5/22/25: DC Embassy Shooting, IDF Fires At EU Diplomats, Trump Ambushes South Africa Pres & MORE!

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
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Speaker 2 (00:33):
Good morning, everybody, Happy Thursday. Welcome to Breaking Points. Ryan Groom,
great to see.

Speaker 3 (00:37):
You, sir, Nice to see too.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
We have a lot of news to get through this morning,
including some breaking news of dual murder last night and
what appears to be a blatant act of political violence.
We'll break that down for you. We also have a
lot of updates coming out of Israel and Gaza. We
have naturally, specifically out of the occupied West Bank. We
had a wild situation unfold in the White House yesterday

(00:59):
when the South African President came to visit and we
actually have someone from South Africa to break down some
of the claims that were made in that interaction. Had
a wild day in the stock market as well. The
bond market also not looking too great. We also should
add this in. They did pass the big beautiful bill.

Speaker 4 (01:20):
Through the House. The margin was one vote.

Speaker 2 (01:23):
I will remind you that we just had one Democrat,
Jerry Connolly, pass away, so he literally ends up being
the margin. That actually ties into some of what's going
on with the stock market too, so we can talk
about that there. We have some court updates with regard
to deportations, a judge saying that Trump is blatantly defying
their court order. And we've got some AI team ups

(01:44):
going on that are kind of interesting.

Speaker 5 (01:46):
Ran.

Speaker 3 (01:46):
Yeah, more concentration in the tech spaces. That's what we need,
open AI teaming up with Apple to make some tepa
super smart smartphone, smart or smart.

Speaker 2 (01:55):
Something that I can't even really wrap my head around.
So well, but we'll do our best. But let's go
ahead and start with that breaking news right here out
of d C last night. Can put these images up
on the screen too. Young Israeli embassy staffers were murdered
near the Capital Jewish Museum in d C. According to officials,
they do have a suspect. We'll tell you more about

(02:17):
him in a moment. They were fatally shot, they say,
at close range, while they were leaving an event Wednesday
at that Capital Jewish Museum in DC. According to the
embassy's spokesperson, can put the Axios article up on the
screen here, which has some more details. The two victims
have been identified at this point as Jurin Lishinski and
Sarah Lynn Milgram in a statement that was shared two

(02:40):
x Apparently, the suspect has been identified as thirty year
old Elias Rodriguez of Chicago, Illinois. People who were in
the area said Ryan that he was sort of pacing
around this museum and then when these two young embassy
staffers came out, he pulled down a gun and shot
him at close range.

Speaker 3 (02:58):
It seems like he may have tried to get into
the event, or may have had ideas plans to get
into the event, was not able to do so, and
so hung out outside and then you know, shot people
who had had come outside, killing them both. He there's
video of him chanting Free, Free Palestine as he's getting arrested.

Speaker 6 (03:19):
We're talking about this a second.

Speaker 3 (03:20):
Kenklippenstein obtained and postages is his manifesto, which is what
you would expect from kind of a hard left activist. Yeah,
it's you know, people can people can find it pretty easily.

Speaker 6 (03:34):
We can put a little bit of it up.

Speaker 3 (03:35):
But it's it's rather kind of standard fair Certainly chat
GPT could whip this up for somebody. A kind of
the sectarian left are arguing arguing on behalf of you know,
the use of political violence. To me, it's civilian. You know,
civilian violence against civilians has never justified period. You know,

(03:59):
you'll often have Israel say that they killed someone in
the Hamas like Ministry of Finance.

Speaker 6 (04:04):
But if you're which is wrong.

Speaker 3 (04:06):
But and the principle holds across the board, if you're
not carrying a weapon in war, yeah, then you're not
a legitimate target.

Speaker 2 (04:12):
Yeah yeah, I mean these are two young Israeli staffers,
and you know, if you do care about the cause
of Palestine, you also know the way that this will
immediately plan to the hands of those who seek to
tar the entire movement as violent anti Semitic extremists. At
a time when you know in some ways, it seemed
that the dam was starting to break in terms of
both public opinion and you know, leading figures in Europe

(04:34):
and around the world who were starting to speak out.
So you know, it's a it's a horrific act of violence.
We actually have that video. We can play view of
the suspect chanting free Palestine as he is taken into custody.

Speaker 4 (04:47):
Let's go ahead and play that, guys.

Speaker 2 (04:49):
Oh god, we can put the manifesto a piece of

(05:14):
it up on the screen. As Ryan said, obtained by
Ken Klippenstein, before I read this, I do want to
read Ken's justification for why he published it, because these
things can be Controversially says he's obtained the manifesto allegedly
alleged manifesto. He mentioned some reasons why he believes the
document to be authentic, and then he says that you know,
I'm publishing it here not to glorify the violence, which

(05:35):
I find abhorrent and condemned, but so the public can
better understand the truth of what happened. Refusing to confront
the content of these texts often creates an information vacuum
that is quickly filled by hoaxed documents. Conspiracy theories or
selective leafs from authorities that can distort the facts. I
believe sunlight is the best disinfectant, especially when politics is involved.

Speaker 4 (05:52):
As the document makes clear, is the case here.

Speaker 2 (05:55):
And this was the close to that manifesto, which was
some nine hundred words long, and it says the action
would have been morally justified taken eleven years ago during
Protective Edge, around the time it personally became acutely aware
of our brutal conduct in Palestine. But I think to
most Americans such an action would have been illegible, would
seem insane. I'm glad that today at least there are
many Americans for which the action will be highly legible

(06:17):
and in some funny way, the only sane thing to do.
And then he says, I love you, Mom, dad, baby, Sis, etc.
Free Palestine, Elliot Rodriguez.

Speaker 3 (06:24):
Yeah, it does agree legible, but's still insane. And now
anybody that he's been remotely associated with is being kind
of roped into this PSL Party for Socialism and Liberation
as an organization that was linked to him in the
early hours of this.

Speaker 6 (06:43):
Killing, of this twin killing.

Speaker 3 (06:45):
PSL has said that he's not a member they disavow
any connection to him that he was involved with one
chapter that no longer exists for a very brief time,
like in twenty seventeen or something, But in a time
like this, the kind of state consequences for any organization
that's remotely associated with him. Of course, you know when

(07:06):
you're trying to when you're trying to say it's somebody
like makmun Khalil is a terrorist who was all about
peaceful coexistence and reconciliation and just protesting his violence, when
the state is willing to detain him indefinitely without charge
and call him a terrorist when he is.

Speaker 6 (07:26):
Completely peaceful in what he's doing.

Speaker 3 (07:29):
To then associate yourself with him and take it upon
yourself to commit these acts of violence against civilians is
also taking an action that, to me, you don't even
have the right to do if you consider yourself part
of a movement, like if you're either part of a
movement or you're some atomistic of some neoliberal vigilante, which

(07:51):
is a reactionary right wing approach.

Speaker 4 (07:53):
That's absolutely that is absolutely accurate.

Speaker 2 (07:55):
And of course immediately people are theorizing that it's a
false flag, not because there's any evidence of that, there
is no evidence of that, but because of how clearly
damaged it is, right, how clearly damaged it is at
a time when, to your point, you have this administration
that is using any excuse they can to effectively criminalize
dissent from the status quo in regard to Israel, when

(08:17):
you just had this incident we're going to cover later
in the show of the idea firing on diplomats from
all around the world and you know, creating a massive
diplomatic crisis for itself, separate and apart from the crisis
of legitimacy, from starving and bombing Palestinians and killing so
many in what has been a mass slaughter over the

(08:38):
past number of days. You know, they certainly want to
pain anyone who objects to that as an extremist, a barbarian,
an anti semi a terrorist themselves. And this will only
give sucker to, you know, the people who would use
this incident to you know, further crushed descent and wield
the power of the state to make sure that no

(08:58):
one can, no one can object to what is being
done in our names with our money.

Speaker 3 (09:02):
And when our money in Gaza, did we play Maryo Bowser.

Speaker 4 (09:06):
Yet, no, we didn't.

Speaker 2 (09:07):
We can play that, guys, this is actually not I
think the piece we have is not actually Marrio Bowser.
This is represented the police department here talking about some
of the details of the shooting.

Speaker 4 (09:17):
We can go ahead and take a listen to that.

Speaker 7 (09:18):
At approximately nine o eight pm tonight, we received multiple
calls for a shooting in the area of Third Street
and f Street Northwest. Offices located one adult male and
one adult female unconscious and not breathing at the scene.
DC Fire and Ems responded in. Despite all life saving efforts,
both victims succumbed to their injuries. The preliminary investigation indicates

(09:42):
that both victims were exiting an event at the Capitol
Jewish Museum, located in the five hundred block of Third
Street Northwest, when the shooting occurred. We believe the shooting
was committed by a single suspect who is now in custody.
Prior to the shooting, the suspect was observed pacing back
and forth outside of the museum.

Speaker 8 (10:03):
He approached a group.

Speaker 7 (10:05):
Of four people, produced a handgun and opened fire, striking
both of our decedents. After the shooting, the suspect then
entered the museum and was detained by event security. Once
in handcuffs, the suspect identified where he discarded the weapon,
and that weapon has been recovered, and he implied that

(10:26):
he committed the offense. The suspect chanted Free, Free Palestine
while in custody. The suspect has been tentatively identified as
thirty year old Elias Rodriguez of Chicago, Illinois.

Speaker 2 (10:42):
So that was DC Police Chief Pamil Smith there with
some early details, and President Trump has already weighed in,
we can put this up on the screen as well.
His comments that I think were posted to truth Social
He says, these horrible DC killings based obviously on anti
Semitism must now hatred and radicalism have no place in
the USA. Condolences to the families of the victims. So
sad that such things as this can happen. God bless

(11:05):
you all. So that's what we know. Will certainly keep
you updated about this, you know, horrific events here in DC.
At the same time, we did want to talk a
little bit about what is unfolding in Israel. So there
was recently a large delegation of diplomats from countries around
the world touring the occupied West Bank, and let's go

(11:28):
ahead and put these images up on the screen. And
you can see one of them here, you know, doing
a sort of talk to the camera. A few of
them in the background as well, and then what you'll
see unfold is there were shots fired by the IDF
in their direction. You can see them become alarmed here
and you know, start to duck and hurriedly move away again.

(11:53):
These are diplomats from countries around the world. Representatives from Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Netherlands,
pole In, Portugal, Romania, UK, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Brazil, Canada.
Huge delegation that was fired on Ryan by the IDF

(12:15):
And there was a statement put out afterwards in you know,
this was obviously an unbelievable diplomatic crisis statement put out
afterwards that said something to the effect of, well, they
wandered off of their pre designated path and we regret
the inconvenience.

Speaker 3 (12:32):
Right. So, even if you take the official Israeli explanation
as true from start to finish, it's still quite unhinged.
And if you roll, if you scroll back in the
video and look look in closely. The New York Times
is saying they fired warning shots, shot into the air,
and all kinds of euphemisms. The guns look like they're

(12:54):
pointed pretty closely. Now, they didn't hit anybody, but the
guns does look looks like a little.

Speaker 6 (13:00):
Too close for comfort for a warning shot.

Speaker 3 (13:02):
And if that scene looks familiar to you, it's Janine
and it is very close to where Sharen Abu Akhla
was shot and killed by an IDF soldiers, only a
few blocks away from there. So their official version is
there was an approved route that they were allowed to
take through Janine, and that towards the very end, as

(13:25):
they were doing these interviews.

Speaker 6 (13:26):
They deviated from the route.

Speaker 3 (13:29):
And that required the Israelis to shoot at them to
get them back onto.

Speaker 6 (13:34):
Their approved route.

Speaker 3 (13:36):
The organizers say they did not deviate from the route.

Speaker 6 (13:41):
This was the approved route.

Speaker 3 (13:42):
They were in consultation with the Israelis the entire time,
and the only people there are diplomats and journalists who
were interviewing the diplomats, setting aside the disagreement over whether
or not they're on the route, even if they were
slightly off the root right and what planet do you

(14:03):
fire at them, and and then and then and do
your statements say we regret the inconvenience.

Speaker 2 (14:07):
And this the authoritarian nature of requiring that you know,
under pain of gunfire, you must stay on this one
specific route also was quite illustrative. And obviously people are
gonna go, okay, well, if this is how they treat
foreign diplomats from their some of their greatest allies from
around the world, how do you think that they are

(14:29):
treating you know, the Palestinians that that reside there, and
so also Ryan. Obviously this comes at a time where
you have Europe increasingly speaking out and threatening actions and
taking some actions because of the you know, ongoing starvation,
because of just how how barbaric. The latest ground offensive

(14:53):
in Gaza truly has been the high level of deaths,
the continued bombing of the rubble and destruction of hospitals.
It's gotten to a point where it does sort of
feel like there's a bit of a global dam breaking,
where people are starting to realize whether their heads have
stayed or whether they're we're going to play you, peers
Morgan here in a minute. They're starting to realize the

(15:14):
way that history is going to view these actions.

Speaker 3 (15:17):
Yes, and you've had a Spain increasingly cutting economic and
military ties with Israel. You had, as you mentioned, the UK,
Canada and France all putting out a joint statement and
promising concrete action if Israel it doesn't restrain its assault
on gods and start letting in humanitarian a You've had

(15:39):
net Yahou and Macrone going back and forth. You've had
the free trade agreement between Israel and the EU kind
of up for review as a result of these human
rights abuse. Is Yet in the face of this yesterday
we can put this up. My colleague Jeremy Scahe over
Dropsite covered this extraordinary net Yahoo's speech where he says
that at the end of this UH operation Gideon's Chariot,

(16:02):
that Israel will control all areas of the Gaza Strip. Uh.
He said that the US and the other Western allies
are in full support of killing what he described as
quote monsters. This is kind of despite what you might
hear he's saying from from the press from the Europeans. Uh.
He he talked a lot about UH full ethnic cleansing

(16:26):
of the Gaza Strip and repeatedly put it in Trump's mouth.
He said, he repeated repeated. He repeatedly used the phrase
quote Trump's plan. He called it revolutionary Trump's plan, of course,
is that one where he said it's going to become
a riviera on the Mediterranean. He's gonna, You're gonna he's
gonna move the Palestinians out to Libya or or you know,

(16:48):
God knows where. Uh, Yahu said uh. He repeated his
stance that Israel will not engage in a permanent cease fire,
only temporary ingred only temporary agreements that really lease Israeli captives,
and will continue the war of annihilation with the ultimate
aim of implementing what he called what he keeps calling
quote Trump's plan. And then finally he says Netaw who

(17:13):
says it is taking this long to quote defeat Hamas
because quote we want to achieve our goals with minimum
loss of IDF soldiers. It won't take another eighteen months.
And then he added that Isra will only allow aid
for gaza that has attributed in individual meal boxes, not
trucks with aid for local distribution as they've been doing,

(17:34):
and they'll create quote sterile zones to distribute more food.
So continuing to use the starvation as part of his
as part of his tach land here.

Speaker 2 (17:45):
Yeah, And one of the things that was really significant
from his comments is for the first time, he's now
asserting that the implementation of Trump's ethnic cleansing plan is
now one of his conditions for ending the war.

Speaker 3 (18:00):
He says it's underway, that it's not a future plan,
that he is using the starvation to enact to this plan.
This is all happening while Trump is allegedly, like Biden, getting.

Speaker 4 (18:11):
Very frustrutted behind.

Speaker 3 (18:13):
The scenes, behind the scenes, very frustrated, and is continuing
with his negotiations with a run. They're meeting in Rome
on Friday. While Israel, we can put up ce No, no,
let's let's put up STE three first, because this, this is,

(18:35):
this is relevant to what we were just talking about.
Then Yaho has lots of public support like this is.
He's not going out on a limb here when he's
doing this. The Starvey on Israeli Channel thirteen is does
Israel have to let in humanitarian aide to Gaza? Fifty
three percent of Israeli say no, So fifty three percent
of Israeli is endorsing just objective war crimes, four percent

(19:00):
saying yes.

Speaker 6 (19:01):
Thirteen.

Speaker 2 (19:01):
Don't know, I would be interested in the religious breakdown
in the subtabs.

Speaker 3 (19:06):
Right if ten to twenty percent are Palestinian citizens of
Israel and they're polled there or Druis citizens of Israel.

Speaker 2 (19:14):
Yes, the numbers for Jewish Is release are almost certainly
even higher.

Speaker 3 (19:18):
Right, those are tipped, The scales are tipped there by
that so putting up C four Relevant to all this
is that this is a follow up to the CNN
story from two days ago. CNN reported based on American
intelligence officials leaking to them that Israel was preparing to

(19:38):
strike Iran alone without US support. The update to that
is now that Israel is planning to immediately strike Iran
if talks between Iran and the United States breakdown. So
they would not so as long as the talks are going,
according to this report in Axios, Israel will hold back.

(19:59):
But the that Trump announces things are going nowhere, I'm
my people need to come home from Rome with cough
is done talking. I'm angry at the Iatola for you
know whatever post. Yeah, that they're saying that at that
moment they're going to that they're going to.

Speaker 2 (20:16):
Strike with basically the calculation being from Bbe that Trump
will be mad and will accept such a thing. In
that moment of talks breaking down, I saw you and
Jeremy speculating a little bit like who do you think
is leaking THEEDS reports and to what, like what are
they trying to accomplish?

Speaker 3 (20:33):
I think originally it was the one two the CNN
was Americans telling basically telling Israel, we're aware that you're
doing this, and we don't approve of it.

Speaker 6 (20:47):
The alternative explanation.

Speaker 3 (20:48):
Is they do approve of it, but they want to
publicly wash their hands of it because the alt on Iran,
if it is carried out, could have horrific reverberations around
the entire region, and also for American troops who are
in the region.

Speaker 4 (21:08):
Can it be done without our assistance?

Speaker 6 (21:10):
They can drop bombs?

Speaker 3 (21:12):
And this also goes back to a point that I've
seen my colleague ma Hussein make that the goal is
not necessarily.

Speaker 6 (21:22):
Ending the nuclear the nuclear program.

Speaker 3 (21:24):
The goal really is to crush Iran politically and substantially,
to make it so that Iran is not an economic
and political power in the region, an Iran that is
no longer sanctioned and is an active and normal part
of the global community, even if it does not have

(21:47):
a nuclear program, is arguably, from Yahoo's perspective, a bigger
strategic threat than a weakened Iran that does have a
nuclear program or is close to getting a nuclear program.
The idea that the bombing is about the nuclear program
misses that analysis that the idea maybe just will just
bomb them and keep the sanctions on and then okay, yes,

(22:12):
if we have to bomb them every five years, will
bomb them every five years, and we'll just do that endlessly.

Speaker 2 (22:17):
And the last information that we've gotten out of those
nuclear talks is not particularly encouraging, although you just never
know that the Trump administration where they're going to end up.
But you had Witcough coming out and saying insisting on
zero enrichment as a clear red line. Other administration official,
including Trump himself, has been more like, h we'll see.
Other administration officials have said other things at other times.

(22:38):
But that's kind of where things are right now with.

Speaker 4 (22:40):
Regard to that.

Speaker 3 (22:41):
Right, it's totally plausible that you could have atomic inspectors
go in and allow for a civilian nuclear program and
prevent it from getting close to breakout. In fact, if
you don't do that, you actually make it easier for
them to get to that can break out.

Speaker 4 (23:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (23:02):
So again the.

Speaker 6 (23:06):
Focus on.

Speaker 3 (23:08):
The focus on whether or not they're going to get
the bomb is again it was once again astraction, I
think from the broader goal.

Speaker 4 (23:15):
I think that's well said.

Speaker 2 (23:17):
The other thing we wanted to bring you an update
on is what's going on with Mack mud Khalil, who
has been in prison for how many months at this
point for quite a while, missed the birth of his
newborn son to his you know, his wife is an
American citizen, and we can put this up on the screen.
He attempted to have a contact visit with his newborn child,
who he has not been able to meet yet for

(23:39):
you know, the crime of being participating in pro palesign
protests at Columbia, and that visit was denied. So this
is from the ACLU, they say in a decision that
underscores the government's ongoing retaliation against mackmou Khalil in response
to his advocacy and support of palestinine rights. Officials from
ICE and private prison contractor GEO Group. They're the same
one that had the tussle in Newark. But anyway, have

(24:02):
refused to allow a contact visit between him and his
family and the official site a blanket no contact visitation
policy and unspecified security concerns relating to the presence of
a mother and a newborn baby. I think we may
have another piece of this statement here that we can read.
ICE's refusal comes after multiple requests from mister Khalil's legal
team that point to federal policies explicitly encouraging contact visits

(24:23):
between detained parents and their children. Mister Khalil's team has
also noted permission for family visits like these are routinely
granted at facilities like the Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey,
where his attorneys have requested he be transferred. And so,
I mean, they're treating him like a hardened, you know,
the most horrific criminal you can imagine. When they've asserted

(24:44):
no criminality against him, they've asserted nothing more than him
being an active member of a pro Palestine movement on
campus at Columbia, right, And.

Speaker 3 (24:52):
These contact visits are They're a normal thing, especially in
a country that has you know, systematized mass incarceration. You
go through a metal detector, you get searched, you and
your baby get searched. You go into a room where
oftentimes there's lots of other people.

Speaker 6 (25:11):
They get searched. They come into that same room.

Speaker 3 (25:13):
You meet In that room, you can hug, you can
sit there specified amount of time. Everybody's watching cameras, guards,
He goes back to a cell. They go back out
like this is this is very basic stuff. So to
deny this is clearly just malevolent and cruelty for the
sake of it.

Speaker 4 (25:34):
Yeah, there's no other reading of that.

Speaker 2 (25:35):
At the same time, you have the new president of Columbia,
Clear Shipment, speaking at their graduation ceremony, and quite a
lot of students not too happy with her or what
she had to say.

Speaker 4 (25:46):
Let's go ahead and take listen to that.

Speaker 9 (25:57):
Good morning, class of twenty twenty five. I know that
many of you feel good morning, class of twenty twenty five.

(26:18):
I know that many of you feel some amount of
frustration with me, and I know you feel it with
the administration. And I know we have a strong, strong
tradition of free speech at this university. And I am

(26:45):
always open to feedback, which I am getting right now.
The work of your generation will be to shape these
interesting times, to define the.

Speaker 2 (26:56):
Values, and I know Ryan, she did also in her
comments say something about mak Munkhalil and how she understands
that a lot of people are regretting his absence that day.
But I mean, Colombia is really case in point of
the university that completely bent to whatever the Trump administration
was trying to throw at it, and all it resulted

(27:18):
in was more and more demands being made of the
university versus you know, any sort of like amuseman. I
know they're just going to give up and go away now.

Speaker 3 (27:26):
Yeah. And Shipman as a long time, long time a
television correspondent before she got into her other career, was
a well, very well known figure in like the nineties,
in two thousands, was Good Morning America. Was until recently,
you know, married to Jay Carney, who himself was a
top Washington journalist and then became a spokesman for Obama

(27:50):
and then a spokesman I think for Amazon that tracks. Yeah,
And so you know, to have a journalist at the
helm of this completely embarrassing capitulation is it doesn't speak
well to the kind of ability of kind of broadcast
journalists to stand up for their their their their craft

(28:13):
and their trade.

Speaker 2 (28:14):
Yeah, well, and we've seen plenty of that coming from
other news outlets as well. In fact, it's not on
the show. But I don't know if you saw there
was some memo that went out from Bob Iger to
the ladies at the View that they needed to tone
down there.

Speaker 4 (28:26):
That's right gl rhetoric.

Speaker 3 (28:28):
So yeah, yeah, broadcast journalism is are we broadcast journalists?
We're broadcasting but not really right?

Speaker 2 (28:35):
Yeah, yeah, I don't know, hope or not. I don't
want to be part of that club right now. We
can't broadcast journalists.

Speaker 3 (28:44):
Peers Morgan, Yeah, speaking of how about that?

Speaker 2 (28:48):
So you know, Peers really put his YouTube show on
the map with these raucous debates over Israel. I mean,
he's obviously debates all kinds of stuff, but I really
feel like those are the ones that brought a lot
of people to that program, and Pures has mostly taken
the side of Israel one hundred percent. You know, there
have been times where he's objected to this or that,
but broadly he's been very pro Israel. And he had

(29:11):
Meddi Hasen on his show recently and he said to Meddi,
you know what, basically you were right. I don't think
that we disagree anymore. He even uses the word genocide
in this context. Let's go ahead and take a listen
to a little bit of that.

Speaker 10 (29:24):
You and I have talked about this war in Gaza
for ever since it started, this phase of the seventy
five year conflict, and I have resisted going as far
as you have done in your criticism of the Israeli government.

Speaker 11 (29:40):
I resist no more.

Speaker 10 (29:41):
I think we've reached common ground about what we view
is happening and has been happening through this period of
this blockade, which frankly is just starvation of the people there,
including so many innocent young women and children. And I
think that the incessant bombing and killing, and we don't
know how many civil have been killed, but it is
on a daily basis, it looks like hundreds of people

(30:03):
every day with no apparent attempt. It seems to me
to have any real plan for how this ends or
what happens when it ends, other than if you look
at what Smadridge has been saying, probably the most right
wing member of a very right wing government, he is
talking in a genocidal language about kicking all the Palestinians out.

(30:24):
So I think you and I have reached a place
in the last few weeks where we are in agreement.
But my question of youe Metti is how does this end?

Speaker 4 (30:33):
What do you make of those comments Ryan and the
timing of them.

Speaker 3 (30:36):
I think Pierce, because of his program, has had to
follow this in an incremental way. True, and because he
invites on people from all different walks away of all
different factors, all different perspectives, he has been exposed to

(30:56):
the reality of.

Speaker 6 (30:57):
What's going on.

Speaker 3 (30:58):
And I think anybody who's exposed to the reality of
what's going on and isn't actively paid to take a
certain position.

Speaker 4 (31:07):
To just be propagandist, yes, can.

Speaker 3 (31:10):
Only conclude that this is a unique, a new crime
against humanity that's being carried out. And so.

Speaker 6 (31:22):
He had to so he said it. I don't know
what did you make of it?

Speaker 2 (31:26):
Yeah, I mean, I just think, as I said earlier,
something about the I think probably the months of starvation
and the images that are coming out of these emaciated babies,
and you know the risk of mass famine and mass
death event.

Speaker 4 (31:43):
Because of this. I mean, how you just how do
you justify that?

Speaker 6 (31:46):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (31:46):
You know, I mean, it's just you can't say this
is oh targeted. We're going after amahas when you are
intentionally starving an entire population, and then when you see
these images of the rubble and then they're bombing the
rubble and with gruesome results, and there they just you know,
Smotrich and all the rot and I've just.

Speaker 4 (32:05):
Gone mask off.

Speaker 2 (32:06):
At this point, they've taken the layers of Hasbro Hasbara
out and said, I know, we want to ethnically cleanse them.
We are going with the Trump plan, and even this
pitty bit of aid that we might let in is
just to enable for the war crimes. If you're actually
grappling with that, how can you say other than this
is this is a horror, This is a atrocity, And

(32:29):
how can.

Speaker 4 (32:29):
You feel other than when we look.

Speaker 2 (32:32):
At this a decade down the road, or however long
it is down the road, people are going to have
to get asked very hard questions about what did you say,
what did you do? Where were you and so you know,
I think there's a very belated effort to try.

Speaker 4 (32:47):
To end up on the right side of history.

Speaker 2 (32:49):
And I will just say for myself, I hope there's
a real tracking of every journalist who enabled these crimes.

Speaker 4 (32:59):
Every politician who enabled these crimes.

Speaker 2 (33:02):
Every propagandist, every poster like, I think it is critical
that we look back and understand who justified these atrocities
and enabled these atrocities, and funded these atrocities, and provide
a diplomatic cover for these atrocities. I think that's going
to be absolutely essential. And so yeah, I'm listen. I

(33:24):
don't want to like, I'm glad to hear Peers say it.
It's extremely related, and I do think that there's a
sense of like, oh shit, I better get on the
right side of history for him, for some of these
world leaders that are coming out and starting to make
some noises as well.

Speaker 6 (33:36):
Right, if you're behind mccron, it's taken you a while.

Speaker 4 (33:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (33:39):
I appreciated Mehdi's response, which he said where he says, look,
I wish I had been wrong, right. No, I wish
that because in October November of twenty twenty three, the
most wild, vulgar assessment of what is isels approach was

(34:02):
and was going to be turned out to almost underestimate
what it was right. And there's no there's no there's
no satisfaction in being right about that at all.

Speaker 4 (34:13):
That's right. Well, if you looked into.

Speaker 3 (34:15):
Better to have been wrong, and to have you know,
tens of thousands of people still alive and millions of
people still in their homes and a path toward peace
and co existence, that's right.

Speaker 6 (34:25):
Instead we have this.

Speaker 2 (34:27):
We have horror and the cold comfort of yeah, I
guess we were right.

Speaker 8 (34:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (34:31):
I mean, if you listen to.

Speaker 2 (34:32):
The most maximalist voices on actual brief or if you
went and talked to you know, Daniel Owiss or some
of these other settlers right who or you know Smoke
Trich and.

Speaker 4 (34:41):
A lot of that.

Speaker 2 (34:42):
I mean, there were people in Israel right away who
were saying what their plans were.

Speaker 3 (34:46):
They've been saying that a long time, and they don't
always get to get the reins of power and that.

Speaker 4 (34:51):
To actually enact it.

Speaker 2 (34:52):
But if you would listen to them and taken that
seriously from the beginning, then you would have had a
much more accurate understanding versus the spin and the oh
we're dropping leaflets and oh, here's my presentation of how
there's actually tunnels under this hospital, and oh, that wasn't
even us that bombed the hospital. We would never bomb
a hospital. It's almost quaint to go back and think
about some of these things that were debated at the

(35:12):
time and how we were to Oh, they would never,
they would never do the most moral army on the planet.
And now they don't even bother to really justify, you know,
it's just so out.

Speaker 3 (35:23):
Now they're saying, yeah, we're doing it, and it's good.

Speaker 4 (35:25):
Yeah, and we're getting away and the world has let
us do it. That's what smoocher said.

Speaker 3 (35:30):
Meanwhile, public Enemy number one has become miss Rachel.

Speaker 4 (35:33):
That's right.

Speaker 6 (35:34):
She was the subject of this really bizarre New York.

Speaker 3 (35:39):
Times New York Times article. Yeah, in a moment, she
has not back down at all. And so I think
we have a recent clip that we should posted a
video with a double amputeam Rahaf, Let's roll that.

Speaker 4 (35:55):
Let's go back to sleep, Rahaf. We're so tired.

Speaker 12 (36:01):
See the bunny sleeping too.

Speaker 4 (36:03):
It's near the moon.

Speaker 12 (36:05):
Shall we wake them?

Speaker 8 (36:08):
Mabel married to They're so still?

Speaker 9 (36:13):
Are they in?

Speaker 11 (36:15):
Make up?

Speaker 9 (36:16):
Soon?

Speaker 11 (36:23):
Make up?

Speaker 12 (36:23):
Little Bunnies Skip, Little Bunnies skip ski skip skip Little Bunniest,
Bunniest get.

Speaker 4 (36:31):
This skip skip skip that stuff.

Speaker 12 (36:34):
Let's hop again, hap Little bunnies half hop Hop Hop
Little Bunnies half hop hop hop little bunnies half hap
hap hap hop this stuff.

Speaker 13 (36:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (36:50):
The strangest element of this New York Times piece on
her and I don't even I don't I'd like to
do some reporting on this, trying to figure out how
this even got into the piece. Is there forwarding of
complaints by what they called an advocacy group, Anti Stop
Anti Semitism. It's not an anti it's not an advocacy group.
It's like one unhinged.

Speaker 4 (37:09):
Person troll yeah, who.

Speaker 3 (37:11):
Posts mostly anonymous nonsense and accused her of effectively being
funded to support Hamas, which.

Speaker 6 (37:23):
That's what trolls can do.

Speaker 3 (37:24):
Like the Internet is filled with URLs that you can
buy and you can make claims. It's very crazy for
the New York Times to then take this and then
report it as something that advocacy groups are saying when
it's not, like again, it's not AVAC group, it's just
it's a nut, and then confront her with it and

(37:44):
have her respond to this claim of whether or not
she's being funded to support Hamas. And one of the
pieces of evidence they forward from this Anti Stop Anti
Semitism troll account is that for every one post about
an Israeli child.

Speaker 6 (38:02):
She's put up ten posts about a child in Gaza.

Speaker 3 (38:06):
It's like, well, that's wildly disproportionate in favor of Israel,
considering that they're eighteen thousand plus children who've been killed, right,
and it's it's not ten to one, right, And.

Speaker 2 (38:17):
It's not to mention children like Rahaf who are surviving.
She's alive and thank god was well. I have of
trouble talking about this. It was medically evacuated. Her brothers
are still in Gaza, her father is still in Gaza.

Speaker 6 (38:32):
You know.

Speaker 2 (38:33):
Miss Rachel talked about this with Mehdi like she's a
double amputee. I mean, like I said, thank god, she
was medically evacuated. She's getting the care that she needs.
But yeah, how and the idea that the only way
you could care about that and want to highlight that
is if you're being paid by Hamas, Like it's the

(38:54):
height of insanity of inhumanity to be so disconnected from
human emotions that you think the only reason someone might
care about an adorable double imputee like Rahaf is because
they're being paid by Hamas.

Speaker 4 (39:11):
Like it's just the same.

Speaker 3 (39:13):
There was another quote in that article towards the bottom
that was quite wild. A person named Stacy Hackner, a
teacher at a London Shader, said, quote, Miss Rachel seems
to be someone who is really really good hearted, but
in the context of everything that's going on, she says
I care about all children, but really she's talking about

(39:33):
the children of Gaza. That has left a lot of
Jewish parents feeling quite isolated, which is I think what's
so startling about that quote is that I believe it
is representing her authentic feeling.

Speaker 6 (39:50):
She is genuinely.

Speaker 3 (39:53):
Hurt that Miss Rachel is saying I care about all
children and is talking about the children of Gaza. That is,
she feels that as as painful and offensive, right, And
where do you go from there?

Speaker 6 (40:09):
Like, your only accusation against.

Speaker 3 (40:12):
Her is that she says I care about all children,
but really she's talking about the children of Gaza, and
that that and it's just understood that there's something wrong
with that if you're talking about the children of Gaza,
there's something.

Speaker 6 (40:23):
Wrong with that.

Speaker 2 (40:25):
That they don't count as children, that they should be
kept separate. Apart that if you're talking about the children
of Gaza, you don't really.

Speaker 3 (40:31):
Care about it represents a view from a just startlingly
dark place.

Speaker 2 (40:35):
Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. So well, let's let's go
ahead and transition to this wild scene that played out
in the White House yesterday when the President of South.

Speaker 4 (40:50):
Africa came to visit.

Speaker 2 (40:51):
South African President Ramafosa was in DC yesterday and the
context here, you know, is that the US the Trump
administration to shut down all refugee admissions. It's except for
white farmers that they claim are facing persecution and even
genocide in South Africa. So this meeting quickly turned contentious

(41:14):
as President Trump basically ambushed him with this whole multimedia
presentation of his allegations against what his government is doing
in his own country of South Africa. Also kind of
comes on the heels of President's Trump trip to the
Middle East, where he said, We're not going to go
around the world lecturing.

Speaker 4 (41:30):
People about their human rights of viuses, so we do
it from here. Yeah, we'll just do it right here
when you come to visit us.

Speaker 2 (41:34):
So in any case, let me show you a little
bit of this, and we are going to have a
guest join us in a minute to break down some of.

Speaker 4 (41:40):
The claims that are made here.

Speaker 6 (41:41):
And what actually that's a mean. Reality is it's means tested.

Speaker 3 (41:44):
If you have a certain amount of money, then we
will not care about your human rights.

Speaker 4 (41:49):
Well, that actually comes up in this exchange at one point.

Speaker 2 (41:52):
We'll play you that in a minute where the President
of South Africa says, wil, I'm sorry, I don't have
a four hundred million dollars plane for you, basically saying
I guess I didn't have sufficient funds for you know,
to really get on your good side here. In any case,
let's go ahead and take a listen to a little
bit of how this went down.

Speaker 14 (42:08):
It will take President Trump listening to the voices of
South Africa, some of whom are his good friends, like
those who are here when we have talks between us
on the quiet a quiet table. It will take President
Trump to listen to them. I'm not going to be
repeating what I've been saying. I would say if there

(42:31):
was Africana farmer genocide, I can bet you these three
gentlemen would not be here, including my Minister of Agriculture,
he would not be with me.

Speaker 5 (42:43):
But you're surprised that I say we have none of quite,
we have thousands of stories talking about it. Show me
we have documentaries. We have news stories.

Speaker 14 (42:55):
Today even in the Parliament. And they're a small minor
which is allowed to exist in terms of our constitution.

Speaker 5 (43:04):
But you do allow them to take land?

Speaker 13 (43:08):
No, no, no, no, do allow them to take land.

Speaker 14 (43:10):
Nobody can take.

Speaker 13 (43:11):
Where they take the land, they kill the white farmer.
And when they kill the white farmer, nothing happens to them.
There is nothing happens. There is criminality in our country.
People who do get killed, unfortunately through criminal activity are
not only a white, majority of them are black. And

(43:33):
we are now farmers. The farmers are not black. I
don't say that's good or bad, but the farmers are
not black.

Speaker 2 (43:40):
So what the President is trying to say there Ryan
is we do have a really significant problem with violence,
which is true. There are tens of thousands of bookers
in South Africa every year, but if you look at
the statistics, I mean, it's disproportionately actually the poor, which
tends to be black South Africans, who are affected. But
there is no indication that white farmers in particular are
are more subject to violence than other groups in a

(44:02):
nation that is again unfortunately beset by high level levels
of violence RNNE.

Speaker 3 (44:07):
And it doesn't mean, there is never racially charged violence,
and I think people here in the United States might
have a people on the right might have a better
time understanding this if they contextualize it in the in
the within the United States. So in South Africa, there
are definitely cases where black South Africans have killed white

(44:30):
South African farmers and have used racial language when they've
done so, like that has happened. Yeah, no, there's no
question about it, with some of their playing witnesses like
these core cases that that has happened. Here in the
United States, there have been many cases of white people

(44:51):
who have killed black people and have used racially charged language. Also,
the reverse people can argue that what the numbers are,
it has happened, but you wouldn't Nobody would say that
white genocide or black genocide is going on here in
the United States just because you can find those examples.

Speaker 6 (45:11):
So you have to look at it holistically.

Speaker 3 (45:13):
So that's what I would argue to people on the
right who have been convinced by seeing some examples of
of racial violence and have then gone from there to oh,
this is genocide.

Speaker 2 (45:23):
Yeah, why do you think Trump has become obsessed with
this particular thing?

Speaker 4 (45:27):
I mean, there's the obvious. There's a few things that
are obvious.

Speaker 2 (45:30):
Number one, Elon Musk being so probable and not just Elon,
David Sachs and some others who are close with the
administration are.

Speaker 6 (45:35):
Also there's tons of Peter teel right.

Speaker 2 (45:38):
Peter Tile also South African exactly. So I mean that
seems significant because in the first administration we did not
see this same focus. There's that this is a fixation
with white nationalists. You know, you can see Steven Miller
being really into this kind of thing. This, you know,
I've seen all kinds of you know, commentary on Twitter
and et cetera. The other piece is that, you know,

(46:00):
South Africa has been one of the leading opponents of
Israel's genocide in Gaza.

Speaker 4 (46:07):
In fact, one of the White House.

Speaker 2 (46:08):
You know, one of the things that they put out
even explained that that was a piece of why they
were upset with South Africa. So it's also sort of
one of these like up is down left as right
situations where the very country that is standing strongest against
genocide in the context of you know, Israel and Gaza
is now being accused of committing genocide, you know, which

(46:30):
is you know, frankly a fairly preposterous claim.

Speaker 3 (46:33):
You also see some lurid arguments on the right that
this that this is what happens if DEI goes on unchecked.

Speaker 6 (46:40):
Yeah, so they've roped it into their whole dee.

Speaker 2 (46:42):
I mean, this is in the whole sphere of people
who long for the days of Rhodesia and who want
to use the breakdown of you know, the high levels
of violence in South Africa also to broadly smear black
people is unable to govern. I mean that's you know,
that's where this whole argument leads it to as well. So,
you know, I think that's there's a whole host of

(47:04):
reasons why Trump has probably decided that this is something
that he is very interested in, and I think he
also just loves It's kind of a troll, is kind
of a distractions. It's that sort of thing as well,
to make everybody get upset and talk about it, and
the you know, outrageous nature of saying that this particular
group is more you know, beset by violence or under

(47:28):
threat than you know, people who helped us our troops
in Afghanistan now than the Taliban's back in power, people
from other conflicts around the world is also, you know,
just utterly absurd, which is part of why he likes
it because it upsets people like us or of liberal
commentariat on TV or whatever so much.

Speaker 3 (47:45):
Right, and so far, there's been what dozens of white
South Africans let in under this program. Yes, and it's
basically open to every white South African for the most part. Yeah,
and there are many many, what's the population hundreds many,
hundreds of thousands of millions of white South Africans A
lot so for you know, point zero zero, zero whatever

(48:10):
percent to take.

Speaker 4 (48:11):
It up is not very four point five million according.

Speaker 3 (48:15):
To white South African Yeah, and fifty to sixty have
taken him up on this offer. It's not it's not
a very strong argument for them feeling like they're facing
imminent threat of genocide.

Speaker 4 (48:29):
Yes, that is a that is a good point as well.

Speaker 2 (48:31):
Let me play you one more clip before we bring
in our guests, where the President of South Africa, anticipating
that something like this was going to unfold, brought with
him first, like you know, a bunch of white guys
that are in his cab, even some Gulf some of
the white South African golfers. There are a number of
them who are you know, very high level in PGA tour,
et cetera, thinking like okay, it loves them.

Speaker 4 (48:53):
Yeah, this has got to be the way to get
in good with Trump.

Speaker 2 (48:56):
And there's a moment here too that I referenced earlier
where He's says straight to Trump's face like a sorry,
I didn't have a plane to give you, indicating like
maybe it'd be treated a little different if I had
some more gifts than I.

Speaker 6 (49:09):
Would be pony up in extreme Maybe yeah, maybe.

Speaker 8 (49:11):
Maybe, just maybe.

Speaker 4 (49:13):
So let's take a listen to a little bit of
how that went down.

Speaker 15 (49:16):
Dependent well, white after honor refugees here do you explain
to America and to whisup Burby as well from White
afri Hounor's here when other refugees like at Dans thats
Wayland's Asians have all had their attap of status removes.

Speaker 5 (49:32):
Well, this is a group NBC that is truly fake news.
They ask a lot of questions in a very pointed way.
They're that questions they statements today have many friends from
South Africa, but many of those friends are.

Speaker 13 (49:49):
They can't go back.

Speaker 8 (49:50):
I have elon is from South Africa.

Speaker 5 (49:52):
I don't want to get Elon involved.

Speaker 14 (49:54):
That's all I have to do. Get him into another thing,
but to be from South Africa.

Speaker 13 (50:00):
This is what he learned wanted. He actually came here
on a different subject, sending rockets to Mars.

Speaker 6 (50:05):
Okay, he likes that better.

Speaker 13 (50:07):
He likes that subject better.

Speaker 16 (50:08):
We have too many deaths. But it's across the board.
It's not only white farmer, it's across the board. We
need technological help. We need starlink at every little police station.

Speaker 14 (50:24):
I'm sorry, I don't have a plane to give you.

Speaker 5 (50:26):
I wish you did.

Speaker 15 (50:29):
I would tell if.

Speaker 5 (50:29):
Your country offered the United States Air Force applan, I
would take it.

Speaker 14 (50:33):
Okay, But coming back to this issue, which I really
would like us to talk about and talk about it
very calmly. We were taught by Nurse and Mandela that
whenever they're our problems, people need to sit down around
the table and talk about it. And this is precisely
what we would also like to talk about, including of

(50:55):
course trade matters, investment matters, so the issues that concern
you as the United States, and does your own death.

Speaker 2 (51:05):
So he also introduces there another piece of the puzzle
of why there might be this particular upset with South
Africa because Elon wants them to take up Starlink, and
there's a provision that would require I think Starlink to
be owned thirty percent by black South Africans through some
sub subsidiary in South Africa.

Speaker 4 (51:26):
I think those are the details, guys, you have to
go and double check.

Speaker 2 (51:28):
But in any case, he has felt aggrieved that he
hasn't been able to get South Africa taken to take
up Starlink, and so that gets a mention there too
of you know, one of the South Africans, it's like,
we really want starlink, you know, is is that going
to make you happy with us? Because other countries around
the world, that's been the way that they've greased the
skids with this administration, and.

Speaker 3 (51:47):
Starlink would legitimately be good for South Africa, right because
like they've had such a hard time building up the
telecommunications infrastructure that now you like, you know what, skip
all that stuff. Let's just jump to the star link era,
that the satellite era. But right, they also have rules
around local ownership and I guess you know it's causing.

Speaker 2 (52:11):
Problems apparently, yes, apparently, And then just too on the
nose that the President of South Ava says, well, I'm sorry,
I don't have a plane, and Trump's like, well, if
you hadn't want to take.

Speaker 6 (52:21):
It, yeah, come back when you have a plane.

Speaker 4 (52:23):
There you go.

Speaker 3 (52:24):
The word for that is, you know, bribery is one,
but tribute is the other. Like for tens of thousands
of years, that is how emperors have operated. You pay
tribute to the emperor and you don't necessarily get anything
for it. But if you don't pay your tribute, everybody

(52:44):
knows then you're not going to get treated as well
by the benevolent emperor.

Speaker 4 (52:48):
No matter how many golfers you bring.

Speaker 3 (52:51):
Apparently, although the golfers are tribute also in a.

Speaker 2 (52:55):
Way, yeah, they are tribute to Trump's particular es A right,
Let's go ahad and get to our guests who can
break down some of the more specifics.

Speaker 8 (53:02):
Here.

Speaker 3 (53:04):
We are now joined by bulel Wal Mabasa, who is
a land reform attorney in South Africa. And I was
just saying that I reached out to around midnight her
time last night and asked her if she could be
on this morning and if she was asleep, go ahead
and reach back out to us in the morning. She
said on a day like today, There's no way I'm sleeping.
So what has it been like in South Africa? How

(53:26):
are South Africans kind of responding to this unbelievable scene
out of the Oval Office.

Speaker 17 (53:34):
So interestingly, the responses have been varied from you know, commentators, intellectuals,
and academics on one end of this spectrum, praising the
South African team, saying that they've maintained the moral high ground,
that our President Suramaposa maintained composure and that he did

(53:58):
not descend into the kind kind of you know, comical
playing out of the you know, the the the meeting,
and others you know, kind of a little bit more
in the middle saying well, it was kind of you know,
President Trump being President Trump, which was you know, kind

(54:18):
of a zero out obtain for for for the US
team and maybe about you know, sixty out of one
hundred for the youth for the South African team.

Speaker 8 (54:29):
And the other extreme end, which is.

Speaker 17 (54:33):
Kind of this weaponization or weaponizing Nelson Mandela's call for
reconciliation as if there is a trade off for not
transforming the country and this kind of a begging ball
syndrome reminiscent of the colonial era. You know, we are

(54:55):
the poor African country and we need this rich superpower
and with this small economy.

Speaker 8 (55:00):
And we need you to rescue us, almost like a uh,
you know.

Speaker 17 (55:06):
Messiah, you know, to state you know, metaphorically, almost like
a savior coming down. So there actually has been interesting
from a political lens, but obviously, you know, not being
a political commentator in any way, my focus was on
the land confiscation issue and how it was addressed, and

(55:31):
that's where yeah, and I think that's what we're going
to talk about.

Speaker 4 (55:34):
Yes, of course.

Speaker 2 (55:35):
And I wanted to get I wanted to play some
of the specific claims that were made by the President,
who I said earlier prepared this whole multimedia presentation for
this meeting, and and get you to address some of
the specific claims that were made. This is a five guys,
if we could go ahead and play that.

Speaker 5 (55:52):
This is very bad.

Speaker 13 (55:54):
These are These are verial sides right here, burial sides
over a thousand of white farmers. And those cars are
lined up to pay love on a Sunday morning. Each
one of those white things you see is across and

(56:17):
there's approximately a thousand of them. They're all white farmers.
The family of white farmers, and those cars aren't driving
their stuff.

Speaker 5 (56:26):
There to pay respects to their family member who's killed.

Speaker 14 (56:30):
Have they told you where that is, mister president? You know,
I'd like to know where that is. Of course, this
I've never seen.

Speaker 2 (56:40):
In addition, there were news articles that were printed out
about deaths. I know one of them actually had nothing
to do with South Africa. It was from another African
nation and you know, was completely unrelated. As you referenced
before we played earlier, there were claims made about land exproporation,
and I know that that is your particular specialty. So
could you sort through some of these these claims that

(57:01):
were made and help us understand what's really going on here?

Speaker 17 (57:04):
Yes, so the visuals around the white process, there isn't
actually that that wasn't a burial site. And you know,
with the kind of US machinery, you know, with the
intelligence agencies in the US being the most powerful, it
boggles the mind that such an untruth could land up

(57:24):
in the Oval Office and be presented as truth.

Speaker 8 (57:27):
That was a protest.

Speaker 17 (57:28):
In actual fact, those aren't burial sides, and there isn't
in fact a burial site of just exclusively farm victims
or victims of farm murders that exists in South Africa,
and in so far as the land confiscation issue, I
think what what needed to be put through in that

(57:49):
meeting is that President Ramaposa himself was part and parcel
of the negotiations that took place just before South Africa
became a democracy, and he was part and parcel of
a team that formulated our constitution. It was the National
Party government at the time and the ANC incoming government.

(58:09):
They negotiated into a constitution. How so Africa was going
to deal with its land issues. South Africa's constitution recognizes
that there was a law which was promulgated in nineteen thirteen,
the Natives Land Act, that actually confiscated land from black
people into at the hands of the white minority. Black

(58:31):
people were dispossessed of eighty percent of the land that
was in the hands of the seven percent of the population.

Speaker 8 (58:39):
And if there's a.

Speaker 17 (58:40):
Historical context that grounds what our reform policy is. We
have in our constitution section twenty five that protects property rights,
that says that no one may be expropriated of property
unless in terms of the law of general application, So
in terms of the rule of law. But in the
same section it also says that we take into account

(59:02):
the past historical in justices that have taken place in
our country and therefore within that constitution it invites the state.
In fact, it's not even any invitation, said direct obligation
to the state to say, the state massive or reasonable
legislative measures to ensure that we have land reform in
a form of land restitution, land registribution and security of

(59:26):
land tenure.

Speaker 8 (59:27):
So that should have been the very first.

Speaker 17 (59:30):
Kind of key message to say our land reform project
is grounded within the rule of law.

Speaker 8 (59:35):
It's part and parcel constitution.

Speaker 17 (59:37):
We've got a very rich judiciary where all of this
is happening every single day.

Speaker 8 (59:42):
We've got a restitution program in South Africa, for.

Speaker 17 (59:44):
Example, where people can lay claim to land that they've
lost previously and they get either provided with the land
or compensation, and this has this is probably the biggest
restitution program in the world. And land transfers are happening
is fully without violence. Then they are grounded within the
rule of law. So I think that's probably the very

(01:00:06):
key first message that South Africa could have opened up
the conversation about, and that there isn't this land confiscation
is not you know, it's not happening. Certainly it's not
sanctioned by law. But I think also most important is
to say expropriation that we follow in South Africa is

(01:00:28):
very similar to the laws of eminent domain in America.
In fact, our laws of expropriation borrow from the UK
law the laws in Germany. It's no simple and you know,
I know in the UK it's called compulsory purchase. And
so our law, which is granted on Roman Dutch law,
English law of expropriation is no different. Even in America

(01:00:51):
there are instances, for example, where expropriation does take place
for the public interest, for environmental purposes and so forth,
and this is what South Africa is doing. The only
difference that South Africa has, if you had to compare
it with the other developed nations, is that we are
also using our expropriation laws in order to make land

(01:01:12):
available in line with our constitutional imperatives of transformative justice.

Speaker 3 (01:01:18):
So this to me feels like the crux of the issue,
like everything else that's going on in the Oval Office
there the fake thousand you know, white cross or the
White Cross is representing a fake one thousand dead people.

Speaker 6 (01:01:32):
All the talks about white.

Speaker 3 (01:01:34):
Genocide, it's all a distraction because what is what they
really want to talk about is this underlying central conflict
around around land reform, and that is a real conflict.

Speaker 8 (01:01:45):
That's a conflict.

Speaker 6 (01:01:46):
Yeah, that's that's a real one.

Speaker 3 (01:01:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:01:48):
So let's so how does it? How does it work?

Speaker 3 (01:01:50):
So this is what you do?

Speaker 6 (01:01:52):
You know, you work in this in this field.

Speaker 3 (01:01:55):
Who who is getting expropriated and who is the land
being redistributed to as part of that process? Because I
really do feel like that we should just talk about
it because this is what people are really actually genuinely
upset about, but they don't want to come out and
say it.

Speaker 17 (01:02:11):
Yes, South Africa's land policy is granted on three notions.
The first is called land restitution, which means that people
who can prove that they were or their descendants were
dispossessed of land without compensation that it happened after nineteen thirteen,
those people were able to go to the government and
make land claims and if those claims are proven to

(01:02:32):
be valid, those people then could either be given the
land that they lost and sometimes if the land that
the lost is no longer viable for human occupation, or
it's been built up, or it's not a shopping center.
They're given alternative land, or they're given compensation.

Speaker 8 (01:02:48):
That's one arm of it.

Speaker 17 (01:02:50):
That is the restitution program that I spoke about, that
it started in nineteen ninety four. Yes, it's been slow paced,
but that's the land one of the land form a pillars.
The second pillar is land redistribution, now land redistribution. It's
also embedded in our constitution. It says the states must
take legislative measures to ensure that people who need the land,

(01:03:11):
who need to have access to land, are given the land. Again,
the state has been slow that haven't provided enough resources
in order to ensure that the land is redistributed. I
think so far we're only speaking about ten percent of
the land that has been redistributed. There's been very poor
physical support in order to see progress there.

Speaker 8 (01:03:32):
The third leg of this is the.

Speaker 17 (01:03:37):
Land tenure of black people. More than sixty percent of
black people don't have securit tenure.

Speaker 8 (01:03:42):
What that means is that they.

Speaker 17 (01:03:44):
Don't have formal rights, property rights. They live in informal settlements.
And this is what the land reform projects of South
Africa is trying to correct when it comes to itspropriation.
Expropriation is actually very simply color blind. Expropriation is just
the tool that the state uses when it needs to
use land for a public purpose or a public interest.

(01:04:06):
The best example we can give about expropriation that's been
actually implemented is the how trained. We've got the how train,
which is that it's bit trained that links people in
public transport system those people were expropriated, those people would
have been black, White, Indian and so forth. It's actually
a very color blind. It's a state tool that is

(01:04:27):
used worldwide, and so the outcry around itspropriation without compensation
is a little bit it's it's hype. It's it's hyperbole
because even in that legislation it tells you under what
circumstances there could be nol compensation.

Speaker 8 (01:04:43):
And this way, there's.

Speaker 17 (01:04:44):
Abandoned buildings, you cannot check the owner, where the land
is unsafe, there's a safety risk.

Speaker 8 (01:04:50):
So it's only.

Speaker 17 (01:04:51):
Within quite determined, you know, easily determinable circumstances where that
could happen. But in the main, we don't have an
expropriation law in South Africa that promotes expropriation as a
wholesale concept. In fact, when I sat as part of
the Presidential Advisory Panel, we found that the States, the

(01:05:12):
Democratic state, has actually not even used the expropriation powers,
although it's sanctioned in the constitution. So all of this
is a rather perplexing situation where actually the government has
been slow to implement the constitutional obligations for land reform
and yet to find this kind of it's almost an

(01:05:34):
untruth that has kind of built legs that that that
that we saw play out in the Oval House, so
in the Oval Office.

Speaker 8 (01:05:44):
And so what we actually now find is that.

Speaker 17 (01:05:48):
The land reform question is almost metaphorical for the need
to transform South africa society. At the heart of transformation,
whether we're talking about you know, labor, land, uh, you know,
business and so forth, is the need to transform as
society because we're still so Africa is the most unequal

(01:06:10):
country in the world, skewed against the black majority. We
still have the economy in the hands of majority of
white people. We still have property rights landowners skewed in favor,
held in white hands.

Speaker 8 (01:06:26):
And so it's kind of a machinery that you you kind.

Speaker 17 (01:06:30):
Of watch in disbelief because it couldn't prefer that from
the truth on the ground.

Speaker 2 (01:06:36):
And lastly, I think the the other major question is
that of violence that I know the President was saying that,
you know, unfortunately there is a high level, high level
of violence, but that violence is not disproportionately aimed at
white people or white farmers. It it afflicts you know,
people of all types within the country. Could you could
you speak to to some of that and you know

(01:06:59):
what what the number are, what the reality is, and
what are some of the you know, potential sources of
that violence.

Speaker 8 (01:07:06):
Crime is skewed highly.

Speaker 17 (01:07:09):
It's something that mainly affects poorer communities where there is
lack of policing, the service delivery, where it is not
as you know, good as you know, more the affluent.

Speaker 8 (01:07:22):
Parts of society.

Speaker 17 (01:07:24):
The victims of crime, and I don't have the statistics
of hand, actually are poor black people. The majority of
people in prisons are black men. And so the claim
that you know, there's there's this targeting of a spirit
of a minority group is not born by the facts

(01:07:44):
or the evidence. And I think there was also too
much said around the issues of violence and crime, which
distorts the experience, the lived experience of South Africans across
the racial lines. I think the South African societies progressed
to such a you know, since Mandela became the president,

(01:08:05):
the first first democratic president.

Speaker 2 (01:08:07):
Uh.

Speaker 17 (01:08:08):
We have societies that are completely mixed. We live in
suburbs that are Malteri racial. My children go to school
in a Malti racial school. And our societies society as
a as A as A as A, as.

Speaker 8 (01:08:22):
A, you know, living in a black woman's body.

Speaker 17 (01:08:24):
I mean a law firm with a diverse you know,
people from diverse backgrounds. We have black people now living
in suburbia, so we've got I think the the conversation
focused on the issues of crime, which are vealid issues,

(01:08:46):
was the lost opportunity to sell the country that we
know and love and we live in where we've actually
and and maybe not completely, but we we are the
lived example of the Rainbow nation that Nelson Mandelas spoke about.
And yes, we do have issues to deal with, inequality, poverty,

(01:09:07):
unemployment and not unique to South Africa. And yes unemployments
that's high at thirty two percent. But I think that
South Africa still remains a viable, colorful complex. But beautiful
place to live, work and play, and I think it

(01:09:28):
was unfortunate that there was this kind of ambush and
concentration around violence.

Speaker 3 (01:09:34):
And Trump also last question for me. Trump also in
the meeting, played a clip of Julius Malema singing or
chanting the rap song like kill the Boar? What's is Boar?
White South African? That's a clip that Elon Musk has
circulated many times. It's a prominent clip kind of on

(01:09:55):
the right here in the United States. Can you talk,
you just brieve about who is Mali? What does what
should people understand about.

Speaker 8 (01:10:03):
This cheerless Malemma actually.

Speaker 17 (01:10:08):
Comes from the A and C, which is the world
It was the majority reading party up until the recent elections.
He was then expelled. He was formed part of the
youth wing. He was expelled from the A and C.
He formed his own party, the Economic Freedom Front. I
think up until I could be inaccurate in terms of percentages,

(01:10:29):
but his party, I think got seven percent of the
vote national vote, although that's you know, it's in the minority.
He does have quite a you know, his majority of
his membership is around the youth. But in terms of
the song, the issue was dealt with by the courts
from the High Court all the way to the Constitutional Court,

(01:10:52):
and it was not found to be a hate speech.
And there's a little bit of contextual background around that.
During that parted era, when the political prisons were exiled,
whether force fully or voluntarily, the societies that remained behind
made up a lot of these chants. There's hundreds and

(01:11:13):
thousands of them that were kind of a yearning for
you know, one day when Mandela's released, we're going to
have a freedom back. And it's quite contextual, and the
literal meaning then at the time was we're going to
put up arms, We're going to revenge the white farmer
or the boa, and it is not literal. And in fact,

(01:11:36):
there was a court case that every forum launched, that
was heard by the High Court, it went on appeal
to other courts, and ultimately the highest quote of the
land found that these songs and this song in particular,
did not you know, it did not amount to hate speech.

Speaker 8 (01:11:58):
And I think the reason for that is that it
was contextual.

Speaker 17 (01:12:01):
It was around the time no one sings that song
and goes and kills, you know, a white farmer, and
I still have songs that I was chance that.

Speaker 8 (01:12:11):
We grew up with. You know, some of it goes
we miss you, Manela, where are you?

Speaker 17 (01:12:16):
And in fact growing up in so it so there
was a lot of that kind of mystery around where
our political prisoners we're not we're going to get freedom.
So there's a context to which those songs were played
and there were chances, the chances, you know, the chants
that were created. But our ultimate highest court in the
land has opined on this to say that it doesn't

(01:12:38):
form part of the of hate speach precisely because of
the history and the context and in relation to j
Les Malama, he's he's quite a noteworthy figure in our
in our in our political landscape because he did form
part of the A and C, which was the ruling party.
He was expelled from the the Youth Party, and his

(01:13:02):
brand of I would say he is kind of, you know,
regarded to be on the left of of of our
political arena. But I think what's important to note as
well is correct is pointed out in the meeting or
in the yeah in the Oval offices that he enjoys
round about seven seven percent if not less, of the

(01:13:26):
national of the national vote.

Speaker 3 (01:13:28):
Is the context changing, you know, that you said that
the context made it so that people understood it not
to be literal. But in the context of now so
many international right wing figures talking about the tension, the
racial tensions in South Africa, has that overlaid a new
context that is giving a new meaning. That means that

(01:13:49):
I think might start beginning to.

Speaker 17 (01:13:51):
Depends on the lens in which you are seeing or
perceiving things. If you are right wing, a person who
legitimately believe that there's this genocide and there's this land confiscation.

Speaker 8 (01:14:05):
Then it plays into the hands of that.

Speaker 17 (01:14:07):
But if you are a South African kind of a
regular citizen, despite whichever kind of you know, racial or
social class that should belong to, that it's not something
that will have any form of weight in terms of
behavior or even conduct to flow South Africans got it interesting.

Speaker 2 (01:14:30):
Yeah, thank you so much for helping us understand some
of these different pieces. We really appreciate you taking the
time below wall.

Speaker 8 (01:14:37):
Thank you, it was great to chat to you, Sam.
Thanks good bye.

Speaker 2 (01:14:45):
Had a pretty significant market sell off yesterday and since
I got my resident finance bro Ryan here.

Speaker 4 (01:14:51):
I thought we would go through.

Speaker 2 (01:14:52):
There was actually a pretty significant reason why there was
a sell off AUSTRALI let's go and put the numbers
up on the screen here from CNN, the Dell thinks
eight hundred points as bond market starts to freak out
over Trump's tax bill. That was the analysis from CNN.
And you can put the next piece up on the screen.
You can see a little bit more of what was

(01:15:13):
going on here. This is from this account.

Speaker 4 (01:15:15):
Do you know how to say this, Ryan? The Kobec
letter is that how I don't know.

Speaker 3 (01:15:19):
I only ever see it. I don't hear people talk
about it.

Speaker 2 (01:15:22):
In any case, they have this the beginning of the
drop that happened at one pm, and they say, well,
what actually happened was a week twenty year bond auction
which sent US treasury yields soaring.

Speaker 4 (01:15:37):
So for those of us who.

Speaker 2 (01:15:38):
Aren't finance bros, Ryan, what effectively happened here is the
government went to do treasury bond twenty year treasury bond auction.
There was a very weak demand, meaning people didn't really
weren't too psyched about buying the stat at this point.
It required a significant increase in the yield that was offered,
so the price went down, the yield goes and that,

(01:16:01):
you know, fit in with the pattern of Okay, we've
got a world that's moving away from the dollar. We've
got a world that is no longer fleeing to treasuries
as safety. We have this giant bill that's about to pass.
It's about to blow up the deficit by some roughly
four trillion dollars more in service of giving, you know,
tax cuts to a bunch of people who really don't

(01:16:22):
particularly need a tax cut. And because of all of
those factors, there was a significant reaction to the stock market.
I just checked in with the markets which are open now,
and they are down a bit this morning as well.

Speaker 3 (01:16:33):
Yeah, and so this comes after Moody's downgraded US debt
from the top to the just underneath it tip top
of ratings. And the twenty year note, which is what
they were auctioning off, is actually a bit of an anomaly.
The US didn't sell them for many decades. Steve Manutchen

(01:16:55):
brought them back. Usually we sell the big ones of
the ten years and thirty in the thirty He's like,
why not bring back the twenties. Everybody loves the twenties. Bizarrely,
you can get a higher yield.

Speaker 6 (01:17:07):
For the twenty than you can for the thirty.

Speaker 3 (01:17:10):
And that's which doesn't which doesn't make economic sense because
if you're locking up your money for a longer time, you're.

Speaker 6 (01:17:16):
Supposed to get a higher yield.

Speaker 3 (01:17:18):
But because there are so many thirty year notes out there,
they're much more liquid, so you can trade them more easily,
and so as a result, you get this kind of
anomalous situation where you have to you know, the US
has to pay a higher yield for a shorter time period.

Speaker 6 (01:17:34):
In other words, you should get rid of the twenty years.

Speaker 3 (01:17:38):
Unless unless you can flood the market with them and
create more liquidity, which eventually they could potentially get to.
But so they had this auction and yeah, at first
they're offering like a four you know, high fours on
the on the interest rate, and there weren't enough people
lining up to buy them. And we don't know exactly
how much of this is just as buyers saying, we

(01:18:01):
don't trust the the market here on these bonds, because
if you buy, if you buy the bond at this
price and then bond prices collapse over the next few days,
you're you know, then you're stuck holding that bag. If
you're not planning on keeping them for twenty years, and
we don't know how much of it is related to,
you know, geopolitics of Japan, Canada, China. Some of the

(01:18:24):
usual biggest buyers of at these auctions saying few, Yeah,
I mean what am I? Why am I going to
come in here and make life easier for you when
you're actively trying to make life worse for us?

Speaker 4 (01:18:36):
Do you have a central banker who's ahead of Canada now?

Speaker 2 (01:18:38):
So you never know, you never know what kind of
game's gonna be playing there, And we we do know
the bond market has probably been the most powerful countervailing
force against Trump's economic plans of you know, of all
the various factors. You know, he himself admitted he walked
it back, but he himself admitted that when the what
did he say, the bond market.

Speaker 4 (01:18:59):
Started to yippy yippy, Yeah, they started.

Speaker 2 (01:19:01):
Getting yippie, is when he pulled back from the most
maximalist tariff posture that he had originally had. And so
I mean, that's the broader context, is you already had.
And I think the Ukraine warned the huge sanctions regime
we threw at Russia. I think, you know, contributed to
this as well. But you already had a world that
was starting to move away from dollars reserve currency. Then

(01:19:22):
you have Trump declare trade war on the entire world,
not just you know, China or some smaller subset of countries,
the entire world in this very take this very belligerent
stance towards you know, traditional allies like Japan and Canada
and other places, and that has accelerated that move away.

(01:19:42):
Part of what ultimately leads him to back off is
the fact that, you know, usually when you have this
economic chaos and uncertainty, there's a quote unquote flight to
safety and people buy up US government debt, and that
wasn't happening, and that was what kind of freaked them
out and caused them to, look, we still have significant
tariffs that are on and they're still saying, hey, we're

(01:20:02):
going to go back in and impose more terrors whatever.
But cause them to back off the most maximus posture
that he originally.

Speaker 3 (01:20:08):
Had, and moodies and the interest rate moves have ripple
effects throughout the entire economy because if if you're you know,
let's say you have corporate debt, and that corporate debt
is collateralized by some you know, you know, treasuries held
by the corporation or there's some other counterpart of your
interplay with the with the treasuries, now they're no longer

(01:20:32):
triple a that that means that the bonds underneath them,
they lose a little bit of value as well, which
means all of it creates high, you know, higher interest
rates because the bonds are less valuable, which then creates
this this cycle, this vicious cycle where when the US
was just absolutely flooding the economy with money at a

(01:20:54):
zero and there's basically a zero percent or less interest
rate going around, you couldn't put your money in bonds
because you're getting zero percent return for it, right, So
you put it in this into equities in the stock market,
and that pushed up the stock That pushed up the
stock market like crazy, pushed up bitcoin, pushed up all
this other stuff.

Speaker 6 (01:21:14):
I asked that bubbles, like housing as well.

Speaker 3 (01:21:18):
Now that you you're looking you're looking at the equity market,
You're like, hmm, this seems way overvalued. I think this
is going to crash because you know, Trump's still still
headed for the cliff, just at a slightly like he
was going at the cliff one hundred and forty five percent.
Right now he's going at the cliff at thirty percent,
right He's still headed for the cliff. Yeah, And you're like, oh, well,

(01:21:38):
now I can get you know, five point one percent
interest rate for a twenty year note and four something
for ten you know. So then you sell your equities
and then you move into these these bonds, which eventually
should push the bond prices up and the yelds down,
but it it pulls more money out of the stock
market at the same time. Now, if and if people

(01:21:59):
are deep trying to decouple from the dollar, then then
you can have all you can have it all sinking
at the same time. You can have the market going
down and the bond mark going down at the same time,
which is unusual but might represent the new path forward
because you've got people like Jamie Diamond and you can

(01:22:19):
we can.

Speaker 4 (01:22:20):
Put up this b three guys a week economic outlook.

Speaker 3 (01:22:24):
Jamie Diamond and others keep saying, guys, like, things are
not good. Things are not as good as the market
is saying they are right now. Like the market, you know,
freaked out in April and crashed and then it climbed
mostly all the way back and then you know, now
maybe it's on its way back down. But you've got
Diamond and a whole bunch of others saying things are

(01:22:46):
bad in the United States, like we're headed in a
not great direction. What is what on earth is propping
this up at this point? And then that's where the
bill comes. And so they passed it, like what very
early in the morning, Yes, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:23:05):
I think early this morning they passed this, the big
beautiful bill that provides lots of money for the police.

Speaker 3 (01:23:12):
Takes they put up before for this, Yeah, lots of
tax cuts for.

Speaker 2 (01:23:15):
The rich, and you know, at the expense of Medicaid
and SNAP and other programs to benefit middle class and
working class and lower income people. And this is Jason Furman,
who's was a White House economists under Obama. But he says,
I'm sure, I'm not sure I've ever seen such a
brutal distributional analysis from CBO. This contrast the Medicaid and

(01:23:39):
SNAP cuts for the lowest dea style with the tax
cuts for the top death sile and so you can
see the way that you know, the cuts are coming
from the people who can least support the cuts and
the benefits are going to the people who at least
need the benefits.

Speaker 6 (01:23:52):
But you know, it's a wild chart.

Speaker 2 (01:23:55):
It doesn't come in and it doesn't come anywhere close
enough to like balance out because the tax cuts that
are being flooded for the wealthy, the extension of the
Tax Cuts and Jobs Act effectively is a four trillion
dollar expenditure.

Speaker 3 (01:24:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:24:08):
So they're making some custom Medicaid and to Snap in
particular that are going to be really bad for millions
of Americans, but it still doesn't even come close to
making up for the large s that is being showered
on the wealthiest among us.

Speaker 3 (01:24:23):
Yeah, it looks like a giant heist of money from
poor and working class people to rich people. And you
wouldn't think ideologically that Wall Street would be opposed to that, Right,
they're not, but they're like, WHOA, I don't know, I
don't think we can handle this like this this is
a bit much.

Speaker 9 (01:24:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:24:40):
Well it's also I mean, it's the final failure and
humiliation for DOGE, which again I've never thought was actually
about cost cutting or efficiency, but that was what they claimed,
and they did not actually save any money. They probably
cost the government money, especially with the cuts the IRS,
which means that you can't.

Speaker 4 (01:24:58):
Go after rich tax sheets.

Speaker 2 (01:25:00):
So there were no deficit. There was no deficit reduction
that was achieved there. I mean, what the Wall streeterers
would like is for them to take more of an
acts to the you know, Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid, etc.

Speaker 4 (01:25:13):
It's what they would really like to see.

Speaker 2 (01:25:14):
But you know, I'm not one to be a big
leg deficit hawk and like wring my hands about the debt.
You know, I think for a long time those concerns
have been really overblown. However, we may be entering a
new era in global economics and in US economics where
the reason we've been able to spend so much without
really much care or concern is because we've been the

(01:25:36):
global reserve currency and because we have benefit from what
is described as the exorbitant privilege of being the center
of the economic world here. And if that is changing,
then we're going to have to have a different relationship
towards our debt and our deficit than we have in
the past.

Speaker 3 (01:25:52):
And so far we still are because you know, the
world doesn't really trust anybody else, right, but you are seeing,
you know, moves towards people trading in their own currency,
which which then you know, right now we have this
like you're in this glorious position where you know, if
two countries are trading with each other, rather than trading
in their own currency, they move it through a dollar.

Speaker 6 (01:26:14):
The dollar system. They don't, they don't have to do that.

Speaker 3 (01:26:19):
You know, there's there's all sorts of kind of value
in the liquidity and the efficiency of our capital markets
that that keep that keeps us there.

Speaker 6 (01:26:27):
But as but as as that.

Speaker 3 (01:26:30):
Erodes, yeah, then then then we become like other countries.
I have to like pay for things, right and it
wouldn't you know, people say like, oh, it's just you
look at the budget numbers. It's just absolutely impossible. We can't,
we can't do it. I mean it's true, you can't.
You can't balance the budget if you want to cut
taxes on the rich, right and you're trying to balance
it by finding waste in medicaid, right like, and you

(01:26:54):
could actually go after Medicare and medicaid and get a
significant amount of fraud out of that, out of that system,
but you're still squeez you know, you were talking about
hundreds of billions. There's trillions in like over a ten
year period, just just by tweaking the higher marginal tax
rates on the on the super rich.

Speaker 2 (01:27:13):
Yeah, hey a look at the Pentagon. But instead in
this budget they're increasing Pentagon spending. You know, the budget
really does, in my opinion, reflect, you know, the priorities
of Trump two point zero, which is it's a huge
boon to the oligarchy and huge boon to the police
state at the expense of working class people, with a
few flourishes thrown in, like no tax on tips or

(01:27:35):
whatever that they can point to and posture as a
pro working class party even as they effectuate one of
the largest upward transfers of wealth in history.

Speaker 6 (01:27:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:27:44):
Also the billions of dollars that people spend around the country,
around the world coming to this country, buying real estate
and through tourism and going to universities here. Yeah, it's
also a significant can you know, prop up of our
of the dollar economy. If we lose that, then we're

(01:28:07):
in huge trouble. Yeah, because we don't make enough stuff
to We don't have any other ideas, like that's that's
our thing.

Speaker 6 (01:28:13):
People want to live here.

Speaker 3 (01:28:15):
It's a nice place to live and we're very welcoming
up until recently two foreigners.

Speaker 2 (01:28:20):
Yeah, no, that's right, that's right. On the other hand,
let's put this up on the screen. There were some
decent jobless numbers that came in. Jobless claims dropped a
bit last week. This was a little bit below the
initial estimates of the previous week's unrevised tally of two
hundred twenty nine thousand, so they dropped it two hundred
twenty seven thousand. So you know, you don't see it

(01:28:43):
like a huge spike in jobless claims or anything like
that showing up yet. And then on the other handless
put the nice piece up on the screen. You do
have some you know, some indications with retail you previously
had Walmart, you know, this whole back and forth with Trump,
but basically saying like, look, we're gonna have to raise
our prices.

Speaker 4 (01:28:58):
Because of these tariffs.

Speaker 2 (01:28:59):
Now, of course, say we'd love to raise prices for
any number of reasons, and plenty of retailers will take
advantage of the terrorist to prices even beyond what they
have to. But also when you're talking about a thirty
percent tariff on China, that is going to require some
price hikes in order to you know, continue to run
a profitable business.

Speaker 4 (01:29:16):
This was interesting to me. Ryan leave us up on
the screen.

Speaker 2 (01:29:18):
Target on Wednesday cut it's full year sales outlook, as
executives said, weaker discretionary spending, consumer uncertainty about tariffs, and
backlash to the company's rollback of key diversity equity inclusion
efforts hurt its business. So they went away from woke
and went broke apparently.

Speaker 3 (01:29:34):
Yes, I mean the backlash against that was massive and
a lot of people that were boycotting Target as a
result of.

Speaker 6 (01:29:43):
This Wow and It's showing up.

Speaker 4 (01:29:45):
So they got on both sides.

Speaker 2 (01:29:46):
They got the boycott for the wokeness and then they
got the boycott for the anti wokeness.

Speaker 6 (01:29:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:29:52):
Interesting, So one indication there of things that maybe to come.
Let's go and move on to the latest news with
regard to deportations, we have new ice tactics. Practically every
day we can put these images up on the screen.
They're now camping out outside of asylum hearings. This is

(01:30:14):
D zero guys camping out outside of asylum hearings. And
then you know, the minute if a case is dismissed
or whatever, they just you know, I don't know why
these like the masking of these agents of the state
is deeply disturbing to be and that is a common
trend now. Actually, Ken Clippenstein did some reporting on exactly this,
and even in photos they're blurring their face or they're

(01:30:36):
turning around backwards so you can't see their faces, et cetera.
But this woman was asked how long were you here for?
She said a year. Then they say, were you guys
given any type of process? She says, yes, a process
of asylum. And then she says, I had my first
court hearing, and she goes on, they dismissed my case.

(01:30:56):
So her case is dismissed, and then she's just swept
right up by ice. Let's put the next piece up
on the screen. This was a significant, significant result in
the court system. Here a judge has said directly that
the Trump administration is violating their court order with these
deportation this deportation flight to South Sudan.

Speaker 4 (01:31:20):
Go ahead and read you this.

Speaker 2 (01:31:21):
This says after a deportation flight with eight migrants left
Texas reportedly intended for South Sudan this week, of federal
judge on Wednesday rule the Trump administration had.

Speaker 4 (01:31:28):
Violated a previous order.

Speaker 2 (01:31:29):
US District Court Judge Brian Murphy in Massachusetts said it
at hearing the administration had failed to adhere to an
injunction he issued in March that prevented people from being
sent to countries other than their own without opportunities to
raise fears of persecution or torture. And South Sudan not
in a good state right now. United State Department warning
for Americans to avoid South Sudan. I think our diplomats

(01:31:52):
have been pulled because of safety concerns. And this is
where it appears the government didn't really want to give
up this information. But it appears that these migrants were sent.
And the judge even went ryan so far as to say,
the department's actions are unquestionably violative of this court's order.
So no ambiguity and raise the possibility even of outright contempt.

Speaker 3 (01:32:15):
Yeah, this is what contempt is for. There is an
order in place, and they clearly had contempt for it.
Their argument is that these are terrible, uh, you know,
murderers and other criminals. You know, if if you can't,
why can't they figure out a way to do this legally?
If it's true, if you've got a murderer here who's
here illegally, you can you can figure out a way

(01:32:38):
to deport them. If you can't go to Congress and say,
look this, we've got to murder here illegally, and you
know these judges aren't allowing us.

Speaker 6 (01:32:48):
We need better laws on the books. Nobody is going
to object to that.

Speaker 2 (01:32:52):
It would not be any sort of a First of all,
murders should serve their sentence before they, you know, are
released into whatever country you're talking about. But second of all,
there's literally not a single politician who would object to
a murder who's here illegal, illegally getting deported somewhere. And
it would not be a difficult process to play out.
But it's you asked the question, why don't they do

(01:33:15):
this the lawful way? I mean that is part of the.

Speaker 4 (01:33:18):
Point, right. They want to test the bounds. They want
to outright defy the.

Speaker 2 (01:33:25):
Constitution and these judicial orders that have been issued and
see how far they can go and see what they
can get away with. I mean, that is a that
is a key part of their strategy here. The other
thing that's in this budget that just passed is a
huge increase in funding for Ice. That makes it, i think,
the largest funded federal law enforcement agency in history. So

(01:33:47):
you know those are you're getting the police state, you're
getting the you know, the military expansion, and you're getting
the tax cuts for the rich. So so far, they
have not been able to achieve deportation numbers that approach
that are even like commiserate with what Obama Deporter in chief, was.

Speaker 4 (01:34:03):
Able to accomplish.

Speaker 2 (01:34:05):
They're trying to secure the resources to be able to
do that, but in the meantime, they want these displays
of lawlessness and cruelty to substitute for that, and then
to encourage people to self deport. That's effectively what substituting
for you know, actually falling process or god forbid, going
through Congress and actually you know, passing laws that help
you accomplish the outcomes that you want, which, as we've

(01:34:27):
discussed before, I think Democrats would have absolutely gone along
with at the beginning of this administration. Now I think
it would be a bit different, and I don't I.

Speaker 3 (01:34:35):
Don't know what numbers we're going to have available, but
it's you know, it's probably going to work to some degree.
You know, I think you know, within immorant communities. They
have successfully struck staple fear. Yes, they're definitely afraid and
some and some are going back. At the same time
they're they are trying to arrest and detain people as

(01:35:00):
there as they're leaving, which is counterproductive to the whole idea.
Like that, this and this, this is a this is
a bizarre trend where people are suing for the right
to be able to leave freely, and then DHS is
going to court trying to say no, no, we want
to be able to detain you and then deport you,

(01:35:20):
detain you and definitely and then deport you at some
point down down the line.

Speaker 4 (01:35:23):
I hadn't seen those cases, which is.

Speaker 3 (01:35:25):
Which is a real problem with the private detention facility, right,
because they profit the profit, right, and now they're going
to have this massive budget which is going to meet
you create a lot more profit. And there's no there
isn't any money in somebody just buying a ticket and
going home, right, Like the money is in hiring people

(01:35:45):
to go catch them, lock them up and then guard
them indefinitely.

Speaker 2 (01:35:50):
Right.

Speaker 4 (01:35:50):
That's very dark, but very good point.

Speaker 2 (01:35:53):
Let's put D two up on the screen because this
really gets the heart too of what's going on here.
So there was a memorandum that came out from the administration,
from the intel community that said like, basically, okay, we're
not being invaded by trend To Aragua and specifically debunking
the alleged connection between the Venezuelan government and this gang.

(01:36:14):
And this is a problem for this administration because that
is the pretext for which which they used to invoke
the Alien Enemies Act. You know, this is supposed to
be used in wartime or in times of an invasion.
So they said, we're being invaded by trend To Ragua. Preposterous,
and the Venezuelan government is directing this invasion. So they
fired the people who drafted the original report, and then

(01:36:37):
they did this rewrite from Joe Kent, and he has
now been caught, you know, directing them to manipulate the
outcome of this report.

Speaker 4 (01:36:48):
So let me read you a little bit from this article.

Speaker 2 (01:36:50):
They say, new emails document how he top eight to
Tulci Gabbert, the Director of National Intelligence, ordered analysts to
edit an assessment with the hope of insulating President Trump
and gathered from being attacked for the administration's claim that
Venezuela's government controls a criminal gang.

Speaker 4 (01:37:05):
Quote.

Speaker 2 (01:37:06):
We need to do some rewriting and more analytic work
so this document is not used against the DNI, that's
Tulsi or Potus, Joe Kent, the chief of staff to
Miss Gabbard, wrote in an email to a group of
intelligence officials on April third, using shorthand for Miss Gabard's
position in the President of the United States. Times reported
last week that Joe Kent had pushed analysts to redo
that assessment date of February twenty sixth on that relationship

(01:37:29):
between Venezuela's government and the gang trender Arragua, after it
came to light that the assessment contradicted a subsequent claim
by mister Trump. Disclosure of the price sise language of
mister Kent's emails has added to the emerging picture of
a politicized intervention. But remarkably, even with them like cooking
the results of this assessment, they still weren't able to

(01:37:49):
totally validate, Like they couldn't go far enough to actually
validate the claims that were made in the Invocation of
the Alien Enemies Act. So even with them doing their
absolute best to insist we are invaded by trender Uragua,
and it is the Venezuelan government that is directing the
you know, whatever is going on in Aurora, Colorado, apartment

(01:38:10):
buility or whatever. Even they were not able to fully
make those claims right.

Speaker 3 (01:38:15):
And also if their argument is there is an ongoing invasion,
the invasion's over.

Speaker 6 (01:38:20):
So that's a problem too.

Speaker 2 (01:38:21):
Yeah, Emily has made that point that she she wanted
to ask administration about. Okay, well you've you know, the
border crossings are genuinely significantly down. So is are we
being invaded or are we not being invaded? In the
problem solved because you.

Speaker 3 (01:38:36):
Can't have guess you could argue we've been invaded and
you have to find all the invaders.

Speaker 4 (01:38:39):
I guess that's what they would say. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:38:42):
But the other problem they have with this invasion rhetoric
is that so much of it was done legally within
the properly within the immigration system. What's his name, Andre,
the makeup dude, you know, Yeah, he like made a
TVP want toppointment, had an asylum case open, yep, was here,

(01:39:03):
like was here legally. That's not how an invasion unfolds.
Invasions you just crash.

Speaker 4 (01:39:09):
You're not going through.

Speaker 6 (01:39:09):
Castle wall one.

Speaker 4 (01:39:10):
App Yeah, we're waiting for your appointment at the border, and.

Speaker 3 (01:39:14):
You can put up this next this next alment D three.
He was not alone, you know, more than fifty at
least of the Venezuelans who are who were sent to
El Salvador, according to this investigation and analysis by Cato,
right wing libertarian institute, we're.

Speaker 2 (01:39:33):
Here legally so and even beyond that, in this analysis,
he was actually only able to ascertain the legal status
of ninety of the individuals.

Speaker 4 (01:39:44):
And out of that ninety fifty of them right came
here legally.

Speaker 2 (01:39:48):
So actually a clear majority of the numbers that he
was able to ascertain any information about came here legally.
So you know, it's not a scientific sample, et cetera.

Speaker 3 (01:39:59):
But if you expectin that out to fifty, how many
do they send, Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:40:02):
Roughly q fifty a ton, Yeah, roughly two fifty.

Speaker 2 (01:40:05):
So if you extrapolate that out, you know, it's very
easy to believe that actually a majority of the people
who were sent to a foreign dungeon potentially for life,
came here legally and committed We already know they a
majority committed no crimes.

Speaker 3 (01:40:21):
And as Ben Franklin would say, even if it was
just one, it's wrong, that's right, and that's.

Speaker 6 (01:40:27):
Why you have to do process.

Speaker 3 (01:40:29):
So what did he say, I'd rather one hundred guilty
men go free than one innocent man go to prison,
and that and that's the founding spirit of our Bill
of rights and our entire kind of rule of law system. Yeah,
that that it is better to protect the innocent.

Speaker 4 (01:40:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:40:46):
I think the view from the you know, the extremists
in the administration and you know, which is quite prevalent
in Republican influencers, is that the Biden immigrants policy was illegitimate.
So even if you came here, you know, as a
venezuela and got temporary protected status doesn't count. You're still

(01:41:08):
in their view, you're still illegal because they didn't they
didn't like that procedure, and so it's illegitimate. This came
up during the Haitian situation in Springfield, Ohio that you know,
the vast majority of them were there legally through that
Trump temporary protected status program or had been here. Actually

(01:41:29):
a number of them have been here even longer, and
you know, had over time moved to Ohio. But that
was the view was that even though they had availed
themselves of legal channels. Those channels were legitimate because they
opposed them.

Speaker 6 (01:41:42):
Right.

Speaker 3 (01:41:43):
So and so Rick Grennell, special Envoyd to Trump in
the State Department, returned yesterday from Venezuela with a with
an American who had been held there for a significant
amount of time. Grannell had has been this is this
is not the first American that Grenell has gotten out

(01:42:04):
of detention in Venezuela and maybe some other countries as well.

Speaker 2 (01:42:08):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (01:42:09):
He's also been in active negotiations with the with the
government there that I guess we technically don't recognize, but clearly,
clearly we do. He did an interview yesterday on his
on his way back with Steve Bannon saying that the
US is not out trying to enact regime change all
over the world. Then this was in the context of

(01:42:32):
the Maduro government in Venezuela, not.

Speaker 4 (01:42:35):
All over the world, just in South Africa, just.

Speaker 3 (01:42:37):
Just in South Africa. And so, uh, we put this
next element of monsuscoop from the Miami Herald. This is
D four usked secretly negotiating deal to let Venezuela sell
more oil if it takes more deportees. And this is
actually where diplomacy does play a role in our migration policy.

(01:43:01):
Like let's let's imagine that that you know that this
is phrased in oil terms, because that's how we understand
our diplomacy. No, China and Russia have been making overtures
towards Venezuela. Their their oil industry is practically shut down
because of because of sanctions, and and uh, the the

(01:43:21):
amount of the disrepair that it is, it has fallen into,
it's it's it's not the easiest oil to refine apparently,
and so it requires you know, significant investment and upkeep,
and that's been impossible under sanctions. And so the idea
here is that the US would move towards normalizing relations
with Venezuela. In exchange, we'd get a bunch of oil.

(01:43:42):
And then when you have normalized relations with the country,
your immigration policy works more fluidly. Like if, for instance, uh,
there's a French person here who overstays their visa and
they get then they get caught and they get a
deportation order. France takes them back. We're allies with France,

(01:44:04):
we have normal relations with them. We don't with Venezuela,
which is why and we have we don't have normal
relations with so many countries around the world that we
are bullying, you know, because it's just what, just what
we do, and so then we have to then, know,
we don't have to. But then they choose to send
them to El Salvador or South Sudan, or they call

(01:44:25):
up Libya or and whoever whoever claims to represent Libya
at this point, can you take them? Hey, Somaliland, you
want to be recognized as a country. Okay, well you
have to take a bunch of people from Bolivia because
we can't send them to Bolivia because we tried to
coop their government and we don't have good relations with them.
So if you want a rational immigration policy, it would require,
you know, normal diplomatic relations with other countries, not not

(01:44:49):
being a thug in your region. So I actually wouldn't
you know, jump down jump on Grannell for that, Like,
if Grannell can greate normal relations with Venezuela, then yes,
if there are people here who are getting deported that
as well, would then accept them.

Speaker 2 (01:45:05):
I'm sort of this though, because Venezuela has accepted deportation flights.
But perhaps it was on more of like an ad
hoc basis, because this is one of the key things
that was key details of the you know, the Venezuelan's
being shipped to El Salvador instead. Apparently, prior to that
flight to El Salvador, Venezuela had said yes, we'll take

(01:45:27):
you know, deportees from the US, and there have been
subsequently flights that have left and brought deportees to Venezuela.
But like I said, perhaps maybe that was more ad
hoc and this is to be a more durable, long
lasting relationship. It's also funny because apparently Meduoro they have
an analyst here who says he wants a deal similar
to the one granted to Syria.

Speaker 4 (01:45:46):
He's looking for the Yeah. It's like, okay, well you
could do it with them, you.

Speaker 6 (01:45:50):
Know, why not.

Speaker 4 (01:45:50):
I'm a former al Qaeda guy.

Speaker 3 (01:45:52):
Surely I'm not not that bad, right he literally nobody
who could be as bad as the al Kaya guy,
I mean, the former Alkada guy. Like I think, if
we can get along strong pass it's a very good point.

Speaker 6 (01:46:04):
If you can get along with him, you can get
along with Maduro.

Speaker 3 (01:46:07):
I interviewed the Venezuela Foreign minister maybe like a year ago,
and he brought up, and he mentioned deportations as a
place to where there could be room for negotiations if
in a world where there was normalized relations. But yet
they certainly will take some and certainly if they're political opponents, Ben.

Speaker 6 (01:46:23):
Azuell is happy to take them.

Speaker 3 (01:46:24):
Yes, they said that you and then beat them up
and put them in there in jails, right, the US position.

Speaker 2 (01:46:29):
According to this, other analysts said they argue Maduro can
become a pro American dictator.

Speaker 3 (01:46:34):
So, I mean it would not he would not be
the first American, you know, pro American dictator.

Speaker 2 (01:46:42):
Yeah, sure to fit them mold. So anyway, interesting, We'll
see what develops there. But I mean, it would make
sense that they're using those deportation flights as leverage to
try to roll back some of those sections and you know,
secure oil sales on a more permanent basis. Yeah, all right,
let's get to this AI. This is pretty interesting. We
try to follow this closely. Put this up on the screen.

(01:47:04):
We've got a new collab between open ai and Joni Ive,
who is the designer of the iPhone, in a six
point five billion dollar deal to create AI devices. Let
me read you a little bit of this because I'm
just gonna be honest with you. I have a hard
time wrapping my head around what this tech is actually
going to be. But they say they want to move

(01:47:27):
away effectively from the smartphone era to this type of
tech that's almost like ambient, Like it's like your glasses
or your head.

Speaker 4 (01:47:34):
But I don't really know anyway, they say in a
joint interview.

Speaker 2 (01:47:37):
Mister Ive and mister Allman declined to say what such
devices could look like, how they might work, but they
said they hope to share details next year. Mister Ive
fifty eight fram the ambitions as galactic, with the aim
of creating amazing products that elevate humanity. We've been waiting
for the next big thing for twenty years, mister Altman added.
We want to bring people something beyond the legacy products
we've been using for so long. Mister Altman and mister

(01:47:57):
Iver are effectively looking beyond an era of smart phones,
which have been people's signature personal device since the iPhone
debuted in two thousand and seven.

Speaker 4 (01:48:04):
If the two men.

Speaker 2 (01:48:05):
Succeed, and it's a very big if they could spur
what is known as ambient computing, rather than typing and
taking photographs on smartphones, future devices like pendants or glasses
that use AI could process the world in real time,
fielding questions and analyzing images and sounds in seamless ways.
They put on this like funny hype video, like relatively

(01:48:28):
lengthy hype video for this partnership. We pulled a couple
pieces to share with you. Let's take a listen to
a little bit of what Sam Oltman had to say.

Speaker 18 (01:48:38):
I think we have the opportunity here to kind of
completely reimagine what it means to use a computer.

Speaker 11 (01:48:49):
Sam is a rare visionary. He shoulders incredible responsibility, but
his curiosity, his humility remain utterly inspiring.

Speaker 18 (01:49:06):
Johnny is the deepest thinker of anyone I've ever met.
What that leads him to be able to come up
with is unmatched.

Speaker 19 (01:49:17):
I was just thinking, what a privilege it is to
really connect with somebody new and it's it hasn't happened
in a long time. And the reason I think that
it happened is we had both a very strong shared vision.
We maybe didn't know exactly where we were going to go,
but like the direction of the like the force vector,

(01:49:38):
felt clear. And then this like deeply shared sense of
values about what technology should be when technology has been
really good, when it's gone wrong.

Speaker 11 (01:49:46):
I mean that that was in a way one of
the basis I think for one of the reasons Sam
and I clipped was despite our wonderfully different journeys to
this point, our motivations and values are completely the same.
In my experience, if you're trying to have a sense
of where you are going to end up, you shouldn't

(01:50:12):
look at the technology. You should look at the people
who are making the decisions, and you should look at
what drives, motivates and look at values.

Speaker 4 (01:50:22):
So Johnny and Sam really feeling.

Speaker 3 (01:50:24):
Each other there, they really are, you know, you were saying, Sam,
really sounds like Ezrare at the beginning, Like what really
does actually?

Speaker 4 (01:50:31):
Yeah, really through me that it fits.

Speaker 6 (01:50:33):
With the abundance agenda. It does?

Speaker 4 (01:50:35):
It absolutely does.

Speaker 3 (01:50:36):
I mean I just can't get over all been taking
this nonprofit and turn It's one of the things I
agree with Elon Musk on taking this nonprofit and turn
trying to turn it into a for profit and then
he's going to use the billions and like rise up
in market cap that to then by the guy that
helped make the iPhone. I'm sure everybody who else who

(01:50:57):
participated in making the iPhone was like, this guy didn't
do it.

Speaker 2 (01:51:02):
It's just like a brand, like you created this brand
image around I don't know anything. That's why I thought,
And it's actually Johnny because I really like I've never
heard but apparently he's a big deal.

Speaker 3 (01:51:11):
But yeah, and it also feels dystopian, like we all
understand the way that so if if you didn't drive
before ways and Google maps, like you don't know that
you actually can get around places knowing.

Speaker 8 (01:51:27):
Where to go.

Speaker 4 (01:51:27):
Your brain that were devoted to like actually to get places.

Speaker 3 (01:51:32):
And so if you take that and you apply it,
you put glasses on and you look this way, and
it says tree like your brain is going to stop working.

Speaker 6 (01:51:44):
It's going to.

Speaker 3 (01:51:44):
Shut down, and it's going to it would be like
it's it's like when you don't walk for a couple
of weeks because your bed ridden, your legs stop working.

Speaker 2 (01:51:55):
I have thought that same thing with the exact the
exact like GPS, because when I first started driving, there
was map quests and those sorts of things, but you
had to print out direction.

Speaker 4 (01:52:07):
And then if you screwed up, you had to actually.

Speaker 2 (01:52:10):
Like get out a map and like figure it out,
or like go to the gas station, be like, where
the hell am I what do I do? And then
your brain actually does this thing of learning where you're
going and how to get there.

Speaker 3 (01:52:21):
I'm going to go to a gas station just for
fun and ask somebody how to get somewhere.

Speaker 6 (01:52:25):
They'll like nine one.

Speaker 2 (01:52:28):
I've actually had people on the street like Taurus asked
me how to get a place.

Speaker 4 (01:52:31):
I'm like, you're gonna get it.

Speaker 2 (01:52:33):
Way better to have much better success with this anyway. Yeah,
it is terrifying to think about. And already I think
with even the level of AI we've gotten to, there
is a lot of risk of especially writing ability atrophying.
There's all these you know, stories about college kids just
like rampantly cheating, which you know, you could solve that

(01:52:53):
particular problem force people to write stuff while they're in
class or whatever. But when you think about it being
almost fully embedded in your life or ultimately what Elon
and others want, I mean, it's this like transhumanist vision
where the tech is actually embedded in your head and
in this becomes indistinguishable from you and yourself and your

(01:53:16):
humanity and whatever your own brain would have brought you
to I mean, I don't know how you can feel
any other way than that it is frightening and dystopian,
and that they're playing with forces that even they don't understand,
and I think would admit that they.

Speaker 3 (01:53:30):
Don't really understand, and which nobody asked for and.

Speaker 4 (01:53:33):
Which nobody asked for. That's exactly right.

Speaker 2 (01:53:35):
And we're such a broken society now that it doesn't
even feel possible to have like a serious adult conversation
about the deployment of this technology, the development of this technology,
how it should be used, how it should be constrained,
et cetera. Let me play a little bit more of
the Bromance video with with Sam and Johnny there talking

(01:53:55):
about how they their belief they're selling this as like, oh,
the iPhone experience, Like we're all too locked down the
screens and it's you know, all these alerts and notifications
or whatever, and this is going to be a human
centric improvement on the current state of affairs, is the
way that they're pitching this.

Speaker 4 (01:54:14):
At least, let's take a listen to a little bit
more of that.

Speaker 19 (01:54:17):
You can talk to people who use our latest model
and say this is like genius level in every field,
and you just have to put in the work to
pull it all together. But if you have a hard problem,
you can have this like team of geniuses in all
of their different disciplines, and they report, I'm two or
three times more productive as a scientist than I was before.
I'm two or three times faster to find a cure
for cancer than I was before because I have this

(01:54:39):
incredible external brain that just didn't exist six months ago.
I think this will be one of these moments of
just an absolute embarrassment of riches of what people don't
create for collective society.

Speaker 11 (01:54:52):
I am absolutely certain that we are literally on the
brink of a new generation of technology that can make
us better selves.

Speaker 4 (01:55:06):
Can make us our better selves. That's the that's the pitch.

Speaker 2 (01:55:09):
And look, I mean, there are certain aspects that I'm
sure will be beneficial, you know, and they like to
sell the possible benefits of like medical breakthroughs, et cetera.

Speaker 4 (01:55:18):
But just focus on that, guys, Yeah, just let's let's
just do those pieces.

Speaker 3 (01:55:23):
Show us you can make some medical breakthroughs, then come
back and make us our better selves.

Speaker 2 (01:55:28):
Yeah, and be like, and we're going to eliminate all
of the necessity of human lapor. By the way, and
some of this is already happening. Let's put this up
on the screen from Klarna, which is isn't Clarna the
thing where like when you go to pay for something online,
it's like you can pay an installments. It's like the
sort of like consumer loan. So they've been having some
trouble recently because of consumer sentiment. But in any case,

(01:55:49):
they announced that they already used AI to shrink their
workforce by forty percent, they said, the CEO said, the
truth is the company is shrunk from about five thousand
to now only three thousand employees. If you go to
LinkedIn and look at the jobs, you'll see how we're shrinking.

Speaker 4 (01:56:04):
And if you talk to the leaders.

Speaker 2 (01:56:09):
Of the AI revolution to a person, they will all
tell you that the goal is to eliminate as much
human labor as possible. And look, maybe in a world
where you have like a large universal basic income or
some sort of you know, ability to function as an
economic political society, and imagine that there might be some

(01:56:32):
solution for this type of mass disruption larger than the
Industrial Revolution in a shorter.

Speaker 4 (01:56:37):
Period of time.

Speaker 2 (01:56:38):
That's what they're at least promising to deliver, then maybe
you could, you know, imagine a non dystopian version of this.
But as things sit today in US society, where we
can't even do things like you know, give parents paid
over time, it's hard to imagine this working out in
a way that is beneficial for the masses, especially since
it's controlled by these few highlight concentrated, you know, tech giants.

Speaker 3 (01:57:03):
And this one itself is particularly symbolic because it's a
company that is basically a payday lender, you know, trying
to you know, grease the wheels of consumption commerce for
people who aren't getting paid enough to be able to
make ends meet.

Speaker 6 (01:57:19):
So there's this company.

Speaker 3 (01:57:20):
They'll come in and give you a little the little
loan and the terms are great unless you don't pay it,
and then the terms are terrible. And so the argument
from AI is, we can do this high tech payday
lending with fewer employees, right, so we're not.

Speaker 2 (01:57:38):
Even getting lead like the job creation of the payday lender,
you know, it's just like concentrating all of the wealth
extraction in the hands of it just a few people,
just a few people.

Speaker 4 (01:57:49):
We're going to make sure that that happens like.

Speaker 3 (01:57:50):
Oh good, okay, great, thanks, that's that's nice.

Speaker 6 (01:57:52):
That makes me feel better.

Speaker 2 (01:57:54):
You know, we mentioned the abundance guys earlier. Derek has
been doing some work on suggesting that some of this
AI job replacement among white color employees may already be happening.

Speaker 4 (01:58:04):
That they're increasing indications.

Speaker 2 (01:58:05):
I mean, one of the things they point to is
the number of college graduates you're going straight to law school.

Speaker 4 (01:58:09):
Now, that's also kind of a recession indicator, so it
could be that good.

Speaker 3 (01:58:13):
Also, guys, be careful, Like AI can write legal briefs well,
and that's the thing.

Speaker 2 (01:58:17):
And you know, you can imagine if you're a big
law firm, instead of hiring I don't know, twenty of
the new associates, you hire five and you give.

Speaker 4 (01:58:27):
Them chat GPT, and a lot of law briefs are a.

Speaker 2 (01:58:31):
Lot of like grunt legal work is very sort of
copy and paste, and especially the corporate filings are just
basically like proforming. You sub in this company's name instead
of that company's name, and their evaluation instead of their
valuation whatever.

Speaker 3 (01:58:46):
What they're finding though, is that these AI models are
just fabricating a bunch of stuff. Yeah, like they're writing
these legal briefs and citing cases that don't exist, completely
misreading cases that do exist, applying law that, making up
laws that don't actually exist, and putting them in And
you can tell that men designed all of this because

(01:59:07):
it's done with complete authority.

Speaker 6 (01:59:10):
Yeah, yeah, I can tell.

Speaker 3 (01:59:11):
You all about that case.

Speaker 6 (01:59:12):
Well, the thing is completely wrong.

Speaker 2 (01:59:15):
It really messes with you too, because it'll be like,
you know, twenty citations and nineteen of them are spot off,
and then one buried in there is just totally made up,
is completely fabricated.

Speaker 3 (01:59:26):
And so the thing that college graduates are hired for
at these white collar jobs is producing memos for the boss,
like organizing, doing research.

Speaker 4 (01:59:35):
Be an Excel spreadsheet, spreadsheets now, and that's.

Speaker 6 (01:59:39):
How you learn what the company does.

Speaker 3 (01:59:41):
Learn you know how to work in a company, and
then rise through the ranks and then become one of
the people telling the college graduates what to do. If
those jobs all get cut out, how does that twenty
two year old then become the thirty two year old
who's in the mid job and become the forty five
year old higher up. Yeah, you're breaking the whole You're

(02:00:03):
breaking the entire thing.

Speaker 2 (02:00:05):
Yeah, I have a daughter who you know, is going
to be going to college, and she's seventeen, she has
one more year of high school, and she I think
she knows what she wants to do. But if I
were to give sort of like broad advice about what
would be the right careers to go into, that would
be like AI proof. It's not an easy thing to
figure out, not an easy thing to figure out at all,

(02:00:27):
because Yeah, most of those entry level like color jobs
that you would get coming out of college seems like
they could be, you know, hugely impacted by what but
even what we already have let alone wherever the development
ultimately goes. And again, you know, I guess it'd be
one thing if there was some sort of a natural
conversation about what we're going to do about that, But

(02:00:48):
there's not. It's just total no breaks on the car.
We're in a race with China and we have to
win consequences. We're not even going to think about what
the fallout is going to be. And we think about
how foundly our society has been changed by the smartphone
and by specifically algorithmic social media. We can't even cope
with that, apparently, right and now we're going to be

(02:01:10):
you know, have an ambient tech that's informing you know,
that's talking to our brains all the time, and you know,
feeding us answers or insights or you know, writing our
essays or whatever constantly. It's just I don't think anyone
can really anticipate what the fallout could be.

Speaker 3 (02:01:26):
Well, luckily the textile mails are coming back, so they work,
there are they are?

Speaker 9 (02:01:32):
They?

Speaker 6 (02:01:34):
Nobody here knows how to sew though, so that's a problem.

Speaker 2 (02:01:36):
Well and certainly, and yeah, well that that was the
other thing when Lutnik was talking about like the millions
army of millions to screw in little little screws. If
you listen to the whole quote, he actually says, no,
that will actually be robots that will be doing.

Speaker 3 (02:01:49):
That, and what he yeah, he's like, this is out
of context. What you'll actually be doing is you'll be working.

Speaker 4 (02:01:54):
On the robots, right, right, But that will take your kids.

Speaker 3 (02:01:57):
And your grandkids will also be able to work on
the robots, right. Not the most inspiring vision of the future.

Speaker 4 (02:02:04):
And why wouldn't you have other robots working on the robots.

Speaker 3 (02:02:07):
I guess the robots are going to break eventually, and
the other robots can't figure it out.

Speaker 2 (02:02:12):
Maybe there's some role for the human being in there.
All right, guys, thank you so much for hanging with
us today. Ryan and Emily are going to do the
Friday Show tomorrow. I'm sure there will be many things
for them to discuss, and we are actually going to
take Memorial Day off enjoy a long weekend. Let our
crew and everybody enjoy a long weekend. So we'll see
you back here next week.

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