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Speaker 3: Good morning, everybody, and welcome to Counterpoints. Ryan. How are
Speaker 3: you doing. You're in the studio making me look bad?
Speaker 4: Well, I didn't read the memo, so here I am
Speaker 4: in the studio and making sure everything is locked down
Speaker 4: and ready for us when we get back in here
Speaker 4: officially next week. Got some crew in here too, so
Speaker 4: we're in good shape.
Speaker 3: Thanks for checking in on things.
Speaker 5: But it's a great shot actually, and you still have
Speaker 5: the winter monitors behind you, so it really works out well.
Speaker 5: Because there's about seven inches of snow in DC, which
Speaker 5: usually it's really warm outside when we have the winter
Speaker 5: monitors on. Yes indeed, all right, so we have a
Speaker 5: big packed show for everyone today. We're going to be
Speaker 5: starting with the tragic wildfire that broke out in Palisades
Speaker 5: yesterday outside of Los Angeles. Then Donald Trump held a
Speaker 5: wild press conference. Will break down all of the key
Speaker 5: elements from it for you. Mark Zuckerberg obviously, as Crystal
Speaker 5: ow Ands Sager covered yesterday, changed the free speech policy
Speaker 5: on Meta and so other things as well. But the
Speaker 5: reaction to it is what we're going to cover today
Speaker 5: because it's been very, very interesting. Kevin O'Leary is poised
Speaker 5: to by TikTok. Obviously, oral arguments in the case at
Speaker 5: the Supreme Court will begin on Friday, so this is
Speaker 5: a very high stakes game. Congestion pricing has gone into
Speaker 5: effect in New York City, and man, the reactions there,
Speaker 5: and there is a lot to talk about actually with
Speaker 5: that entire story, and I'm curious to get your thoughts
Speaker 5: on it, Ryan, The reactions have been fascinating to watch,
Speaker 5: and Ryan, we're also going to do updates from Gaza.
Speaker 5: This is something that Donald Trump touched on at his
Speaker 5: press conference, and there's a lot more going on with
Speaker 5: the UAE and other countries as they look for some
Speaker 5: type of settlement there.
Speaker 3: And we have a guest.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and it might not be in this show that
Speaker 4: goes out on the podcast, but we're going to be
Speaker 4: joined by Ahmed Khan again. If you may remember, a
Speaker 4: few weeks ago, we had talked about how he had
Speaker 4: spent something like six months and managed to get his
Speaker 4: own shipment of aid into Gaza working with the on
Speaker 4: the ground organization ARENA. We'll talk to him about and
Speaker 4: he went in with the shipment, so we'll talk to
Speaker 4: him about like what he saw on the ground there.
Speaker 4: He also has been kind of at the forefront of
Speaker 4: a what is kind of a considered to be a
Speaker 4: niche issue, but it shouldn't be. There's something like twenty
Speaker 4: five to fifty thousand people in Gaza who need kind
Speaker 4: of critical medical care and all they need is permission
Speaker 4: from is to leave, and they have a hospital that
Speaker 4: is willing to treat them. Israel's blocking them and he's
Speaker 4: working on a lot of those cases. He's also been
Speaker 4: in Ukraine recently, so he's going to update us on
Speaker 4: a bunch of what he's seen.
Speaker 5: Fantastic well, let's start with the tragedy outside of Los
Speaker 5: Angeles and the Palisades, where thirty thousand people have been evacuated.
Speaker 5: Around three thousand acres have already burned, and the fire,
Speaker 5: as we come to everybody right now, is zero percent
Speaker 5: zero percent contained.
Speaker 3: There are two other fires.
Speaker 5: Raging in the area as well, but this fire, the
Speaker 5: images that are coming in are just We're going to
Speaker 5: put some of them up on the screen for everybody
Speaker 5: right now. Images are coming in right now and they
Speaker 5: are stunning. So if you were listening to this, what
Speaker 5: we're looking at here is just the hills in complete flames.
Speaker 3: People taking video.
Speaker 5: From Westalia, for example, just showing how close the blaze
Speaker 5: is down Ryan this footage that we've been seeing come in.
Speaker 5: I'm going to share another tab here. This is footage
Speaker 5: from KTLA from the perimeter of the fire. They've actually
Speaker 5: started clearing these. This is just shocking. People abandoned their
Speaker 5: vehicles because of the gridlock. Obviously it's a very la thing.
Speaker 5: They're now needing to get those cars, the abandoned vehicles
Speaker 5: that people left as they fled on foot out of
Speaker 5: the way by using a bulldozer, just so that the
Speaker 5: firefighters can get in and have access to to actually
Speaker 5: save lives and save property and contain the fire a
Speaker 5: little bit. But as of right now, it's not contained
Speaker 5: basically at all. What have you made of this just
Speaker 5: in the last you know, honestly, Ryan, twenty four hours
Speaker 5: as we started to see some of these horrifying images.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I was talking to a few friends who live
Speaker 4: in Los Angeles last night and they said, you know,
Speaker 4: the winds were unlike really anything that they had felt before.
Speaker 4: These Santa Ana winds whipping through measurements have clocked them
Speaker 4: up to ninety nine miles per hour. They're expected, you know,
Speaker 4: to continue at that pace through much of today. It
Speaker 4: seems like it's been at least ten years since there's
Speaker 4: been there's there have been Santa Ana winds of that forest,
Speaker 4: and so they're picking up embers from fires, tossing them
Speaker 4: through the dry air, landing them on new rooftops, burning
Speaker 4: burning new houses, new fires sparking in, you know, throughout
Speaker 4: the Los Angeles area, creating a real kind of hell
Speaker 4: on Earth situation. Like you said, zero percent contained, seems like,
Speaker 4: you know, there were reports of a lot of fire
Speaker 4: hydrants running, running out of water, and the traffic, you know,
Speaker 4: on the best of days in Los Angeles is just brutal, absolute,
Speaker 4: you know, the most poorly designed urban area you can
Speaker 4: possibly imagine, and trying to imagine escaping raging fire with
Speaker 4: those normal traffic patterns in your way turning into panicked
Speaker 4: traffic patterns. You know, every one of those cars represents
Speaker 4: a family or a person who was fleeing their home
Speaker 4: and then believed that they couldn't make it anymore in
Speaker 4: their car and just left it right in the middle
Speaker 4: of the road, which of course then leads to you know,
Speaker 4: complete and total gridlock.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I do want to share one video of two men
Speaker 5: escaping because I think it's a glimpse into the experiences
Speaker 5: that a lot of people in California have had over
Speaker 5: the last twenty four hours. And it's apocalyptic. It's like
Speaker 5: a horror movie come to life. So let's take a
Speaker 5: look at this video. Here, let's get out of here.
Speaker 6: We tried, We tried, bro, I'm sorry.
Speaker 7: Yeah, the mystery falls.
Speaker 3: Sorry brot oh true and right.
Speaker 5: What I think is especially horrifying about that video is
Speaker 5: you can see in real time the fire is spreading
Speaker 5: because they're obviously running through the embers that are falling
Speaker 5: like snow onto trees, onto houses, and it really does
Speaker 5: look like it looks like snow. It's snowing in hell essentially,
Speaker 5: like it's raining fire onto them. And you can see
Speaker 5: they're in the middle of How it's you know, spreading
Speaker 5: so wildly and why it's not contained.
Speaker 3: Just like a horror movie. I mean, it really looks
Speaker 3: like a scene from a horror movie.
Speaker 4: And it's unlike, unlike a lot of things, that's not
Speaker 4: sparing the rich either. You know, it's going after you,
Speaker 4: you know, properties worth you know, well well into the millions, uh,
Speaker 4: really rocking the city. It's well, you know, hopefully this
Speaker 4: these winds die down and they can get this under
Speaker 4: control and we don't have kind of a apocalyptic level
Speaker 4: damage despite the scenes that we're seeing, right.
Speaker 5: And so La Mayor Karen Bass is actually not in
Speaker 5: town right now, but immediately people have started to wonder
Speaker 5: about the twenty three million dollars that she had recently
Speaker 5: proposed as a cut to the fire department. This is
Speaker 5: the headline from back in April. You can see if
Speaker 5: you go down here. She proposed a decrease of about
Speaker 5: twenty three million dollars from.
Speaker 3: The LA Fire Department.
Speaker 5: And you know that for Karen Bass is going to
Speaker 5: be a huge, huge problem going forward when she gets
Speaker 5: back into town. Let me share another element here as well.
Speaker 5: A lot of people wondering understand, wondering, uh, this is
Speaker 5: a post on X where are our tax dollars going?
Speaker 3: As the city of Valet goes broke.
Speaker 5: One of the many questions we get this is from
Speaker 5: the account of the La City Controller, Kenneth Metcha. He says,
Speaker 5: the city just started a new fiscal year and if
Speaker 5: you want to know how the mayor and a majority
Speaker 5: of city council decreased her increased department's operational.
Speaker 3: Budgets see below.
Speaker 5: So what you're you're seeing on this chart, if you
Speaker 5: can make it out as a huge increase in the
Speaker 5: police budget. And as you go down you start to see,
Speaker 5: you know, decreases that are going to now come under
Speaker 5: the microscope. Public works is one of those that's uh,
Speaker 5: you know, there's a there's a big cut there.
Speaker 3: Fire. You can see that down towards the end.
Speaker 5: That's the second if you're if you're listening to this,
Speaker 5: indeed you see a significant cut out of the fire
Speaker 5: budget and ran the other thing I wanted to mention
Speaker 5: is you probably remember this. Obviously, the infamous company PG
Speaker 5: and E Pacific Gas and Electric ended up being on
Speaker 5: the under the microscope, just as Karen Bass's budget cuts
Speaker 5: likely will be in the Dixie Fire. To you, you
Speaker 5: were able to Wall Street Journal reporter wrote a whole
Speaker 5: great book about how PG and E they had They
Speaker 5: just had an updated all of their equipment, and that
Speaker 5: was like the literal spark in the Dixie Fire. And oftentimes,
Speaker 5: as we peel back the layers, this isn't just a
Speaker 5: force of nature. It isn't just an accident, It isn't
Speaker 5: just you know, there's there's usually some level as you're
Speaker 5: appeeling back of incompetence or corruption or human error that
Speaker 5: gets to the heart of this. And that's going to
Speaker 5: be the question moving forward.
Speaker 4: And if you step back kind of out of the
Speaker 4: it's it's I think it's very difficult to look at
Speaker 4: Los Angeles in particular from inside of our of our
Speaker 4: perspective as Americans, because it's sort of like fish and water,
Speaker 4: like it just kind of is what it is. But
Speaker 4: if you try to step back and look at it
Speaker 4: from outside the United States or or in a in
Speaker 4: a more objective way. What you see is a city
Speaker 4: that spends tens of millions of dollars on individual homes
Speaker 4: for individual people with the most you know, lavish artwork
Speaker 4: and swimming pools and luxury. Is that anybody could you know,
Speaker 4: possibly contemplate, say like two hundred, two hundred years ago,
Speaker 4: while starving kind of the rest of the city of
Speaker 4: needed public improvements so that they can so that people
Speaker 4: can actually move around efficiently, and so that the and
Speaker 4: so that public services are decently funded. And so we
Speaker 4: often say, well, you know, can we afford you know,
Speaker 4: an effective fire department, Can we afford you know, better schools.
Speaker 4: The question that you might have to ask about Los
Speaker 4: Angeles in particular, maybe the United States more generally, can
Speaker 4: we afford this billionaire class? Because we are the ones
Speaker 4: that have produced that billionaire class. It's our society, it's
Speaker 4: our system. We are somehow deciding or through not deciding,
Speaker 4: allowing this flourishing of this extraordinary inequality that is sucking
Speaker 4: up all of the resources that could be put in
Speaker 4: other directions. And the question is can we afford it?
Speaker 4: And when you look at what's happening in Los Angeles now,
Speaker 4: to me, it says, no, we can't afford it.
Speaker 5: I mean, it gets harder to afford it in that sense, Ran,
Speaker 5: when you're also allowing the billionaires to corrupt the system
Speaker 5: and to just live in a sheer state of oligarchy,
Speaker 5: which is sort of it's tragic. It's tragic comedy in
Speaker 5: California because you know, tragic comedy when there's not actual
Speaker 5: human life on the line, because you look at it
Speaker 5: and you're like, this is you have the system of referendums,
Speaker 5: like you have as close to direct democracy as this
Speaker 5: in the United States, and yet the billionaires really run
Speaker 5: the show. So this may be a total force of
Speaker 5: nature situation that would not be uncommon or crazy. But
Speaker 5: California has seen some PGNE is a company that gets
Speaker 5: just enormous benefits from the government.
Speaker 7: We've seen, you know.
Speaker 5: Massive slashing from Karen Bass fire was second to last
Speaker 5: on that list of the highest cuts. So yeah, there's
Speaker 5: there are going to be a lot of significant questions
Speaker 5: I think asked here rightfully so about the oligarchy in California.
Speaker 3: Ran.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and we're entering a phase where the climate is
Speaker 4: going to be more difficult for our human population to
Speaker 4: live in and more expensive, and we're going to have
Speaker 4: to decide whether or not we want to invest in
Speaker 4: that or else, whether we want to see it just
Speaker 4: burned down in front of us.
Speaker 5: Horrib Well, well, let's hope that things get better today,
Speaker 5: although it's not looking like they will.
Speaker 3: But stay tuned. Will have a lot more to come
Speaker 3: on this story, for sure.
Speaker 8: All right.
Speaker 4: Donald Trump met with a media for over an hour
Speaker 4: yesterday describing his plans for military slash potentially economic coercion
Speaker 4: against Panama, against Greenland, poked some fun at Canada along
Speaker 4: the way. We're going to talk about a bunch of
Speaker 4: what he said, but let's start by playing some of
Speaker 4: the key clips and I'm going to share these. Bear
Speaker 4: with me.
Speaker 5: I'm a bit news this was, by the way, this
Speaker 5: was like a wild press conference that he held in
Speaker 5: Palm Beach yesterday. It was like very I saw one
Speaker 5: one journalist post on X like the Trump era is back.
Speaker 5: It did remind me a lot of those press conferences
Speaker 5: he held during the transition in twenty seventeen, before he
Speaker 5: was inaugurated in twenty seventeen, and some of the early
Speaker 5: press conferences in that administration too, even some of the
Speaker 5: COVID press conferences. I mean, this is Donald Trump at
Speaker 5: his trumpiest when he's interacting with reporters and just goes
Speaker 5: for a really long time. We'll talk about literally anything.
Speaker 5: So there's a wide range from these clips you're about
Speaker 5: to see. But Ryan cued up a great one. This
Speaker 5: is about Greenland, right, Canada?
Speaker 4: I think this was O Canada. Here we go.
Speaker 9: But why are we supporting a country two hundred billion
Speaker 9: plus a year. Our military is at their disposal all
Speaker 9: of these other things.
Speaker 7: They should be a state.
Speaker 9: That's why I told Trudeau when he came down, I said,
Speaker 9: what would happen if we didn't do it?
Speaker 7: He said, Canada would dissolve.
Speaker 9: Canada wouldn't be able to function if we didn't take
Speaker 9: that twenty percent of our car up market. You know,
Speaker 9: we again, they send us hundreds of thousands of cars.
Speaker 9: They make a lot of money with that. They send
Speaker 9: us a lot of other things that we don't need.
Speaker 9: We don't need their cars and we don't need the
Speaker 9: other products.
Speaker 7: We don't need their milk.
Speaker 9: We got a lot of milk, We got a lot
Speaker 9: of everything, and we don't need any of it. So
Speaker 9: I said to him, well, why are we doing it.
Speaker 9: He said, I don't really know. He was unable to
Speaker 9: answer the question, but I can answer it. We're doing
Speaker 9: it because of habit, and we're doing it because we
Speaker 9: like our neighbors. We've been good neighbors. But we can't
Speaker 9: do it forever. And it's a tremendous amount of money.
Speaker 9: And why should we have a two hundred billion dollar deficit?
Speaker 9: And add on to that many many other things that
Speaker 9: we give them in terms of subsidy. And I said,
Speaker 9: that's okay to have if you're a state, but if
Speaker 9: you're another country, we don't want to have it. We're
Speaker 9: not going to have it with European Union either.
Speaker 4: Love it, right, I.
Speaker 3: Always love it when he says not.
Speaker 5: Sometimes he just drops the in front of something, so
Speaker 5: instead of saying the European Union, he just says a
Speaker 5: European Union.
Speaker 3: We're not going to do it with European Union.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And I love that. He just talks about Canada
Speaker 4: being one state, not you can imagine there might be
Speaker 4: more than one state in that giant thing in there.
Speaker 4: But we'll talk more about Canada because this is fun.
Speaker 4: But let's let's look at some of his other good
Speaker 4: times Greenland. Donald Trump Junior here visited Greenland a little provocation.
Speaker 4: Maybe this is the you know, this is the effort
Speaker 4: to plant the flag.
Speaker 5: He's been in Greenland for the last couple of days
Speaker 5: with Sergio Gore and Charlie Kirk, and they've been posting
Speaker 5: pictures and videos with the good people of Greenland. So
Speaker 5: the timing of the press conference was quite interesting yesterday
Speaker 5: because it was happening as these pictures were being posted
Speaker 5: of Donald Trump Junior, you know, saying the people in
Speaker 5: Charlie Kirk posting, you know, the people of Greenland just
Speaker 5: want their freedom, etcetera, etcetera. I'm paraphrasing them, but they
Speaker 5: actually made the trip. So it was good timing for
Speaker 5: Donald Trump to make these remarks in a question after
Speaker 5: a question he got yesterday.
Speaker 4: Yeah, here we go.
Speaker 6: D citing actions to draw plans and could you elaborate it.
Speaker 9: I think you didn't rule out a military perversion, and well,
Speaker 9: we need Greenland for national security purposes. I've been told
Speaker 9: that for a long time, long before I even ran.
Speaker 9: I mean, people have been talking about it for a
Speaker 9: long time. You have approximately forty five thousand people there.
Speaker 9: People really don't even know if Denmark has an illegal
Speaker 9: right to it. But if they do, they should give
Speaker 9: it up because we needed for nancial security. That's for
Speaker 9: the free world. I'm talking about protecting the free world.
Speaker 9: You look at you don't even need binoculars. You look outside.
Speaker 9: You have China ships all over the place. You have
Speaker 9: Russian ships all over the place. We're not letting that happen.
Speaker 9: We're not letting it happen.
Speaker 4: Okay, we're not letting that happen. Let's see where where's
Speaker 4: the right on Greenland? While doing up the next.
Speaker 5: Clip entirely in favor, but the rights trolling of Canada
Speaker 5: is what really has me confused recently. If you add
Speaker 5: Canada to the United States as a state or as
Speaker 5: individual states, you're you're adding actually by GDP, which is
Speaker 5: not the best measure of these things, but it is
Speaker 5: a measure of these things. One of the would be
Speaker 5: one of the poorest states in the in the unions,
Speaker 5: I guess, you know, national defense. Obviously, advantages that would
Speaker 5: come with adding ended to controlling more of the Arctic.
Speaker 5: But that one baffles me a little bit. I think
Speaker 5: a lot of it is trolling. Greenland is not trolling.
Speaker 5: That's that's completely serious. Goes back to obviously, Seward, the
Speaker 5: people are Alaska panned out well, so maybe it wouldn't
Speaker 5: be such a folly to take on Greenland.
Speaker 4: Yeah, fair point. Yes, Seward's folly was what the purchase
Speaker 4: of Alaska, right, people said, it was absolutely ridiculous. That
Speaker 4: seemed to work out pretty well for the US, and
Speaker 4: Seward also wanted to get the other Alaska on the
Speaker 4: other side. Here's Trudeau's response. There isn't a snowballs chance
Speaker 4: in hell, Trudeau tweeted, true to who's now resigned, there
Speaker 4: isn't a snowball's chance in hell that Canada would become
Speaker 4: part of the United States. Workers and communities in both
Speaker 4: our countries benefit from being each other's biggest trading and
Speaker 4: security partners. I'd like to know how that conversation that
Speaker 4: Trump described with Trudeau actually went. You know, I think
Speaker 4: you know, I'm not somebody who's here to give the
Speaker 4: United States advice on how to be a better global hedgemon,
Speaker 4: because I think we're actually a genuinely destructive force in
Speaker 4: the world, So anything that strengthens US is probably a
Speaker 4: bad idea. But to me, it does actually seem that
Speaker 4: the US as a hedgemon would be strengthened by basically
Speaker 4: absorbing Canada into the United States, not just for the resources,
Speaker 4: but also for you know, the number one thing that
Speaker 4: the US kind of has going for it is it
Speaker 4: is that it's the global reserve currency backed by the
Speaker 4: US military. If you add Canada's currency to the US currency,
Speaker 4: you know, the Canadian dollar goes away and they just
Speaker 4: have American dollars. You know, it adds a non trivial
Speaker 4: you know, circulation of currency around the world, which is
Speaker 4: which would then counteract the efforts by bricks and and
Speaker 4: you know generally by bricks, but by other countries to
Speaker 4: start doing bilateral or multilateral trading that goes around the dollar,
Speaker 4: which is the main threat because if we're not we're
Speaker 4: not actually manufacturing anything, and we're just the center of capital.
Speaker 4: But the but capital isn't circulating in US dollars anymore
Speaker 4: because we've we've thrown away our kind of our you know,
Speaker 4: imperial privilege that we have, then what do we have left?
Speaker 4: Uh So, to that extent, I would say for the US,
Speaker 4: it's probably a good thing. In Canada from its perspective,
Speaker 4: does seem to have lost the plot, like there was
Speaker 4: a there was a stretch where you could look at
Speaker 4: Canada and say, they've they've got something interesting going on
Speaker 4: up there. You know, they've they've got a little different
Speaker 4: version here. Uh, They've got it. They've got a different culture,
Speaker 4: they've got some stronger you know, communal politics. Now they
Speaker 4: just there's nothing, nothing impressive going on up there. So
Speaker 4: I think it's probably a wrap for Canada.
Speaker 5: People hate when we talk about Canada. They're really gonna hate.
Speaker 3: What you just said. Quote nothing impressive going.
Speaker 4: On there, grow me wrong.
Speaker 5: Yeah, the country is in dire straits right now, There's
Speaker 5: no question about that. And actually your point about currency
Speaker 5: is a really interesting one. In the natural resources in
Speaker 5: Canada and Mexico, I mean Mexico, well we're just you know,
Speaker 5: talking at the thirty thousand foot level.
Speaker 3: That would be I think a spectacular.
Speaker 5: Edition in terms of, like we like natural resources shipping,
Speaker 5: and that's what a lot of this comes down to, shipping,
Speaker 5: not just for commerce, but for defense. That's the conversation
Speaker 5: that's being had about Panama. Donald Trump talked a little
Speaker 5: bit about Panama and the press conference yesterday as well.
Speaker 5: It's obviously very timely because of Jimmy Carter's funeral. And
Speaker 5: I'm sure Ryan, you have a different perspective than I
Speaker 5: do on Panama. But one of the things I will
Speaker 5: say is the Overton window is shifting right now. And
Speaker 5: this is something that Trump. I don't know if it's genius,
Speaker 5: if it's incidental, but we've never ever it's only Trump
Speaker 5: that broaches something like this and gets taken seriously. We
Speaker 5: never ever had these conversations before. And just for the
Speaker 5: I mean, we have, but you're not in recent contemporary politics.
Speaker 5: You'd just sort of be laughed at if you talked
Speaker 5: about adding Canada as the fifty first state, but.
Speaker 4: In kind of laughing.
Speaker 3: Well yeah, but.
Speaker 5: He's like, Canada is not laughing, and they really aren't laughing,
Speaker 5: And you know, Denmark isn't finding this whole thing all
Speaker 5: that amusing either. But that's like, this is going to
Speaker 5: change the way that we talk about our neighbors, not
Speaker 5: just in terms of.
Speaker 4: Trade, literally literally changed the way we talk about our neighbors.
Speaker 9: Speaking of laughing, steet trillion dollars worth of assets. We're
Speaker 9: going to be changing the name of the Gulf of
Speaker 9: Mexico to the Gulf of America, which has a beautiful
Speaker 9: ring that covers a lot of territory.
Speaker 7: The Gulf of America.
Speaker 9: What a beautiful name, and it's appropriate, it's appropriate, and
Speaker 9: Mexico has to stop allowing millions of people to pour
Speaker 9: into our and.
Speaker 4: So yeah, that that that goes along with his kind
Speaker 4: of Trumpian Monroe doctrine where you know, he, like you said,
Speaker 4: he talked about how look, hey, we built the Panama Canal.
Speaker 4: We built it for us basically, but let let Panama
Speaker 4: take care of it. Now we've turned it over to
Speaker 4: the Chinese, and that's outrageous. You know, I do think
Speaker 4: from an American perspective, like the dominant power having influence,
Speaker 4: you know, having the dominant influence in its sphere seems reasonable. Uh.
Speaker 4: It seems also kind of hypocritical for us to then
Speaker 4: tell China that, you know, they ought to have, you know,
Speaker 4: no influence on on their side of the world. You
Speaker 4: know that that that we're going to completely control this
Speaker 4: and also we're going to completely control everything around China
Speaker 4: as well. Like you can imagine from China like wait
Speaker 4: a minute, okay, fine, Panama Canal, you want that thing back,
Speaker 4: all right? Whatever? It's tiny, It's like you like, you know,
Speaker 4: the big ships can't fit through it anymore. You need
Speaker 4: to do a lot of upgrades on it. But then
Speaker 4: get off our back about Chinese influence over in Asia.
Speaker 5: So the conversation Crystal and Soccer had yesterday about Trudeau
Speaker 5: as the kind of symbol of the neoliberal arc over
Speaker 5: the last ten years and that sort of winding down
Speaker 5: as Trudeau is the beacon of the like new neoliberal
Speaker 5: future and then is kind of unraveling as Donald Trump
Speaker 5: comes back into office and has been selected by voters
Speaker 5: again is interesting. And in the context of what you're
Speaker 5: just saying, cold war Western politics where this like soft
Speaker 5: imperialism or this like apologetic imperialism, where you have people
Speaker 5: like Jimmy Carter negotiating the return of the Panama Canal to.
Speaker 4: Panama RD four in the press conference right right.
Speaker 5: While waging a Cold war and doing it, you know,
Speaker 5: in different ways that I think are arguably very imperialists.
Speaker 5: And you and I would definitely agree on that. And
Speaker 5: so what Trump, I think Trump is like just shifting that.
Speaker 5: It's like that is who knows. I mean, you go
Speaker 5: from Carter to Reagan and things flip back and forth.
Speaker 5: But Trump seems like he's ushering in this new era
Speaker 5: of just like brash imperialism or return to brash imperialism,
Speaker 5: which is like, this is hard power, this is our hemisphere,
Speaker 5: this is it's the monro doctrine to your point, which
Speaker 5: you do hear a lot of conservatives talking about.
Speaker 3: Now in a very reverent way.
Speaker 5: So I do think it's like just the conversation that
Speaker 5: he's broached and brought into the overtin window or stretch
Speaker 5: the overton window to bring it in is a pretty
Speaker 5: fascinating one.
Speaker 4: It is nice to be at least able to you know,
Speaker 4: talk about it out loud, right and talk about it
Speaker 4: in clear terms, rather than smuggling it in through the
Speaker 4: language of democracy promotion.
Speaker 5: Or right like would you rather have the CIA run
Speaker 5: Panama or at least have like transparently out in the
Speaker 5: open the United States is trying to run panel.
Speaker 4: Yeah, if these are our choices. Yeah, So in any event,
Speaker 4: it's going to be interesting there that that at least
Speaker 4: we will be gifted with.
Speaker 5: Yes, the Gulf of America, of which, by the way,
Speaker 5: like we have a state called New Mexico.
Speaker 4: New Mexico.
Speaker 5: Well yeah, it wouldn't really work, but anyway, Yes, quite
Speaker 5: a moment yesterday at that wild press conference, and we'll
Speaker 5: see what happens going forward now.
Speaker 4: That wellkness that's going through and renaming everything.
Speaker 5: By the way, oh it is a sort of iconoclass, right,
Speaker 5: not a bad point, right, Well, we have more meltdowns
Speaker 5: to cover, Ryan, So let's move on to Brian Stalter.
Speaker 3: After Mark Zuckerberg.
Speaker 5: Made his major announcement yesterday that Meta would be changing
Speaker 5: its approach to speech, actually reversing its approach to speech
Speaker 5: policies on the platform, fact checking policies on the platform,
Speaker 5: reactions have been pouring in from people on the left
Speaker 5: and the right. Let's just start with in case you
Speaker 5: missed it, part of this video Mark Zuckerberg posted soccer
Speaker 5: and Crystal covered it yesterday. It actually sort of happened
Speaker 5: early in the morning. This was posted right before seven
Speaker 5: am East Coast time, and was accompanied by a statement
Speaker 5: from Meta that kind of fleshed out their approach a
Speaker 5: little bit, you know, getting rid of those third party
Speaker 5: fact checkers. Moving towards community notes, Mark Zuckerberg mentioned Elon
Speaker 5: Musk directly at least x directly, the platform that Musk
Speaker 5: has started using for community notes. So let's take a
Speaker 5: look just at a brief clip from Mark Zuckerberg statement
Speaker 5: yesterday in case you missed it, so.
Speaker 10: Here it is, and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies,
Speaker 10: and restoring free expression on our platforms. More specifically, we're
Speaker 10: going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them
Speaker 10: with community notes similar to X starting in the US.
Speaker 3: Ryan.
Speaker 5: One interesting thing there is he says back to our
Speaker 5: roots and talks about how he had started Meta as
Speaker 5: a way to give people a voice.
Speaker 3: So it's it's.
Speaker 5: Pretty interesting to see this like re recycling of the
Speaker 5: ethos that there. They had a lot in that sort
Speaker 5: of early Obama era when they were the cool kids
Speaker 5: with the ping pong tables in their offices, and now
Speaker 5: they're saying, listen, we're just getting back to Internet one
Speaker 5: point zero ethos.
Speaker 3: This is all about free speech. I'm wearing a gold chain.
Speaker 5: I look like I would be, you know, sitting on
Speaker 5: a UFC bench with you know, Elon and Trump even
Speaker 5: even more like I fit in even more than Mike Johnson.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and there is some real truth that some of
Speaker 4: the early tech DNA you know, had roots in kind
Speaker 4: of an anarchist you know, information wants to be free
Speaker 4: version of the world. In fact, going back to the
Speaker 4: kind of you know, hippie acid creation of the Internet.
Speaker 4: You know, in its early days, a lot of those
Speaker 4: founders really believed that they were building kind of revolutionary
Speaker 4: technology that was going to overthrow the powers that be.
Speaker 4: Move fast and break things was you know for a
Speaker 4: very long time, you know, Zuckerberg's motto for Facebook. And
Speaker 4: so there is actually some truth that at some point
Speaker 4: in tech's life it did have that ethos and did
Speaker 4: move away from it.
Speaker 3: No, that's a I think a very worthy point.
Speaker 5: So Brian Stelter then appeared on CNN and had quite
Speaker 5: an interesting conversation about it.
Speaker 3: So let's well a little bit of Steltzer here.
Speaker 6: It gets in this broader sense that when people like
Speaker 6: zucker Elon Musk or mar Zuckerberg talk about free speech,
Speaker 6: everybody wants free speech, but it oftentimes seems that these
Speaker 6: tech CEOs actually are favoring or preferring a certain kind
Speaker 6: of speech.
Speaker 7: Right, They're favoring.
Speaker 6: Their own speech or their own political preferences, and not
Speaker 6: the actual entire user or the community's speech. You know,
Speaker 6: the changes announced by Meta today are very much a
Speaker 6: maga makeover, a pro Trump makeover, and that's gonna win
Speaker 6: meta some conservative users, but it may repel some liberals.
Speaker 6: That's the same thing we've seen happen on Elon Musk's
Speaker 6: next he's turned into more of a right wing platform
Speaker 6: where he's pro free speech when it's really pro Musk
Speaker 6: or pro Trump speech.
Speaker 3: So right.
Speaker 5: And that's interesting because we just talked about how Facebook
Speaker 5: is a was sort of informed by that early ethos
Speaker 5: of the Internet, and now in twenty twenty five you
Speaker 5: have Brian Stelter referring to that as a maga makeover,
Speaker 5: And honestly, there's something of a point to that in
Speaker 5: that it is the same argument that you started to
Speaker 5: hear from people on the right who were skeptical of
Speaker 5: these early Internet guys, conservatives, not libertarians so much.
Speaker 3: Obviously libertarians were always a part of that movement.
Speaker 5: But it's just to call that a maga makeover. It's
Speaker 5: true in some sense, but also misses the broader context
Speaker 5: that it's actually more of the traditional, like aclu old
Speaker 5: left approach to speech that the right kind of happened
Speaker 5: upon because it suddenly was turned against them.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I think it's wrong for Stella to conflate
Speaker 4: what's going on at Twitter X and what's going on
Speaker 4: at Facebook. I think, you know, both are flowing from
Speaker 4: the same kind of political project that we're seeing. You know,
Speaker 4: Zuckerberg was very clear that he's explicitly making this change
Speaker 4: because elections have consequences. Like one admirable thing about his
Speaker 4: video is that it did not include corporate speak. It
Speaker 4: was he was It was very direct. It's like and
Speaker 4: it was very plain about what they're going to do.
Speaker 4: We're going to shut down our trust in safety team
Speaker 4: in California, We're going to move it to Texas. Just
Speaker 4: straightforward things like that, which you can agree or disagree with,
Speaker 4: but like, like, wow, that's that. This is This is
Speaker 4: rarely blunt stuff. And he pinpointed it directly to the
Speaker 4: election with Musk. You know, he kind of drove the
Speaker 4: change more than responded to the change. And you know,
Speaker 4: his champion of free speech has has become kind of
Speaker 4: mockable in the face of his his demonetizing of a
Speaker 4: whole bunch of his enemies that he engaged with on
Speaker 4: the H one B controversy, and then all of a
Speaker 4: sudden they all start losing their like blue jacks and
Speaker 4: their promoted stuff. And their their subscribers and and everything else.
Speaker 4: So it's like, all right, well, anybody who you know
Speaker 4: really put their faith there, I guess found that to
Speaker 4: be a little bit misplaced.
Speaker 5: It's oligarchy, however you slice it.
Speaker 4: It is. And actually, before we get to the next element,
Speaker 4: I want to pull one up that's not on the rundown,
Speaker 4: which I think is yeah, going on a little rogue here,
Speaker 4: But we can do that because we've got this more
Speaker 4: more nimble system here. So this was Lena Kahan on
Speaker 4: CNBC with with a bit of a different take on
Speaker 4: what the problem is here an.
Speaker 11: Economy where the decisions of a single company or a
Speaker 11: single executive are not having extraordinary impact on speech online.
Speaker 11: And I know that's a concern that we hear bipartisan
Speaker 11: members of Congress talk about, and so it'll be interesting
Speaker 11: to see what happens. We of course, have litigation ongoing.
Speaker 11: There's going to be a trial starting this spring FTC
Speaker 11: versus Facebook, alleging that their prior acquisitions were illegal.
Speaker 12: What do you think, though, of the relationship that we're
Speaker 12: seeing between big tech and the next administration. What do
Speaker 12: you make of the meetings and pilgrimages with which we're
Speaker 12: seeing Mark Zuckerberg go to mar A Lago, or we're
Speaker 12: seeing a Jeff Bezos or Tim Cook. I mean, this
Speaker 12: is a very different kind of relationship than administration the
Speaker 12: Biden administration had, and specifically what you represented to the
Speaker 12: business community.
Speaker 11: So I approached my job with a focus on faithfully
Speaker 11: enforcing the law and making sure we were doing that
Speaker 11: across the economy without fear.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, lead that for there. But basically what
Speaker 4: she's saying is probably something that the right would have
Speaker 4: agreed with several years ago, which is, Yep, we shouldn't
Speaker 4: have to hope that Mark Zuckerberg wakes up one day
Speaker 4: and makes the right decision. Yep, No, nobody elected Mark
Speaker 4: Zuckerberg to be.
Speaker 5: And Elon Musk and Elon Musk right, we shouldn't have
Speaker 5: to hope that Jack Dorsey wakes up one day and
Speaker 5: you know, is looks favorably upon the conservative case when
Speaker 5: The New York Times is coming down on you, and yeah,
Speaker 5: Lena Kahn one favor on the right. I mean, she
Speaker 5: continued a Trump administration suit against Google because that argument
Speaker 5: it wasn't just that she was going after big tech,
Speaker 5: it was that this very specific argument about single oligarchs
Speaker 5: who control a wide swath of the public square with
Speaker 5: private platforms, whether it's Instagram, Facebook, Meta as a whole,
Speaker 5: or Twitter now x that that was always the problem,
Speaker 5: and so yes, it's great that they're, you know, saying
Speaker 5: at least publicly that they're taking a lighter approach to
Speaker 5: the suppression or censorship of speech. That is obviously a
Speaker 5: step in the right direction, and saying we're not going
Speaker 5: to put our thumb on the scale as much as
Speaker 5: our previous policy suggested. But what Lena Khan is saying
Speaker 5: is that we have an economy structured so as that
Speaker 5: they can put their.
Speaker 3: Thumb on the scale at any given moment.
Speaker 5: And that is the problem in and of itself, not
Speaker 5: that they've decided that they're going to do it less,
Speaker 5: but the fact that they have the power to begin
Speaker 5: with is the problem. And conservatives used to agree with that.
Speaker 5: The question is whether Zuckerberg and Musk are convincing them
Speaker 5: they don't have to worry about it, or they don't
Speaker 5: have to worry about it as much, so then it
Speaker 5: becomes a lower priority. Doesn't Ken Paxton in twenty twenty
Speaker 5: six hypothetically care as much about going after big tech
Speaker 5: if big tech isn't going after conservatives exactly.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, a lot of Lina Khan's anti trust
Speaker 4: stuff has its roots in kind of right wing, free
Speaker 4: market oriented approaches to you know, how markets ought to
Speaker 4: be structured. Even though that even though she's you know,
Speaker 4: gotten a lot of favor on on the left and
Speaker 4: what she's describing there as an ad monopoly. That where
Speaker 4: Facebook has built a moat around an ad monopoly which
Speaker 4: you know, prevents other social networks from from coming in.
Speaker 4: It's it's difficult because you have you know, size and scale,
Speaker 4: you know, uh, you know, difficulties of you know, you
Speaker 4: have to get to a threshold level in a social
Speaker 4: network or you're not a social network. You need the
Speaker 4: social part in there, not just a handful of handful
Speaker 4: of users. But she's saying because of the way they've
Speaker 4: built the moat, other other people can't get in. And
Speaker 4: you're exactly right that you don't want politicians to be
Speaker 4: deciding on the policy of the structure of an economy
Speaker 4: based on just whether or not those companies are culturally
Speaker 4: with them at the at the at a particular moment.
Speaker 3: H right.
Speaker 5: And this is not like, uh, this is not something
Speaker 5: that's going to be in the rear view mirror for
Speaker 5: the right or the left. Frankly, if you are as
Speaker 5: administrations switch and you have people trying to curry favor
Speaker 5: with the left and the right. Obviously it wasn't quite
Speaker 5: as bad for the left when the Biden administration was
Speaker 5: asking directly asking people like Mark Zuckerberg.
Speaker 3: To censor the right.
Speaker 5: But if you don't change the fundamental structure of the economy,
Speaker 5: this becomes a problem for any side. And that doesn't
Speaker 5: go away unless you change the structure of the economy.
Speaker 5: And so what we're looking at now is having a
Speaker 5: wide swath of our discourse exported onto these private platforms
Speaker 5: that gamify that discourse and that have control over what
Speaker 5: is said, have control over the algorithms that amplify or
Speaker 5: deamplify what is said.
Speaker 3: And that's our future.
Speaker 5: That doesn't go away, that doesn't change, and we desperately,
Speaker 5: desperately need a.
Speaker 3: Solution to it.
Speaker 5: So, unfortunately, it looks like some of that enthusiasm may
Speaker 5: be blunted on the right if you have Zuckerberg putting
Speaker 5: a million dollars into the inauguration fund. It's not just
Speaker 5: you know, whether the principle of the argument is still
Speaker 5: embraced by the right. It's whether there's any momentum or
Speaker 5: energy to have their own sort of Lena Kahn when
Speaker 5: the donors are like, this is a backbench issue, give
Speaker 5: us the tax cuts, let's focus on this. Let's focus
Speaker 5: on that. You're right, you know, it's not ideal, but
Speaker 5: so yeah, it could be a quite unfortunate turn of events,
Speaker 5: and Zuckerberg could be getting exactly what he pays for.
Speaker 4: So I saw Ben Shapiro was in here. Anytime I
Speaker 4: look at the top performers on Facebook, it seems like
Speaker 4: Shapiro and his you know, alliance that he had built
Speaker 4: with Zuckerberg over the years was really paying off. What's
Speaker 4: his take here.
Speaker 5: Yeah, everyone could see a post that he put up
Speaker 5: yesterday along with his segment from his show. He says
Speaker 5: Facebook is just completely reversed course on censorship. He posted
Speaker 5: this on x after years of doing the Democratic parties
Speaker 5: anti free speech bidding. It's beyond time. Good for Zuckerberg,
Speaker 5: and let's be real, this happened because up one then
Speaker 5: in all caps he said, still not tired of winning,
Speaker 5: Let's go to Donald Trump himself, because he actually got
Speaker 5: asked that question directly at mar Alago yesterday.
Speaker 13: Meta said today it was not putting in fact checks
Speaker 13: on which website and it.
Speaker 7: Was a lot of community.
Speaker 9: So I watched their news conference and I thought it
Speaker 9: was a very good news conference. I think they've honestly,
Speaker 9: I think they've come a long way Meta Facebook, I.
Speaker 7: Think they've come a long way.
Speaker 9: I watched it. The man was very impressive. I watched it. Actually,
Speaker 9: I watched it on Fox. I'm not allowed to say that.
Speaker 8: Do you think he's been directly responding to the threats
Speaker 8: that you have made to him in the past?
Speaker 7: But probably probably so.
Speaker 3: Ryan.
Speaker 5: This gets to exactly what we were just talking about,
Speaker 5: which is as this like this, this better policy. Although
Speaker 5: I do wonder how community notes work is going to
Speaker 5: work on Facebook when the only people left on Facebook
Speaker 5: seemed to be elderly. Sorry, no offense to everybody's still
Speaker 5: on Facebook. It's not just the elderly, but it sort
Speaker 5: of sounds like a sitcom waiting to happen, Like, give
Speaker 5: me a sitcom inside the community of like Wikipedia editors,
Speaker 5: except its Facebook community notes.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I mean I told our drop site team last night,
Speaker 4: I was like, look if if Zuckerber is going to
Speaker 4: actually allow politics back onto Facebook and maybe even threads,
Speaker 4: then there's we might as well post there. Again, like,
Speaker 4: we don't even have drop site. We don't even have
Speaker 4: a Facebook page. We're going to start one because you're like,
Speaker 4: it is a very boomer heavy audience, but there are
Speaker 4: a lot of boomers. Yeah, and that's a big It's
Speaker 4: it's an audience worth reaching if you can reach them.
Speaker 4: The reason we hadn't done it isn't because we hate boomers.
Speaker 4: It's because Zuckerberg was basically blocking anything interesting that you
Speaker 4: know that wasn't just you know, fluff content right getting shared.
Speaker 5: I'm actually going to share this post that Joel Kaplan,
Speaker 5: who is the new longtime Republican lobbyist, the head of
Speaker 5: their like global affairs public affairs outreach that used to
Speaker 5: be Nick Klegg. Many people remember he wrote this as
Speaker 5: a supplement to what Zuckerberg said yesterday and actually talked
Speaker 5: exactly about what you talked about, Ryan, in that the
Speaker 5: policy at Facebook for a long time was actually to
Speaker 5: suppress political content because they were under the impression that
Speaker 5: it's why it's not what people wanted to see, sort
Speaker 5: of clogging up their news feeds on Facebook, and I
Speaker 5: think you're right that that actually probably sent a lot
Speaker 5: of younger people away from Facebook because the old saw
Speaker 5: about not talking about politics and religion. We actually like,
Speaker 5: as a people like to talk about politics and religion.
Speaker 5: It's healthy for us to talk about politics and religion.
Speaker 5: And we love to see everybody's dogs and their puppies
Speaker 5: and their graduation pictures, and their families and their babies
Speaker 5: and all of that. But you can also do that
Speaker 5: in text groups and all of that other stuff. Now,
Speaker 5: So they said that they are going to stop suppressing
Speaker 5: political content that they realized people want to do that,
Speaker 5: so they didn't actually roll out this fact checking program
Speaker 5: or this the death of the fact checking program, which
Speaker 5: has wide consequences because obviously they used to partner with
Speaker 5: all of these third parties that actually got money for
Speaker 5: being part of the program, you know, traditional news outlets,
Speaker 5: things like PolitiFact, and there were others, you know, even
Speaker 5: I think the Daily Caller was like the one conservative
Speaker 5: group other than The Dispatch, which I don't really count,
Speaker 5: that cooperated in all of this. But they also say
Speaker 5: they're going to allow more speech and a personalized approach
Speaker 5: to political content.
Speaker 3: They noted, so.
Speaker 5: Quite a significant reversal, not just on those third party
Speaker 5: fact checkers, which is very significant in and of itself,
Speaker 5: but actually on everything political for basically on everything political.
Speaker 3: Which was pretty interesting.
Speaker 6: Ryan.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, Well, let's turn to this post from Glenn
Speaker 5: because just as we were talking about sort of the
Speaker 5: realignment implications of this, I thought it was worth bringing
Speaker 5: in Glenn here. He says it's hard to overstate how
Speaker 5: angry and upset Brazilian officials like this are. He has
Speaker 5: a post from Joel Brandt that he's quote tweeting, along
Speaker 5: with other supporters of its secret due Process, Free Judicial
Speaker 5: censorscript scheme about Zuckerberg's announcement. The Meta CEO's announcement gutted
Speaker 5: the core weapons of speech suppression, and he's absolutely right
Speaker 5: about that it did, and he's pointing out that people
Speaker 5: on the left are angry about it. Now, Brian Stelter
Speaker 5: didn't sound angry to me. Maybe frustrated is a good
Speaker 5: way to put it. But there are some people who
Speaker 5: are flat out angry about this, especially Ryan, people who
Speaker 5: had been using threads and saw that as an escape
Speaker 5: from x So it's like a test for the left.
Speaker 4: Threads at least as far as I can tell, lost
Speaker 4: basically all of its momentum, specifically because it was refusing
Speaker 4: to allow politics and news into the feed and because
Speaker 4: it was insisting on not doing anything remotely chronological. You know,
Speaker 4: so whenever you would log in, it would just give you,
Speaker 4: like them, what it thought would be the most interesting
Speaker 4: thing to you, even if it was seven days old
Speaker 4: or twenty five days old. And so the people who
Speaker 4: wanted news out out of a social feed went over
Speaker 4: to Blue Ski. The liberals went over to Blue Sky
Speaker 4: much more than Threads, and Blue Sky is really outpaced Threads,
Speaker 4: at least culturally among liberals. Who knows if this change
Speaker 4: in Threads will will pull people in because it has
Speaker 4: that it has the scale it has, you know, it
Speaker 4: has millions of people in there because of their connection
Speaker 4: to Facebook and Instagram. But it might be so trash
Speaker 4: that that it's impossible. Now. The other the flip side
Speaker 4: of Glenn's point is an interesting and curiousity take on this.
Speaker 4: I think it was alone with Rahu. I saw it
Speaker 4: was our nobotron on Twitter. Somebody was saying that the
Speaker 4: same way that democrats have used democracy promotion to intervene
Speaker 4: imperially in other countries' internal affairs and push an American
Speaker 4: hegemonic agenda. They worry that Republicans are now going to
Speaker 4: use free speech as as its wedge to get into
Speaker 4: other countries internal domestic politics and drive drive their own
Speaker 4: political agenda in another country, so that that free speech
Speaker 4: will be a fig leaf for American intervention in just
Speaker 4: the same way that democracy promotion was a fig leaf
Speaker 4: for American intervention for democrats. In other words, you would
Speaker 4: come in and take on the EU or take on
Speaker 4: the Brazilian center left around their speech policies. But what
Speaker 4: you're what you're actually trying to do is over is
Speaker 4: regime change, overthrow the government and put in a government which,
Speaker 4: just as in the mirror example of democracy promotion, doesn't
Speaker 4: actually care about democracy, doesn't actually care about free speech,
Speaker 4: is actually just trying to implement an allied right wing agenda.
Speaker 4: And so you kind of just use those use those
Speaker 4: aspirational values along the way. Hopefully that's not what we
Speaker 4: end up seeing, but I think it's something to be
Speaker 4: on the lookout for.
Speaker 5: It's definitely something to be on the lookout for, because
Speaker 5: it's being talked about in those kinds of spaces right now.
Speaker 5: And you know, honestly, it could be there's an argument
Speaker 5: that it's for the better. Like if we're pushing other
Speaker 5: countries to adopt just standards of free speech, it's still imperialism.
Speaker 3: But we're going to be doing the imperialism.
Speaker 4: No matter what. So human rights and democracy and yeah,
Speaker 4: we're not all four. Everybody's for human rights. Human rights
Speaker 4: are great.
Speaker 5: Yeah, the one thing we're not going to do is
Speaker 5: stop the like coercive Like, we're not going to stop
Speaker 5: doing that.
Speaker 3: So if it's for like, if we can get better.
Speaker 5: Speech policies out of the UK or Canada or some
Speaker 5: countries that do have terrifying speech policies that hopefully are
Speaker 5: not canaries in the coal mine for the United States,
Speaker 5: then I'm all for it. But it's exactly going to
Speaker 5: test the argument that we were just talking about with
Speaker 5: Lena Kahan, where the right got really uncomfortable with some
Speaker 5: of this coercive imperialism, the sort of soft power, and
Speaker 5: this could test it in the exact same way.
Speaker 3: I think you're right, Ryan, that is something to be
Speaker 3: on the lookout for.
Speaker 4: Yeah, speak clear out about what we're doing while we're
Speaker 4: doing it. The fight over TikTok is coming down to
Speaker 4: the wire. A new buyer is now jumping into the fray.
Speaker 4: Let's play this.
Speaker 13: And then midday twelve oh five, Trump will be who
Speaker 13: we have to work with to close the deal and
Speaker 13: once ahead, so I wanted to let him know as
Speaker 13: well as others in his cabinet, that we're doing this
Speaker 13: and we're going to need their help.
Speaker 4: So this is Kevin O'Leary, a right wing businessman from Canada,
Speaker 4: which is which is still currently a sovereign country to
Speaker 4: the north of the United States, but may at some
Speaker 4: point be another state in the United States. Either way,
Speaker 4: he's a shark tank guy ally of Trump and coming
Speaker 4: in at the last moment to try to rescue TikTok
Speaker 4: from potential potentially being banned if the sale is not
Speaker 4: successfully forced and if the Supreme Court does not give
Speaker 4: it some reprieve. So Emily, what's the latest here.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So just to be clear on the timeline, that
Speaker 5: law that was signed last year in April means that
Speaker 5: TikTok needs to be sold by January nineteenth to a
Speaker 5: US buyer. So January nineteenth, you will note, is the data.
Speaker 4: We're not a US buyer right, it's like a non
Speaker 4: somebody from China, Russia, Iran and some other like places
Speaker 4: that we consider adversaries because otherwise Trump would have to
Speaker 4: hurry up and make Canada a state for January nineteen. Well,
Speaker 4: I don't know if actually is going to be able
Speaker 4: to be a qualified buyer.
Speaker 5: That's a interesting point because I don't know if Kevin
Speaker 5: O'Leary is actually an American citizen, or whether he's negotiating
Speaker 5: on behalf of an American company that he has a
Speaker 5: stake in something like that. There's also a billionaire Frank
Speaker 5: McCourt who's been making moves to try and conservative billionaire
Speaker 5: to try and buy TikTok.
Speaker 3: January nineteenth is the day before Donald Trump's inauguration.
Speaker 5: That is when TikTok is set to be banned, and
Speaker 5: Trump has said he's got a quote warm spot for TikTok.
Speaker 5: The Supreme Court is considering a Trump backed effort to
Speaker 5: overturn the US Court of Appeals decision to uphold the
Speaker 5: law that Joe Biden signed on Friday, So those arguments
Speaker 5: are happening on Friday, the deadline, so that's the tenth.
Speaker 5: The deadline is the nineteenth, So this is all playing
Speaker 5: out TikTok is right now, and people can understand why
Speaker 5: this is the Acxios tear sheet. Ryan is now sending
Speaker 5: people to what's it called Lemon eight because they're panicked.
Speaker 5: They don't know that this is actually going to work
Speaker 5: out at all, because they're I mean, if they lose
Speaker 5: control of the company, obviously they're losing a lot of power,
Speaker 5: They're losing a lot of revenue bite dances based in Beijing.
Speaker 5: Obviously they still have other revenue streams that are very powerful.
Speaker 5: This one is extremely powerful, though, and they would like
Speaker 5: to keep a slice of it at the very least
Speaker 5: ahead of what could be transpiring now. It's possible the
Speaker 5: Supreme Court does not decide in Trump's favor, in favor
Speaker 5: of people who are trying to prevent this from happening.
Speaker 5: That's actually we don't really have a clear indication of
Speaker 5: where the Supreme Court is going to go on this
Speaker 5: at all.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 5: A lot of people have said, if you look at
Speaker 5: what happened with the US Court of Appeals, it's unlikely
Speaker 5: that the Conservative Court is going to change it, just
Speaker 5: based on, you know, the arguments that they found.
Speaker 4: Composed the Court of appeals find well, it's basically rejected,
Speaker 4: like they upheld the law, right, right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they upheld the law because it was passed through
Speaker 5: the democratic process. I mean, there was something that was
Speaker 5: done by Congress, signed by the President, and that's going
Speaker 5: to be a persuasive argument probably, and and maybe it
Speaker 5: should be a persuasive argument. That's and what's important is
Speaker 5: not to conflate that. You know, there are a lot
Speaker 5: of laws that we might like that go through that
Speaker 5: process and are fine, but it's important not to conflate
Speaker 5: that with whether or not the bill was a good idea.
Speaker 5: And you know, even as somebody who's been pretty sympathetic
Speaker 5: the idea of banning TikTok, you and I've talked about
Speaker 5: this before. For different reasons, that bill was horrible. It
Speaker 5: was like a deep state power grab essentially for the
Speaker 5: reasons that you just talked about in terms of naming
Speaker 5: or for adversaries and ways that it could be the
Speaker 5: power could be expanded sort of Patriot Act type of
Speaker 5: manner to suddenly like have government control.
Speaker 3: I mean, we already have a lot of that.
Speaker 5: But anyway, all this is to say that's a separate
Speaker 5: what the Supreme Court does is a separate argument for
Speaker 5: whether that original bill was good, and that's a separate
Speaker 5: argument in and of itself from whether it's good to
Speaker 5: ban TikTok.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and Byte Dance also owns Lemonade, which would mean
Speaker 4: by the strictures of that law that was passed, it
Speaker 4: would also be banned. Bite Dance seems to think that
Speaker 4: because it's much lower profile, it might be able to
Speaker 4: slip through. And I think also they're being smart. They're thinking,
Speaker 4: if we're if we're going to lose access to this site,
Speaker 4: to this app TikTok very soon, we should you know,
Speaker 4: use the app while we have it to drive as
Speaker 4: many people to something that will still control after this.
Speaker 4: Because presumably if they do inc a deal to offload
Speaker 4: TikTok to an American or a Canadian buyer, then they
Speaker 4: will leave at Lemonade alone because it's not a significant threat,
Speaker 4: and if they've boosted the value of it in the meantime,
Speaker 4: that be in an advantage to them. But the reason
Speaker 4: I've always thought that this won't actually come to pass
Speaker 4: is that, you know, the deep State had wanted to
Speaker 4: ban TikTok for a very long time. It was only
Speaker 4: after October seventh, that they were able to get enough
Speaker 4: congressional buy in to pass the law through Congress and
Speaker 4: get the President to sign it because members of Congress
Speaker 4: and members of the Establishment and both parties were horrified
Speaker 4: not at the images that were coming out of Gaza,
Speaker 4: but at the fact that young people were able to
Speaker 4: see the images that were coming out of Gaza and
Speaker 4: were repelled by them and were in opposition to the
Speaker 4: genocidal assault that they were seeing. Mitt Romney and we
Speaker 4: played the clip here on the program if you remember
Speaker 4: like six months ago or whatever it pass said very explicitly,
Speaker 4: the reason that the Congress wants to ban TikTok is
Speaker 4: because it was generating images out of Gaza that was
Speaker 4: making it difficult to continue to unapologetically support Israel's war effort.
Speaker 4: He straight upset it in an on stage with Anthony Blincoln,
Speaker 4: who acknowledged and agreed that TikTok was making the US
Speaker 4: support for Israel that much more difficult. So the reason
Speaker 4: I think it won't come to pass is that the
Speaker 4: genocide is nearly complete, Like the depopulation is complete and
Speaker 4: almost almost complete in northern Gaza, ninety plus percent of
Speaker 4: people have been dislocated from their homes. The Gaza Strip
Speaker 4: is effectively uninhabitable, yet continues to be inhabited, and so
Speaker 4: Israel in the US one. And so at that point,
Speaker 4: it doesn't matter if there's if the public is able
Speaker 4: to see what's going on via TikTok. So that's why
Speaker 4: I think that they will end up getting a reprieve. Now,
Speaker 4: they may also cobble together this deal and O'Leary or
Speaker 4: somebody else might wind up with it, which presents a
Speaker 4: wild situation where you end up having so much of
Speaker 4: the media in explicitly right wing hands, like you know,
Speaker 4: Elon Musk, an active partisan with the Republican Party. At
Speaker 4: this point, Fox News the biggest you know, cable channels,
Speaker 4: active and active partisan. And then it you know, the
Speaker 4: the broadcast networks to its right are you know, they're
Speaker 4: not trivial anymore. Those are significant. MSNBC completely collapsing CNN
Speaker 4: is a disaster. Uh. And then if you also have
Speaker 4: TikTok owned by you know, an explicit right wing person,
Speaker 4: not just a billionaire who has billionaire tendencies, but also
Speaker 4: but somebody who's kind of partisan, a partisan conservative like O'Leary. Uh,
Speaker 4: it's it sets up an extraordinary difficult situation for the
Speaker 4: center left and left.
Speaker 5: Just gets back to the point about what that Lena
Speaker 5: Khan made on CNBC recently about just having an economy
Speaker 5: structured in a way that these platforms are so powerful
Speaker 5: a rival government power, significantly rival government power, and are
Speaker 5: under the control of a CEO, with this like massive
Speaker 5: swath of the discourse about politics under their sway at
Speaker 5: any given moment. And what's interesting, Ran is the reason
Speaker 5: I think the deep state still cares a lot about
Speaker 5: TikTok Israel side is China and what they want to do.
Speaker 5: Really the reason that they want this sold through US entity.
Speaker 5: I mean, I think there's there's some very legitimate reasons
Speaker 5: for wanting that, and we've.
Speaker 3: Talked about some of those before, but.
Speaker 5: I think they also want TikTok to function in the
Speaker 5: way that Twitter and X I'm sorry X and Meta do,
Speaker 5: which is they'll give you access. If you are trying
Speaker 5: to spy on Americans, they will share the data. They
Speaker 5: will or Google is another example, they will cooperate. You
Speaker 5: will have a way to access it. If you're in
Speaker 5: the FBI or CIA or whatever. You'll have better You
Speaker 5: don't have to go ask Beijing for data, and you know,
Speaker 5: TikTok would It's kind of interesting because TikTok would say, well,
Speaker 5: we're we're all functioning in America anyway.
Speaker 3: But they that's not necessarily true.
Speaker 5: But anyway, all this is to say, I think you
Speaker 5: know the benefit for the quote unquote you say of
Speaker 5: having TikTok owned by a US entity is more spy
Speaker 5: powers for them to snoop on Americans domestically. So whether
Speaker 5: or not there's good reasons for wanting it not to
Speaker 5: be spy powers for just Beijing, different question.
Speaker 4: Meanwhile, do you notice that Lev Parnas's kid has blown
Speaker 4: up on TikTok the last couple of days. He's doing
Speaker 4: like one minute news reports and he's up to like
Speaker 4: one and a half two million followers in like just weeks.
Speaker 4: It's the funniest thing ever, Like, what is Lev Parnas's
Speaker 4: kid doing on delivering news to people on TikTok.
Speaker 5: Also, I'm told that Taylor Armstrong is going viral on
Speaker 5: TikTok for the baby. There's no playing meme that Real
Speaker 5: Housewives Bravo fans of us have known about for like
Speaker 5: a decade plus. Taylor Armstrong is famously the woman who's
Speaker 5: yelling at the cat in the meme from Real Housewives
Speaker 5: of Beverly Hills. But now she's just going viral again.
Speaker 5: So you never know what pops out of TikTok.
Speaker 3: It is.
Speaker 4: It's a global and national treasure. It must be protected.
Speaker 5: There you have it from Brian grim All right, right,
Speaker 5: let's move on to congestion pricing in New York. Well,
Speaker 5: congestion pricing is officially in effect in New York City
Speaker 5: as of this week, as of the fifth actually, so
Speaker 5: we're a couple of days into it, and which means
Speaker 5: we have the benefit. I'm saying all kinds of reactions. Now,
Speaker 5: here's just a quick map that was posted the day
Speaker 5: before it went into affect in Manhattan. So this is
Speaker 5: from morning Brew NYC Congestion sols tolls start tomorrow. That
Speaker 5: was a fifth for motor entry Manhattan at sixtieth Street
Speaker 5: or below, cars, SUVs, pickups nine dollars, non commuter buses
Speaker 5: fourteen forty big rigs, twenty one to sixty, motorcycles for fifty.
Speaker 5: The MTA wants to raise fifteen billion dollars for mass
Speaker 5: transit improvements and ease gridlock. So this is the congestion
Speaker 5: relief zone. If you're not super familiar with New York,
Speaker 5: it's basically that part of Manhattan. I mean, the sun's obvious,
Speaker 5: but it's like the most congested. It shows their Westside
Speaker 5: Highway excluded. It goes all the way down to the
Speaker 5: southernmost tip FDR Drive excluded, those of those brake cream boundaries.
Speaker 5: But in the middle there man that is affecting a
Speaker 5: whole lot of people Ryan and raises some fascinating questions
Speaker 5: about class and all of that. So let me run
Speaker 5: a video here of one man, this man on the street,
Speaker 5: that was done right. You actually posted this a couple
Speaker 5: of days ago. Let's take a listen to this man
Speaker 5: on the street.
Speaker 8: We need to affect nine dollars each day that you
Speaker 8: pass sixtieth Street. And while I disagree with it for
Speaker 8: many reasons, for me in particular, it really hits home
Speaker 8: because I live right here on sixty first Street in
Speaker 8: this building, and my car is right there parked in front.
Speaker 9: Of my building.
Speaker 8: And if I want to go to turn around to
Speaker 8: go uptown to visit my kids who live on seventy
Speaker 8: ninth Street, I have to pay nine dollars to go
Speaker 8: around the block, because this is a one way street,
Speaker 8: and that's a one way street, and that's a one
Speaker 8: way street, and there's no way for me to get
Speaker 8: uptown without going around the block and paying nine dollars.
Speaker 8: And I think something has to be sorted out for
Speaker 8: Manhattan residences.
Speaker 5: Ryan, That's quite an interesting clip because it gets to
Speaker 5: the class dynamics here.
Speaker 3: What Yeah, you posted this yourself, so tell us what
Speaker 3: you mean.
Speaker 4: I mean, there's a couple of interesting dynamics here. First
Speaker 4: of all, the real estate where that guy is standing
Speaker 4: is some of the most expensive in the entire world.
Speaker 4: So this is not This is not a work. It's
Speaker 4: very unlikely. And I think actually somebody found this guy
Speaker 4: is like a pretty rich dude, So like set that aside.
Speaker 4: The reason the news camera was there the same reason
Speaker 4: when I did my Man on the Street interview. They
Speaker 4: were standing outside the emergency department and grabbing people coming
Speaker 4: out of the hospital.
Speaker 5: Yes, missed Ryan on Sky News who went viral. I
Speaker 5: think you actually went viral on TikTok x.
Speaker 4: They were looking for people angry at the healthcare system
Speaker 4: on an insurance industry. They went to sixtieth Street and
Speaker 4: sixty first Street here because that's where the line is,
Speaker 4: and so yes like it. You know, whenever there's a line,
Speaker 4: it's going to suck for the people who are like,
Speaker 4: you know, five feet from it. And what he's saying
Speaker 4: is like, in order to go north, I actually have
Speaker 4: to go south, go one block over, and then go
Speaker 4: north and boom, now I had to being through it.
Speaker 4: The other funny thing, though, is that, Okay, it's kind
Speaker 4: of that is kind of a funny predicament that the
Speaker 4: guy is in that just because of where he is,
Speaker 4: he's going to get dinged every possible time. And you
Speaker 4: know what, if he has a good alderman or whatever,
Speaker 4: he you know, the good city councilman, everybody in that block,
Speaker 4: you know, can get half half off whatever. I don't care.
Speaker 4: What's funny though, they're talking like eighteen blocks.
Speaker 14: It's a twenty minute walk like this is this is
Speaker 14: this is not a long distance And the whole the
Speaker 14: point of living, a point of living in the city,
Speaker 14: a city like Manhattan, is that it is walkable, that
Speaker 14: you can get places by foot and that and that,
Speaker 14: and that's good.
Speaker 4: For you, it's good for the planet, it's good for
Speaker 4: your kids. To do that walk. So that guy is
Speaker 4: not for any of the arguments. Kind of a sympathetic
Speaker 4: character there, But I think there are some more sympathetic
Speaker 4: arguments that that we should that we should entertain and
Speaker 4: see if we can grapple with.
Speaker 3: Yeah, let's take a look at this headline. This is
Speaker 3: from the New York Post.
Speaker 5: Map shows congestion pricing will cost up to twenty seven
Speaker 5: dollars to drive into Manhattan. Firefighters, teachers, and businesses can't
Speaker 5: afford it. So here's the map, and if you're looking
Speaker 5: at it's similar to the first map that we showed,
Speaker 5: but it actually gets even more specific about if you're
Speaker 5: commuting through particular points in New York City. If you're
Speaker 5: super familiar with New York, it'll make sense to you
Speaker 5: a Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan Bridge, Williamsburg Bridge.
Speaker 3: You can see some of these.
Speaker 5: Exact pricing for for different folks, told by plate versus
Speaker 5: told by easy pass. This is really expensive, Like, actually,
Speaker 5: this is really expensive. I saw one man on a
Speaker 5: street interview with a guy who was just like a
Speaker 5: blue collar worker coming who was commuting into the city,
Speaker 5: and some would costs him an extra two hundred dollars
Speaker 5: a month. If he didn't start taking the subway. The subway,
Speaker 5: of course, is not something that a lot of people
Speaker 5: who aren't using it regularly want to start using right now,
Speaker 5: because there's fair evasion that leads to some you know,
Speaker 5: unfortunate experiences with law enforcement. There's also, like we just
Speaker 5: saw last week, the horrifying video of a man who
Speaker 5: somehow miraculously survived after being pushed onto the platform as
Speaker 5: a train was coming on by someone who's just doing
Speaker 5: it for the hell of it. Seemingly the woman who
Speaker 5: was burned alive as passers by were helpless, and some
Speaker 5: of them may have been able to do something but didn't.
Speaker 5: Law enforcement didn't do much at all. Everyone has seen
Speaker 5: these images, and people are not keen to leave the
Speaker 5: safety of their vehicles. And I say that, you know,
Speaker 5: safety not you know, being not in terms of car crashes,
Speaker 5: which are obviously very significant area.
Speaker 3: As well and everywhere.
Speaker 5: But putting themselves vulnerable onto the subway is something a
Speaker 5: lot of people don't want to do, especially you know,
Speaker 5: when they it was previously they had organized their commutes
Speaker 5: around budgets that were totally doable for them, and now
Speaker 5: the city is asking them to pay more money when
Speaker 5: let me just share this next screen and get your
Speaker 5: thoughts on this. Ryan, you had Uber and Lyft spending
Speaker 5: millions of dollars pushing for the congestion pricing because it
Speaker 5: helps them while it doesn't help other people.
Speaker 3: I think that's pretty interesting. This is your posting.
Speaker 5: They poured millions of dollars in efforts to legalize the
Speaker 5: congestion tolling and they stand to be among the biggest winners.
Speaker 5: They hired top lobbyists to help persuade key state and
Speaker 5: city officials to approve the controversial level, including Governor Kathy
Speaker 5: Hochel and the mt A. So that brings us into
Speaker 5: interesting perspective as well. I'm curious what you make of it.
Speaker 4: Ryan, Yeah, so uh, Uber and Lyft lobbying for this
Speaker 4: and getting a sweetheart deal out of it where it's
Speaker 4: cheaper for them, you know, and it and it makes
Speaker 4: it easier for them to compete. You know, that's bs
Speaker 4: and you know they ought to that that. You know,
Speaker 4: that shouldn't that shouldn't be the case. I think I
Speaker 4: think the opponents there have a have a very reasonable
Speaker 4: argument because not only they're getting a sweetheart deal, then
Speaker 4: there's gonna be less congestion, and they're gonna be able
Speaker 4: to zip around more. On other hand, people who use
Speaker 4: ubers and lifts you know, pretty frequently are going to
Speaker 4: be are are going to uh benefit from that because
Speaker 4: their trips will be will be quicker. Uh. There's a
Speaker 4: kind of a chicken and egg you know problem here
Speaker 4: that the city is trying to address to you to
Speaker 4: your point about the subway being trash. You know, I
Speaker 4: lived there about twenty years ago or so, and I
Speaker 4: used to take the subway to work, and people who
Speaker 4: live in New York have a real you know, fondness
Speaker 4: for and defensiveness around its subway and all the character
Speaker 4: that it has. But it's also, you know, compared to
Speaker 4: other major cities around the world, particularly around the world,
Speaker 4: and even even in the US, it's trash compared to
Speaker 4: a lot of them. It should be a lot better. So,
Speaker 4: this is supposed to be the greatest city in the world,
Speaker 4: and it definitely does not have the greatest the greatest
Speaker 4: subway system or not even probably in the top one hundred,
Speaker 4: and so in order to upgrade that, they're trying to
Speaker 4: come up with money through this congestion pricing scheme, and
Speaker 4: so it's going to push people to use a system
Speaker 4: that is not yet upgraded. But if you don't do
Speaker 4: something like this, then then it never gets upgraded, and
Speaker 4: people have both over congested traffic and in a completely
Speaker 4: degrading subway system. One. So the low income there's a
Speaker 4: low income discount that has been worked into the law,
Speaker 4: which is just woefully inadequate. Make it's if you if
Speaker 4: you have a gross income of sixty thousand dollars or less,
Speaker 4: you're able to get half off of your fare, but
Speaker 4: only after your first ten trips. And I think the
Speaker 4: sixty thousand is pretty absurd. You know, most people who
Speaker 4: are coming into New York, the reason they're driving into
Speaker 4: New York is because they're making a little bit more
Speaker 4: than that. But it's still extraordinarily difficult to live in
Speaker 4: New York on say seventy or live in the New
Speaker 4: York area on even seventy or or eighty thousand dollars,
Speaker 4: especially if then all of your you know, you're spending
Speaker 4: hundreds of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars on
Speaker 4: tolls and fairs.
Speaker 3: So they really should is extremely high.
Speaker 4: They really should have made that that discount a lot
Speaker 4: more generous and make it, make it easy, make it
Speaker 4: easier for the middle for the middle class to get.
Speaker 4: But if it works, then this is this is the
Speaker 4: argument that I would make to people who don't want
Speaker 4: to pay it but are end up paying it because
Speaker 4: they don't live near transit and it's just not feasible
Speaker 4: for them to use use a transit. Like, look, if
Speaker 4: you actually shave off a half an hour of your
Speaker 4: commute each way, and let's say you make let's say
Speaker 4: you make forty dollars an hour, you make thirty dollars
Speaker 4: an hour. If you shave off an hour of that,
Speaker 4: that's thirty or forty dollars that you not to get
Speaker 4: not to get too you know, you know, economics bro
Speaker 4: or neoliberal, but like people's time is valuable, and so
Speaker 4: if it works, and that's and that's a huge if.
Speaker 4: So far we're seeing it working. Like so far, we're
Speaker 4: seeing that commute traffic does seem to be moving faster.
Speaker 4: You know, let let us know in the comments, if
Speaker 4: you live in New York and if you've been driving
Speaker 4: around the city, you know what your experience has been.
Speaker 4: But if you can actually save that time, time is money,
Speaker 4: you can actually you know you could you could work
Speaker 4: an extra hour on your shift if you can, if
Speaker 4: you can get those hours, or you have an hour,
Speaker 4: or you have an extra hour to yourself a day,
Speaker 4: which you know, is that worth nine dollars to you
Speaker 4: to a lot of people, I think it would be,
Speaker 4: especially if that money is then going into improving the
Speaker 4: subway system in the long run.
Speaker 5: The obvious benefit while we're doing the sort of advantages
Speaker 5: and disadvantage pros and cons is also for emergency vehicles
Speaker 5: is a serious problem in New York that when traffic's
Speaker 5: not moving and you need to get ambulances through. That's
Speaker 5: a significant reason just in and of itself to start
Speaker 5: thinking about how to deal with congestion. But I just
Speaker 5: think what sucks, and this is not just New York based,
Speaker 5: but near in particular, where people are the cost of
Speaker 5: living is really high, and people are taxed to hell
Speaker 5: and have.
Speaker 3: Been for years.
Speaker 5: It's like you're punishing them. You're punishing them for the
Speaker 5: city's mismanagement of their own taxpayer dollars. And people have
Speaker 5: organized their lives of course of years around commutes that
Speaker 5: work for their budget, that work for their schedule.
Speaker 3: Uh, and so that the sudden like it just.
Speaker 5: Feels like a punishment for people who have been dutifully
Speaker 5: like paying their taxes for years and now because the
Speaker 5: like the the reason the subway is a disaster, it's
Speaker 5: not really just because they lack resources. They lack resources,
Speaker 5: financial resources, because of the mismanagement it's in.
Speaker 3: It's a complete vicious cycle right now. People have been
Speaker 3: paying into.
Speaker 5: The system and it just again, it's going to It's
Speaker 5: it's going to It's one of those things that just
Speaker 5: is going to. The middle class is going to bear
Speaker 5: the brunt of it, which obviously sucks.
Speaker 4: Although meanwhile, Dave Will pointed out really fascinating class dynamic
Speaker 4: in the New York Post coverage. I don't know if
Speaker 4: you saw this, but the uh they the Post was
Speaker 4: writing about drivers who were cleverly evading the fair because
Speaker 4: you know, people have different tricks. You put this gloss
Speaker 4: on your license plate, which is illegal, but if you
Speaker 4: can get away with it nobody sees it, then the
Speaker 4: camera can't catch your your license plate or other tricks
Speaker 4: to like not get nailed with this fair. He's like,
Speaker 4: I've searched the New York Post and was unable to find,
Speaker 4: you know, any articles celebrating the cleverness of subway fare
Speaker 4: of vaders that to them is like a cover story
Speaker 4: worthy crime and a driver who evades the fair you
Speaker 4: know that person is clever and an American hero. And
Speaker 4: it does go back to this unspoken assumption that car
Speaker 4: culture is is just better because who like who built
Speaker 4: the subway, The public built the subway, Who built the roads?
Speaker 4: The public built the roads. But there's this belief that
Speaker 4: one of them, just by natural right, ought to be
Speaker 4: free and the other one ought to cost people money,
Speaker 4: and that if you're if you're stealing one, you're a hero.
Speaker 4: You're stealing the other, you're a villain, and if you
Speaker 4: peel it back. There's there's no philosophical, logical, political rationale
Speaker 4: for the argument that different transportation modes that were both
Speaker 4: funded by the public should be treated so radically different.
Speaker 4: So not in the post.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that's a great point.
Speaker 4: So President Donald Trump has promised hell on Earth if
Speaker 4: there isn't a hostage deal by the time he's sworn
Speaker 4: into office. Meanwhile, over at drop site News, we've gotten
Speaker 4: a statement from Hamas appealing directly to President Trump. I'm
Speaker 4: going to read some of that. They write the Hamas
Speaker 4: spokesperson says, well, we believe we can reach an agreement
Speaker 4: immediately if Netanyahu and his government stop their stalling and
Speaker 4: obstructing the deal, we are ready to proceed with agreement
Speaker 4: immediately that guarantees a permanent ceasefire, the withdrawal of all
Speaker 4: Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip, the return of displaced
Speaker 4: people to their homes without restrictions, a serious prisoner exchange
Speaker 4: deal from both sides, and the immediate launch of a
Speaker 4: comprehensive relief and reconstruction process for Gaza. Therefore, we look
Speaker 4: forward to President Trump and his team exerting pressure on
Speaker 4: that Yahoo and his government to move forward with the
Speaker 4: deal before his inauguration. Now this comes just as there's
Speaker 4: news being reported by Reuters and others that when it
Speaker 4: comes to that post reconstruction or post deal reconstruction process,
Speaker 4: the UAE, which is a very very close ally of
Speaker 4: Trump himself and the Trump family, has said that it
Speaker 4: would take a lead in kind of overseeing with the
Speaker 4: US a security and reconstruction until a reformed house stating
Speaker 4: authority could start taking control in Gaza. Now, what's interesting
Speaker 4: about this is several things. One uh the US having
Speaker 4: some role in security and reconstruction in Gaza suggests boots
Speaker 4: on the ground, Like how how does you know how
Speaker 4: would the US play a role in security? Uh, you know,
Speaker 4: without boots in the ground. One, I guess one possibility
Speaker 4: would be just you know, financing it and sending you know,
Speaker 4: enormous amounts of weapons and money so that the UA
Speaker 4: you can hire like Colombian mercenaries to patrol Gaza.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 4: So it remains me seeing what those details are.
Speaker 13: Uh.
Speaker 4: But what's also interesting is that, you know, the Gulf
Speaker 4: countries had been insisting that a pathway to statehood was
Speaker 4: essential for their involvement in a most conflict reconstruction. If
Speaker 4: these reports are accurate, that would suggest that the UAE
Speaker 4: is UEE at least is backing off of that of
Speaker 4: that piece of the deal as Saudi Arabia and Israel
Speaker 4: are continuing their talks towards normalization, where Saudi is insisting
Speaker 4: on some type of language you know, about a pathway
Speaker 4: to statehood being included or there or there won't be normalization.
Speaker 4: You know, when we were I guess when we were
Speaker 4: last speaking a couple of weeks ago before the Christmas
Speaker 4: and New Year's break there were there was a lot
Speaker 4: of talk that a deal was, you know, just moments
Speaker 4: away from from being inked. Trump putting the January twentieth
Speaker 4: deadline on it, to me, has always meant that net
Speaker 4: Yahoo will take every day that's available. It's January eighth,
Speaker 4: that's that's at least twelve days that he has a
Speaker 4: free hand to strike Gaza. And the air strikes, oh,
Speaker 4: have have heated up. They've they've expanded, they've they've been
Speaker 4: almost around the clock according to people you know in Gaza.
Speaker 4: So I would not expect him to strike a deal,
Speaker 4: you know, a moment before he's absolutely forced to by
Speaker 4: Donald Trump. So but let's let's play a little bit
Speaker 4: from Trump to get a flavor of how he how
Speaker 4: he's framing, you know, his his approach to this.
Speaker 5: And these are comments from his press conference yesterday that
Speaker 5: we played some clips earlier in the show on other things.
Speaker 5: But he was asked by everyone different questions and touched
Speaker 5: on Israel.
Speaker 4: Here, yes, here you go, all.
Speaker 3: Hell must be paid.
Speaker 7: They don't release, don't you Well do I have to
Speaker 7: define it for you?
Speaker 9: Hell will break in if those hostages aren't back.
Speaker 7: I don't want to hurt your negotiation.
Speaker 9: If they're not back by the time I get into office,
Speaker 9: all hell will break out in the Middle East and
Speaker 9: it will not be good for AMAS and it will
Speaker 9: not be good frankly for anyone. All hell will break out.
Speaker 9: I don't have to say anymore, but that's what it is.
Speaker 4: So there's some real uh gallows humor going on in Gaza.
Speaker 4: And we're going to talk to Amat Khan, who was
Speaker 4: in Gaza recently. He was telling me that when he
Speaker 4: was there, Trump made similar comments all hell will break
Speaker 4: loose uh and everyone universally that he spoke to, like,
Speaker 4: does he have any idea what's going on here?
Speaker 3: Like?
Speaker 4: What what? What would that look like like? And it
Speaker 4: goes from a rhetorical question to an actual question where
Speaker 4: it's like, wait a minute, what what would hell on
Speaker 4: Earth look like if it wasn't this, which is you know, starvation,
Speaker 4: you know MP rampant disease, it's cold at night, your
Speaker 4: tent you're living in tents. Your tents are flooding, uh,
Speaker 4: and air strikes are continuing relentlessly, like and all the
Speaker 4: hospitals are shut down, Like what so if that's the
Speaker 4: status quo, what what the hell look like?
Speaker 5: I think, you know, Hamas in a strange way, has
Speaker 5: some leverage with Donald Trump in that respect, because.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they've taken Hell off the table by already bringing
Speaker 4: it to Gaza.
Speaker 5: There's that, There's there's also that Trump doesn't want He
Speaker 5: wants to be the guy who looks like he secured
Speaker 5: a deal. And so if if he has to get
Speaker 5: to a deal, that means he needs Hamas's cooperation. So
Speaker 5: does he want to escalate beyond what you just described,
Speaker 5: Ryan and be the guy who was behind what he
Speaker 5: already described for net and Yahoo what six months ago
Speaker 5: is a public relations problem? Does he want to be
Speaker 5: overseeing that or you know, does it? Does Hamas have
Speaker 5: I guess some real leverage in they want a deal
Speaker 5: and Trump wants a deal. He wants to be the
Speaker 5: guy who solved the problem and died the conflict and
Speaker 5: secured what he will say, his piece, whether it's lasting
Speaker 5: is you know, dubious, but that does actually sort of
Speaker 5: give Hamas their position some leverage going into a Trump administration.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and over at the drops on News Twitter account,
Speaker 4: you can find a report from Israeli media that a
Speaker 4: May document that was approved by Netahu's cabinet describing a
Speaker 4: the terms that they would agree to for a ceasefire
Speaker 4: was leaked to the Israeli media, and it's consistent effectively
Speaker 4: with you know, what Hamas is asking for and is
Speaker 4: consistent with what Israel is now expected to get from
Speaker 4: an upcoming ceasefire if one really happens. And actually, I
Speaker 4: have this right here, so think about that. This is May.
Speaker 4: The the hostages have been held since May. Some many
Speaker 4: perhaps have died since then. To get nothing extra to like,
Speaker 4: to get to get an agreement that was already on
Speaker 4: the table last May, is such an extraordinary and fundamental
Speaker 4: failure when it comes to what a the leader of
Speaker 4: a government's mission is, which is to protect their own people,
Speaker 4: their own citizens. If you're one of those hostage families,
Speaker 4: you're asking why, like why is it now January and
Speaker 4: we're about to ink a deal potentially we're going to
Speaker 4: inc a deal that was available to us in May,
Speaker 4: Like what did we achieve between May and January? And
Speaker 4: the answer can only be satisfaction of a lust for
Speaker 4: the complete and total destruction of Gaza as a habitable place,
Speaker 4: because nothing else has improved from Israel's perspective and from
Speaker 4: the perspective the hostages from May until January. Unless I'm
Speaker 4: missing something, so.
Speaker 3: Trump, we may see something similar.
Speaker 5: If we see something like that in Israel, we may
Speaker 5: see something similar also in Ukraine, where there's.
Speaker 4: Still Grit's a dealer was available in like February March
Speaker 4: twenty twenty two, and better actually than is that, we'll
Speaker 4: be available now.
Speaker 5: People will say that what really changed is the seriousness
Speaker 5: of the negotiations. You have this presidential transition in the
Speaker 5: United States, and that changes the positions and the leverage
Speaker 5: that the deal makers have.
Speaker 3: So that's the I'd expect to hear, but I think
Speaker 3: it's a valid point.
Speaker 4: Before we leave, let's just comment a little bit on
Speaker 4: some of the Antie blaken has been making the rounds
Speaker 4: and doing some exit interviews. He spoke with the New
Speaker 4: York Times. Here let me play a little bit of
Speaker 4: that to what.
Speaker 15: Has become the defining crisis of this era, which is
Speaker 15: the conflict in Gaza. You came in thinking you could
Speaker 15: broker a historic agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel, and
Speaker 15: then Hamas attacked is on October seventh, with the horrific
Speaker 15: results which we saw, and Israel's response has been extreme.
Speaker 15: The latest UN figures put the Palestine in death toll
Speaker 15: of forty five thousand. Over ninety percent of Gaza's population
Speaker 15: is now displaced, the population is starving, all hospitals have
Speaker 15: been destroyed. In November, a UN committee released a report
Speaker 15: that found Israel's warfare practices quote consistent with the characteristics
Speaker 15: of genocide. I know you don't agree with that estimation,
Speaker 15: but do you believe that Israel's acts have been consistent
Speaker 15: with the rules of war.
Speaker 16: Let's step back for a second and think about where
Speaker 16: we were on October sixth, and then where we were
Speaker 16: on October seventh, and where we've been since then.
Speaker 4: You're right.
Speaker 16: On October sixth, we were very much pursuing normalization between
Speaker 16: Saudi Arabia and Israel, and in fact I was scheduled
Speaker 16: to go to Saudi Arabia and Israel on October tenth trip.
Speaker 16: Obviously that didn't happen because the events of October seventh,
Speaker 16: But the purpose of that trip was to work on
Speaker 16: the Palestinian component of any normalization agreement between Saudi Arabian Israel,
Speaker 16: because we believed, and the Saudis also said, it was
Speaker 16: usually important to make sure that if there was going
Speaker 16: to be a normalization, there was also a pathway toward
Speaker 16: a Palestinian state.
Speaker 4: End it there for now, because a lot of it
Speaker 4: from there is just him kind of humiliating himself by
Speaker 4: trying to present the world in a way that it
Speaker 4: just isn't. And but that that piece is interesting because
Speaker 4: what it reveals is just how flawed that the American
Speaker 4: strategy was that to ignore the Palestinian piece of a
Speaker 4: Mid East piece. Deal knows that he's saying on October tenth,
Speaker 4: He's going to go to talk to Israel and Saudi
Speaker 4: Arabia about the Palestinian issue. Anybody who who's like hearing
Speaker 4: that and isn't completely absorbed in the propaganda here would
Speaker 4: be like, wait a minute, You're going to talk to
Speaker 4: Israel and Saudi Arabia about the Palestinians, Like what about
Speaker 4: the Palestinians going to talk to them about the Palestinians?
Speaker 4: Like are they are they're gonna be involved in this
Speaker 4: conversation about them at all? And if they were involved
Speaker 4: in a serious way, then it's very difficult to imagine
Speaker 4: there's an October seventh Hamma was very clear that one
Speaker 4: of the motivations for October seventh was that they felt
Speaker 4: like they were being written off of the historical stage,
Speaker 4: that they were being sidelined by the United States in
Speaker 4: an effort to normalize the you know, to normalize relations
Speaker 4: with Israel, normalize and effectively normalize the occupation and just
Speaker 4: keep the status quo in place indefinitely. And it was
Speaker 4: a They described it in as a version of a
Speaker 4: flip to table moment. And if that's the case, then
Speaker 4: that is a fundamental failure of the of the policy
Speaker 4: that was being carried out by you know, all all administrations,
Speaker 4: you know, whether Biden, Trump and everybody since you know,
Speaker 4: Clinton effectively or actually maybe since Bush.
Speaker 3: I mean, what you heard Blinkett just responding to from
Speaker 3: the New York Times.
Speaker 5: There was totally unspoken, but it was him like embracing
Speaker 5: the Trump policy, doubling tripling down on the Abercord policy.
Speaker 5: I don't know that I agree that it's hard to
Speaker 5: imagine October seventh happening without the Abraham Accords, but I
Speaker 5: do agree that it's clearly pushed.
Speaker 3: Them to a flip the table moment.
Speaker 5: Doesn't in any way justify the flip the table moment,
Speaker 5: but I do agree that that's a component of it,
Speaker 5: and it makes me wonder, as many people are whether
Speaker 5: Donald Trump.
Speaker 4: Right some of the Abraham Accords. You'd have to have
Speaker 4: you have to have real, genuine these talks going on
Speaker 4: that everybody believed were serious. And if that, if those
Speaker 4: were happening, my argument would be, then there wouldn't have
Speaker 4: been an October seventh.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's interesting, but.
Speaker 4: I mean Hamas would have to be brought into them, Yeah,
Speaker 4: as the power in Gaza. Yeah, that's an if that
Speaker 4: is impossible to conceive of, because the purpose of Israel
Speaker 4: helping to prop up a Hamas in Gaza was that.
Speaker 4: So those talks aren't happening.
Speaker 5: I mean the Hamas Charter, which was changed from obviously
Speaker 5: to just talk about the Israel like the foundational principle
Speaker 5: of Israel's existence.
Speaker 3: I think there's an ideological.
Speaker 5: Part there, an a geological component there that makes it
Speaker 5: I think likely that you know, in October seventh could
Speaker 5: happen sort of at any given moment until there's something.
Speaker 5: That's why peace talks are always so depressing, because.
Speaker 4: It's interesting how an organization like HAMASC can get its
Speaker 4: hand forced. You know, it wasn't because they never necessarily
Speaker 4: had a change of heart that they changed their charter,
Speaker 4: and I think it was twenty seventeen to embrace it,
Speaker 4: to embrace the two state deals. That there was public
Speaker 4: pressure from from Palestinians, it's a good point to move
Speaker 4: in that direction, which then led to the twenty eighteen
Speaker 4: the Great March of Return, which was these non violent
Speaker 4: protests in Gaza that would mark march to the fence.
Speaker 4: But we're organized by Gaza Civil Society and initially had
Speaker 4: at an arm's length at best relationship with Hamas and
Speaker 4: Maas saw them as is not helpful to their and
Speaker 4: not part of their ideological project. Hamas eventually, because they
Speaker 4: were so popular, had to come around for political reasons
Speaker 4: and and kind of embrace them. Everybody knows how those ended.
Speaker 4: Is IDF troops outside of the fence shot something like
Speaker 4: forty thousand people on arm, you know, most unarmed people,
Speaker 4: almost all of them unarmed, and we're shooting for legs,
Speaker 4: you know, shooting people's legs for sport, as a as
Speaker 4: a UN report has has has laid out. And then
Speaker 4: with the collapse of that nonviolent movement, Hamas then has
Speaker 4: more political capital to organize toward a toward a violent response.
Speaker 5: Yeah, what's interesting to me is is there a it does.
Speaker 5: Does the Trump camp recognize that there's there's something serious
Speaker 5: when Hamas says that Abraham the Abraham Accords were a
Speaker 5: factor and sort of pushing them towards October seventh? Do
Speaker 5: they take that seriously? Do they believe that hamasas sincere
Speaker 5: when they say that, or do they continue to think
Speaker 5: the Abraham Accords were the triumph of US policy to Israel?
Speaker 5: And the answer to that is they continue to think
Speaker 5: the Abraham Accords were just sort of an indisputed triumph.
Speaker 5: And that doesn't mean you can't recognize that they were,
Speaker 5: you know, keeping Palestinians out of the loop, had you know,
Speaker 5: downstream consequences, But it doesn't seem like there's recognition of that.
Speaker 5: And so it's actually just I think it's really hard
Speaker 5: to predict the particulars of Trump's Israel policy in this
Speaker 5: next administration. We can predict obviously the broad swath of
Speaker 5: it is, you know, like deep support, but what does
Speaker 5: it look like in practice? How does he influence negotiations?
Speaker 5: That I think is less easy to predict.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so we'll see. I think it's reasonable that we
Speaker 4: might actually get a ceasefire deal right around the nineteenth
Speaker 4: or twentieth. Whether it holds, I think is a is
Speaker 4: a totally different question. Yeah, and what that looks like
Speaker 4: might be. It might be a deal on paper that
Speaker 4: Israel violates regularly, like if you notice, like the hes
Speaker 4: Bela Israel deal is getting very close to completely collapsing.
Speaker 4: But Israel has bombed Hesbela dozens scores, maybe hundreds of
Speaker 4: times since the quote unquote sees fire deal. So we'll see.
Speaker 4: Up next, we're going to be joined by American philanthropist
Speaker 4: i'm Ed khan Imed. Thanks for joining us here. I
Speaker 4: really appreciate it.
Speaker 7: Thanks Ryan, Thanks Emily, and so.
Speaker 4: With you today, we want to talk about a couple
Speaker 4: of things. One, you were fairly recently in Gaza. You
Speaker 4: organized a shipment of humanitarian supplies into the Strip and
Speaker 4: and you went with your shipment or you went alongside
Speaker 4: your shipment. And we had promised our viewers at the
Speaker 4: time that we would get your take on like how
Speaker 4: how did you do that, how did you how on
Speaker 4: earth did you pull that off? And also what was
Speaker 4: you know, what did you see that we're not seeing
Speaker 4: just through the images that we get out of Gaza,
Speaker 4: and we've also done some coverage of something else that
Speaker 4: you're working on, which is that the need to get
Speaker 4: the tens of thousands of people who need critical medical
Speaker 4: care out of Gaza to places that are willing to
Speaker 4: to to take them in. Whose whose lives are you know,
Speaker 4: at risk at every moment that they're not being allowed
Speaker 4: to get to get that treatment. So I just I'll
Speaker 4: just start here by you. You had shared, uh this
Speaker 4: one one of here's one video of your trip, so
Speaker 4: tell us a little bit about like where you are
Speaker 4: and what your impression was as you're getting here.
Speaker 7: That's called the middle area of Gaza kanyunissel Malassie. They
Speaker 7: are a series of tented caps and you can see
Speaker 7: that it's children, and that's what you see everywhere in Gaza,
Speaker 7: you see children. You don't really see anything else. You
Speaker 7: see children. This was a community building exercise and just
Speaker 7: sort of a kid's activity. Obviously, the schools are all
Speaker 7: destroyed and they just try to keep the kids busy,
Speaker 7: so we just walked into it. The kids were dancing
Speaker 7: the Dubka Palestinian dance and there were various performers and
Speaker 7: sort of we just came in to view it, and
Speaker 7: you know, you're just overwhelmed by what these kids are experiencing.
Speaker 7: What they're experiencing is something no child should ever have
Speaker 7: to experience, and actually no child has experienced what they're
Speaker 7: experience and saying they live in tents almost every night
Speaker 7: of the year, they listen to two hundred and fifty
Speaker 7: pound bombs, five hundred pound bombs, and sometimes two thousand
Speaker 7: pound bombs landing near them. They have friends that have
Speaker 7: been killed and they don't know when their time will be,
Speaker 7: but they just continue. So you know, you can see
Speaker 7: them smiling and cheerful, and it's almost amazing because none
Speaker 7: of these kids have had protein for a month or two,
Speaker 7: and none of them have had They may mainly eat
Speaker 7: but one time a week at one time a day,
Speaker 7: but they still smile. So you're struck by that.
Speaker 4: And is it bread? Like, what's the what's the thing
Speaker 4: that they're able to get the most?
Speaker 7: There really isn't anything that you can count on. It
Speaker 7: just depends on what these eraarly authorities will allow in
Speaker 7: and it's sort of idiosyncratic. It just sort of happens,
Speaker 7: you know, sort of sometimes there'll be enough food in
Speaker 7: the markets, and sometimes there won't. Sometimes the food will
Speaker 7: be very expensive in the markets, and sometimes it won't.
Speaker 7: So there's no rhyme or reason to any of it,
Speaker 7: you know, I sort of I've told you I think
Speaker 7: from the beginning that the essentially the Israeli government has
Speaker 7: decided they don't necessarily want to kill everybody at once
Speaker 7: because they think it's probably not something they can get
Speaker 7: away with. But what they do is allow sort of
Speaker 7: the minimum calorie counting. So you know, people are just
Speaker 7: getting by on whatever whatever is available that day, a
Speaker 7: lot of dry goods, you know, sort of canned canned stuff,
Speaker 7: but it's you know, it's nothing. I don't know, it's
Speaker 7: nothing anyone, you know, sort of any of your viewers
Speaker 7: would be comfortable with or I don't know how many
Speaker 7: people would survive in the US on this.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and then I'll let Emily let you jump in
Speaker 4: one quitch. So shortly, yeah, shortly after October seventh, you
Speaker 4: would you would told me as as Israel unleashed, it's
Speaker 4: its response what you thought their plan was. And now
Speaker 4: here we are a year and a half later, and
Speaker 4: it feels like everything is going according to the plan
Speaker 4: that you kind of you thought that they were playing
Speaker 4: out at the time, what it and and so I
Speaker 4: think that that kind of gives your assessment an extra
Speaker 4: layer of credibility because it's it's really been born out
Speaker 4: the last year and a half. What what what did
Speaker 4: you see coming? And what have you seen unfold?
Speaker 3: Well?
Speaker 7: I think very clearly Israeli government wants all Palestinians out
Speaker 7: right like uh, and they can't do it all at once,
Speaker 7: so they have created conditions that are unlivable and at
Speaker 7: some points and I they will and I think all
Speaker 7: American officials are aware of this, and all probably all
Speaker 7: European officials are aware of this, because it's just it's
Speaker 7: pretty black and white.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 7: They don't want to kill everybody, They just want everybody out.
Speaker 7: So they've they've killed plenty of people, and people are
Speaker 7: living under horrible conditions, and they just want to get
Speaker 7: rid of all Palestinians from Gaza in the West Bank
Speaker 7: and sort of remake Judaea and Samaria. And I think
Speaker 7: that's you know, that's Prime Minister not know who's plan.
Speaker 7: I mean, it's just very clear. So I suppose now
Speaker 7: that will be up to President Trump to decide whether
Speaker 7: that's going to happen or not. You know, I don't know,
Speaker 7: Like it's like a there really aren't any world leaders
Speaker 7: who seem to they've sort of been detached from any
Speaker 7: sort of empathy of the situation because what the situation inside,
Speaker 7: it's truly unlivable. I mean, it's sort of bombs, NonStop,
Speaker 7: artillery NonStop, F fifteen's, F sixteens, F thirty fives dropping
Speaker 7: massive bombs. You're sort of every fifteen minutes, you're shaking
Speaker 7: the you know, whatever wherever you're staying. If you're in
Speaker 7: a tent, it's shaking, if you're in some kind of structure,
Speaker 7: it's shaking. And you know, the trauma is just unimaginable.
Speaker 5: If you were to sure you have but talk to
Speaker 5: American officials, let's say Opera and good faith and tell
Speaker 5: them or persuade them that it is possible to not
Speaker 5: just provide the minimum calori account, but to bring in
Speaker 5: more food to make the situation for people living in
Speaker 5: Gosam more livable while also protecting their security concerns. For instance,
Speaker 5: what would you tell them, How would you explain to
Speaker 5: them that it is possible to feed these children and
Speaker 5: also like just bring in more aid. Maybe you have
Speaker 5: had those conversations.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean it is possible. I've done it in Ukraine,
Speaker 7: right like, so they you know, the Russians don't bomb
Speaker 7: all the border crossings and they don't bomb all the
Speaker 7: food trucks. I think this administration just doesn't care, right like.
Speaker 7: So it's just not you know, they'll just lying about
Speaker 7: well everywhere out of their mouth is just lying. So
Speaker 7: I'm hope, I'm optimistic that maybe priced and travel will
Speaker 7: will not want to see these images and not want
Speaker 7: to see this this situation and you know, sort of
Speaker 7: earned babies and little kids in their tent sleeping and
Speaker 7: then you know, sort of next thing, you know, they're dead.
Speaker 7: You know, I don't know. But for yeah, for American officials,
Speaker 7: let's say middle level American officials, yeah, I think they're
Speaker 7: all horrified by what's going on. They know what's going on,
Speaker 7: they see the briefings, but you know, the decision makers
Speaker 7: and the Biden administration just don't care. You know, they're
Speaker 7: just just very dishonest about all of it. They know
Speaker 7: exactly the numbers that have gone in, they know how
Speaker 7: many people, they know what it takes to keep these
Speaker 7: people fed and healthy. I mean, you're looking at one
Speaker 7: point one one point two million children, it's over fifty
Speaker 7: percent of the population. What what security risk of these
Speaker 7: little girls, you know, sort of hold against the Israelis,
Speaker 7: Like you know, it's just it's mind boggling all the
Speaker 7: I try not to pay attention on the stuff that
Speaker 7: comes out of the like sort of the armshair quarterbacks
Speaker 7: and the conference goers and but I mean, it's all
Speaker 7: it's all nonsense. Like you know, I challenge all of
Speaker 7: them or any of them to come to guys and
Speaker 7: spend forty eight hours see if they number one make
Speaker 7: it out alive. And number two are still repeating these
Speaker 7: idiotic talking points about human shields and security and et cetera.
Speaker 5: Right, or about you know, smuggling things that can be
Speaker 5: turned into weapons through the food shipments or what's another
Speaker 5: example like the Hamas hoarding everything that gets into Gaza.
Speaker 5: From your perspective, you would say, if you go on
Speaker 5: the ground, it's entirely possible for the United States to
Speaker 5: back humanitarian aid that's done in a way that gets
Speaker 5: to the children, and that.
Speaker 7: I mean, to be honest with you, I could do
Speaker 7: it myself, Like you know, with a sort of group
Speaker 7: of collaborators, don't even need the United States just make
Speaker 7: a mess of the whole situation. But yeah, it's not
Speaker 7: complex at all. There's nothing. Don't let anyone tell you
Speaker 7: it's complex. I've done it. I've delivered humanitarian assistance to
Speaker 7: every war zone the last twenty five years. It's it's
Speaker 7: very doable. I mean, it's just just a matter of
Speaker 7: whether you're going to, you know, kill everybody delivering a
Speaker 7: humanitarian assistance. It's just a decision someone may but anything,
Speaker 7: it would be done, It would be able to, it
Speaker 7: would be easily done.
Speaker 5: Have you been in touch with any people in the
Speaker 5: incoming administration or try to get I mean no, Trum don't.
Speaker 7: Really know anyone. I mean, like, I'm not you know,
Speaker 7: I'm out here in the world. I'm not really just
Speaker 7: I mean, it's sort of maybe my weakness is I
Speaker 7: don't I don't go to cocktail parties or sleazy hotel
Speaker 7: bars and stuff. So I mean that's where all these
Speaker 7: people hang out. I guess I don't really they don't
Speaker 7: really run into me. H. In places like the front
Speaker 7: line in Ukraine or Gaza, Syria. In this place, you
Speaker 7: don't really see these kind of people around, so I
Speaker 7: don't know, you know, I don't I try to get
Speaker 7: the message out.
Speaker 4: Can can you give us some examples of because I've
Speaker 4: been following your attempt to like get this shipment in
Speaker 4: and some other shipments in over over months and months
Speaker 4: and months, can you give people some examples of the
Speaker 4: kind of hold ups that you want wound up getting
Speaker 4: along along the way and right.
Speaker 7: So then, yeah, I mean it's a good question. Essentially,
Speaker 7: I made a decision, Well, WFP is great on the
Speaker 7: food and that's their mandate and they do that. I
Speaker 7: sort of did a survey in Gaza and understood that
Speaker 7: there were specific medicines that were not getting into Gaza
Speaker 7: for whatever reason, and I decided to go and source them.
Speaker 7: And I purchased medicines around Europe, and you know, a
Speaker 7: few containers worth of medicines. And I've done this a
Speaker 7: few times. And there's a process through the Israeli government.
Speaker 7: It's the Israeli government agencies called CogAT, which I think
Speaker 7: you know that everything has to go through COGAD. So
Speaker 7: I apply through CogAT and say, look this is what
Speaker 7: I have, this is where I purchased it from this
Speaker 7: is where it was made. This is how much it costs.
Speaker 7: This is how much each item is. This is what's
Speaker 7: in this box. This is what's in this box, and
Speaker 7: this is palette number this and everything has to be
Speaker 7: totally itemized, and you know, sort of they approve it,
Speaker 7: and then it's just a long process of getting the
Speaker 7: actual stuff physically in. So in my case, one time,
Speaker 7: I tried to send it over you know, like I'm
Speaker 7: gonna somehow still optimistic to try to make things work.
Speaker 7: So on one of the shipments, I tried to send
Speaker 7: it over Jaylots, the Joint Logistics over the shore, which
Speaker 7: was the pier that the United States government tried to tried
Speaker 7: to work. Yeah, and and it didn't. Yeah, it actually
Speaker 7: went and then was stuck by the next to the pier,
Speaker 7: and then the pier closed, and so then I had
Speaker 7: to look for another solution and wound up shipping it
Speaker 7: from Cyprus, where where the Jaylots was based, to ash Dot, Israel.
Speaker 7: And then there's just a process like the ship, the
Speaker 7: stuff's on the ship, the ship has to be cleared
Speaker 7: to come into port. That's a few days. Then the
Speaker 7: ship had the stuff has to be cleared to unload
Speaker 7: off the port. That's another few days, and this sort
Speaker 7: of things like it's it's just not something anyone has
Speaker 7: really taken too seriously. In the United States government really
Speaker 7: cares about to be honest with you, because you know,
Speaker 7: and this is all urgent stuff.
Speaker 4: Any of that normal when it comes to humanitarian relief.
Speaker 7: No, of course not. You know, sort of if you
Speaker 7: need this stuff, you need to get it in right,
Speaker 7: like there's no you know what it is, you know
Speaker 7: exactly every detail. You know how much I paid for it,
Speaker 7: you know how I paid for it, Like I provide
Speaker 7: like bank account like everything, and you know, it's just
Speaker 7: like one reason after another too. You know, one day
Speaker 7: the truck's about to go in and the generator breaks
Speaker 7: at one of the borders, and I'm like, this is
Speaker 7: one of the most sophisticated countries in the world and
Speaker 7: their generator broken. Now the borter is closed, you know. So,
Speaker 7: I mean, I got lots of stories that I won't
Speaker 7: board you with. It's kind of ridiculous if you get
Speaker 7: into the my new show, like I think, I try
Speaker 7: to forget all the stuff that happens because I might,
Speaker 7: you know, sort of just get depressed.
Speaker 5: That's actually really interesting. I think we would welcome many
Speaker 5: examples of that, people bored by them. And maybe i'm
Speaker 5: you could also flesh out the parallel that you're talking
Speaker 5: about with Ukraine is a great example right now, because
Speaker 5: the same people who are, you know, saying Israel has
Speaker 5: to do this, would would say the opposite about Putin.
Speaker 5: If you could maybe flesh out what you've seen, like
Speaker 5: the ability to get humanitarian aid to people over there,
Speaker 5: that would.
Speaker 3: Be It's easy.
Speaker 7: And Ukraine is very easy because there the borders are open,
Speaker 7: you know, not the Russian border and not the Belarus border,
Speaker 7: but you have Poland, you have Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Moldova,
Speaker 7: and those are all relatively friendly countries and there are
Speaker 7: no issues. You can get whatever you want. You know,
Speaker 7: do you declare it. There's a process, but it goes
Speaker 7: right over and into wherever it's needed. In the case
Speaker 7: of Gaza, and like I said, there's nothing, there's no
Speaker 7: carollary for Gaza. There's never been a situation where all
Speaker 7: the borders are closed and one entity controls what goes
Speaker 7: in or out. And so I sort of say, and
Speaker 7: you know, people take this the wrong way, but I
Speaker 7: sort of say it's as if the Russians, if you
Speaker 7: want to think about Gaza, it's as if the Russians
Speaker 7: controlled all the border, so they controlled Poland and Hungary
Speaker 7: and Slovakia and Romania, like they controlled what was going
Speaker 7: And I mean they could, they literally could bomb those borders,
Speaker 7: but they don't. But in the situation of Gaza, there's
Speaker 7: just no there's no other way to get anything in
Speaker 7: other than through Israel and through you know, sort of
Speaker 7: the good graces of the Israeli authorities. And I think
Speaker 7: there are some good actors in the Israeli government, but
Speaker 7: you know, they have their marching orders, and their marching
Speaker 7: orders are very clearly let the absolute minim in and
Speaker 7: no one's pushing us. And you know, the Biden administration
Speaker 7: again just you know, fumbled whatever leverage they had, and
Speaker 7: they have all the leverage because two to three Giant
Speaker 7: Air Force planes land full of weapons every day for
Speaker 7: the last over a year. But they just never pushed in.
Speaker 7: So these Raelies understand like, look, this is not important
Speaker 7: to the United States, so we'll just we'll keep doing
Speaker 7: what we're doing.
Speaker 4: Can you since you've spent so much time in Ukraine,
Speaker 4: can you compare how Israel approaches Palestinian civilian infrastructure and
Speaker 4: how Putin approaches Ukrainian civilian infrastructure.
Speaker 7: I mean, there are some similarities, but you know, there's
Speaker 7: literally nothing left in Gaza. I mean, you see my videos,
Speaker 7: like there's literally essentially when you enter Karm Shalom ironically
Speaker 7: named border crossing, you drive along side of Gaza in Israel.
Speaker 7: So to your right as you're driving south is Gaza.
Speaker 7: On to your left is Israel, and your sort of
Speaker 7: life is normal, and they're shopping malls and gas stations,
Speaker 7: et cetera. And when you enter a Kram Shalom, they're
Speaker 7: giant reinforced walls thirty feet high that are one after another,
Speaker 7: and so you sort of zigzag through these walls, and
Speaker 7: once you've crossed those walls, all you see is devastation.
Speaker 7: As soon as you enter, it's just rubble in every direction,
Speaker 7: and the first thing you see are kids playing in
Speaker 7: the rubble, and so there's no carllary for that. I
Speaker 7: you know, it's kind of wild that the amount of
Speaker 7: rubble in Gaza, which is the size of Philadelphia or
Speaker 7: Las Vegas, is I think twice to three times the
Speaker 7: amount of rubble that's in Ukraine, which is the size
Speaker 7: of Texas, you know, and the Wars three years old
Speaker 7: in Ukraine, so there's it's actually I tell the Ukrainians
Speaker 7: that I come there to uh I recently went directly
Speaker 7: from Gaza to Ukraine, and I said, and I actually
Speaker 7: went to the front and I said, you know, I'm
Speaker 7: here to relax after Gaza. So that was everybody laughed,
Speaker 7: because what else do you do?
Speaker 4: Well, yeah, because you had sent me one video from
Speaker 4: a place where were sleeping where that it's just this
Speaker 4: seemed like the windows were rattling all night long.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's bombs.
Speaker 7: It's the GPU thirty GBU thirty nine. It's a glided
Speaker 7: glided air bomb that has electronics on it, which you know,
Speaker 7: you can guide it. They're just massive bombs and they
Speaker 7: just drop them over and over and over again, and
Speaker 7: every no matter where you're sleeping, you'll hear them all
Speaker 7: night long, and they shake the ground and they shake everything,
Speaker 7: and you know, essentially the what they do is if
Speaker 7: there's a guy they're looking for who they think is humas,
Speaker 7: if anyone's around that guy, he's dead or she's dead,
Speaker 7: or the four year old kid is dead, and you know,
Speaker 7: sort of these bombs, aren't you know, checking people's IDs.
Speaker 7: They're just killing.
Speaker 3: The New York Times just confirmed in that long investigation.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean it's it's indisputable, like literally, you know,
Speaker 7: sort of there's nothing precise about any of it. They
Speaker 7: could be precise if they wanted to, and sort of
Speaker 7: you know, when you're driving around Daza, it's it's like
Speaker 7: kind of like in your thoughts because if some sort
Speaker 7: of character that they're looking for happens to wind up
Speaker 7: next to your car, you're got. They're not you know,
Speaker 7: they're not really asking questions or confirming or any and
Speaker 7: that's just that's that's you know, like literally nobody can
Speaker 7: deny this. And again the entire United States decision making
Speaker 7: authority knows this, and that's just the way it is.
Speaker 7: So there's no Carol Area. Actually the Russians don't do.
Speaker 7: I mean, they they've killed plenty of civilians, but it's
Speaker 7: just a different level.
Speaker 4: If the Israeli goal is to depopulate Gaza, why don't
Speaker 4: they let at least the injured people out. I think
Speaker 4: they're working across purposes to that goal.
Speaker 7: Well, I think it's part of the plan, right, Like
Speaker 7: you get the people so desperate to the point where
Speaker 7: once you you know, sort of move onto that mechanism
Speaker 7: of getting everybody out, then everybody just goes. But until
Speaker 7: that point, you're going to make life as miserable as
Speaker 7: possible for everything. So we have the situation now where
Speaker 7: they're between. I mean, they're probably about ten thousand kids
Speaker 7: who either have pre existing conditions like cancer or have
Speaker 7: been injured significantly and can't get out.
Speaker 8: And there is a.
Speaker 7: Process with the World Health Organization to get people out,
Speaker 7: and these reelis will sort of approve five to ten
Speaker 7: percent of the cases. And you know, I know these cases.
Speaker 7: I've seen these kids and they're literally sitting in a
Speaker 7: tent with no chemotherapy, just just dying. And their case
Speaker 7: was rejected and you don't get an answer as to
Speaker 7: why it was rejected. And again this is another failure
Speaker 7: of the US administration. And sort of it's like they
Speaker 7: just don't care, right, Like there's no other answer for it.
Speaker 7: Why would you, why would you, let you know, five, ten,
Speaker 7: fifteen thousand kids who are in urgent need of medical
Speaker 7: care and can be evacuated out just sit there. But
Speaker 7: you know, it's across the board, like there's no blood
Speaker 7: pressure medication, so people just die of heart attacks in
Speaker 7: their tents. It's on and on and on and on.
Speaker 5: Well, I was just gonna ask, like a hypothetical, if
Speaker 5: President Ryan Grimm were being inaugurated on January twentieth, is
Speaker 5: it on the humanitarian front, not the military front, but
Speaker 5: on the humanitarian front. Is it in the power of
Speaker 5: an incoming United States administration almost flip a switch on
Speaker 5: the humanitarian stuff and use the leverage and say you
Speaker 5: are letting these in. Like, how theoretically simple would it
Speaker 5: be if someone wanted to, you know, increase humanity the
Speaker 5: input of humanitarian aid.
Speaker 7: Yeah, if you decided that you don't want little kids
Speaker 7: to be suffering twenty four to seven, you could scale
Speaker 7: up madame humanitarian aid in days. The United States government
Speaker 7: knows exactly what the needs are, you know, the United
Speaker 7: Nations knows exactly what the needs are, what the calorie
Speaker 7: count is, medicine, et cetera. And it could happen immediately.
Speaker 7: I mean, the resources are out there, the stuff's out there,
Speaker 7: and you would just tell the Israelis, look, I can't
Speaker 7: abide by this, this is wrong, and and and change
Speaker 7: it tomorrow.
Speaker 4: Literally, Well, I'm Ed. I always appreciate your insights and
Speaker 4: also what you're doing for the people of Gaza, and
Speaker 4: thank you, thank you so much for joining us. Anything
Speaker 4: else you'd want to add for people.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean, you know, like I think people are
Speaker 7: frustrated and trying to figure out how they can help
Speaker 7: and what they can do, and I think they should
Speaker 7: just keep keep at it. It's it's tough, it's really
Speaker 7: it's really sad. But the people in Gaza appreciate them.
Speaker 7: They they they hear them, They understand that there are
Speaker 7: people with them that feel their their their plight, that
Speaker 7: are aware of them, and I think people just need
Speaker 7: to really just push the the decision makers. Unfortunately, we're
Speaker 7: at a point in this world where there are just
Speaker 7: no world leaders who really you know, there's just there's
Speaker 7: no empathy. It's just sort of apathy, I suppose. And
Speaker 7: you know, there are certain things like would regard to
Speaker 7: the children's evacuations, that's something that has to happen, increasing
Speaker 7: the amount of humanitarian aid. It has to happen. Is
Speaker 7: again the population. You know, when they keep talking about
Speaker 7: Hamas Hamas, it's like they're about twenty thousand before like
Speaker 7: fifteen months ago. There were let's say, twenty thousand Hamas
Speaker 7: soldiers or whatever you want to call them. I don't
Speaker 7: know how many there are now, but you're it's a
Speaker 7: war against women and children. Essentially seventy percent of the
Speaker 7: population are women and children. So and literally when you
Speaker 7: drive around Gayza, you just see children like that's the
Speaker 7: thing you're struck in, just rubble in children and you're wondering, like,
Speaker 7: where is this? You know Humas and I'm sure they
Speaker 7: are there, but you just don't see them. So I
Speaker 7: tell everybody to keep the faith, and you know, we'll
Speaker 7: we'll make a change one of these days.
Speaker 4: We'll see I'm ed con Thanks so much for joining us.
Speaker 7: Thanks Ryan, Thanks Emily.
Speaker 4: All right, well that'll that'll do it for us today.
Speaker 4: Thanks everybody. Also, thank you everybody for the kind words
Speaker 4: over the last couple of weeks. It's really meant a
Speaker 4: lot too to me and my family. I'll keep you
Speaker 4: updated as we continue on that front. Emily, anything else.
Speaker 5: Now, your family is amazing and all the breaking points,
Speaker 5: subscribers and viewers are amazing.
Speaker 3: So thank you to everybody. Thank you for supporting us
Speaker 3: into another year, and we'll see you back here soon.
Speaker 4: See then