great that they're, you know, saying

(36:03):
at least publicly that they're taking a lighter approach to
the suppression or censorship of speech. That is obviously a
step in the right direction, and saying we're not going
to put our thumb on the scale as much as
our previous policy suggested. But what Lena Khan is saying
is that we have an economy structured so as that

(36:24):
they can put their.

Speaker 3 (36:25):
Thumb on the scale at any given moment.

Speaker 5 (36:29):
And that is the problem in and of itself, not
that they've decided that they're going to do it less,
but the fact that they have the power to begin
with is the problem. And conservatives used to agree with that.
The question is whether Zuckerberg and Musk are convincing them
they don't have to worry about it, or they don't
have to worry about it as much, so then it
becomes a lower priority. Doesn't Ken Paxton in twenty twenty
six hypothetically care as much about going after big tech

(36:51):
if big tech isn't going after conservatives exactly.

Speaker 4 (36:54):
Yeah, you know, a lot of Lina Khan's anti trust
stuff has its roots in kind of right wing, free
market oriented approaches to you know, how markets ought to
be structured. Even though that even though she's you know,
gotten a lot of favor on on the left and
what she's describing there as an ad monopoly. That where

(37:14):
Facebook has built a moat around an ad monopoly which
you know, prevents other social networks from from coming in.
It's it's difficult because you have you know, size and scale,
you know, uh, you know, difficulties of you know, you
have to get to a threshold level in a social
network or you're not a social network. You need the
social part in there, not just a handful of handful

(37:35):
of users. But she's saying because of the way they've
built the moat, other other people can't get in. And
you're exactly right that you don't want politicians to be
deciding on the policy of the structure of an economy
based on just whether or not those companies are culturally
with them at the at the at a particular moment.

Speaker 3 (37:56):
H right.

Speaker 5 (37:57):
And this is not like, uh, this is not something
that's going to be in the rear view mirror for
the right or the left. Frankly, if you are as
administrations switch and you have people trying to curry favor
with the left and the right. Obviously it wasn't quite
as bad for the left when the Biden administration was
asking directly asking people like Mark Zuckerberg.

Speaker 3 (38:17):
To censor the right.

Speaker 5 (38:19):
But if you don't change the fundamental structure of the economy,
this becomes a problem for any side. And that doesn't
go away unless you change the structure of the economy.
And so what we're looking at now is having a
wide swath of our discourse exported onto these private platforms
that gamify that discourse and that have control over what

(38:40):
is said, have control over the algorithms that amplify or
deamplify what is said.

Speaker 3 (38:44):
And that's our future.

Speaker 5 (38:46):
That doesn't go away, that doesn't change, and we desperately,
desperately need a.

Speaker 3 (38:51):
Solution to it.

Speaker 5 (38:52):
So, unfortunately, it looks like some of that enthusiasm may
be blunted on the right if you have Zuckerberg putting
a million dollars into the inauguration fund. It's not just
you know, whether the principle of the argument is still
embraced by the right. It's whether there's any momentum or
energy to have their own sort of Lena Kahn when
the donors are like, this is a backbench issue, give

(39:14):
us the tax cuts, let's focus on this. Let's focus
on that. You're right, you know, it's not ideal, but
so yeah, it could be a quite unfortunate turn of events,
and Zuckerberg could be getting exactly what he pays for.

Speaker 4 (39:28):
So I saw Ben Shapiro was in here. Anytime I
look at the top performers on Facebook, it seems like
Shapiro and his you know, alliance that he had built
with Zuckerberg over the years was really paying off. What's
his take here.

Speaker 5 (39:42):
Yeah, everyone could see a post that he put up
yesterday along with his segment from his show. He says
Facebook is just completely reversed course on censorship. He posted
this on x after years of doing the Democratic parties
anti free speech bidding. It's beyond time. Good for Zuckerberg,
and let's be real, this happened because up one then
in all caps he said, still not tired of winning,

(40:05):
Let's go to Donald Trump himself, because he actually got
asked that question directly at mar Alago yesterday.

Speaker 13 (40:12):
Meta said today it was not putting in fact checks
on which website and it.

Speaker 7 (40:16):
Was a lot of community.

Speaker 9 (40:17):
So I watched their news conference and I thought it
was a very good news conference. I think they've honestly,
I think they've come a long way Meta Facebook, I.

Speaker 7 (40:26):
Think they've come a long way.

Speaker 9 (40:27):
I watched it. The man was very impressive. I watched it. Actually,
I watched it on Fox. I'm not allowed to say that.

Speaker 8 (40:33):
Do you think he's been directly responding to the threats
that you have made to him in the past?

Speaker 7 (40:37):
But probably probably so.

Speaker 3 (40:40):
Ryan.

Speaker 5 (40:40):
This gets to exactly what we were just talking about,
which is as this like this, this better policy. Although
I do wonder how community notes work is going to
work on Facebook when the only people left on Facebook
seemed to be elderly. Sorry, no offense to everybody's still
on Facebook. It's not just the elderly, but it sort

(41:00):
of sounds like a sitcom waiting to happen, Like, give
me a sitcom inside the community of like Wikipedia editors,
except its Facebook community notes.

Speaker 3 (41:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (41:10):
I mean I told our drop site team last night,
I was like, look if if Zuckerber is going to
actually allow politics back onto Facebook and maybe even threads,
then there's we might as well post there. Again, like,
we don't even have drop site. We don't even have
a Facebook page. We're going to start one because you're like,
it is a very boomer heavy audience, but there are

(41:32):
a lot of boomers. Yeah, and that's a big It's
it's an audience worth reaching if you can reach them.
The reason we hadn't done it isn't because we hate boomers.
It's because Zuckerberg was basically blocking anything interesting that you
know that wasn't just you know, fluff content right getting shared.

Speaker 5 (41:50):
I'm actually going to share this post that Joel Kaplan,
who is the new longtime Republican lobbyist, the head of
their like global affairs public affairs outreach that used to
be Nick Klegg. Many people remember he wrote this as
a supplement to what Zuckerberg said yesterday and actually talked
exactly about what you talked about, Ryan, in that the

(42:12):
policy at Facebook for a long time was actually to
suppress political content because they were under the impression that
it's why it's not what people wanted to see, sort
of clogging up their news feeds on Facebook, and I
think you're right that that actually probably sent a lot
of younger people away from Facebook because the old saw
about not talking about politics and religion. We actually like,

(42:35):
as a people like to talk about politics and religion.
It's healthy for us to talk about politics and religion.
And we love to see everybody's dogs and their puppies
and their graduation pictures, and their families and their babies
and all of that. But you can also do that
in text groups and all of that other stuff. Now,
So they said that they are going to stop suppressing

(42:55):
political content that they realized people want to do that,
so they didn't actually roll out this fact checking program
or this the death of the fact checking program, which
has wide consequences because obviously they used to partner with
all of these third parties that actually got money for
being part of the program, you know, traditional news outlets,

(43:15):
things like PolitiFact, and there were others, you know, even
I think the Daily Caller was like the one conservative
group other than The Dispatch, which I don't really count,
that cooperated in all of this. But they also say
they're going to allow more speech and a personalized approach
to political content.

Speaker 3 (43:32):
They noted, so.

Speaker 5 (43:35):
Quite a significant reversal, not just on those third party
fact checkers, which is very significant in and of itself,
but actually on everything political for basically on everything political.

Speaker 3 (43:47):
Which was pretty interesting.

Speaker 6 (43:48):
Ryan.

Speaker 5 (43:49):
Yeah, yeah, Well, let's turn to this post from Glenn
because just as we were talking about sort of the
realignment implications of this, I thought it was worth bringing
in Glenn here. He says it's hard to overstate how
angry and upset Brazilian officials like this are. He has
a post from Joel Brandt that he's quote tweeting, along
with other supporters of its secret due Process, Free Judicial

(44:11):
censorscript scheme about Zuckerberg's announcement. The Meta CEO's announcement gutted
the core weapons of speech suppression, and he's absolutely right
about that it did, and he's pointing out that people
on the left are angry about it. Now, Brian Stelter
didn't sound angry to me. Maybe frustrated is a good
way to put it. But there are some people who
are flat out angry about this, especially Ryan, people who

(44:33):
had been using threads and saw that as an escape
from x So it's like a test for the left.

Speaker 4 (44:45):
Threads at least as far as I can tell, lost
basically all of its momentum, specifically because it was refusing
to allow politics and news into the feed and because
it was insisting on not doing anything remotely chronological. You know,

(45:06):
so whenever you would log in, it would just give you,
like them, what it thought would be the most interesting
thing to you, even if it was seven days old
or twenty five days old. And so the people who
wanted news out out of a social feed went over
to Blue Ski. The liberals went over to Blue Sky
much more than Threads, and Blue Sky is really outpaced Threads,

(45:29):
at least culturally among liberals. Who knows if this change
in Threads will will pull people in because it has
that it has the scale it has, you know, it
has millions of people in there because of their connection
to Facebook and Instagram. But it might be so trash
that that it's impossible. Now. The other the flip side

(45:52):
of Glenn's point is an interesting and curiousity take on this.
I think it was alone with Rahu. I saw it
was our nobotron on Twitter. Somebody was saying that the
same way that democrats have used democracy promotion to intervene
imperially in other countries' internal affairs and push an American

(46:14):
hegemonic agenda. They worry that Republicans are now going to
use free speech as as its wedge to get into
other countries internal domestic politics and drive drive their own
political agenda in another country, so that that free speech

(46:35):
will be a fig leaf for American intervention in just
the same way that democracy promotion was a fig leaf
for American intervention for democrats. In other words, you would
come in and take on the EU or take on
the Brazilian center left around their speech policies. But what
you're what you're actually trying to do is over is

(46:57):
regime change, overthrow the government and put in a government which,
just as in the mirror example of democracy promotion, doesn't
actually care about democracy, doesn't actually care about free speech,
is actually just trying to implement an allied right wing agenda.
And so you kind of just use those use those

(47:18):
aspirational values along the way. Hopefully that's not what we
end up seeing, but I think it's something to be
on the lookout for.

Speaker 5 (47:24):
It's definitely something to be on the lookout for, because
it's being talked about in those kinds of spaces right now.
And you know, honestly, it could be there's an argument
that it's for the better. Like if we're pushing other
countries to adopt just standards of free speech, it's still imperialism.

Speaker 3 (47:41):
But we're going to be doing the imperialism.

Speaker 4 (47:43):
No matter what. So human rights and democracy and yeah,
we're not all four. Everybody's for human rights. Human rights
are great.

Speaker 5 (47:50):
Yeah, the one thing we're not going to do is
stop the like coercive Like, we're not going to stop
doing that.

Speaker 3 (47:58):
So if it's for like, if we can get better.

Speaker 5 (48:00):
Speech policies out of the UK or Canada or some
countries that do have terrifying speech policies that hopefully are
not canaries in the coal mine for the United States,
then I'm all for it. But it's exactly going to
test the argument that we were just talking about with
Lena Kahan, where the right got really uncomfortable with some
of this coercive imperialism, the sort of soft power, and

(48:26):
this could test it in the exact same way.

Speaker 3 (48:28):
I think you're right, Ryan, that is something to be
on the lookout for.

Speaker 4 (48:30):
Yeah, speak clear out about what we're doing while we're
doing it. The fight over TikTok is coming down to
the wire. A new buyer is now jumping into the fray.
Let's play this.

Speaker 13 (48:44):
And then midday twelve oh five, Trump will be who
we have to work with to close the deal and
once ahead, so I wanted to let him know as
well as others in his cabinet, that we're doing this
and we're going to need their help.

Speaker 4 (49:04):
So this is Kevin O'Leary, a right wing businessman from Canada,
which is which is still currently a sovereign country to
the north of the United States, but may at some
point be another state in the United States. Either way,
he's a shark tank guy ally of Trump and coming

(49:25):
in at the last moment to try to rescue TikTok
from potential potentially being banned if the sale is not
successfully forced and if the Supreme Court does not give
it some reprieve. So Emily, what's the latest here.

Speaker 5 (49:41):
Yeah, So just to be clear on the timeline, that
law that was signed last year in April means that
TikTok needs to be sold by January nineteenth to a
US buyer. So January nineteenth, you will note, is the data.

Speaker 4 (49:57):
We're not a US buyer right, it's like a non
somebody from China, Russia, Iran and some other like places
that we consider adversaries because otherwise Trump would have to
hurry up and make Canada a state for January nineteen. Well,
I don't know if actually is going to be able

(50:18):
to be a qualified buyer.

Speaker 5 (50:20):
That's a interesting point because I don't know if Kevin
O'Leary is actually an American citizen, or whether he's negotiating
on behalf of an American company that he has a
stake in something like that. There's also a billionaire Frank
McCourt who's been making moves to try and conservative billionaire
to try and buy TikTok.

Speaker 3 (50:35):
January nineteenth is the day before Donald Trump's inauguration.

Speaker 5 (50:38):
That is when TikTok is set to be banned, and
Trump has said he's got a quote warm spot for TikTok.
The Supreme Court is considering a Trump backed effort to
overturn the US Court of Appeals decision to uphold the
law that Joe Biden signed on Friday, So those arguments

(50:59):
are happening on Friday, the deadline, so that's the tenth.
The deadline is the nineteenth, So this is all playing
out TikTok is right now, and people can understand why
this is the Acxios tear sheet. Ryan is now sending
people to what's it called Lemon eight because they're panicked.
They don't know that this is actually going to work

(51:22):
out at all, because they're I mean, if they lose
control of the company, obviously they're losing a lot of power,
They're losing a lot of revenue bite dances based in Beijing.
Obviously they still have other revenue streams that are very powerful.
This one is extremely powerful, though, and they would like
to keep a slice of it at the very least

(51:44):
ahead of what could be transpiring now. It's possible the
Supreme Court does not decide in Trump's favor, in favor
of people who are trying to prevent this from happening.
That's actually we don't really have a clear indication of
where the Supreme Court is going to go on this
at all.

Speaker 3 (52:02):
Now.

Speaker 5 (52:03):
A lot of people have said, if you look at
what happened with the US Court of Appeals, it's unlikely
that the Conservative Court is going to change it, just
based on, you know, the arguments that they found.

Speaker 4 (52:15):
Composed the Court of appeals find well, it's basically rejected,
like they upheld the law, right, right.

Speaker 5 (52:22):
Yeah, they upheld the law because it was passed through
the democratic process. I mean, there was something that was
done by Congress, signed by the President, and that's going
to be a persuasive argument probably, and and maybe it
should be a persuasive argument. That's and what's important is
not to conflate that. You know, there are a lot
of laws that we might like that go through that
process and are fine, but it's important not to conflate

(52:45):
that with whether or not the bill was a good idea.
And you know, even as somebody who's been pretty sympathetic
the idea of banning TikTok, you and I've talked about
this before. For different reasons, that bill was horrible. It
was like a deep state power grab essentially for the
reasons that you just talked about in terms of naming
or for adversaries and ways that it could be the
power could be expanded sort of Patriot Act type of

(53:07):
manner to suddenly like have government control.

Speaker 3 (53:11):
I mean, we already have a lot of that.

Speaker 5 (53:12):
But anyway, all this is to say that's a separate
what the Supreme Court does is a separate argument for
whether that original bill was good, and that's a separate
argument in and of itself from whether it's good to
ban TikTok.

Speaker 4 (53:24):
Yeah, and Byte Dance also owns Lemonade, which would mean
by the strictures of that law that was passed, it
would also be banned. Bite Dance seems to think that
because it's much lower profile, it might be able to
slip through. And I think also they're being smart. They're thinking,
if we're if we're going to lose access to this site,

(53:47):
to this app TikTok very soon, we should you know,
use the app while we have it to drive as
many people to something that will still control after this.
Because presumably if they do inc a deal to offload
TikTok to an American or a Canadian buyer, then they
will leave at Lemonade alone because it's not a significant threat,

(54:10):
and if they've boosted the value of it in the meantime,
that be in an advantage to them. But the reason
I've always thought that this won't actually come to pass
is that, you know, the deep State had wanted to
ban TikTok for a very long time. It was only
after October seventh, that they were able to get enough
congressional buy in to pass the law through Congress and

(54:32):
get the President to sign it because members of Congress
and members of the Establishment and both parties were horrified
not at the images that were coming out of Gaza,
but at the fact that young people were able to
see the images that were coming out of Gaza and
were repelled by them and were in opposition to the

(54:55):
genocidal assault that they were seeing. Mitt Romney and we
played the clip here on the program if you remember
like six months ago or whatever it pass said very explicitly,
the reason that the Congress wants to ban TikTok is
because it was generating images out of Gaza that was

(55:18):
making it difficult to continue to unapologetically support Israel's war effort.
He straight upset it in an on stage with Anthony Blincoln,
who acknowledged and agreed that TikTok was making the US
support for Israel that much more difficult. So the reason
I think it won't come to pass is that the

(55:39):
genocide is nearly complete, Like the depopulation is complete and
almost almost complete in northern Gaza, ninety plus percent of
people have been dislocated from their homes. The Gaza Strip
is effectively uninhabitable, yet continues to be inhabited, and so

(56:02):
Israel in the US one. And so at that point,
it doesn't matter if there's if the public is able
to see what's going on via TikTok. So that's why
I think that they will end up getting a reprieve. Now,
they may also cobble together this deal and O'Leary or
somebody else might wind up with it, which presents a

(56:25):
wild situation where you end up having so much of
the media in explicitly right wing hands, like you know,
Elon Musk, an active partisan with the Republican Party. At
this point, Fox News the biggest you know, cable channels,
active and active partisan. And then it you know, the

(56:48):
the broadcast networks to its right are you know, they're
not trivial anymore. Those are significant. MSNBC completely collapsing CNN
is a disaster. Uh. And then if you also have
TikTok owned by you know, an explicit right wing person,
not just a billionaire who has billionaire tendencies, but also

(57:11):
but somebody who's kind of partisan, a partisan conservative like O'Leary. Uh,
it's it sets up an extraordinary difficult situation for the
center left and left.

Speaker 5 (57:24):
Just gets back to the point about what that Lena
Khan made on CNBC recently about just having an economy
structured in a way that these platforms are so powerful
a rival government power, significantly rival government power, and are
under the control of a CEO, with this like massive
swath of the discourse about politics under their sway at

(57:46):
any given moment. And what's interesting, Ran is the reason
I think the deep state still cares a lot about
TikTok Israel side is China and what they want to do.
Really the reason that they want this sold through US entity.
I mean, I think there's there's some very legitimate reasons
for wanting that, and we've.

Speaker 3 (58:07):
Talked about some of those before, but.

Speaker 5 (58:09):
I think they also want TikTok to function in the
way that Twitter and X I'm sorry X and Meta do,
which is they'll give you access. If you are trying
to spy on Americans, they will share the data. They
will or Google is another example, they will cooperate. You
will have a way to access it. If you're in

(58:31):
the FBI or CIA or whatever. You'll have better You
don't have to go ask Beijing for data, and you know,
TikTok would It's kind of interesting because TikTok would say, well,
we're we're all functioning in America anyway.

Speaker 3 (58:45):
But they that's not necessarily true.

Speaker 5 (58:48):
But anyway, all this is to say, I think you
know the benefit for the quote unquote you say of
having TikTok owned by a US entity is more spy
powers for them to snoop on Americans domestically. So whether
or not there's good reasons for wanting it not to
be spy powers for just Beijing, different question.

Speaker 4 (59:12):
Meanwhile, do you notice that Lev Parnas's kid has blown
up on TikTok the last couple of days. He's doing
like one minute news reports and he's up to like
one and a half two million followers in like just weeks.
It's the funniest thing ever, Like, what is Lev Parnas's
kid doing on delivering news to people on TikTok.

Speaker 5 (59:31):
Also, I'm told that Taylor Armstrong is going viral on
TikTok for the baby. There's no playing meme that Real
Housewives Bravo fans of us have known about for like
a decade plus. Taylor Armstrong is famously the woman who's
yelling at the cat in the meme from Real Housewives
of Beverly Hills. But now she's just going viral again.
So you never know what pops out of TikTok.

Speaker 3 (59:52):
It is.

Speaker 4 (59:52):
It's a global and national treasure. It must be protected.

Speaker 5 (59:56):
There you have it from Brian grim All right, right,
let's move on to congestion pricing in New York. Well,
congestion pricing is officially in effect in New York City
as of this week, as of the fifth actually, so
we're a couple of days into it, and which means
we have the benefit. I'm saying all kinds of reactions. Now,
here's just a quick map that was posted the day

(01:00:18):
before it went into affect in Manhattan. So this is
from morning Brew NYC Congestion sols tolls start tomorrow. That
was a fifth for motor entry Manhattan at sixtieth Street
or below, cars, SUVs, pickups nine dollars, non commuter buses
fourteen forty big rigs, twenty one to sixty, motorcycles for fifty.
The MTA wants to raise fifteen billion dollars for mass

(01:00:39):
transit improvements and ease gridlock. So this is the congestion
relief zone. If you're not super familiar with New York,
it's basically that part of Manhattan. I mean, the sun's obvious,
but it's like the most congested. It shows their Westside
Highway excluded. It goes all the way down to the
southernmost tip FDR Drive excluded, those of those brake cream boundaries.

(01:01:03):
But in the middle there man that is affecting a
whole lot of people Ryan and raises some fascinating questions
about class and all of that. So let me run
a video here of one man, this man on the street,
that was done right. You actually posted this a couple
of days ago. Let's take a listen to this man

(01:01:24):
on the street.

Speaker 8 (01:01:25):
We need to affect nine dollars each day that you
pass sixtieth Street. And while I disagree with it for
many reasons, for me in particular, it really hits home
because I live right here on sixty first Street in
this building, and my car is right there parked in front.

Speaker 9 (01:01:46):
Of my building.

Speaker 8 (01:01:47):
And if I want to go to turn around to
go uptown to visit my kids who live on seventy
ninth Street, I have to pay nine dollars to go
around the block, because this is a one way street,
and that's a one way street, and that's a one
way street, and there's no way for me to get
uptown without going around the block and paying nine dollars.
And I think something has to be sorted out for

(01:02:08):
Manhattan residences.

Speaker 5 (01:02:10):
Ryan, That's quite an interesting clip because it gets to
the class dynamics here.

Speaker 3 (01:02:18):
What Yeah, you posted this yourself, so tell us what
you mean.

Speaker 4 (01:02:21):
I mean, there's a couple of interesting dynamics here. First
of all, the real estate where that guy is standing
is some of the most expensive in the entire world.
So this is not This is not a work. It's
very unlikely. And I think actually somebody found this guy
is like a pretty rich dude, So like set that aside.

(01:02:43):
The reason the news camera was there the same reason
when I did my Man on the Street interview. They
were standing outside the emergency department and grabbing people coming
out of the hospital.

Speaker 5 (01:02:54):
Yes, missed Ryan on Sky News who went viral. I
think you actually went viral on TikTok x.

Speaker 4 (01:03:00):
They were looking for people angry at the healthcare system
on an insurance industry. They went to sixtieth Street and
sixty first Street here because that's where the line is,
and so yes like it. You know, whenever there's a line,
it's going to suck for the people who are like,
you know, five feet from it. And what he's saying
is like, in order to go north, I actually have
to go south, go one block over, and then go

(01:03:21):
north and boom, now I had to being through it.
The other funny thing, though, is that, Okay, it's kind
of that is kind of a funny predicament that the
guy is in that just because of where he is,
he's going to get dinged every possible time. And you
know what, if he has a good alderman or whatever,
he you know, the good city councilman, everybody in that block,

(01:03:42):
you know, can get half half off whatever. I don't care.
What's funny though, they're talking like eighteen blocks.

Speaker 14 (01:03:49):
It's a twenty minute walk like this is this is
this is not a long distance And the whole the
point of living, a point of living in the city,
a city like Manhattan, is that it is walkable, that
you can get places by foot and that and that,
and that's good.

Speaker 4 (01:04:08):
For you, it's good for the planet, it's good for
your kids. To do that walk. So that guy is
not for any of the arguments. Kind of a sympathetic
character there, But I think there are some more sympathetic
arguments that that we should that we should entertain and
see if we can grapple with.

Speaker 3 (01:04:27):
Yeah, let's take a look at this headline. This is
from the New York Post.

Speaker 5 (01:04:30):
Map shows congestion pricing will cost up to twenty seven
dollars to drive into Manhattan. Firefighters, teachers, and businesses can't
afford it. So here's the map, and if you're looking
at it's similar to the first map that we showed,
but it actually gets even more specific about if you're
commuting through particular points in New York City. If you're
super familiar with New York, it'll make sense to you
a Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan Bridge, Williamsburg Bridge.

Speaker 3 (01:04:51):
You can see some of these.

Speaker 5 (01:04:52):
Exact pricing for for different folks, told by plate versus
told by easy pass. This is really expensive, Like, actually,
this is really expensive. I saw one man on a
street interview with a guy who was just like a
blue collar worker coming who was commuting into the city,
and some would costs him an extra two hundred dollars

(01:05:13):
a month. If he didn't start taking the subway. The subway,
of course, is not something that a lot of people
who aren't using it regularly want to start using right now,
because there's fair evasion that leads to some you know,
unfortunate experiences with law enforcement. There's also, like we just

(01:05:33):
saw last week, the horrifying video of a man who
somehow miraculously survived after being pushed onto the platform as
a train was coming on by someone who's just doing
it for the hell of it. Seemingly the woman who
was burned alive as passers by were helpless, and some
of them may have been able to do something but didn't.
Law enforcement didn't do much at all. Everyone has seen

(01:05:56):
these images, and people are not keen to leave the
safety of their vehicles. And I say that, you know,
safety not you know, being not in terms of car crashes,
which are obviously very significant area.

Speaker 3 (01:06:11):
As well and everywhere.

Speaker 5 (01:06:12):
But putting themselves vulnerable onto the subway is something a
lot of people don't want to do, especially you know,
when they it was previously they had organized their commutes
around budgets that were totally doable for them, and now
the city is asking them to pay more money when
let me just share this next screen and get your
thoughts on this. Ryan, you had Uber and Lyft spending

(01:06:36):
millions of dollars pushing for the congestion pricing because it
helps them while it doesn't help other people.

Speaker 3 (01:06:45):
I think that's pretty interesting. This is your posting.

Speaker 5 (01:06:47):
They poured millions of dollars in efforts to legalize the
congestion tolling and they stand to be among the biggest winners.
They hired top lobbyists to help persuade key state and
city officials to approve the controversial level, including Governor Kathy
Hochel and the mt A. So that brings us into
interesting perspective as well. I'm curious what you make of it.

Speaker 4 (01:07:08):
Ryan, Yeah, so uh, Uber and Lyft lobbying for this
and getting a sweetheart deal out of it where it's
cheaper for them, you know, and it and it makes
it easier for them to compete. You know, that's bs
and you know they ought to that that. You know,
that shouldn't that shouldn't be the case. I think I
think the opponents there have a have a very reasonable

(01:07:29):
argument because not only they're getting a sweetheart deal, then
there's gonna be less congestion, and they're gonna be able
to zip around more. On other hand, people who use
ubers and lifts you know, pretty frequently are going to
be are are going to uh benefit from that because
their trips will be will be quicker. Uh. There's a
kind of a chicken and egg you know problem here

(01:07:50):
that the city is trying to address to you to
your point about the subway being trash. You know, I
lived there about twenty years ago or so, and I
used to take the subway to work, and people who
live in New York have a real you know, fondness
for and defensiveness around its subway and all the character

(01:08:10):
that it has. But it's also, you know, compared to
other major cities around the world, particularly around the world,
and even even in the US, it's trash compared to
a lot of them. It should be a lot better. So,
this is supposed to be the greatest city in the world,
and it definitely does not have the greatest the greatest

(01:08:31):
subway system or not even probably in the top one hundred,
and so in order to upgrade that, they're trying to
come up with money through this congestion pricing scheme, and
so it's going to push people to use a system
that is not yet upgraded. But if you don't do
something like this, then then it never gets upgraded, and
people have both over congested traffic and in a completely

(01:08:56):
degrading subway system. One. So the low income there's a
low income discount that has been worked into the law,
which is just woefully inadequate. Make it's if you if
you have a gross income of sixty thousand dollars or less,
you're able to get half off of your fare, but
only after your first ten trips. And I think the

(01:09:19):
sixty thousand is pretty absurd. You know, most people who
are coming into New York, the reason they're driving into
New York is because they're making a little bit more
than that. But it's still extraordinarily difficult to live in
New York on say seventy or live in the New
York area on even seventy or or eighty thousand dollars,
especially if then all of your you know, you're spending

(01:09:40):
hundreds of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars on
tolls and fairs.

Speaker 3 (01:09:44):
So they really should is extremely high.

Speaker 4 (01:09:46):
They really should have made that that discount a lot
more generous and make it, make it easy, make it
easier for the middle for the middle class to get.
But if it works, then this is this is the
argument that I would make to people who don't want
to pay it but are end up paying it because
they don't live near transit and it's just not feasible

(01:10:08):
for them to use use a transit. Like, look, if
you actually shave off a half an hour of your
commute each way, and let's say you make let's say
you make forty dollars an hour, you make thirty dollars
an hour. If you shave off an hour of that,
that's thirty or forty dollars that you not to get

(01:10:29):
not to get too you know, you know, economics bro
or neoliberal, but like people's time is valuable, and so
if it works, and that's and that's a huge if.
So far we're seeing it working. Like so far, we're
seeing that commute traffic does seem to be moving faster.
You know, let let us know in the comments, if
you live in New York and if you've been driving

(01:10:50):
around the city, you know what your experience has been.
But if you can actually save that time, time is money,
you can actually you know you could you could work
an extra hour on your shift if you can, if
you can get those hours, or you have an hour,
or you have an extra hour to yourself a day,
which you know, is that worth nine dollars to you

(01:11:14):
to a lot of people, I think it would be,
especially if that money is then going into improving the
subway system in the long run.

Speaker 5 (01:11:21):
The obvious benefit while we're doing the sort of advantages
and disadvantage pros and cons is also for emergency vehicles
is a serious problem in New York that when traffic's
not moving and you need to get ambulances through. That's
a significant reason just in and of itself to start
thinking about how to deal with congestion. But I just
think what sucks, and this is not just New York based,

(01:11:44):
but near in particular, where people are the cost of
living is really high, and people are taxed to hell
and have.

Speaker 3 (01:11:50):
Been for years.

Speaker 5 (01:11:51):
It's like you're punishing them. You're punishing them for the
city's mismanagement of their own taxpayer dollars. And people have
organized their lives of course of years around commutes that
work for their budget, that work for their schedule.

Speaker 3 (01:12:07):
Uh, and so that the sudden like it just.

Speaker 5 (01:12:09):
Feels like a punishment for people who have been dutifully
like paying their taxes for years and now because the
like the the reason the subway is a disaster, it's
not really just because they lack resources. They lack resources,
financial resources, because of the mismanagement it's in.

Speaker 3 (01:12:28):
It's a complete vicious cycle right now. People have been
paying into.

Speaker 5 (01:12:31):
The system and it just again, it's going to It's
it's going to It's one of those things that just
is going to. The middle class is going to bear
the brunt of it, which obviously sucks.

Speaker 4 (01:12:42):
Although meanwhile, Dave Will pointed out really fascinating class dynamic
in the New York Post coverage. I don't know if
you saw this, but the uh they the Post was
writing about drivers who were cleverly evading the fair because
you know, people have different tricks. You put this gloss
on your license plate, which is illegal, but if you

(01:13:02):
can get away with it nobody sees it, then the
camera can't catch your your license plate or other tricks
to like not get nailed with this fair. He's like,
I've searched the New York Post and was unable to find,
you know, any articles celebrating the cleverness of subway fare
of vaders that to them is like a cover story

(01:13:25):
worthy crime and a driver who evades the fair you
know that person is clever and an American hero. And
it does go back to this unspoken assumption that car
culture is is just better because who like who built
the subway, The public built the subway, Who built the roads?

(01:13:47):
The public built the roads. But there's this belief that
one of them, just by natural right, ought to be
free and the other one ought to cost people money,
and that if you're if you're stealing one, you're a hero.
You're stealing the other, you're a villain, and if you

(01:14:08):
peel it back. There's there's no philosophical, logical, political rationale
for the argument that different transportation modes that were both
funded by the public should be treated so radically different.
So not in the post.

Speaker 3 (01:14:25):
Yeah, I think that's a great point.

Speaker 4 (01:14:29):
So President Donald Trump has promised hell on Earth if
there isn't a hostage deal by the time he's sworn
into office. Meanwhile, over at drop site News, we've gotten
a statement from Hamas appealing directly to President Trump. I'm
going to read some of that. They write the Hamas

(01:14:49):
spokesperson says, well, we believe we can reach an agreement
immediately if Netanyahu and his government stop their stalling and
obstructing the deal, we are ready to proceed with agreement
immediately that guarantees a permanent ceasefire, the withdrawal of all
Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip, the return of displaced
people to their homes without restrictions, a serious prisoner exchange

(01:15:11):
deal from both sides, and the immediate launch of a
comprehensive relief and reconstruction process for Gaza. Therefore, we look
forward to President Trump and his team exerting pressure on
that Yahoo and his government to move forward with the
deal before his inauguration. Now this comes just as there's
news being reported by Reuters and others that when it

(01:15:35):
comes to that post reconstruction or post deal reconstruction process,
the UAE, which is a very very close ally of
Trump himself and the Trump family, has said that it
would take a lead in kind of overseeing with the

(01:15:56):
US a security and reconstruction until a reformed house stating
authority could start taking control in Gaza. Now, what's interesting
about this is several things. One uh the US having
some role in security and reconstruction in Gaza suggests boots

(01:16:20):
on the ground, Like how how does you know how
would the US play a role in security? Uh, you know,
without boots in the ground. One, I guess one possibility
would be just you know, financing it and sending you know,
enormous amounts of weapons and money so that the UA
you can hire like Colombian mercenaries to patrol Gaza.

Speaker 3 (01:16:42):
Uh.

Speaker 4 (01:16:42):
So it remains me seeing what those details are.

Speaker 13 (01:16:46):
Uh.

Speaker 4 (01:16:47):
But what's also interesting is that, you know, the Gulf
countries had been insisting that a pathway to statehood was
essential for their involvement in a most conflict reconstruction. If
these reports are accurate, that would suggest that the UAE
is UEE at least is backing off of that of

(01:17:09):
that piece of the deal as Saudi Arabia and Israel
are continuing their talks towards normalization, where Saudi is insisting
on some type of language you know, about a pathway
to statehood being included or there or there won't be normalization.
You know, when we were I guess when we were

(01:17:30):
last speaking a couple of weeks ago before the Christmas
and New Year's break there were there was a lot
of talk that a deal was, you know, just moments
away from from being inked. Trump putting the January twentieth
deadline on it, to me, has always meant that net
Yahoo will take every day that's available. It's January eighth,

(01:17:52):
that's that's at least twelve days that he has a
free hand to strike Gaza. And the air strikes, oh,
have have heated up. They've they've expanded, they've they've been
almost around the clock according to people you know in Gaza.
So I would not expect him to strike a deal,

(01:18:13):
you know, a moment before he's absolutely forced to by
Donald Trump. So but let's let's play a little bit
from Trump to get a flavor of how he how
he's framing, you know, his his approach to this.

Speaker 5 (01:18:32):
And these are comments from his press conference yesterday that
we played some clips earlier in the show on other things.
But he was asked by everyone different questions and touched
on Israel.

Speaker 4 (01:18:44):
Here, yes, here you go, all.

Speaker 3 (01:18:45):
Hell must be paid.

Speaker 7 (01:18:46):
They don't release, don't you Well do I have to
define it for you?

Speaker 9 (01:18:50):
Hell will break in if those hostages aren't back.

Speaker 7 (01:18:54):
I don't want to hurt your negotiation.

Speaker 9 (01:18:56):
If they're not back by the time I get into office,
all hell will break out in the Middle East and
it will not be good for AMAS and it will
not be good frankly for anyone. All hell will break out.
I don't have to say anymore, but that's what it is.

Speaker 4 (01:19:10):
So there's some real uh gallows humor going on in Gaza.
And we're going to talk to Amat Khan, who was
in Gaza recently. He was telling me that when he
was there, Trump made similar comments all hell will break
loose uh and everyone universally that he spoke to, like,
does he have any idea what's going on here?

Speaker 3 (01:19:32):
Like?

Speaker 4 (01:19:32):
What what? What would that look like like? And it
goes from a rhetorical question to an actual question where
it's like, wait a minute, what what would hell on
Earth look like if it wasn't this, which is you know, starvation,
you know MP rampant disease, it's cold at night, your
tent you're living in tents. Your tents are flooding, uh,

(01:19:53):
and air strikes are continuing relentlessly, like and all the
hospitals are shut down, Like what so if that's the
status quo, what what the hell look like?

Speaker 5 (01:20:08):
I think, you know, Hamas in a strange way, has
some leverage with Donald Trump in that respect, because.

Speaker 4 (01:20:16):
Yeah, they've taken Hell off the table by already bringing
it to Gaza.

Speaker 5 (01:20:20):
There's that, There's there's also that Trump doesn't want He
wants to be the guy who looks like he secured
a deal. And so if if he has to get
to a deal, that means he needs Hamas's cooperation. So
does he want to escalate beyond what you just described,

(01:20:40):
Ryan and be the guy who was behind what he
already described for net and Yahoo what six months ago
is a public relations problem? Does he want to be
overseeing that or you know, does it? Does Hamas have
I guess some real leverage in they want a deal

(01:21:01):
and Trump wants a deal. He wants to be the
guy who solved the problem and died the conflict and
secured what he will say, his piece, whether it's lasting
is you know, dubious, but that does actually sort of
give Hamas their position some leverage going into a Trump administration.

Speaker 4 (01:21:21):
Yeah, and over at the drops on News Twitter account,
you can find a report from Israeli media that a
May document that was approved by Netahu's cabinet describing a
the terms that they would agree to for a ceasefire
was leaked to the Israeli media, and it's consistent effectively

(01:21:46):
with you know, what Hamas is asking for and is
consistent with what Israel is now expected to get from
an upcoming ceasefire if one really happens. And actually, I
have this right here, so think about that. This is May.
The the hostages have been held since May. Some many

(01:22:15):
perhaps have died since then. To get nothing extra to like,
to get to get an agreement that was already on
the table last May, is such an extraordinary and fundamental
failure when it comes to what a the leader of

(01:22:39):
a government's mission is, which is to protect their own people,
their own citizens. If you're one of those hostage families,
you're asking why, like why is it now January and
we're about to ink a deal potentially we're going to
inc a deal that was available to us in May,
Like what did we achieve between May and January? And

(01:23:01):
the answer can only be satisfaction of a lust for
the complete and total destruction of Gaza as a habitable place,
because nothing else has improved from Israel's perspective and from
the perspective the hostages from May until January. Unless I'm

(01:23:21):
missing something, so.

Speaker 3 (01:23:23):
Trump, we may see something similar.

Speaker 5 (01:23:27):
If we see something like that in Israel, we may
see something similar also in Ukraine, where there's.

Speaker 4 (01:23:33):
Still Grit's a dealer was available in like February March
twenty twenty two, and better actually than is that, we'll
be available now.

Speaker 5 (01:23:43):
People will say that what really changed is the seriousness
of the negotiations. You have this presidential transition in the
United States, and that changes the positions and the leverage
that the deal makers have.

Speaker 3 (01:23:58):
So that's the I'd expect to hear, but I think
it's a valid point.

Speaker 4 (01:24:04):
Before we leave, let's just comment a little bit on
some of the Antie blaken has been making the rounds
and doing some exit interviews. He spoke with the New
York Times. Here let me play a little bit of
that to what.

Speaker 15 (01:24:16):
Has become the defining crisis of this era, which is
the conflict in Gaza. You came in thinking you could
broker a historic agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel, and
then Hamas attacked is on October seventh, with the horrific
results which we saw, and Israel's response has been extreme.
The latest UN figures put the Palestine in death toll

(01:24:38):
of forty five thousand. Over ninety percent of Gaza's population
is now displaced, the population is starving, all hospitals have
been destroyed. In November, a UN committee released a report
that found Israel's warfare practices quote consistent with the characteristics
of genocide. I know you don't agree with that estimation,
but do you believe that Israel's acts have been consistent

(01:25:01):
with the rules of war.

Speaker 16 (01:25:05):
Let's step back for a second and think about where
we were on October sixth, and then where we were
on October seventh, and where we've been since then.

Speaker 4 (01:25:14):
You're right.

Speaker 16 (01:25:14):
On October sixth, we were very much pursuing normalization between
Saudi Arabia and Israel, and in fact I was scheduled
to go to Saudi Arabia and Israel on October tenth trip.
Obviously that didn't happen because the events of October seventh,
But the purpose of that trip was to work on
the Palestinian component of any normalization agreement between Saudi Arabian Israel,

(01:25:36):
because we believed, and the Saudis also said, it was
usually important to make sure that if there was going
to be a normalization, there was also a pathway toward
a Palestinian state.

Speaker 4 (01:25:48):
End it there for now, because a lot of it
from there is just him kind of humiliating himself by
trying to present the world in a way that it
just isn't. And but that that piece is interesting because
what it reveals is just how flawed that the American

(01:26:09):
strategy was that to ignore the Palestinian piece of a
Mid East piece. Deal knows that he's saying on October tenth,
He's going to go to talk to Israel and Saudi
Arabia about the Palestinian issue. Anybody who who's like hearing

(01:26:30):
that and isn't completely absorbed in the propaganda here would
be like, wait a minute, You're going to talk to
Israel and Saudi Arabia about the Palestinians, Like what about
the Palestinians going to talk to them about the Palestinians?
Like are they are they're gonna be involved in this
conversation about them at all? And if they were involved

(01:26:52):
in a serious way, then it's very difficult to imagine
there's an October seventh Hamma was very clear that one
of the motivations for October seventh was that they felt
like they were being written off of the historical stage,
that they were being sidelined by the United States in

(01:27:13):
an effort to normalize the you know, to normalize relations
with Israel, normalize and effectively normalize the occupation and just
keep the status quo in place indefinitely. And it was
a They described it in as a version of a
flip to table moment. And if that's the case, then

(01:27:37):
that is a fundamental failure of the of the policy
that was being carried out by you know, all all administrations,
you know, whether Biden, Trump and everybody since you know,
Clinton effectively or actually maybe since Bush.

Speaker 3 (01:27:50):
I mean, what you heard Blinkett just responding to from
the New York Times.

Speaker 5 (01:27:53):
There was totally unspoken, but it was him like embracing
the Trump policy, doubling tripling down on the Abercord policy.
I don't know that I agree that it's hard to
imagine October seventh happening without the Abraham Accords, but I
do agree that it's clearly pushed.

Speaker 3 (01:28:08):
Them to a flip the table moment.

Speaker 5 (01:28:09):
Doesn't in any way justify the flip the table moment,
but I do agree that that's a component of it,
and it makes me wonder, as many people are whether
Donald Trump.

Speaker 4 (01:28:21):
Right some of the Abraham Accords. You'd have to have
you have to have real, genuine these talks going on
that everybody believed were serious. And if that, if those
were happening, my argument would be, then there wouldn't have
been an October seventh.

Speaker 3 (01:28:38):
Yeah, that's interesting, but.

Speaker 4 (01:28:39):
I mean Hamas would have to be brought into them, Yeah,
as the power in Gaza. Yeah, that's an if that
is impossible to conceive of, because the purpose of Israel
helping to prop up a Hamas in Gaza was that.
So those talks aren't happening.

Speaker 5 (01:28:57):
I mean the Hamas Charter, which was changed from obviously
to just talk about the Israel like the foundational principle
of Israel's existence.

Speaker 3 (01:29:06):
I think there's an ideological.

Speaker 5 (01:29:09):
Part there, an a geological component there that makes it
I think likely that you know, in October seventh could
happen sort of at any given moment until there's something.
That's why peace talks are always so depressing, because.

Speaker 4 (01:29:25):
It's interesting how an organization like HAMASC can get its
hand forced. You know, it wasn't because they never necessarily
had a change of heart that they changed their charter,
and I think it was twenty seventeen to embrace it,
to embrace the two state deals. That there was public
pressure from from Palestinians, it's a good point to move
in that direction, which then led to the twenty eighteen

(01:29:48):
the Great March of Return, which was these non violent
protests in Gaza that would mark march to the fence.
But we're organized by Gaza Civil Society and initially had
at an arm's length at best relationship with Hamas and
Maas saw them as is not helpful to their and

(01:30:10):
not part of their ideological project. Hamas eventually, because they
were so popular, had to come around for political reasons
and and kind of embrace them. Everybody knows how those ended.
Is IDF troops outside of the fence shot something like
forty thousand people on arm, you know, most unarmed people,
almost all of them unarmed, and we're shooting for legs,

(01:30:32):
you know, shooting people's legs for sport, as a as
a UN report has has has laid out. And then
with the collapse of that nonviolent movement, Hamas then has
more political capital to organize toward a toward a violent response.

Speaker 5 (01:30:50):
Yeah, what's interesting to me is is there a it does.
Does the Trump camp recognize that there's there's something serious
when Hamas says that Abraham the Abraham Accords were a
factor and sort of pushing them towards October seventh? Do
they take that seriously? Do they believe that hamasas sincere

(01:31:12):
when they say that, or do they continue to think
the Abraham Accords were the triumph of US policy to Israel?
And the answer to that is they continue to think
the Abraham Accords were just sort of an indisputed triumph.
And that doesn't mean you can't recognize that they were,
you know, keeping Palestinians out of the loop, had you know,

(01:31:34):
downstream consequences, But it doesn't seem like there's recognition of that.
And so it's actually just I think it's really hard
to predict the particulars of Trump's Israel policy in this
next administration. We can predict obviously the broad swath of
it is, you know, like deep support, but what does
it look like in practice? How does he influence negotiations?

(01:31:59):
That I think is less easy to predict.

Speaker 4 (01:32:01):
Yeah, so we'll see. I think it's reasonable that we
might actually get a ceasefire deal right around the nineteenth
or twentieth. Whether it holds, I think is a is
a totally different question. Yeah, and what that looks like
might be. It might be a deal on paper that
Israel violates regularly, like if you notice, like the hes

(01:32:22):
Bela Israel deal is getting very close to completely collapsing.
But Israel has bombed Hesbela dozens scores, maybe hundreds of
times since the quote unquote sees fire deal. So we'll see.
Up next, we're going to be joined by American philanthropist

(01:32:43):
i'm Ed khan Imed. Thanks for joining us here. I
really appreciate it.

Speaker 7 (01:32:47):
Thanks Ryan, Thanks Emily, and so.

Speaker 4 (01:32:50):
With you today, we want to talk about a couple
of things. One, you were fairly recently in Gaza. You
organized a shipment of humanitarian supplies into the Strip and
and you went with your shipment or you went alongside
your shipment. And we had promised our viewers at the
time that we would get your take on like how

(01:33:12):
how did you do that, how did you how on
earth did you pull that off? And also what was
you know, what did you see that we're not seeing
just through the images that we get out of Gaza,
and we've also done some coverage of something else that
you're working on, which is that the need to get
the tens of thousands of people who need critical medical
care out of Gaza to places that are willing to

(01:33:35):
to to take them in. Whose whose lives are you know,
at risk at every moment that they're not being allowed
to get to get that treatment. So I just I'll
just start here by you. You had shared, uh this
one one of here's one video of your trip, so

(01:34:03):
tell us a little bit about like where you are
and what your impression was as you're getting here.

Speaker 7 (01:34:11):
That's called the middle area of Gaza kanyunissel Malassie. They
are a series of tented caps and you can see
that it's children, and that's what you see everywhere in Gaza,
you see children. You don't really see anything else. You
see children. This was a community building exercise and just
sort of a kid's activity. Obviously, the schools are all

(01:34:31):
destroyed and they just try to keep the kids busy,
so we just walked into it. The kids were dancing
the Dubka Palestinian dance and there were various performers and
sort of we just came in to view it, and
you know, you're just overwhelmed by what these kids are experiencing.

(01:34:52):
What they're experiencing is something no child should ever have
to experience, and actually no child has experienced what they're
experience and saying they live in tents almost every night
of the year, they listen to two hundred and fifty
pound bombs, five hundred pound bombs, and sometimes two thousand
pound bombs landing near them. They have friends that have

(01:35:14):
been killed and they don't know when their time will be,
but they just continue. So you know, you can see
them smiling and cheerful, and it's almost amazing because none
of these kids have had protein for a month or two,
and none of them have had They may mainly eat

(01:35:34):
but one time a week at one time a day,
but they still smile. So you're struck by that.

Speaker 4 (01:35:40):
And is it bread? Like, what's the what's the thing
that they're able to get the most?

Speaker 7 (01:35:47):
There really isn't anything that you can count on. It
just depends on what these eraarly authorities will allow in
and it's sort of idiosyncratic. It just sort of happens,
you know, sort of sometimes there'll be enough food in
the markets, and sometimes there won't. Sometimes the food will
be very expensive in the markets, and sometimes it won't.
So there's no rhyme or reason to any of it,

(01:36:08):
you know, I sort of I've told you I think
from the beginning that the essentially the Israeli government has
decided they don't necessarily want to kill everybody at once
because they think it's probably not something they can get
away with. But what they do is allow sort of
the minimum calorie counting. So you know, people are just
getting by on whatever whatever is available that day, a

(01:36:30):
lot of dry goods, you know, sort of canned canned stuff,
but it's you know, it's nothing. I don't know, it's
nothing anyone, you know, sort of any of your viewers
would be comfortable with or I don't know how many
people would survive in the US on this.

Speaker 4 (01:36:46):
Yeah, and then I'll let Emily let you jump in
one quitch. So shortly, yeah, shortly after October seventh, you
would you would told me as as Israel unleashed, it's
its response what you thought their plan was. And now
here we are a year and a half later, and
it feels like everything is going according to the plan

(01:37:08):
that you kind of you thought that they were playing
out at the time, what it and and so I
think that that kind of gives your assessment an extra
layer of credibility because it's it's really been born out
the last year and a half. What what what did
you see coming? And what have you seen unfold?

Speaker 3 (01:37:27):
Well?

Speaker 7 (01:37:27):
I think very clearly Israeli government wants all Palestinians out
right like uh, and they can't do it all at once,
so they have created conditions that are unlivable and at
some points and I they will and I think all
American officials are aware of this, and all probably all
European officials are aware of this, because it's just it's

(01:37:48):
pretty black and white.

Speaker 5 (01:37:51):
You know.

Speaker 7 (01:37:51):
They don't want to kill everybody, They just want everybody out.
So they've they've killed plenty of people, and people are
living under horrible conditions, and they just want to get
rid of all Palestinians from Gaza in the West Bank
and sort of remake Judaea and Samaria. And I think
that's you know, that's Prime Minister not know who's plan.
I mean, it's just very clear. So I suppose now

(01:38:13):
that will be up to President Trump to decide whether
that's going to happen or not. You know, I don't know,
Like it's like a there really aren't any world leaders
who seem to they've sort of been detached from any
sort of empathy of the situation because what the situation inside,
it's truly unlivable. I mean, it's sort of bombs, NonStop,

(01:38:36):
artillery NonStop, F fifteen's, F sixteens, F thirty fives dropping
massive bombs. You're sort of every fifteen minutes, you're shaking
the you know, whatever wherever you're staying. If you're in
a tent, it's shaking, if you're in some kind of structure,
it's shaking. And you know, the trauma is just unimaginable.

Speaker 5 (01:38:54):
If you were to sure you have but talk to
American officials, let's say Opera and good faith and tell
them or persuade them that it is possible to not
just provide the minimum calori account, but to bring in
more food to make the situation for people living in
Gosam more livable while also protecting their security concerns. For instance,

(01:39:18):
what would you tell them, How would you explain to
them that it is possible to feed these children and
also like just bring in more aid. Maybe you have
had those conversations.

Speaker 7 (01:39:30):
Yeah, I mean it is possible. I've done it in Ukraine,
right like, so they you know, the Russians don't bomb
all the border crossings and they don't bomb all the
food trucks. I think this administration just doesn't care, right like.
So it's just not you know, they'll just lying about
well everywhere out of their mouth is just lying. So
I'm hope, I'm optimistic that maybe priced and travel will

(01:39:52):
will not want to see these images and not want
to see this this situation and you know, sort of
earned babies and little kids in their tent sleeping and
then you know, sort of next thing, you know, they're dead.
You know, I don't know. But for yeah, for American officials,
let's say middle level American officials, yeah, I think they're
all horrified by what's going on. They know what's going on,

(01:40:15):
they see the briefings, but you know, the decision makers
and the Biden administration just don't care. You know, they're
just just very dishonest about all of it. They know
exactly the numbers that have gone in, they know how
many people, they know what it takes to keep these
people fed and healthy. I mean, you're looking at one
point one one point two million children, it's over fifty
percent of the population. What what security risk of these

(01:40:36):
little girls, you know, sort of hold against the Israelis,
Like you know, it's just it's mind boggling all the
I try not to pay attention on the stuff that
comes out of the like sort of the armshair quarterbacks
and the conference goers and but I mean, it's all
it's all nonsense. Like you know, I challenge all of
them or any of them to come to guys and

(01:40:58):
spend forty eight hours see if they number one make
it out alive. And number two are still repeating these
idiotic talking points about human shields and security and et cetera.

Speaker 5 (01:41:09):
Right, or about you know, smuggling things that can be
turned into weapons through the food shipments or what's another
example like the Hamas hoarding everything that gets into Gaza.
From your perspective, you would say, if you go on
the ground, it's entirely possible for the United States to
back humanitarian aid that's done in a way that gets

(01:41:31):
to the children, and that.

Speaker 7 (01:41:34):
I mean, to be honest with you, I could do
it myself, Like you know, with a sort of group
of collaborators, don't even need the United States just make
a mess of the whole situation. But yeah, it's not
complex at all. There's nothing. Don't let anyone tell you
it's complex. I've done it. I've delivered humanitarian assistance to
every war zone the last twenty five years. It's it's
very doable. I mean, it's just just a matter of

(01:41:54):
whether you're going to, you know, kill everybody delivering a
humanitarian assistance. It's just a decision someone may but anything,
it would be done, It would be able to, it
would be easily done.

Speaker 5 (01:42:06):
Have you been in touch with any people in the
incoming administration or try to get I mean no, Trum don't.

Speaker 7 (01:42:12):
Really know anyone. I mean, like, I'm not you know,
I'm out here in the world. I'm not really just
I mean, it's sort of maybe my weakness is I
don't I don't go to cocktail parties or sleazy hotel
bars and stuff. So I mean that's where all these
people hang out. I guess I don't really they don't
really run into me. H. In places like the front
line in Ukraine or Gaza, Syria. In this place, you

(01:42:34):
don't really see these kind of people around, so I
don't know, you know, I don't I try to get
the message out.

Speaker 4 (01:42:40):
Can can you give us some examples of because I've
been following your attempt to like get this shipment in
and some other shipments in over over months and months
and months, can you give people some examples of the
kind of hold ups that you want wound up getting
along along the way and right.

Speaker 7 (01:42:59):
So then, yeah, I mean it's a good question. Essentially,
I made a decision, Well, WFP is great on the
food and that's their mandate and they do that. I
sort of did a survey in Gaza and understood that
there were specific medicines that were not getting into Gaza
for whatever reason, and I decided to go and source them.

(01:43:23):
And I purchased medicines around Europe, and you know, a
few containers worth of medicines. And I've done this a
few times. And there's a process through the Israeli government.
It's the Israeli government agencies called CogAT, which I think
you know that everything has to go through COGAD. So
I apply through CogAT and say, look this is what

(01:43:44):
I have, this is where I purchased it from this
is where it was made. This is how much it costs.
This is how much each item is. This is what's
in this box. This is what's in this box, and
this is palette number this and everything has to be
totally itemized, and you know, sort of they approve it,
and then it's just a long process of getting the
actual stuff physically in. So in my case, one time,

(01:44:08):
I tried to send it over you know, like I'm
gonna somehow still optimistic to try to make things work.
So on one of the shipments, I tried to send
it over Jaylots, the Joint Logistics over the shore, which
was the pier that the United States government tried to tried
to work. Yeah, and and it didn't. Yeah, it actually

(01:44:30):
went and then was stuck by the next to the pier,
and then the pier closed, and so then I had
to look for another solution and wound up shipping it
from Cyprus, where where the Jaylots was based, to ash Dot, Israel.
And then there's just a process like the ship, the
stuff's on the ship, the ship has to be cleared
to come into port. That's a few days. Then the

(01:44:53):
ship had the stuff has to be cleared to unload
off the port. That's another few days, and this sort
of things like it's it's just not something anyone has
really taken too seriously. In the United States government really
cares about to be honest with you, because you know,
and this is all urgent stuff.

Speaker 4 (01:45:08):
Any of that normal when it comes to humanitarian relief.

Speaker 7 (01:45:12):
No, of course not. You know, sort of if you
need this stuff, you need to get it in right,
like there's no you know what it is, you know
exactly every detail. You know how much I paid for it,
you know how I paid for it, Like I provide
like bank account like everything, and you know, it's just
like one reason after another too. You know, one day

(01:45:33):
the truck's about to go in and the generator breaks
at one of the borders, and I'm like, this is
one of the most sophisticated countries in the world and
their generator broken. Now the borter is closed, you know. So,
I mean, I got lots of stories that I won't
board you with. It's kind of ridiculous if you get
into the my new show, like I think, I try
to forget all the stuff that happens because I might,
you know, sort of just get depressed.

Speaker 5 (01:45:54):
That's actually really interesting. I think we would welcome many
examples of that, people bored by them. And maybe i'm
you could also flesh out the parallel that you're talking
about with Ukraine is a great example right now, because
the same people who are, you know, saying Israel has
to do this, would would say the opposite about Putin.
If you could maybe flesh out what you've seen, like

(01:46:14):
the ability to get humanitarian aid to people over there,
that would.

Speaker 3 (01:46:19):
Be It's easy.

Speaker 7 (01:46:20):
And Ukraine is very easy because there the borders are open,
you know, not the Russian border and not the Belarus border,
but you have Poland, you have Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Moldova,
and those are all relatively friendly countries and there are
no issues. You can get whatever you want. You know,
do you declare it. There's a process, but it goes
right over and into wherever it's needed. In the case

(01:46:40):
of Gaza, and like I said, there's nothing, there's no
carollary for Gaza. There's never been a situation where all
the borders are closed and one entity controls what goes
in or out. And so I sort of say, and
you know, people take this the wrong way, but I
sort of say it's as if the Russians, if you
want to think about Gaza, it's as if the Russians
controlled all the border, so they controlled Poland and Hungary

(01:47:02):
and Slovakia and Romania, like they controlled what was going
And I mean they could, they literally could bomb those borders,
but they don't. But in the situation of Gaza, there's
just no there's no other way to get anything in
other than through Israel and through you know, sort of
the good graces of the Israeli authorities. And I think

(01:47:23):
there are some good actors in the Israeli government, but
you know, they have their marching orders, and their marching
orders are very clearly let the absolute minim in and
no one's pushing us. And you know, the Biden administration
again just you know, fumbled whatever leverage they had, and
they have all the leverage because two to three Giant
Air Force planes land full of weapons every day for

(01:47:45):
the last over a year. But they just never pushed in.
So these Raelies understand like, look, this is not important
to the United States, so we'll just we'll keep doing
what we're doing.

Speaker 4 (01:47:57):
Can you since you've spent so much time in Ukraine,
can you compare how Israel approaches Palestinian civilian infrastructure and
how Putin approaches Ukrainian civilian infrastructure.

Speaker 7 (01:48:12):
I mean, there are some similarities, but you know, there's
literally nothing left in Gaza. I mean, you see my videos,
like there's literally essentially when you enter Karm Shalom ironically
named border crossing, you drive along side of Gaza in Israel.

(01:48:34):
So to your right as you're driving south is Gaza.
On to your left is Israel, and your sort of
life is normal, and they're shopping malls and gas stations,
et cetera. And when you enter a Kram Shalom, they're
giant reinforced walls thirty feet high that are one after another,
and so you sort of zigzag through these walls, and

(01:48:54):
once you've crossed those walls, all you see is devastation.
As soon as you enter, it's just rubble in every direction,
and the first thing you see are kids playing in
the rubble, and so there's no carllary for that. I
you know, it's kind of wild that the amount of
rubble in Gaza, which is the size of Philadelphia or
Las Vegas, is I think twice to three times the

(01:49:17):
amount of rubble that's in Ukraine, which is the size
of Texas, you know, and the Wars three years old
in Ukraine, so there's it's actually I tell the Ukrainians
that I come there to uh I recently went directly
from Gaza to Ukraine, and I said, and I actually
went to the front and I said, you know, I'm
here to relax after Gaza. So that was everybody laughed,

(01:49:41):
because what else do you do?

Speaker 4 (01:49:43):
Well, yeah, because you had sent me one video from
a place where were sleeping where that it's just this
seemed like the windows were rattling all night long.

Speaker 3 (01:49:51):
Yeah, it's bombs.

Speaker 7 (01:49:52):
It's the GPU thirty GBU thirty nine. It's a glided
glided air bomb that has electronics on it, which you know,
you can guide it. They're just massive bombs and they
just drop them over and over and over again, and
every no matter where you're sleeping, you'll hear them all
night long, and they shake the ground and they shake everything,
and you know, essentially the what they do is if

(01:50:16):
there's a guy they're looking for who they think is humas,
if anyone's around that guy, he's dead or she's dead,
or the four year old kid is dead, and you know,
sort of these bombs, aren't you know, checking people's IDs.
They're just killing.

Speaker 3 (01:50:30):
The New York Times just confirmed in that long investigation.

Speaker 7 (01:50:33):
Yeah, I mean it's it's indisputable, like literally, you know,
sort of there's nothing precise about any of it. They
could be precise if they wanted to, and sort of
you know, when you're driving around Daza, it's it's like
kind of like in your thoughts because if some sort
of character that they're looking for happens to wind up
next to your car, you're got. They're not you know,

(01:50:56):
they're not really asking questions or confirming or any and
that's just that's that's you know, like literally nobody can
deny this. And again the entire United States decision making
authority knows this, and that's just the way it is.
So there's no Carol Area. Actually the Russians don't do.
I mean, they they've killed plenty of civilians, but it's
just a different level.

Speaker 4 (01:51:16):
If the Israeli goal is to depopulate Gaza, why don't
they let at least the injured people out. I think
they're working across purposes to that goal.

Speaker 7 (01:51:27):
Well, I think it's part of the plan, right, Like
you get the people so desperate to the point where
once you you know, sort of move onto that mechanism
of getting everybody out, then everybody just goes. But until
that point, you're going to make life as miserable as
possible for everything. So we have the situation now where
they're between. I mean, they're probably about ten thousand kids

(01:51:49):
who either have pre existing conditions like cancer or have
been injured significantly and can't get out.

Speaker 8 (01:51:56):
And there is a.

Speaker 7 (01:51:57):
Process with the World Health Organization to get people out,
and these reelis will sort of approve five to ten
percent of the cases. And you know, I know these cases.
I've seen these kids and they're literally sitting in a
tent with no chemotherapy, just just dying. And their case
was rejected and you don't get an answer as to

(01:52:17):
why it was rejected. And again this is another failure
of the US administration. And sort of it's like they
just don't care, right, Like there's no other answer for it.
Why would you, why would you, let you know, five, ten,
fifteen thousand kids who are in urgent need of medical
care and can be evacuated out just sit there. But

(01:52:38):
you know, it's across the board, like there's no blood
pressure medication, so people just die of heart attacks in
their tents. It's on and on and on and on.

Speaker 5 (01:52:46):
Well, I was just gonna ask, like a hypothetical, if
President Ryan Grimm were being inaugurated on January twentieth, is
it on the humanitarian front, not the military front, but
on the humanitarian front. Is it in the power of
an incoming United States administration almost flip a switch on
the humanitarian stuff and use the leverage and say you

(01:53:07):
are letting these in. Like, how theoretically simple would it
be if someone wanted to, you know, increase humanity the
input of humanitarian aid.

Speaker 7 (01:53:17):
Yeah, if you decided that you don't want little kids
to be suffering twenty four to seven, you could scale
up madame humanitarian aid in days. The United States government
knows exactly what the needs are, you know, the United
Nations knows exactly what the needs are, what the calorie

(01:53:37):
count is, medicine, et cetera. And it could happen immediately.
I mean, the resources are out there, the stuff's out there,
and you would just tell the Israelis, look, I can't
abide by this, this is wrong, and and and change
it tomorrow.

Speaker 4 (01:53:53):
Literally, Well, I'm Ed. I always appreciate your insights and
also what you're doing for the people of Gaza, and
thank you, thank you so much for joining us. Anything
else you'd want to add for people.

Speaker 7 (01:54:07):
Yeah, I mean, you know, like I think people are
frustrated and trying to figure out how they can help
and what they can do, and I think they should
just keep keep at it. It's it's tough, it's really
it's really sad. But the people in Gaza appreciate them.
They they they hear them, They understand that there are
people with them that feel their their their plight, that

(01:54:30):
are aware of them, and I think people just need
to really just push the the decision makers. Unfortunately, we're
at a point in this world where there are just
no world leaders who really you know, there's just there's
no empathy. It's just sort of apathy, I suppose. And
you know, there are certain things like would regard to
the children's evacuations, that's something that has to happen, increasing

(01:54:53):
the amount of humanitarian aid. It has to happen. Is
again the population. You know, when they keep talking about
Hamas Hamas, it's like they're about twenty thousand before like
fifteen months ago. There were let's say, twenty thousand Hamas
soldiers or whatever you want to call them. I don't
know how many there are now, but you're it's a
war against women and children. Essentially seventy percent of the

(01:55:17):
population are women and children. So and literally when you
drive around Gayza, you just see children like that's the
thing you're struck in, just rubble in children and you're wondering, like,
where is this? You know Humas and I'm sure they
are there, but you just don't see them. So I
tell everybody to keep the faith, and you know, we'll

(01:55:40):
we'll make a change one of these days.

Speaker 4 (01:55:41):
We'll see I'm ed con Thanks so much for joining us.

Speaker 7 (01:55:45):
Thanks Ryan, Thanks Emily.

Speaker 4 (01:55:47):
All right, well that'll that'll do it for us today.
Thanks everybody. Also, thank you everybody for the kind words
over the last couple of weeks. It's really meant a
lot too to me and my family. I'll keep you
updated as we continue on that front. Emily, anything else.

Speaker 5 (01:56:05):
Now, your family is amazing and all the breaking points,
subscribers and viewers are amazing.

Speaker 3 (01:56:12):
So thank you to everybody. Thank you for supporting us
into another year, and we'll see you back here soon.

Speaker 4 (01:56:19):
See then

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