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Speaker 1: Good morning and welcome to Counterpoints. Emily. Really big show today,
Speaker 1: really big show.
Speaker 4: Also, we've had nothing but crazy news cycles for the
Speaker 4: past six plus months. This is one of the craziest
Speaker 4: news cycles. So many hearings. Yeah, just today, I mean
Speaker 4: Rubio Pambondi, John Ratcliffe, Chris Right, Sean Duffy, it's just
Speaker 4: absolutely stuffed. Yesterday with Pete Heigsath. We have the TikTok
Speaker 4: band covering here on the show. Today, Huge news and
Speaker 4: you guys at Breaking Points had a great scoop on
Speaker 4: what's going on with the ceasefire negotiations.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I was just thinking, I really do hope that
Speaker 5: Sager's alien invasion holds off because I want to see
Speaker 5: how the next four years plays out.
Speaker 1: You're curiously, I really am.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and you can't read the last page of the
Speaker 4: book First Life.
Speaker 5: It's going to be interesting, and I'm curious what would
Speaker 5: happen in the event of an alien invasion too, obviously,
Speaker 5: but we can get that later. Like, I want to
Speaker 5: see this whole thing because to your point, the Donald
Speaker 5: Trump I was gonna about say the Trump administration, but
Speaker 5: Donald Trump and his kind of real estate tycoon that
Speaker 5: he assigned to create a ceasefire deal between Israel and
Speaker 5: Hamas is on the brink of pulling off. We're going
Speaker 5: to talk to Jeremy Skahill in just a moment, who's
Speaker 5: been in contact with a lot of people involved in this,
Speaker 5: so he's gonna he's gonna break down what the deal
Speaker 5: actually looks like and how we got to this place.
Speaker 1: But quite quite incredible. I still stand by my prediction.
Speaker 5: That is going to drag this all the way out
Speaker 5: to the nineteenth Yes to ink the like final details.
Speaker 5: Hope I'm wrong, but overnight, Israel was ramping up air
Speaker 5: strikes all across Gaza. There was video that emerged from
Speaker 5: Unicarawi of them blowing up a mosque in northern Gaza yesterday,
Speaker 5: just kind of because they can. And there's a couple
Speaker 5: of days left until they signed the thing, but we're
Speaker 5: getting very close.
Speaker 4: So we're going to start with that news. We're going
Speaker 4: to run down the Heggsath hearing from yesterday, do an update.
Speaker 1: On wild one.
Speaker 4: It was a wild one, although by Trump era standards
Speaker 4: you have sort of medium medium insanity. We'll do an
Speaker 4: update on a crazy story about landlords in the Los
Speaker 4: Angeles area. We'll talk about the migration from TikTok to
Speaker 4: Red Note. And we actually have a Prince, professor of
Speaker 4: astrophysics joining the show today to talk about how Donald
Speaker 4: Trump could potentially set us so up for a Nobel Peace.
Speaker 1: Prize reado Peace Prizes.
Speaker 5: He wrote this essay for Fox News before Trump kind
Speaker 5: of slammed a ceasefire on Israel, which, frankly, in another
Speaker 5: kind of world, could generate a Nobel Peace Prize for
Speaker 5: an American president. Donald Trump has a steeper hill to
Speaker 5: climb to win that prize because he's Donald Trump, and
Speaker 5: it's ludicrous to consider him getting a Nobel Peace Prize.
Speaker 5: But he lays out, you know how, over the next
Speaker 5: four years he's actually set up to resolve three major
Speaker 5: sources of conflict and could legitimately deserve if he pulled
Speaker 5: that off, three Nobel Peace prizes.
Speaker 4: And potentially take us a little bit further from the brink,
Speaker 4: to the extent that we possibly can be of.
Speaker 1: I'd like to pull back from the brank free.
Speaker 4: Yeses Iranian president is giving interviews to American media and
Speaker 4: VC News in particular, so we will have updates on
Speaker 4: all of that. As a reminder, Breakingpoints dot com that's
Speaker 4: where you can get a premium subscription and Ryan, if
Speaker 4: you can't get a premium.
Speaker 5: Subcurity like and subscribe, you tell your friends share it.
Speaker 5: It helps you flip it and put it on social
Speaker 5: because we don't really do that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's true. Shout out to Hull. Yes, I'm told
Speaker 4: we have Jeremy scahe you're calling it dropsite on the
Speaker 4: line here to help us break down the huge news
Speaker 4: about there.
Speaker 1: Let's bring Jeremy in. Jeremy, how you doing.
Speaker 6: All right? You know, pins and needles, hoping that this
Speaker 6: goes through.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so let's actually let's start back in May to
Speaker 5: bring people up to up to speed here.
Speaker 1: So May May of twenty twenty four, that was the.
Speaker 5: Maybe the first time since the November twenty twenty three
Speaker 5: exchange of prisoners between Israel and Masha there was that
Speaker 5: one week ceasefire. What happens in what happens in May
Speaker 5: and what has what has kind of changed since then
Speaker 5: that got us to this place.
Speaker 6: Well, in May, Joe Biden comes out publicly and says
Speaker 6: that he's reached what he called the monumental point in
Speaker 6: the seasfire negotiation and that he has gotten assurances from
Speaker 6: Is that they'll move forward with a deal and the
Speaker 6: basic outlines of it are almost identical to what is
Speaker 6: now being negotiated. That's the first thing that should should
Speaker 6: just be put on the table they move forward. Then
Speaker 6: they get the United Nations Security Council to officially endorse
Speaker 6: this what they called the Biden Framework, But actually many
Speaker 6: of the tenets of it came from this sort of
Speaker 6: backdoor discussions between Anthony blinkln Brett McGirk, Bill Burns, the
Speaker 6: director of the CIA, and the Israelis to make sure
Speaker 6: that when Biden goes out and says, hey, this thing
Speaker 6: is monumental, that it wasn't going to like blow up
Speaker 6: in the White House's face. Well, lo and behold. Then
Speaker 6: Hamas is presented with these terms. There's the back and
Speaker 6: forth that always happens in these which is at the
Speaker 6: technical level. So when you hear people saying, oh, Israel
Speaker 6: accepted this or Hamas accepted this, what they're talking about
Speaker 6: usually is they've accepted the broad framework. And then where
Speaker 6: the real sort of problems start to occur, as when
Speaker 6: you start talking about technical details. For instance, you know,
Speaker 6: as of this morning, there were still there was still
Speaker 6: back and forth going on in Doha over a number
Speaker 6: of technical issues. The Israelis didn't provide maps to the
Speaker 6: Palestinian side showing where their forces would be withdrawn from
Speaker 6: and where they would be repositioned. And the Palestinians are
Speaker 6: concerned that if they leave any vagueness, the Israelis are
Speaker 6: going to exploit it. So I just give that as
Speaker 6: like one example. So you have technical issues, and all
Speaker 6: indications are that these issues right now are being resolved,
Speaker 6: but going back to over the summer, they then get
Speaker 6: to that phase of it where you normally would be
Speaker 6: discussing like implementation, and then the Israelis start to put
Speaker 6: in what Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad negotiators said totally
Speaker 6: new terms that had to do with the Israelis wanting
Speaker 6: to remain in Rafa, to keep control of the Philadelphi corridor,
Speaker 6: to keep control of the net Serene corridor. So Hamas
Speaker 6: is saying, wait, wait a minute, we agreed to what
Speaker 6: Biden said was a monumental framework that the United Nations endorse.
Speaker 6: We now need more time, and then they start the narrative, Oh,
Speaker 6: Hamas refuses to accept the deal. Well, then what happens
Speaker 6: is you have this back and forth where the Americans
Speaker 6: come back to the Arab mediators who say to Hamas, listen,
Speaker 6: would you accept this phrasing in the deal that the
Speaker 6: Americans have said Israel will accept if you guys do.
Speaker 6: Hamas then deliberates on it, and then on July second,
Speaker 6: Hamas officially informs the mediators from Qatar and Egypt, yes,
Speaker 6: we will accept the American amended ceasefire proposal. The Americans
Speaker 6: then go back to Israel and Nenya, who says no, no, no,
Speaker 6: no no. The circumstances have changed, and then what happens
Speaker 6: is you have this string of assassinations where Israel assassinates
Speaker 6: Ismail Hania, the top negotiator for Hamas, and they do
Speaker 6: it in Tehran at a guesthouse that's controlled by the
Speaker 6: most elite military force in Iran. You then have the
Speaker 6: the pager bomb plum, the pager bomb plot in Lebanon,
Speaker 6: the wiping out of not only the senior echelons of
Speaker 6: Hesbalab but also Hassan Nosrela. Then you have the bombings
Speaker 6: of Iran, the Iranians attacking Israel, the fall of the
Speaker 6: regime in Syria, which Netanyahu took credit for. And so
Speaker 6: basically what happened then Ryan last summer was that Biden
Speaker 6: goes out in front of the world. He says, hey,
Speaker 6: we're on the brink of something here. The Israelis just
Speaker 6: shove it in his face, turn around and then escalate
Speaker 6: the war even further, and Biden rewards them, not punishes them,
Speaker 6: rewards them by showering billions of dollars more in US
Speaker 6: weapons on them and then openly endorsing the Israelis setting
Speaker 6: fire to the Middle East. And basically there's been no
Speaker 6: discussion of a ceasefire since then until Donald Trump. First
Speaker 6: of all, he campaigns, you know, sort of to the
Speaker 6: left of Kamala Harris in some ways on this issue.
Speaker 6: It was a little bit contradictory because on the one hand,
Speaker 6: you have you know, Trump saying there's never been a
Speaker 6: more pro Israel president or candidate in American history, and
Speaker 6: he wants Netanyahu to finish the job. On the other hand,
Speaker 6: he does what the Democrats were doing. He goes and
Speaker 6: he meets with a ton of Arab political and religious
Speaker 6: and civic leaders, including in Michigan where you had this
Speaker 6: uncommitted movement where many logical Democratic voters were begging the
Speaker 6: Harris campaign to pay attention to them, and many many
Speaker 6: Arabs in the United States felt like they were just
Speaker 6: being kind of spat upon by the Democrats. And so
Speaker 6: whatever you think about Donald Trump's efforts, there was an
Speaker 6: actual effort there. Trump then wins the election and he
Speaker 6: starts saying things like there's going to be hell to
Speaker 6: pay if there's not a deal. Now, much of the
Speaker 6: reporting on that was you know, sort of spun as
Speaker 6: he's threatening Hamas that some you know, unknown horror is
Speaker 6: going to you know, befall Hamas. First of all, what
Speaker 6: worse could possibly happen to the Palestinian people of Gaza
Speaker 6: right now? I mean, this is a way of letting
Speaker 6: Joe Biden off the hook because this has been a
Speaker 6: scorched earth genocide. But if you really paid attention, what
Speaker 6: Trump was doing was saying not just to Hamas, this
Speaker 6: needs to get done, but also to Israel. And you know,
Speaker 6: there's a lot of people make fun of the people
Speaker 6: that Trump chooses for his positions, but you know, Trump
Speaker 6: is choosing people that he believes can quote unquote make
Speaker 6: a deal. So he taps Steve Whitkoff to be his
Speaker 6: Special Envoy to the Middle East, who is kind of
Speaker 6: a fellow real estate tycoon. And you know, by all accounts,
Speaker 6: what has occurred is that for his own reasons, Trump
Speaker 6: has made it very clear to the Israelis that a
Speaker 6: deal needs to be done in time for his inauguration.
Speaker 6: We can talk about what Trump's motivations might be here,
Speaker 6: but Trump is showing that the power of the office
Speaker 6: of the Presidency is vast, and it exposes the fact
Speaker 6: that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris systematically refused to ever
Speaker 6: take any actions, and there are many they could have
Speaker 6: taken to force a c fire. The US has enormous
Speaker 6: power and influence over Israel, and Joe Biden partially for
Speaker 6: his own ideological support of Israel and partially because these
Speaker 6: guys just got rickrolled by Netanyahu just never did it
Speaker 6: bed rolled.
Speaker 4: So let's put up a one because this obviously brings
Speaker 4: us to today. Israel and Hamas agree in principle as
Speaker 4: CBS News puts it to ceasefire and hostage deal. You
Speaker 4: guys reported that at drop site as well, and this
Speaker 4: is what we're here to talk about. But if we
Speaker 4: move on to a two Reuters flashes out some of
Speaker 4: the bullet points of the ceasefire deal in ways that
Speaker 4: I know Jeremy and Ryan both can help us break
Speaker 4: down a little bit troop withdrawal, increased aid, future governance
Speaker 4: of Gaza. So what can both of you hostage return
Speaker 4: obviously as part of that. So what can both of
Speaker 4: you tell us about for what's actually part of this
Speaker 4: tug of war? What's on the table right now? And
Speaker 4: how could it go wrong in the same way that Jeremy,
Speaker 4: we saw it, as you mentioned, go wrong back in
Speaker 4: the summer.
Speaker 6: So you know, this is structured as a three phase deal.
Speaker 6: Each of the phases are envisioned to be forty two days.
Speaker 6: The first phase of this emily would be the exchange
Speaker 6: of thirty three captives and hostages held in Gaza right
Speaker 6: now that are categorized as being in humanitarian releases. So
Speaker 6: this would be anyone under the age of nineteen, including
Speaker 6: you know, there are a couple of very small children
Speaker 6: that are still being held in Gaza, and we understand
Speaker 6: that the first three hostages that would be released in
Speaker 6: this exchange of captives would be the members of the
Speaker 6: Bebas family. People may remember that there was a nine
Speaker 6: month old baby, Kafir Bebas, who was taken from the
Speaker 6: kibbutz of near Oz on October seventh, along with his
Speaker 6: brother Ariel and the mother and father. And so the
Speaker 6: mother and those two children are widely believed to be
Speaker 6: the first three people that are going to be handed over.
Speaker 6: And then they've created a mathematical formula for each Israeli civilian,
Speaker 6: a certain number of Palestinian prisoners or captives are going
Speaker 6: to be released. You know, Israel still holding several hundred
Speaker 6: children minors in their custody. You know, we talk a
Speaker 6: lot about Israeli hostages. There are Palestinian hostages, you know,
Speaker 6: in the dozens and hundreds being held by Israel right now.
Speaker 6: Also there are going to be There are five female
Speaker 6: Israeli soldiers that are being held in Gaza, and the
Speaker 6: numbers start to increase in terms of the number of
Speaker 6: Palestinians that will be freed from Israeli prisons in return
Speaker 6: for any military figures. So the first round would include
Speaker 6: only these five female Israeli hostages or prisoners, and then
Speaker 6: you have also older people or sick people. This first
Speaker 6: phase would have what's called the temporary cessation of hostilities,
Speaker 6: meaning that there would be a ceasing of fire, but
Speaker 6: this is not a permanent ceasefire. And two weeks into
Speaker 6: this exchange where you would have a sort of in phases,
Speaker 6: Israelis and internationals being held in Gaza being released and
Speaker 6: then Palestinians being released as well. Two weeks into it,
Speaker 6: you then start to have discussions about the mechanism for
Speaker 6: implementing the second phase, and the second phase would start
Speaker 6: to increase the number of captives that are exchanged between
Speaker 6: the two sides. And it's in this phase where the
Speaker 6: draft agreement calls for an actual ceasefire and the withdrawal
Speaker 6: of Israeli forces. In that first phase, you'll start to
Speaker 6: have some pullback of the Israelis. There is still debate
Speaker 6: over kind of what kind of buffer zone is going
Speaker 6: to exist. The Israeli game, though, seems to be and
Speaker 6: this is certainly what people like Ben Gavie and Smotrich
Speaker 6: are openly saying, but it's also quite mainstream, is that
Speaker 6: the Israelis are approaching this from let's just view this
Speaker 6: as we're making a deal over phase one. Yes, Trump
Speaker 6: is telling us we need to have this more comprehensive agreement,
Speaker 6: but wink, wink, nod, nod. We know that it's very
Speaker 6: easy to say Humas violated this and we're back into
Speaker 6: the game. So the Palestinian negotiators I'm dealing with, they're
Speaker 6: very well aware of this, and this is part of
Speaker 6: why they're insisting on like really exact maps from the Israelis,
Speaker 6: really exact timeline, so that they can go back to
Speaker 6: the mediators and say, you know, this is a violation
Speaker 6: by Israel. And then the final phase has to do
Speaker 6: with reconstruction and who would govern Gaza. But a lot
Speaker 6: of people aren't even so focused on that right now.
Speaker 6: You know, for Palestinian people of Gaza, they need this
Speaker 6: to stop. And you know, we know that at least
Speaker 6: forty six thousand Palestinians have been killed. Those numbers are
Speaker 6: almost certainly a massive undercount, so you know, people are desperate.
Speaker 6: We're hearing this from our reporters on the ground inside
Speaker 6: of Gaza. It's a horror show that's happening. And Israel
Speaker 6: has a long history of really intensifying the attacks against
Speaker 6: Gaza before any kind of a deal is made. So
Speaker 6: that's sort of where things stand right now. But I
Speaker 6: don't think we can understate the role that Donald Trump's
Speaker 6: posture has played in the timing of this.
Speaker 4: It's it is.
Speaker 6: If this gets pulled off, the timing will be almost
Speaker 6: entirely a result not of Joe Biden's supposed tireless work
Speaker 6: around the clock, but of Donald Trump basically saying it
Speaker 6: is over. And you know, maybe it's over for a
Speaker 6: few weeks, but you know it's going to be over
Speaker 6: at some point for some period of time, and it's
Speaker 6: largely going to because of Trump's intervention.
Speaker 1: And you don't have to take that from us.
Speaker 5: You can take that from Israeli media and Israeli politicians,
Speaker 5: and to you to your point about Ben Gavie, we
Speaker 5: could put up a three here. There is this remarkable
Speaker 5: moment where on Monday the was Anthony Blanken was giving
Speaker 5: a speech saying that we're all just sitting around here
Speaker 5: waiting for Hamas to accept the deal. After Hamas had
Speaker 5: publicly accepted the basically accepted the framework. Meanwhile, I've got
Speaker 5: Ben Gavere here, who on in a post and also
Speaker 5: in a speech that he posts to Twitter, said very
Speaker 5: openly and it admitted that over the past year and
Speaker 5: a half he and his political forces had scuttled, you know,
Speaker 5: many many hostage deals by using their political power to
Speaker 5: block those deals. It was kind of a remarkable split
Speaker 5: screen where you have Blincoln just you can't tell if
Speaker 5: he's just a kind of confused old man with dementia
Speaker 5: who's just kind of repeating what he's been saying. You know,
Speaker 5: historically it was never true before when he was saying
Speaker 5: it as you laid out, but it was so flagrantly
Speaker 5: a lie on Monday when you to have the entire
Speaker 5: Israeli media on the right and people like Ben Gavern's
Speaker 5: Mochriz saying this is a horrible deal. It's being forced
Speaker 5: on us, while at the same time Blincoln saying it's
Speaker 5: a Hamas that won't take the deal.
Speaker 1: What do you draw, how.
Speaker 5: Would you characterize the as kind of Israeli media response
Speaker 5: and what conclusions can you draw?
Speaker 4: And before Germany you answer that, Let's roll this clip
Speaker 4: of blinken.
Speaker 1: This is a yes, people can hear what he says.
Speaker 7: We assess that Hamas has recruited almost as many new
Speaker 7: militants as it is lost. That is a recipe for
Speaker 7: an enduring insurgency and perpetual war. The longer the war
Speaker 7: goes on, the worse the Umani Tran situation gets in.
Speaker 5: Gozen, right, and there's blink and saying that they have
Speaker 5: not accomplished anything.
Speaker 8: Go ahead, Yeah, I.
Speaker 6: Mean, first just to take you know what Blincoln just
Speaker 6: said there, and then I'll trust the ben Gever part
Speaker 6: of this. You know, this is counterinsurgency, you know history
Speaker 6: one oh one. I mean, if you put people in
Speaker 6: an open air prison camp, if you deprive them of
Speaker 6: the right to nonviolent resistance, if you deprive them of
Speaker 6: food and put them on a calorie restricted diet, which
Speaker 6: the Israelis have done. If you dehumanize them, kill their parents,
Speaker 6: repeatedly tell them that there's no such thing as a Palestinian,
Speaker 6: you're going to leave the only option available to people
Speaker 6: who believe in fighting for their dignity to take up
Speaker 6: arms against their occupier or the colonial power that's invading them. So,
Speaker 6: you know, we could have told Anthony blinkn that this
Speaker 6: would happen on October sixth if they don't stop this
Speaker 6: policy that you're going and it's and by the way,
Speaker 6: it's not just that people are like joining Hamas. What
Speaker 6: we're talking about here is people deciding that they're going
Speaker 6: to be part of the armed resistance against what they
Speaker 6: put what they very clearly view as a brutal, gratuitous
Speaker 6: colonial occupying power backed by the United States and other
Speaker 6: major Western powers. So you know, Anthony Blinkin is going
Speaker 6: to be like for years to come, waking up in
Speaker 6: the morning going to his mirror and saying it's up
Speaker 6: to Hamas. Now, I mean, he's got some weird tick
Speaker 6: where he's just constantly lying about that dimension of this.
Speaker 6: And we could talk about, you know, blinkn A as
Speaker 6: a kind of neo Kissinger at some point. But to
Speaker 6: get back to Ben Gavier, you know, part of this
Speaker 6: is true that the fact that Netyahu's political stability depended
Speaker 6: on building this coalition with Benavier and Smotrich. But in
Speaker 6: recent weeks and months, he's he's been able to broaden
Speaker 6: his coalition out a little bit, so he doesn't actually
Speaker 6: need their votes in order to get this thing through.
Speaker 6: And I think part of this plays to net Yahu's
Speaker 6: favor to sort of, you know, have these guys on
Speaker 6: his right flank making this kind of noise. I mean,
Speaker 6: net and Yahu is the one that sabotaged the deal,
Speaker 6: not Bengavier. And it wasn't only because Smotrich and Ben
Speaker 6: Gavier were there. It was because Netanyaho knew he had
Speaker 6: the political support and it wasn't going to harm him
Speaker 6: politically to keep sabotaging these deals. But now you have
Speaker 6: a different equation where he doesn't so much need these
Speaker 6: guys and you know, Trump and company. I think part
Speaker 6: of this for net Yahoo is he's hoping that by
Speaker 6: working with Trump that Trump is going to help him
Speaker 6: politically as well. It's not entirely about the Gaza deal.
Speaker 6: You know, there are questions about what have Trump people
Speaker 6: offered net Yahu in response. Certainly one of the big
Speaker 6: prizes would be normalization with Saudi Arabia. That would be
Speaker 6: a huge victory for net Nyahu, especially if it doesn't
Speaker 6: include a very clear establishment of a Palestinian state. There's
Speaker 6: the you know, belligerence towards Iran and the potential to
Speaker 6: start striking Iranian nuclear sites or you know, down the
Speaker 6: line to try to enact regime change. Trump has been
Speaker 6: giving indications that may that may not be the full
Speaker 6: direction that he wants to go in, but let's just
Speaker 6: say it's out there. Annexation of the West Bank, these
Speaker 6: are all things that potentially are on the table. But
Speaker 6: net Yahoo primarily is concerned with Net Nyahu. Let's let's
Speaker 6: you know, keep that very clear. And I think that
Speaker 6: part of what's happening here is that there is some
Speaker 6: behind the scenes maneuvering between Netanyahu's camp and Trump's camp
Speaker 6: to look at how can Net Nyaho's neck be saved
Speaker 6: politically as part of this apparent capitulation on the Gaza ceasefire.
Speaker 8: Terms.
Speaker 4: When reports that won't help we can put a five
Speaker 4: up include this one about Steve Whitcoff basically calling now,
Speaker 4: who's bluff about Chabot. I think this was from Haretz,
Speaker 4: and it makes me think, Jeremy that the clip of
Speaker 4: Ben Gavie, we already talked about instances like this. You know,
Speaker 4: a week from now, Donald Trump will be the president
Speaker 4: of the United States, and I can only think that,
Speaker 4: unlike with Biden and Blanken, that telegraphing from people like
Speaker 4: Ben Gavier will infuriate a potential Trump administration.
Speaker 5: Going yeah, and before you answer, I just wanted to
Speaker 5: read for people what I think is an interesting the
Speaker 5: kind of choice that people in Washington would mock Trump
Speaker 5: for but clearly panned out for him.
Speaker 1: And this is from Haretz.
Speaker 5: They write Witcoff and this is Witkoff is the guy
Speaker 5: who uh you know, called up whose aides and we're
Speaker 5: going to meet on Saturday.
Speaker 1: Aids are like, well, you know that's the Sabbath. Can't
Speaker 1: really bb can't really meet.
Speaker 5: And Witkoff knows that who's secular, doesn't doesn't care about
Speaker 5: He's like, don't get me this crap. We're meeting on Saturday,
Speaker 5: and they meet on Saturday that gives him the kind
Speaker 5: of dominance in the meeting, and he steam rolls Nan
Speaker 5: Yah who, how Retz writes, Witcoff is a Jewish real
Speaker 5: estate investor and developer who is close to Trump. He
Speaker 5: doesn't have the background of the kind of people who
Speaker 5: usually filled diplomatic roles. Quote wick Coough isn't a diplomat,
Speaker 5: He doesn't talk like a diplomat. He has no interest
Speaker 5: in diplomatic manners and diplomatic protocols, says a senior Israeli
Speaker 5: diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity. He's a businessman
Speaker 5: who wants to reach a deal quickly and charges ahead
Speaker 5: unusually aggressively. So that kind of appointment is the kind
Speaker 5: that gets mocked here in DC. But that does seem
Speaker 5: like the kind of guy you want to send into
Speaker 5: the meeting and tell Nen Yaho, what part of this
Speaker 5: don't you understand?
Speaker 4: Well, there's a difference between Rex Tillerson and Steve Whitcoffe's exactly, yes, trying.
Speaker 6: To right so, and I mean the Rex Tillerson analogy,
Speaker 6: it's a really it's actually a really good one because
Speaker 6: you know Tillerson, and I think we're going to see
Speaker 6: some of this with like with little Marco Rubio as well,
Speaker 6: go down where you know the people that end up
Speaker 6: in Trump's orbit that have been part of the machine
Speaker 6: or part of kind of the you know, the the
Speaker 6: elite inner circle, they always have kind of a split
Speaker 6: loyalty from Trump's perspective. They're not just loyal to Trump,
Speaker 6: they also are thinking about sort of the bigger picture
Speaker 6: of the American empire and American institution. And so, you know,
Speaker 6: when Trump has like kind of his own people there,
Speaker 6: on the one hand, it causes like, you know, sort
Speaker 6: of the apocalypse has come to town among the blob.
Speaker 6: But on the other hand, I think if you're someone
Speaker 6: like Yahoo and you've got like, you know, Steve Whitcoff,
Speaker 6: someone none of these people had ever heard of before
Speaker 6: coming in, but you know he's there for Trump, it's
Speaker 6: like you're talking to Trump. Whereas if you have like
Speaker 6: an Anthony Blinkn there, you can manage Anthony blink and
Speaker 6: you can spin Antony Blink and you can make an
Speaker 6: absolute fool of Anthony Blinkn. But in this case, it's
Speaker 6: like Trump kind of mafia style. It's like, this is
Speaker 6: my consiglieri that you're going to be talking to, and
Speaker 6: if you what you say to him, you say to me,
Speaker 6: that can be very effective. Whatever we think about it,
Speaker 6: whatever norms it breaks, it can be very effective. I
Speaker 6: do want a caution here, one note of caution. While
Speaker 6: I do think that, you know, there are truths to
Speaker 6: all of this, and I've also heard it from the
Speaker 6: Palestinian side that they're saying, like, you know, somehow Trump's
Speaker 6: people have gotten like issue X to be a non
Speaker 6: issue now. So, like I've heard, tangible results have been
Speaker 6: achieved because of the shift in tactics. That's real. But
Speaker 6: I also think that net and Yahoo and some of
Speaker 6: his people might be playing up some of this for
Speaker 6: their own reasons. It sends some of the fire toward Trump,
Speaker 6: who's enormously popular in Israel. This is by no means
Speaker 6: going to damage Trump's standing in Israel, no matter how
Speaker 6: many commentators whine about it on TV. So I would
Speaker 6: just be careful. I wouldn't over sell the idea that
Speaker 6: like Trump's people really put Netanyahu in a corner. I
Speaker 6: think there's truth to it, and I've heard it also
Speaker 6: from the Palestinian side, But I do think that there
Speaker 6: is some spin at play here because it in a
Speaker 6: way it does benefit Netnyaho and I think met Yahoo's
Speaker 6: probas at the end of the day is his own
Speaker 6: political and personal fate more than it is anything about Israel.
Speaker 6: And in that way, he and Trump have some great similarities.
Speaker 4: And Trump reposted that wild Jeffrey Sachs critique of Netna
Speaker 4: who on truth Social at the.
Speaker 1: End of the day as well.
Speaker 6: You know, if you talk to Palestinians too, they many
Speaker 6: Palestinians who follow this stuff closely are aware also of
Speaker 6: a variety of things that happened during Trump's first term
Speaker 6: where Trump genuinely, for instance, seemed to like Mahmud debas.
Speaker 6: You know, Trump really seemed to be interested in some
Speaker 6: form of a deal that would lead to Palestinian statehood,
Speaker 6: something that Netnyaho would never even consider under Joe Biden.
Speaker 6: You know, so there there are wild cards here, and
Speaker 6: you know, again we've talked about this on the show before.
Speaker 6: Trump at the end of the day, he's not like
Speaker 6: a normal, ordinary person, but he is not a creature
Speaker 6: of the Washington swamp, and that can be dangerous in
Speaker 6: some ways, but it also has its benefits. He really
Speaker 6: really doesn't care about what the Henry Kissingers of the world,
Speaker 6: or Anthony Blinkn's of the world for that matter, believe
Speaker 6: should be the norm of America's standing in the world.
Speaker 6: It cuts both ways, but in this case, it could
Speaker 6: at least give some relief to the Palestinians of Gaza
Speaker 6: who are suffering under an unconscionable genocide that Joe Biden
Speaker 6: could have ended long ago.
Speaker 5: And there's also been reporting over the last year that
Speaker 5: Miriam Addelson, Sheldon Adelson's widow, I guess, offered something like
Speaker 5: one hundred million dollars a Trump's campaign, basically in exchange
Speaker 5: for a direct quid pro quo of allowing Israel to
Speaker 5: annex the West Bank. Talk a little bit about what's
Speaker 5: going on in the West Bank the last few days,
Speaker 5: and what do you think the price might be for
Speaker 5: the West Bank to get this ceasefire.
Speaker 4: And let's also note Miriam Maidelson is just announced yesterday
Speaker 4: co hosting an inaugural ball with Mark Zuckerberg on Trump's behalf.
Speaker 4: Still very much just.
Speaker 6: Wild bedfellows are emerging in this whole thing, whole other discussion. Look,
Speaker 6: it's a it's an incendiary situation right now in the
Speaker 6: West Bank. I mean we had just last night the
Speaker 6: Israelis did air strikes in Janine, killing you know a
Speaker 6: number of people. The Palestinian Authority itself, which is viewed
Speaker 6: by many Palestinians as kind of an extension or an
Speaker 6: agent of the Israeli occupation, has been waging paramilitary campaign
Speaker 6: to go after armed resistance factions right before the Israelis
Speaker 6: actually did this book there.
Speaker 5: People should read, by the way, Marian Barguti's piece and
Speaker 5: drop site on the ground reporting about this PA led
Speaker 5: assault on fighters, and yeah it was.
Speaker 6: I mean, it's the it's the most you know, significant
Speaker 6: military operation that the Palestinian authority has done under the
Speaker 6: areas of its nominal control in recent memory. And you know,
Speaker 6: people in the West Bank, I think are are now
Speaker 6: living in a state of incredible uncertainty. You and and Dane.
Speaker 6: You have new you know, really empowered, violent extremist settlers
Speaker 6: that are attacking Palestinians, stealing Palestinian land. They're being backed
Speaker 6: by the official forces of the Israeli state. You have
Speaker 6: net Nyahu and his government moving forward with trying to
Speaker 6: annex further territory, build more settlements. You then have the
Speaker 6: Palestinian Authority engaging in its paramilitary operations inside of the
Speaker 6: West Bank, and now Israel once again bombing in the
Speaker 6: in the West Bank. If there's a Gaza ceasefire deal, Uh,
Speaker 6: then I think you're going to see and I'm hearing
Speaker 6: this from Palestinians on the ground and intensification of Israeli
Speaker 6: operations in the West Bank itself. So, you know, the
Speaker 6: even even though we may get a break from some
Speaker 6: of this, the overarching reality is that this is unresolved
Speaker 6: and the Palestinians as a people are remain very much
Speaker 6: in danger. I also think though, that it is evidence
Speaker 6: that if the Palestinians had not resisted Israel, they would
Speaker 6: have been erased a long time ago. And you know,
Speaker 6: Hamas certainly is going to have to answer its own
Speaker 6: questions from its own people about decisions that it made
Speaker 6: over the course of the past fifteen and sixteen months.
Speaker 6: But at the end of the day, this is not
Speaker 6: a total victory for NETANYAHUU the likes of which he
Speaker 6: claimed he was going to get. This deal doesn't say
Speaker 6: Hamas is gone. This deal doesn't say Hamas is not
Speaker 6: allowed to participate in politics. And Anthony Blincoln put a
Speaker 6: very fine point on it. Even in a discombobulated way,
Speaker 6: resistance is growing in Gaza and the West Bank. It's
Speaker 6: not being stamped out. You can't kill your way to victory.
Speaker 6: This was what Bush and Cheney thought they could do
Speaker 6: with their you know, neo con wars that many Democrats back.
Speaker 6: It just history just shows it never works. Look at Afghanistan, Jeremy.
Speaker 4: I was going to say the same thing. Blincoln's point
Speaker 4: is actually so self defeating if you're considered it in
Speaker 4: that context. And before we let you go, I just
Speaker 4: want to get your reaction to some of these mounting criticisms.
Speaker 4: I mean, they've been there all along, but especially pitched
Speaker 4: right now from hostage families. So this is a six.
Speaker 4: We can put this up. It's a vo so you'll
Speaker 4: see on video hostage families as really hostage families saying
Speaker 4: that they have received threats or families of the kidnapped
Speaker 4: have received threats that their loved ones would not appear
Speaker 4: on the returney list if they continued to make noise,
Speaker 4: and some of the families back down because they felt threatened.
Speaker 4: That's the translation. And if we move on to a seven,
Speaker 4: you can actually see more of this. This is from
Speaker 4: we are all hostages, who says net and Yah Who's
Speaker 4: coalition members attack hostage families on a weekly basis because
Speaker 4: they despise them. Jeremy, what are the politics or how
Speaker 4: do these politics influence net Yahoo in the days ahead?
Speaker 6: I mean, this is an utterly sickening dynamic. I mean,
Speaker 6: look at the way that the families of the Israelis
Speaker 6: being held in Gaza have been treated. Throughout the course
Speaker 6: of the past fifteen months. Net Yahu and his supporters
Speaker 6: in the government have used the fact that there are
Speaker 6: Israeli captives hostages in Gaza as a major political cudgel
Speaker 6: to defend Israel's genocide, and yet at every turn when
Speaker 6: they could have returned them, I mean, how is it
Speaker 6: that they have not made a deal to get some
Speaker 6: of the elderly people out or children. You know, and
Speaker 6: I've been very clear from the beginning, no one ever
Speaker 6: should be taking children captive hostage, harming them in any way.
Speaker 6: Those people should have been released long ago, and yes,
Speaker 6: Hamas should answer questions for that, but also Israel is
Speaker 6: the main reason why they haven't been released, and those
Speaker 6: families deserve the support of the world when they're saying
Speaker 6: do anything to get our loved ones out of there,
Speaker 6: because at the under other end of that that do
Speaker 6: anything means stop killing the children and the elderly and
Speaker 6: the sick of Gaza as well. I mean they've been
Speaker 6: used as a political football and to be told, if
Speaker 6: you don't shut up, we're going to push your family
Speaker 6: members further down the list and into the second phase
Speaker 6: or the third phase of this. I mean, this is
Speaker 6: just morally reprehensible behavior and.
Speaker 5: Unfortunately not shocking. It's hostage taking. It's literally hostage taking.
Speaker 5: To say that we will keep your family member held
Speaker 5: hostage unless you do x is That is hostage taking,
Speaker 5: even if you're outsourcing the hostage taking in that situation.
Speaker 6: It's also Israel's policy on Palestinians in general, which is,
Speaker 6: if you don't bend the knee and agree to subjugation
Speaker 6: and colonialism and to live as a second or third
Speaker 6: class citizen, if we even allow you to live, then
Speaker 6: you're going to be subjected to economic, military, and political
Speaker 6: warfare as long as you walk this earth. It's a
Speaker 6: microcosm of that broader mentality that leads to things like
Speaker 6: a war of annihilation against an overwhelmingly civilian population of Gaza.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and last question for you from your source is
Speaker 5: when are they expecting? When can when can we expect
Speaker 5: a kind of final announcement here.
Speaker 6: You know, Ryan, I I'd be an idiot if I
Speaker 6: answered that question, because you know, when you when you well,
Speaker 6: I will. I will give you guys one vignette. You know.
Speaker 6: A few days ago, I was talking to a negotiator
Speaker 6: from the Palestinian resistance. We we all say Hamas, but
Speaker 6: there's multiple groups that are involved with the negotiation. It's
Speaker 6: not just Thamas. And they said that they they had
Speaker 6: to affirm in no uncertain terms to the mediators that
Speaker 6: there would be no leaks about this.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 6: They they also want this deal to go through, you know.
Speaker 6: So I had indications, Oh, it's it looks like it's
Speaker 6: going to be you know today, But then you have
Speaker 6: these hiccups happen with technical discussions. So I think there's
Speaker 6: a high likelihood that it's going to happen before Trump's inauguration.
Speaker 6: But the devil is in the details, and net Yahoo
Speaker 6: has been known to pull eleventh hour tricks. So you know,
Speaker 6: I'm I'm not so naive as to say, oh, Ryan, well,
Speaker 6: my sources are telling me today. It all depends on
Speaker 6: what happens with these remaining technical discussions. But there are
Speaker 6: indications that it should happen before Trump's inauguration.
Speaker 5: All right, So up next, we're going to talk about
Speaker 5: a new survey out that shows that among the people
Speaker 5: who voted for Biden in twenty twenty and then did
Speaker 5: not vote for Kamala Harris in twenty twenty four, Kamala,
Speaker 5: refusing to break with Biden on Gaza is cited as
Speaker 5: their number one reason they.
Speaker 1: Decided not to vote. We'll talk about that in a second.
Speaker 5: From twenty twenty to twenty twenty four, Democrats saw a
Speaker 5: staggering drop off and support at the presidential level, with
Speaker 5: some nineteen million people who voted for Joe Biden staying
Speaker 5: home or not mailing in.
Speaker 1: Their ballots in twenty twenty four.
Speaker 5: A new survey conducted by YouGov suggests Biden's support for
Speaker 5: Israel's unrelenting assault on Gaza played a surprisingly large role
Speaker 5: in the decision making of those previous Biden supporters who
Speaker 5: didn't vote. The top reason those non voters cited above
Speaker 5: the economy at twenty four percent an immigration at eleven percent,
Speaker 5: was Gaza, which a full twenty nine percent cited as
Speaker 5: the top reason they didn't cast a vote.
Speaker 1: In twenty twenty four.
Speaker 5: Looking narrowly at states that swung from Biden in twenty
Speaker 5: twenty to Trump in twenty twenty four, the number is smaller,
Speaker 5: but in those states, twenty percent still cited.
Speaker 1: Gaza as the reason they didn't vote.
Speaker 5: Again, the poll was paid for it by the Institute
Speaker 5: for Middle East Understanding, which has been an outspoken critic
Speaker 5: of Israel's assault on Gaza now before firmly demonstrating that
Speaker 5: Gaza costs Democrats the election. A handful of caveats are important,
Speaker 5: So even if October seventh and the resulting genocide had
Speaker 5: never happened, it's fair to assume some number of those
Speaker 5: non voters still would not have voted and would have
Speaker 5: cited a different top reason for not voting. Citing a
Speaker 5: top reason for not voting is different than it being
Speaker 5: the only reason that you didn't vote. And because the
Speaker 5: turnout drop off was smaller or in swing states, Gaza
Speaker 5: may not have been decisive on its own. Whenever surveys
Speaker 5: confirm views we already hold, or tell us things we
Speaker 5: want to be true, it's worth approaching their findings with
Speaker 5: increased skepticism. Still, even the most biased pole can only
Speaker 5: manufacture so much of a response. Even if the true
Speaker 5: numbers aren't as stark as this survey found, the direction
Speaker 5: that it points in is clear. Biden's ruthless support for
Speaker 5: Israel's genocide and the refusal of Harris to break with
Speaker 5: him hurt her among voters who stayed home. A previous
Speaker 5: survey taken during the election by Yugov and similarly sponsored
Speaker 5: by IMEU, found strong evidence that nominee Kamala Harris would
Speaker 5: be significantly boosted by breaking with Biden on Gaza and
Speaker 5: applying real pressure on Israel.
Speaker 1: Harris chose not to do so.
Speaker 5: Breaking with Biden on Gaza could have had a knock
Speaker 5: on effects elsewhere. As Harris never successfully answered a question
Speaker 5: that dogged her throughout her campaign, what would she have
Speaker 5: done diff differently than Biden or what would she do
Speaker 5: differently than Biden in the future, Harris eventually settled on
Speaker 5: the unsatisfying answerence. My presidency will not be a continuation
Speaker 5: of Joe Biden's presidency. And like every new and like
Speaker 5: every new president comes into office, I'll bring my life
Speaker 5: experiences something like that.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm my name's Kamala Harris. I'm not Joe Biden.
Speaker 5: Now in one emblematic response, she has a debate for instance,
Speaker 5: check this one out.
Speaker 9: Clearly, I am not Joe Biden, and I am certainly
Speaker 9: not Donald Trump. And what I do offer is a
Speaker 9: new generation of leadership for our country, one who believes
Speaker 9: in what is possible, one who brings a sense of
Speaker 9: optimism about what we can do instead of always disparaging
Speaker 9: the American people. I believe in what we can do
Speaker 9: to strengthen our small businesses, which is why I have
Speaker 9: a plan. Let's talk about our plans.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, so that's not an answer.
Speaker 5: But breaking with Biden on Gaza, of course, that risk
Speaker 5: losing voters who supported his policy, but a close look
Speaker 5: at this survey shows that the risk was low compared
Speaker 5: to the reward from breaking with him. Voters who were
Speaker 5: with Biden in twenty twenty and stuck with Harris in
Speaker 5: twenty twenty four were asked if breaking with him on
Speaker 5: Gaza would make them more or less enthusiastic about voting
Speaker 5: for Harris, and by a thirty five to five percent margin,
Speaker 5: they said breaking with him would have made them more
Speaker 5: enthusiastic to vote for Kamala Harris, with the remainder saying
Speaker 5: it would have made no difference. Non voters said that
Speaker 5: if she had broken with Biden on Gaza, they'd have
Speaker 5: been more likely to vote for her by a thirty
Speaker 5: six to ten margin. Meanwhile, Democrat's unshakable commitment to the
Speaker 5: war also blended with concerns that the party was not
Speaker 5: focused on issues that mattered to Americans, as I argued previously.
Speaker 5: The survey, meanwhile, showed that the issue was most salient
Speaker 5: among whitef voters, thirty four percent of which said it
Speaker 5: was the top reason they didn't vote for Harris and
Speaker 5: Hispanic voters at twenty seven percent, while less so with
Speaker 5: black voters at just nine percent. And so emily like
Speaker 5: like I was saying, you always have to take polls
Speaker 5: like this with the grain of salt, and you can
Speaker 5: prime a poll. You can you know, if you're asking
Speaker 5: questions about Gaza, then maybe Gaza rises a little bit
Speaker 5: in your mind. If Gaza happens to be in the
Speaker 5: news when you pick up the phone, Poultures have found
Speaker 5: that that heavily influences how much you know, how much
Speaker 5: it comes up in an answer. If the news is
Speaker 5: talking about the deficit constantly, you call somebody up and
Speaker 5: ask them if they're concerned about the deficits, They're like, yeah,
Speaker 5: but there's if.
Speaker 1: The deficits not in the news, then it completely vanishes.
Speaker 1: From I ask on.
Speaker 4: October eighth about the deficit, you'll probably get different.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 5: So all that said, you can't manufacture a number that
Speaker 5: high if there isn't something.
Speaker 1: Real underneath it.
Speaker 5: Totally, and I do think that it blended more generally
Speaker 5: with the problems that Democrats had. If you lose that
Speaker 5: many voters nineteen million, and a third of them say
Speaker 5: that the top reason that they didn't vote for you
Speaker 5: was the way that you were because you didn't break
Speaker 5: with Biden on Gaza. That's millions of people. Not every
Speaker 5: single one of them votes for you, but if some do,
Speaker 5: that matters.
Speaker 4: Yeah. It reminds me of our DNC coverage actually, sort
Speaker 4: of walking through the protests. It was smaller. The protests,
Speaker 4: the demonstrations that the DNC were smaller than a lot
Speaker 4: of people expected, and the media kind of used that
Speaker 4: as an opportunity to brush aside that narrative. But actually,
Speaker 4: this was always going to be a marginal election. It
Speaker 4: was always going to be an election that came down
Speaker 4: to just a little sliver of a percentage in Michigan, Wisconsin,
Speaker 4: places like that. So it doesn't matter that the protest
Speaker 4: is smaller than people expected if it represents a small
Speaker 4: but significant chunk of the broader public. Like we were
Speaker 4: saying that this was going to be significant for a
Speaker 4: long time. And I wonder, Ryan, when you look at
Speaker 4: those numbers, you see perhaps something specifically about college kids,
Speaker 4: you know, Michigan, Michigan.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and we can put some We'll write about this
Speaker 5: at drop site and put the link and the poll
Speaker 5: in there. Yes, young people, certainly, it's not like you
Speaker 5: can see the numbers like like for young people, it's
Speaker 5: the it's a higher concern than it is for older people.
Speaker 4: Well, I'm going to say something. It's going to sound
Speaker 4: maybe a little crass, but I think for if you,
Speaker 4: if you're picking up on the vibes on TikTok and
Speaker 4: other places, over the course of the last you know,
Speaker 4: six months plus, it wasn't cool to like go out
Speaker 4: and vote Kamala Harris and put your eye voted sticker
Speaker 4: on if you were on a campus, it was kind
Speaker 4: of cringe because specifically because of this issue, because Democrats
Speaker 4: lost so much just moral credibility, I think with a
Speaker 4: lot of young people because of this.
Speaker 5: Issue, right, And so I think that's a good way
Speaker 5: of putting it. So in everybody probably experiences this in
Speaker 5: their own life. And actually, if you're watching the show,
Speaker 5: you might be the person in your social circle or
Speaker 5: maybe several you in your social circle watch this show
Speaker 5: and talk about it then you and then you talk
Speaker 5: about what you what you watched here and what you
Speaker 5: read elsewhere to your friends. And so your friends then
Speaker 5: are kind of on the on the outer rung there,
Speaker 5: they're they're getting informed by you, and we are informing
Speaker 5: you like that that that's kind of the direction that
Speaker 5: it goes.
Speaker 1: And so while you might love.
Speaker 5: What Lena Khan is doing, or you might love what
Speaker 5: the NLRB is doing for workers around the country, you're
Speaker 5: less likely to share that with your friends if at
Speaker 5: the same time they're facilitating a genocide.
Speaker 1: So you know what I'm not.
Speaker 5: I'm not I'm glad that Lena Khan's doing good stuff,
Speaker 5: but I'm not going knocking on doors telling people about
Speaker 5: it while they're doing this other evil thing. And so
Speaker 5: I think you're right that it became particularly on social media,
Speaker 5: whereas everybody's getting their news. Yeah, it just it became
Speaker 5: very uncool and unpleasant to like say nice things about
Speaker 5: people who were doing this blanket evil thing.
Speaker 4: I think that's exactly right, Like it literally fell out
Speaker 4: of fashion. And I don't mean that again in a
Speaker 4: pejorative sense, like politics for a lot of people, like
Speaker 4: if you're if you're looking at popular culture and it
Speaker 4: just sort of like osmosis creeps into our world. It
Speaker 4: just the vibes were sucked out of the Democratic Party
Speaker 4: with young people because of this.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And what worked for Biden in twenty twenty two
Speaker 5: on that level was that dark Brandon meme.
Speaker 4: Yeah, even though he was old, Like people say like, oh,
Speaker 4: Biden's so elderly, Nancy Pelosi so elderly, how could young
Speaker 4: people ever vote for them? It's like young people love
Speaker 4: Bernie Sanders. Yeah, love Bernie said Donald Trump just significantly
Speaker 4: improved a share of the youth vote. He's also old.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And think about why dark Brandon worked for that
Speaker 5: to land and for people to be able to say,
Speaker 5: Joe Biden is cool because you know, Lena Khan is cool.
Speaker 5: Because then all RP is cool because he got out
Speaker 5: of Afghanistan. What people had to do is flip his
Speaker 5: entire identity and creating new identity for him.
Speaker 4: It was ironic.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's like, okay, yeah, we acknowledge that Joe Biden sucks.
Speaker 5: We don't support Joe Biden. We support Dark Brand, his
Speaker 5: alter ego, his alter ego who is doing these cool things.
Speaker 5: And we're like, all right, you know what, we can't
Speaker 5: get much in the US. We'll take that that works
Speaker 5: for us. And it legitimately helped to boost the vibes
Speaker 5: and it worked. You're not doing a Dark Brand and
Speaker 5: meme with the lasers coming out of the eyes when
Speaker 5: he's vaporizing children on a daily basis, or with Kamala Harris.
Speaker 4: You can't keep Brat sticking right Like Bratt stuck for
Speaker 4: a few weeks, and then after it it just became impossible.
Speaker 4: It became extremely cringe because I think young people were
Speaker 4: so and if you're not on tech talk, I'm not
Speaker 4: on TikTok. Honestly, I try to pay his attention as
Speaker 4: much attention.
Speaker 1: As I catch joined. Just the other day, I saw
Speaker 1: it if I could get in right before they ban it.
Speaker 4: Amazing stuff coming out of Ryan's learning process, which he's
Speaker 4: broadcasting on access. He's like, try and step by step
Speaker 4: through TikTok. It's great, but if you're if you were
Speaker 4: paying attention to that, it was so so clear. And
Speaker 4: this is again why a lot of Hawks want to
Speaker 4: just ban TikTok, because the propaganda was not working on
Speaker 4: this particular issue, like this was a huge top line
Speaker 4: problem for young people towards the Biden administration that Kamala
Speaker 4: Harris represented.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it just so it's not it's not Gaza alone,
Speaker 5: but Gaza prevented Harris from getting any any momentum with
Speaker 5: people who would have then been interested in talking about
Speaker 5: the other things. Meanwhile, she wouldn't even support Lena Khan.
Speaker 5: She wouldn't even publicly come out and say that she
Speaker 5: would reappoint Lena.
Speaker 4: Con Now, she'd send Mark Cuban out to say that
Speaker 4: they're not going to yes.
Speaker 1: So you know, maybe it was you know, maybe she
Speaker 1: never had a shot.
Speaker 4: But I don't know. Well yet, you you crunched some numbers.
Speaker 4: People can go back and look in twenty twenty about
Speaker 4: Joe Biden, who I think is actually a weaker candidate
Speaker 4: in some levels than Kamala Harris, and how young voters
Speaker 4: in Pennsylvania probably put him over the edge.
Speaker 1: So yeah, that's real, absolutely.
Speaker 4: All right, let's move on to Pete Heigsath's wild confirmation
Speaker 4: hearing yesterday. Ryan, you said that it was a wild one.
Speaker 4: I said it was sort of, by trump Ara standards,
Speaker 4: a medium one, which is still pretty wild.
Speaker 1: The sex and the partying and the and the like.
Speaker 4: Drag Queen's drunk senators. So this is like Stefan like this.
Speaker 4: The Heike Seth hearing had everything it very much did.
Speaker 4: All right, Well, let's take a look here at the
Speaker 4: opening statement that Pete Heikesseth came out with when he
Speaker 4: was speaking before the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday, and
Speaker 4: it went for almost four and a half hours. It
Speaker 4: was really long. They did not go to a second
Speaker 4: round of questioning, interestingly enough, but it was over four hours,
Speaker 4: so there was plenty of time to question Pete Heiseth.
Speaker 4: Here's how he started though, this is be one.
Speaker 10: Thank you for figuratively and literally having my back.
Speaker 6: You are a missus.
Speaker 1: Not only that, you are a perfect fine.
Speaker 10: I want to thank the authorities for the swift reaction
Speaker 10: to that outburst, right, and.
Speaker 4: Said that was a democratic senator while our mics are
Speaker 4: off from the back of the room. If you were
Speaker 4: listening to this and didn't.
Speaker 1: Basically that was a democratic senator.
Speaker 4: It was actually like an old ponytail haired hippie. But
Speaker 4: you know, same thing actually in some cases. But anyway,
Speaker 4: so that's what happened. There were three disruptions. That disruptions.
Speaker 4: I think like during his opening statement, it got off
Speaker 4: to a rocky start. He was able to finish. And
Speaker 4: let's just run through some of the most contentious exchanges.
Speaker 4: Let's go here to Senator Tim kra Tim Kaine, who
Speaker 4: of the many people that brought up, predictably the character
Speaker 4: questions related to Pete Heike Seth, reports about infidelity, reports
Speaker 4: about assault, reports about intoxication at work. Tim Kaine had
Speaker 4: the most explosive exchange with Pete Heigsas. So let's roll this.
Speaker 11: That occurred in Monterey, California in October twenty seventeen. At
Speaker 11: that time, you were still married to your second wife, correct,
Speaker 11: I believe so, and you had just fathered a child
Speaker 11: by a woman who would later become your third wife.
Speaker 10: Correct, Senator. I was falsely charged, fully investigated, and completely cleared.
Speaker 11: So you think you are completely cleared because you committed
Speaker 11: no crime. That's your definition of cleared. You had just
Speaker 11: fathered a child two months before by a woman that
Speaker 11: was not your wife. I am shocked that you would
Speaker 11: stand here and say you are completely cleared. Can you
Speaker 11: so casually cheat on a second wife and cheat on
Speaker 11: the mother of a child that had been born two
Speaker 11: months before and you tell us you are completely cleared?
Speaker 8: How is that a complete clear?
Speaker 4: And it actually even got I think that kept going.
Speaker 4: The level of intensity with Tim Kine kept going.
Speaker 5: Later he's like, we have it on the record source
Speaker 5: who says that, like you got wasted as a strip
Speaker 5: club and tried to get up on stage and danced
Speaker 5: with the dancers, had a sexual harassment claim file against you.
Speaker 5: Shouldn't that be disqualifying? Like the charge that the dude
Speaker 5: is a dog? I think sticks like the guy's dog.
Speaker 4: So let's go then to senator.
Speaker 1: Questions whether it's how relevant that is?
Speaker 12: Yeah?
Speaker 4: Well, and the question of whether it's sticks actually, I
Speaker 4: think is a really important one because here comes Senator
Speaker 4: Mark Wayne Mullen, Republican of Oklahoma, who went in on
Speaker 4: Tim Kaine the rest of the dogs.
Speaker 13: But you so quickly forget about that and then Senator
Speaker 13: Kane or I guess I better use the senator for
Speaker 13: Virginius starts bringing up the fact that what if you
Speaker 13: showed up drunk to your job? How many Senators have
Speaker 13: showed up drunk to vote at night? Have any of
Speaker 13: you guys asked them to step down and resign for
Speaker 13: their job? And don't tell me you haven't seen it,
Speaker 13: because I know you have. And then how many senators
Speaker 13: do you know have got a divorce before cheating on
Speaker 13: their wives? Did you ask them to step down?
Speaker 4: No?
Speaker 13: But it's for show, you guys, make sure you make
Speaker 13: a big show and point out the hypocrisy because a
Speaker 13: man's made a mistake and you want to sit there
Speaker 13: and say that he's not qualified.
Speaker 6: Give me a joke.
Speaker 13: It is so ridiculous that you guys hold yourself as
Speaker 13: this higher standard and you forget you got a big
Speaker 13: plank in your eye. We've all made mistakes. I've made mistakes,
Speaker 13: and Jennifer, thank you for loving him through that mistake,
Speaker 13: because the only reason why I'm here and not in
Speaker 13: prison is because my wife loved me too. I have changed,
Speaker 13: but I'm not perfect. But I found somebody that thought
Speaker 13: I was perfect, and for whatever reason you love Pete
Speaker 13: And I don't know why.
Speaker 4: Many such cases it's true, but this is true. So
Speaker 4: my take on this is actually that this is why
Speaker 4: the charges that Pete Hegseth was a dog seemed very
Speaker 4: obviously to be correct, do not stick, because that's going
Speaker 4: to be bouncing around the internet. And Mark Wayne Mullen,
Speaker 4: regardless of whatever his motivations are there former MMA fighter,
Speaker 4: by the way, he is absolutely correct that it looks
Speaker 4: awfully ridiculous for any member of the Senate to get
Speaker 4: all sanctimonious about people showing up drunk to work and
Speaker 4: cheating on their spouses.
Speaker 5: It does, though Exist's dog behavior is zero point one
Speaker 5: percent level like yeah, as Kane laid out, you know,
Speaker 5: fathering a kid, oh yeah, cheating on your wife, having
Speaker 5: a you know, father and child and then cheating on
Speaker 5: that person.
Speaker 4: But Congress getting a Congress is generally like in that
Speaker 4: one percent maybe zero point one percent, but Congress does
Speaker 4: occupy a slice there anyway. All that is to say,
Speaker 4: I actually read a peace about this, yestuy, because and
Speaker 4: we'll see this more and more like I actually think
Speaker 4: there are very serious questions about whether Pete Heike Seth,
Speaker 4: even if you share his ideology as worldview, like, is
Speaker 4: there a better person than Pete HeiG Seth to be
Speaker 4: this nominee? I think you know, that's a serious conversation
Speaker 4: to be had on the right.
Speaker 5: Right, because this derailed for the most part, any kind
Speaker 5: of sophisticated conversation about what the US but the Pentagon's
Speaker 5: role is in the world.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they were those serious questions were drowned out for
Speaker 4: doug less serious ones. So yeah, ish, but even that,
Speaker 4: I think again, it was this breathless defense of the
Speaker 4: Pentagon as an institution, even if it didn't even if
Speaker 4: they didn't mean it to come across that way, with
Speaker 4: some of them obviously did. But even if they didn't
Speaker 4: mean it to come across that way, it came across
Speaker 4: as like a defense of the status quo, which is
Speaker 4: really toned off right now. And even and if people
Speaker 4: are concerned about Hegsath, they're willing to err on the
Speaker 4: side of the disruptor instead of the side of the
Speaker 4: status quo. So let's take a look here at Duckworth.
Speaker 4: Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, a veteran herself, questioning Pete Hegseath.
Speaker 14: What is the highest level of international negotiations that you
Speaker 14: have engaged in that you have led in, because the
Speaker 14: Secrety Defense does lead international security negotiations. There are three
Speaker 14: main ones that the Secretary of Defense leads and signs.
Speaker 14: Can you name at least one of them?
Speaker 1: Could you repeat the question, Senata, sure, what is.
Speaker 14: The highest level of international security agreement that you have led?
Speaker 14: And can you name some that the Secretary Defense would lead?
Speaker 14: There are three main ones.
Speaker 10: You have not been involved in international security arrangements because
Speaker 10: I have not been in government other than serving in
Speaker 10: the military, so my job has been you name one
Speaker 10: of the three main ones that the talking about defense arrangements,
Speaker 10: I mean NATO might be one of one that you're
Speaker 10: referring to.
Speaker 14: Stay as the Forces Agreement would be one of them.
Speaker 10: Or Status of Forces agreement. I've been a part of
Speaker 10: teaching about Status of Forces agreement, but you don't remember
Speaker 10: to mention it.
Speaker 14: You're not qualified, mister heck Seth. You're not qualified. You
Speaker 14: talk about repairing our defense industrial complex, you're not qualified
Speaker 14: to that. You could do the acquisition and cross servicing agreements,
Speaker 14: which essentially are security agreements. You can't even mention that.
Speaker 5: She also had a brutal exchange where she asked him
Speaker 5: to name any of the countries in the Asian who
Speaker 5: were in the like Southeast Asian Trade Compact, Trade and
Speaker 5: Military Compact, and he was like, Australia, Japan. It's like, no,
Speaker 5: that's that's East Asia and Australia's different continent. I'm talking
Speaker 5: about Southeast Asia.
Speaker 4: That's an economic alliance, right, it.
Speaker 1: Is, it had, but the Pentagon is involved in it.
Speaker 5: And if you like, if you're involved in this stuff,
Speaker 5: that comes up a lot. It was kind of surprising
Speaker 5: that what they used to do with conformation hearings.
Speaker 1: Is they would murder board people like you were.
Speaker 5: You were stuck in a room for like eighteen hours
Speaker 5: for like weeks on end with these people kind of grilling,
Speaker 5: and you had notes to take home and study and memorize.
Speaker 1: And doesn't mean that you got better.
Speaker 5: Nominees as a result of that, just because they did
Speaker 5: a crash course and memorized you know, the tens on countries.
Speaker 5: But it is kind of odd that you wouldn't do
Speaker 5: the basic stuff there Now me, I think, you know,
Speaker 5: the more incompetent the head of the Defense department is,
Speaker 5: then the more likely it is to like run the
Speaker 5: American war machine into the ground the better. So you
Speaker 5: got a guy who is drunk by noon and like
Speaker 5: doesn't really kind of know the basics of this. Now,
Speaker 5: from the other perspective, the status quo also prefers somebody
Speaker 5: who doesn't know.
Speaker 1: What they're doing.
Speaker 5: They want to manipulate it because they think they can
Speaker 5: then run them right over right.
Speaker 4: And I think that Hegseth is right on that line
Speaker 4: for them of somebody who's easily treated as a puppet
Speaker 4: and manipulated, and somebody who may not know the ins
Speaker 4: and out of the outside the pentagon, but will hire
Speaker 4: the people who do and who actually do want to
Speaker 4: disrupt the status quot And I think maybe part of
Speaker 4: this is their suessing that out. Let's take a listen
Speaker 4: to Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and then we will hear a
Speaker 4: little bit from Tom Cotton. Here's Senator Jill Brand.
Speaker 10: Standards have been changed inside infantry training units, ranger school,
Speaker 10: infantry battalions to ensure the community.
Speaker 15: For example, please give me an example.
Speaker 10: I get you're making these quotas to have a certain
Speaker 10: number of female infantry officers or infustry enlisted, and that
Speaker 10: disparages those women.
Speaker 15: Commanders do not have to be quota for the infantry.
Speaker 15: Commanders do not have to have a quota for women
Speaker 15: in the infantry.
Speaker 4: That does not exist.
Speaker 15: It does not exist. And your stay statements are creating
Speaker 15: the impression that these exist because they do not. There
Speaker 15: are not quotas. We want the most lethal force. But
Speaker 15: I'm telling you, having been here for fifteen years listening
Speaker 15: to testimony about men and women in combat and the
Speaker 15: type of operations that were successful in Afghanistan and in Iraq.
Speaker 15: Women were essential for many of those units. When ranger
Speaker 15: units went in to find where are the terrorists hiding
Speaker 15: in Afghanistan or in Iraq, if they had a woman
Speaker 15: in the unit, they could go in talk to the
Speaker 15: women in a village, say where are the terrorists hiding,
Speaker 15: where are the weapons hiding, and get crucial information to
Speaker 15: make sure that we can win that battle. So, just
Speaker 15: you cannot denigrate women in general, and your statements do
Speaker 15: that we don't want women in the military, especially in combat.
Speaker 15: What a terrible statement. So please do not deny that
Speaker 15: you've made those statements.
Speaker 4: You have, so I definitely enjoyed the memes. Ryan one
Speaker 4: in particular that clips together, I might get you in
Speaker 4: trouble with us. On the clip together, all the Senate
Speaker 4: dem women on the committee yelling at him and said
Speaker 4: this is actually worse than combat, because they really were
Speaker 4: yelling at him specifically on this line about women serving.
Speaker 5: And he's moved off a lot of his more extent positions,
Speaker 5: which initially were no women at all. I don't how
Speaker 5: would you characterize his previous positions when it came to
Speaker 5: women's He.
Speaker 4: Literally said on Sean Ryan quote, I'm straight up saying
Speaker 4: that women shouldn't be able to serve in combat. And
Speaker 4: that's what Elizabeth Warren said, I've never seen a you know,
Speaker 4: a conversion. What did she say, a confirmation conversion something
Speaker 4: like that. She also had a moment where she was
Speaker 4: questioning him about whether he would hold to the standard
Speaker 4: he demands generals should be helped to, which is that
Speaker 4: you don't leave the Pentagon and then go work for
Speaker 4: I think it's defense contractors was the specific thing they
Speaker 4: were talking about for ten years, and he was like,
Speaker 4: I'm not a general. So there were some exchanges. I
Speaker 4: thought he and people were laughing at that. I think
Speaker 4: there were some exchanges that were better for him actually
Speaker 4: than obviously others.
Speaker 5: Nice if he would agree to it, Oh my gosh, yeah,
Speaker 5: but he wouldn't agree to it. No, he just said,
Speaker 5: I'm not in general, I men go back to Fox
Speaker 5: and make a lot of money.
Speaker 4: But yeah, and so maybe that's I don't know. But
Speaker 4: he had some moments actually where I think, even to
Speaker 4: the questioning from Duckworth, I didn't think he handled it
Speaker 4: that poorly. I don't think he handled Tim Kaine's questioning
Speaker 4: that poorly. I don't think he handled Gilibrands questioning that poorly.
Speaker 4: Whether those are legitimate issues is different than whether he
Speaker 4: sounded all right. I don't think he flamed out, And
Speaker 4: we've seen that already in senators like Joni Ernz coming
Speaker 4: out and saying, you know, if he had flamed out,
Speaker 4: there would be hesitation, more hesitation right now, at least
Speaker 4: projected publicly like well, I'm gonna have to talk to
Speaker 4: him about X, Y and Z, like dub Fisher told
Speaker 4: him he might want to go study up on this nuclear.
Speaker 1: Triad thing kind of important. Yeah, well, it's to your point.
Speaker 4: About how it used to be done in a way
Speaker 4: that's behind closed doors, more substantive than the four hours
Speaker 4: of theater that you get on television. Christian Gilbren, I
Speaker 4: think is a great example of how you're getting some
Speaker 4: theater on television, and so is Tom Cotton. Let's roll
Speaker 4: b six here of just some of the Republican questioning
Speaker 4: of Pete Haig Seth.
Speaker 16: I want to give you a chance to respond to
Speaker 16: what they said about you. I think the first one
Speaker 16: accused you of being a Christian Zionist. I'm not really
Speaker 16: sure why that is a bad thing. I'm a Christian,
Speaker 16: I'm a Zionist. Zionism is that the Jewish people deserve
Speaker 16: a homeland in the ancient Holy Land where they've lived
Speaker 16: since the dawn of history. Do you consider yourself a
Speaker 16: Christian Zionist.
Speaker 1: Senator, I support.
Speaker 10: I am a Christian, and I robustly support the state
Speaker 10: of Israel and it's existential defense and the way America
Speaker 10: comes alongside them.
Speaker 1: Is there great thank you?
Speaker 16: Because another protester, and I think this one was a
Speaker 16: member of Code Pain, which by the way, is a
Speaker 16: Chinese communist front group these days, said that you support
Speaker 16: Israel's war in Gaza. I support Israel's existential war in Gaza.
Speaker 16: I assume, like me and President Trump, you support that
Speaker 16: war as well, don't you, Senator I do.
Speaker 10: I support Israel destroying and killing every last member of Hamas.
Speaker 4: So that's Tom Cotton and Pete Haig Seth. There's a
Speaker 4: lot of Mark wain Mullen was a good example to
Speaker 4: the sort of dramatic pumping him up. Did you catch
Speaker 4: Senator Tim Sheehy of Montana literally asking how many push
Speaker 4: ups can you do?
Speaker 8: Oh?
Speaker 1: No, I missed. I saw him ask how many genders
Speaker 1: are there?
Speaker 7: Yeah?
Speaker 1: And then he told his classic she he joke.
Speaker 4: Yes, Senator she Yeah, I mean always a winner.
Speaker 1: Can you imagine being his staff? So sick of that?
Speaker 1: Like you hear that joke right ten times a day?
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So anyway, I think you know, he'll probably survive this
Speaker 4: confirmation battle. He was probably always going to survive the
Speaker 4: confirmation battle. But if he had really flamed out yesterday,
Speaker 4: there would have been Gates level, not quite Gates level,
Speaker 4: but Gates type hesitation from people like Jenny Earnster, people
Speaker 4: indeed like Roger Wicker, and that we're not we're not
Speaker 4: seeing that reaction. They eventually would have been pushed by
Speaker 4: Trump to come, but we're just not seeing that type
Speaker 4: of reaction. So I think he'll survive this one, right.
Speaker 1: He probably will.
Speaker 5: And I think if if he represented a more fundamental
Speaker 5: threat to the establishment at the Pentagon, the establishment of
Speaker 5: the Pentagon is very well represented on the Senate Armed
Speaker 5: Services Committee, and you would have seen much more hostility
Speaker 5: to him from Republicans because there is a kind of
Speaker 5: uniparty when it comes to support for the Pentagon in
Speaker 5: the military industrial complex. So, y'all do what you want.
Speaker 5: But you know, if I were running MAGA, I think
Speaker 5: I would want a guy that was a bit more
Speaker 5: of a bureaucratic killer and had more of an instinct
Speaker 5: and understanding for how you're going to actually do this.
Speaker 1: This feels like a guy who was it was.
Speaker 5: He was as shocked as the rest of the world
Speaker 5: was when Trump picked him to be Pentagon secretary.
Speaker 1: He's like, whoa does he does he know what this
Speaker 1: confirmation hearing is going to be?
Speaker 8: Like yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: Trump's like, I don't care, you know, yeah, picking mac Gates.
Speaker 4: I just think, honestly, for the most of the public,
Speaker 4: and there's been like a lot of handbringing in circles
Speaker 4: like the Atlantic about him not agreeing to stand by
Speaker 4: the Geneva Conventions. It just reminds me of all of
Speaker 4: the moral panic over Trump and NATO, right, like, it's,
Speaker 4: oh my, how dare this is beyond the palins. It
Speaker 4: was beyond the pale in Washington. But when the rest
Speaker 4: of the country sees you fuming over someone's skepticism about
Speaker 4: NATO or the Geneva Conventions, you're the one who's on
Speaker 4: the like on the political end of that like pr
Speaker 4: end of that, you're the one who looks like you're
Speaker 4: out of touch.
Speaker 5: And I would say, from a separate perspective there for
Speaker 5: a different perspective there. So this was an exchange Angus
Speaker 5: King had with Hagseeth where he said, would you respect
Speaker 5: the Geneva Convention's ban on torture? And he said, I'm
Speaker 5: not going to let the you know, international community tell
Speaker 5: me what to do. And you know, whenever I see
Speaker 5: somebody who says that they won't con the Geneva Conventions
Speaker 5: on torture, I'm going to go right for those pearls.
Speaker 5: But then immediately I'm like, wait a minute, this is
Speaker 5: the same Democrats, and this is the same Atlantic Monthly
Speaker 5: that wants to sanction the UN for trying to prosecute
Speaker 5: war crimes in Gaza.
Speaker 1: You want to destroy the ICJ. You want to destroy
Speaker 1: the ICC.
Speaker 5: Because it is following the law and indicting Yah and
Speaker 5: have Galant for their crimes against humanity.
Speaker 1: And then you want to hold up the Geneva Conventions.
Speaker 4: That's the point.
Speaker 1: Then I'm like, get out of here. I see.
Speaker 5: But I can clutch my pearls because I support the
Speaker 5: ic C and the ICJ and the Geneva Conventions. You
Speaker 5: can called consistency. You can consistently, can clutch my pearls.
Speaker 4: Senate Dems on Armed Services cannot.
Speaker 1: That's right, Yeah, all right.
Speaker 4: Let's move on to some of this. This is an
Speaker 4: awful story out of Los Angeles. We're gonna roll right
Speaker 4: here into some reports that we're getting from what we're about,
Speaker 4: I should say landlords in the LA area as the
Speaker 4: community continues to be on edge and devastated by wildfire.
Speaker 4: So this is as more perfect Union puts a celebrity realturgy.
Speaker 4: It's an Oppenheim of selling sunset. He's talking a little
Speaker 4: bit about price gouging here. Let's roll a clip.
Speaker 17: This is something that I want to discuss because I
Speaker 17: think it should be exposed. But we're having landlords taking
Speaker 17: advantage of the situation.
Speaker 8: I had a client.
Speaker 17: We sent him to a house that was asking thirteen
Speaker 17: thousand dollars a month. He offered twenty thousand dollars a month,
Speaker 17: and he offered to pay six months upfront, and the
Speaker 17: landlord said, no, I want twenty three thousand dollars a month.
Speaker 17: You know, there are price gouging logs in California. They're
Speaker 17: just being ignored right now. And this isn't the time
Speaker 17: to be taking advantage of situations. And it's also illegal
Speaker 17: to take advantage of a natural disaster.
Speaker 4: So do you think that landlords might be not just
Speaker 4: profiting during this emergency but actually breaking the law?
Speaker 1: Absolutely they are. I mean he starts till last night.
Speaker 17: You cannot charge more than ten percent above mark, you know,
Speaker 17: pre disaster market rates.
Speaker 4: All right, So let's actually take a look at this
Speaker 4: Google docs spreadsheet. This is the next element. Put it
Speaker 4: up on the screen tracking. So this is a spreadsheet
Speaker 4: of landlord's price gadging rent during the LA fires. Just
Speaker 4: post on access and if you go and click on it, the.
Speaker 1: Rents republic before and now in the public now, and
Speaker 1: you can see the doubling.
Speaker 4: And worse yeah, And jud Legom actually went through and
Speaker 4: put some of these from Zillow on three this. Yeah,
Speaker 4: this is c three jued Legom is pulling out things
Speaker 4: on zillo. You can compare this, it's publicly accessible information,
Speaker 4: absolutely against the lawine.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so a couple couple of things here.
Speaker 5: And I'm sure people will have a fun debate about
Speaker 5: this down in the comments section. But to me, I
Speaker 5: get a little frustrated whenever the public is I did
Speaker 5: for socialism and government regulation only when there's a crisis. Like,
Speaker 5: if you're against this, then you need to join me
Speaker 5: in being for tough rent control and being for enormous
Speaker 5: investments in public housing and not not not the kind
Speaker 5: of public housing that is completely restricted, but public investments
Speaker 5: in housing for people, and along with real curbs on
Speaker 5: turning housing into just a free flowing commodity.
Speaker 1: Like you can't. To me, you can't have it both ways.
Speaker 5: You want the market when everything's cool, but then the
Speaker 5: second things go sideways, you're like, oh wait, there's this
Speaker 5: long in the books here, and like, I mean, maybe
Speaker 5: you can't have it both ways because you will have
Speaker 5: a lot of politicians who are willing to crack down
Speaker 5: on this, But I'm saying, if you like this idea
Speaker 5: that greed should not dictate everything, then come on over
Speaker 5: to this side here and let's try to live that
Speaker 5: all the time.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but see on the other side of that, literally,
Speaker 4: on the right side of that, I don't mean the
Speaker 4: correct side, but on the right side.
Speaker 1: Of that, the wrong side of that.
Speaker 4: I don't really think the government, Like I don't also
Speaker 4: trust the government to be dictating these prices either, I
Speaker 4: don't feeling right.
Speaker 5: That's what they're saying here is that there ought to
Speaker 5: be a law or there is a law there is
Speaker 5: that's going to come in and the government is going
Speaker 5: to tell them, you know what, they what they can
Speaker 5: charge in these in these moments. And I'm cool with that,
Speaker 5: but I'm my point is that you're saying that should
Speaker 5: be the case all the time.
Speaker 4: So the law, according to legum is that you can't
Speaker 4: increase rental prices by more than ten percent for thirty
Speaker 4: days after a state of emergency is declared. You're saying
Speaker 4: this should apply not just in a state of emergency,
Speaker 4: that it just but that's I guess that's a separate arge.
Speaker 5: Yeah, because the free market in real estates such as
Speaker 5: as it is, you know, controlled by these landlords, has
Speaker 5: created an emergency where people can't afford housing around the country.
Speaker 4: I am not a necessarily like gimbi person, but they
Speaker 4: would say that it also.
Speaker 1: Was sure for more building shure, yeah, build more too.
Speaker 4: So okay, so this is a happy medium. But Leham
Speaker 4: found this was up on the screen for a while.
Speaker 4: But he found a five bedroom house in Manhattan Beach
Speaker 4: that was like eight it was eighty seven to fifty
Speaker 4: per month on December thirty first, and you can see
Speaker 4: on Zillo that is now going for nineteen seven hundred
Speaker 4: and fifty a month, and that's one hundred and twenty
Speaker 4: five percent increase, so clearly against the law.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and you know this, it reminds me of that
Speaker 5: very viral post by the grandson of one of Hollywood's
Speaker 5: founders where he posted does anybody have contact info for
Speaker 5: private firefighters?
Speaker 1: Do you remember seeing that? He eventually he deleted it.
Speaker 5: But it is this idea that you know, everything belongs
Speaker 5: to the highest bidder. Yeah, yeah, which maybe is fair
Speaker 5: in a world where people amass their money in some
Speaker 5: type of a fair way. This is the This is
Speaker 5: like a third generation Hollywood guy who's just living off
Speaker 5: of his grandfather's hard work.
Speaker 1: And what was so perfect about that story.
Speaker 5: I forget that, I forget who the grandfather was, but
Speaker 5: the grandfather was known as somebody who came up from nothing,
Speaker 5: worked alongside all of his other workers, was well liked
Speaker 5: by those kinds of people as very very classic up
Speaker 5: from your bootstraps and first generation wealth thing down to
Speaker 5: two generations later, guy's never done anything but has a
Speaker 5: huge bank account and wants to hire private firemen to
Speaker 5: come to his house.
Speaker 4: My soft theory is that you will always see price
Speaker 4: gauging people attempting to take advantage of horrible situations. We've
Speaker 4: seen it many times in the past. We've seen it
Speaker 4: really bad in the past, and Gilded Age and all
Speaker 4: of that feels like we've returned to. But I also
Speaker 4: think right now it's somehow worse. There's a level of
Speaker 4: shamelessness that exists right now. And just going through that
Speaker 4: spreadsheet and looking at all of the l's people are
Speaker 4: quite literally posting to zilla like I mean, I didn't
Speaker 4: know it was against the law to have such That's
Speaker 4: what it suggests to me is people don't even know
Speaker 4: that it's illegal. But like you should just morally be
Speaker 4: disgusted with yourself, and we should have a society where
Speaker 4: people are horrified at the prospect of publicly lit alone
Speaker 4: privately posting shit like that.
Speaker 5: And what's incredible is that some of those houses that
Speaker 5: they're doubling the price of are going to burn down.
Speaker 5: Like this fire is still raging the two biggest ones,
Speaker 5: pal Says and Eton, and the latest reporting has eighteen
Speaker 5: percent and thirty five percent contained, respectively, with the Santa
Speaker 5: Ana winds still ripping through this dry area. We're not
Speaker 5: this is this is not remotely over and I think
Speaker 5: that's one of the things that is most defensive to
Speaker 5: people that you have people, you know, capitalizing on this
Speaker 5: before the city is even remotely out of danger.
Speaker 4: The latest update on the death toll, according to the
Speaker 4: medical examiners within the last six hours or so, is
Speaker 4: that they've not been twenty five fire related deaths and
Speaker 4: the extreme fire danger remains high right now. So we
Speaker 4: think we've seen the worst of it, but it's still
Speaker 4: incredibly vulnerable.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's absolutely brutal.
Speaker 5: With just four days until the TikTok ban is officially
Speaker 5: supposed to take effect, if the Supreme Court doesn't grant
Speaker 5: some stay of execution to the Chinese company or run app.
Speaker 5: Millions and millions of people when you can put this
Speaker 5: element up on the screen here in America are flocking
Speaker 5: over to Red Note and what's including me. I'm over on,
Speaker 5: I'm over on Red Note and people are like, what's
Speaker 5: ther it's your handle.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so you got on TikTok and then immediately got
Speaker 4: on Red Note too.
Speaker 1: I got a Red Note before TikTok.
Speaker 4: I think, wow, that's so perfect.
Speaker 5: So I'm not even a refugee. I think my just
Speaker 5: search Ryan grim on there. Maybe I don't know.
Speaker 1: I haven't posted anything on Red Note, but Red Note
Speaker 1: is actually kind of cool. But here.
Speaker 5: But what's amazing about this kind of own goal from
Speaker 5: the US is that TikTok is owned by Byte Dance,
Speaker 5: which is Chinese. You know, uh company h Red Note
Speaker 5: is owned by the Chinese government. There's not even not
Speaker 5: even a layer right between between there.
Speaker 7: Now.
Speaker 5: Uh, it is the number one app in the store
Speaker 5: right now. I think lemon eight, which is also owned
Speaker 5: by Byte Dance, is number two.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 5: According to the law that bans TikTok, both Red Note
Speaker 5: and Bite and Lemonade would also be banned, you know,
Speaker 5: like because it says basically, if there's X number of
Speaker 5: million users.
Speaker 1: And it's a Chinese app, it's banned.
Speaker 5: So it's yeah, you're out of the frying pan into
Speaker 5: the fryar, Like you're still kind of kind of get screwed.
Speaker 5: But it's amazing to watch what's unfolding over there. You
Speaker 5: can put up this second element up there. The cultural
Speaker 5: exchanges between the Americans and Chinese are just absolutely delightful.
Speaker 1: This one has been going viral.
Speaker 5: Chinese user telling the Americans, look, you guys don't need
Speaker 5: a new app. You guys need a revolution. And you
Speaker 5: can go back and be like, all, hey, we'll get
Speaker 5: a revolution. But it's so by the way, it's so
Speaker 5: easy to get banned from Red Note. So you're having
Speaker 5: a bunch of Chinese.
Speaker 4: Because what kind of revolution would you like us to have, sir?
Speaker 5: The censorship on Red Note is much more severe than
Speaker 5: on TikTok or American apps, so.
Speaker 4: Well, so Dan is Chinese, they're probably both equally censored
Speaker 4: and Red Note.
Speaker 5: So you've got a bunch of Chinese users like basically
Speaker 5: giving cheat codes to the Americans, like here are the
Speaker 5: things you can't do if you want to knock at
Speaker 5: band anyway, So you're you're not on red note, not on.
Speaker 4: Red note, but you know who's all over red note
Speaker 4: can put up the next element. Luigi. Luigi is beloved
Speaker 4: on red note, according to people who have been Have
Speaker 4: you seen this, Ryan.
Speaker 5: Yes, I saw somebody say like, well, you know, why
Speaker 5: do you why the Chinese users love, you know, support
Speaker 5: Luigi so much?
Speaker 1: And somebody somebody said something like, that's the next element.
Speaker 5: You know, he who carries the water for the community
Speaker 5: must be supported or something like that. That's delightful.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this is the next element. We can put it
Speaker 4: off on the screen. It's someone on ex posting screenshots
Speaker 4: of the Luigi love on red notes saying red note
Speaker 4: is effing insane.
Speaker 5: Oh there is the person who carries firewood for the
Speaker 5: masses should not be left to freeze in the wind
Speaker 5: and snow.
Speaker 1: That's much better than the one I said.
Speaker 4: And meanwhile, here's the next element as well. You had
Speaker 4: mister Beast yesterday pretty openly, actually this was later on
Speaker 4: Monday night, pretty openly saying okay, I'll find fine, I'll
Speaker 4: buy TikTok so it doesn't get banned, and Ironically, I've
Speaker 4: had so many billionaires reach out to me since I
Speaker 4: tweeted this. Let's see if we can pull it off.
Speaker 4: He posted, that's mister Beek saying that, as reports in
Speaker 4: the New York Times and other places yesterday said Elon
Speaker 4: Musk was being considered by Chinese officials, this is who
Speaker 4: the New York Times sourced their report to for purchasing
Speaker 4: TikTok in the United States head of the band. Which
Speaker 4: is interesting because to the extent that I have seen,
Speaker 4: we haven't seen that floated in American media. So TikTok
Speaker 4: totally denied that. But TikTok itself is mostly separate from China.
Speaker 4: The sort of allegation is that TikTok is based here
Speaker 4: in the US. But the allegation is accurate that Bitedance,
Speaker 4: while it's the parent company, does still have access to
Speaker 4: all of the data because of the way the Chinese
Speaker 4: government controls corporations that they would have to hand over
Speaker 4: data if the Chinese government asked that. There are many
Speaker 4: members actually have the Chinese Communist Party who work for
Speaker 4: byte Dance and byte Dance Beijing headquarters. Forbes has covered
Speaker 4: this really extensively that there has been intentional censorship of
Speaker 4: journalists from byte Dance's headquarters, censorship of different political topics
Speaker 4: from the same places like those are all pretty well
Speaker 4: fleshed out by reporting in Forbes and elsewhere. But it
Speaker 4: is true that there's at least a little bit of
Speaker 4: a firewall between the US operations are of TikTok, which
Speaker 4: is literally based here, and byte Dance, which operates the
Speaker 4: Chinese version of TikTok, and Lemonade, which is also apparently
Speaker 4: gaining in popularity. That does make it different than Red Note.
Speaker 4: Red Note is, to your point, more heavily censored than
Speaker 4: the US version of TikTok. I think what hawks would say,
Speaker 4: and I probably agree with this point, is that the
Speaker 4: potential for censorship on TikTok by China does still exist.
Speaker 5: And yeah, and it's I think it's more about the
Speaker 5: national security apparatus and the US concerned totally that China
Speaker 5: can get to push the algorithm around.
Speaker 4: They're jealous of that control. They want it for themselves.
Speaker 4: And also Facebook and acts and YouTube.
Speaker 5: Yes, and it's so hard for American policymakers to just
Speaker 5: think that, for instance, young people don't like the genocide
Speaker 5: in Gaza. They have to be like, well, they don't
Speaker 5: like the genocide in Gaza because this Chinese app is
Speaker 5: tricking them, or the Chinese app, this Chinese app is
Speaker 5: letting people see what's going on in Gaza, which you know,
Speaker 5: they kind of under pressure, you know, moved moved away from,
Speaker 5: you know, showed they can be pushed around just like
Speaker 5: us big tech firms can be Elon. Musk, let's be clear,
Speaker 5: has enormous investments in China. Yes, so the idea that
Speaker 5: selling it to him does anything about Chinese control about
Speaker 5: over the app is kind of ridiculous. And also you
Speaker 5: would hope that FTC would be like, wait a minute,
Speaker 5: you can't own both Twitter and TikTok.
Speaker 1: That's crazy.
Speaker 4: Yes, you would think it's like completely to your point,
Speaker 4: like the Starlink operations in Ukraine, actually in Israel and Gaza,
Speaker 4: he's involved significantly as a defense tractor, but also as
Speaker 4: the owner of Starlink in conflicts around the world. There's
Speaker 4: also SpaceX. I mean, it's just to applaud this from
Speaker 4: populist right wing perspective is completely bananas and act like
Speaker 4: this is a power that should exist. And I mean
Speaker 4: even X, I think is too much power.
Speaker 1: For one billionaire to own shore.
Speaker 4: So yeah, well, definitely agree on that, but it's to
Speaker 4: an extent. I mean, I was thinking about this today.
Speaker 4: It's this red note stuff. The memes are really funny.
Speaker 4: But whether or not we agree with the policies of
Speaker 4: the Military Industrial Complex and the Pentagon, we could not
Speaker 4: in the distant future find ourselves in the situation where
Speaker 4: China is literally trying to kill American soldiers and vice versa.
Speaker 4: And this will get a lot that's funny at that point.
Speaker 5: Yes, but I would hope that culture exchanges like this
Speaker 5: would make a war less likely as the working people
Speaker 5: in the United States realize they have more in common
Speaker 5: with the working people in China than they do with
Speaker 5: their billionaire owners. As Mac pointed out on Twitter, I
Speaker 5: think that the culture exchange is great. And you know,
Speaker 5: there has been this interesting this is the Well's there's
Speaker 5: the blue ging theory.
Speaker 1: But also.
Speaker 5: Because of the way that China has its firewalled internet,
Speaker 5: the rest of the Internet, the US kind of run
Speaker 5: Internet has existed for the most part without the billion
Speaker 5: plus people in China, Like there hasn't been a whole
Speaker 5: lot of of exchange there.
Speaker 4: That's true, and.
Speaker 5: I've heard people say that it's good that that's not
Speaker 5: the case, because if it was, every single thing on
Speaker 5: the Internet would devolve in including like the comment section
Speaker 5: in this video, would devolve into just flame wars in
Speaker 5: the posts between Indian and Chinese people, and which is
Speaker 5: completely dominate, wash wash everything else away. But otherwise people
Speaker 5: are I think loving having these exchanges with regular Chinese people.
Speaker 4: Well, I was gonna say, to the extent.
Speaker 5: The like, you've had Americans helping Chinese people with their
Speaker 5: English homework, and if you can sigh up Americans into
Speaker 5: doing homework, that's a win.
Speaker 4: Well, to the extent that governments, which we know for
Speaker 4: a fact, exerted control over x over the course of
Speaker 4: the pandemic Google as well, to the extent that the
Speaker 4: two governments don't, you know, try to escalate rather than
Speaker 4: diffuse tensions via these apps. They don't use them as
Speaker 4: propaganda channels to sort of pump up hostilities. Then I think,
Speaker 4: you know, diffusing tension. I'm all for diffusing tension with
Speaker 4: cultural exchange. I'm just highly skeptical that these are channels
Speaker 4: to do that, given how much control our governments will
Speaker 4: exert do exert over them, and in the case of TikTok,
Speaker 4: Elon Musk is perhaps the best friend of the incoming president.
Speaker 4: He's and Chairman She yes, this is in a unique position,
Speaker 4: which again we could be looking at ten twenty one
Speaker 4: hundred years from now and saying, wow, that was really helpful.
Speaker 4: That really spared us some unnecessary conflict, but very much
Speaker 4: yet to be determined.
Speaker 5: Ultimately a complete and total humiliation for Silicon Valley that
Speaker 5: Americans being told that they're going to lose access to
Speaker 5: TikTok are not flocking to Instagram or Threads or Facebook
Speaker 5: or whatever other bile that Silicon Valley has puked up
Speaker 5: over the last ten to fifteen years.
Speaker 1: And they're like, what else has Chairman she got going
Speaker 1: for us?
Speaker 4: Let's take a look.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they're learning like Mandarin and how to type in
Speaker 5: Chinese characters because it's easier to use the app that
Speaker 5: way that you love to see.
Speaker 4: We'll see where it goes, all right, This is actually
Speaker 4: great lead into our next block, Ryan about how Donald
Speaker 4: Trump could potentially in the strangest way possible. It's sort
Speaker 4: of the theme of today's show that all of the
Speaker 4: unorthodox either baggage or advantages Donald Trump comes into office
Speaker 4: with could potentially lead us on a path towards peace
Speaker 4: because he's not stuck in the kind of Cold War
Speaker 4: inertia that most official Washington is. So let's go ahead
Speaker 4: and have that debate.
Speaker 5: Princeton astrophysicist Robert Gottson has floated the idea that Trump
Speaker 5: could actually get three Nobel Prizes.
Speaker 4: We'll see.
Speaker 5: Incoming President Donald Trump seems on the brink of inking
Speaker 5: a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas could be Nobel
Speaker 5: Peace Prize worthy, according to Professor Robert Golston, astrophysicists at
Speaker 5: Princeton University, who earlier this week float had a really
Speaker 5: provocative and fascinating column and over at Fox News called
Speaker 5: we can put this element up the screen here called
Speaker 5: how Donald Trump can make his and when three.
Speaker 1: Nobel Peace Prizes?
Speaker 5: And now, to be clear, Professor Golson was not saying
Speaker 5: that simply getting a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel would
Speaker 5: make him eligible for that peace prize.
Speaker 1: There's more that he would have to do on that.
Speaker 5: But I think it's interesting to walk through the three
Speaker 5: different Nobel peace prizes that you believe he could actually
Speaker 5: legitimately be in line for because of the historical conditions
Speaker 5: in which he's coming into office, and also the through
Speaker 5: line between all three of them. So let's start with
Speaker 5: the one in the Mid East, since that's the one
Speaker 5: that approximately is going on right now. Were you surprised
Speaker 5: that he was able to get this breakthrough over the
Speaker 5: last couple of days, and then what steps have to
Speaker 5: happen after this to make it enduring enough for the
Speaker 5: Nobel Committee to say, you know what, this guy who
Speaker 5: they probably all despise, you know, just from a cultural perspective,
Speaker 5: deserve nerves a Nobel Peace Prize.
Speaker 8: Well, so all indications are that President elect Trump, I
Speaker 8: guess we should say in this context put some pressure
Speaker 8: on Netanyahu to agree to some of the last bits
Speaker 8: of this deal. And you know, his I think general
Speaker 8: philosophy is peace through strength, and you know, his claim
Speaker 8: that all hell will pay seems to have, so to speak,
Speaker 8: paid off. But if you but you know, there's two
Speaker 8: more stages in this deal that's going to have to
Speaker 8: be gone through. Well, let's let's hope by the time
Speaker 8: this is broadcast the first stage has been signed off,
Speaker 8: so there's more to be done. And then ultimately the
Speaker 8: real big issue is the situation in Iran. That Iran
Speaker 8: is right on the brink of nuclear weapons, so we
Speaker 8: need a new comprehensive deal that pulls I Ran back
Speaker 8: from the brink, which we think we could do. I
Speaker 8: think we could do if we make an arrangement with
Speaker 8: them where they can make enriched uranium for their reactors.
Speaker 8: But they never go above say four or five percent enrichment,
Speaker 8: so it's just not usable for a bomb that puts
Speaker 8: them in a situation where they get what they've explicitly
Speaker 8: said they wanted and they don't get what they had
Speaker 8: said they don't want, which is a bomb. We can
Speaker 8: put verification measures in I've actually done some of the
Speaker 8: research on this me and many others, But you can
Speaker 8: put verification measures in place to be sure that they're
Speaker 8: just making uranium for their reactors. Then you say, what's
Speaker 8: the deal on the other side, And it's clear that
Speaker 8: if we're going to move forward these Abraham Accords, we
Speaker 8: need to have a plan for a demilitarized Palestinian state.
Speaker 8: But that has to go through stages, and that has
Speaker 8: to get strong verification, strong controls it that it stays demilitarized,
Speaker 8: and that would be a deal that would settle the
Speaker 8: Middle East. You wouldn't have the threat of the Iranian
Speaker 8: nuclear weapons, and you wouldn't have this continuous problem. Hamas
Speaker 8: you know, wanted to take over all of Israel, and
Speaker 8: some of the right wingers in Israel would like to
Speaker 8: expel the Arabs, and so you know, nobody's going to
Speaker 8: get everything they want. But we could have a situation
Speaker 8: where maybe even Iran joins the Abraham Accords. This I
Speaker 8: think gets gets President Trump a.
Speaker 5: Nobel prized But before you go to that, just just
Speaker 5: want to be clear to the audience that just kind
Speaker 5: of not like a random scientist putting out political ideas.
Speaker 5: Like your entire career has been in the in the
Speaker 5: field to kind of nuclear policy and nuclear proliferation, and
Speaker 5: so you and like you were saying, you've done a
Speaker 5: lot of the research on how it is now possible
Speaker 5: for countries to verify in a serious way, you know what,
Speaker 5: whether other countries are living up to the deals that
Speaker 5: they strike without also then giving away nuclear information back
Speaker 5: to their adversaries.
Speaker 1: And that is a through line for all three of these.
Speaker 1: But go ahead, you were.
Speaker 4: Saying, professor, Yeah, just in the last twenty four hours,
Speaker 4: we have actually an interview with the President of Iran
Speaker 4: and Lester Holt on NBC Nightly News. We have a
Speaker 4: clip of that we want to roll. Now, let's go
Speaker 4: ahead and play this.
Speaker 18: One potential threat to diplomacy could be seen as what
Speaker 18: the US believes or the Iran's plan to assassinate Donald Trump.
Speaker 18: Was there such a plan, Jami?
Speaker 12: The assassinations and acts of terror that we see happening
Speaker 12: in Europe and elsewhere, can we see the footsteps of
Speaker 12: Iranian nationals or other foreign nationals? Have there been any
Speaker 12: links between those terrorist assassinations?
Speaker 8: Anyone?
Speaker 12: Everyone has never been in pursuit of assassination.
Speaker 1: And acts of terror.
Speaker 18: You're saying there was never an Iranian plot to kill
Speaker 18: Donald Trump.
Speaker 12: Never, by no means.
Speaker 18: Are you willing to promise that there will be no
Speaker 18: attempt on the life of Donald Trump ever.
Speaker 12: Since the beginning? We never intended to do.
Speaker 4: That, Okay, So the most persuasive Yes, he promised to
Speaker 4: lesteral So, professor, Obviously, I.
Speaker 8: Will promise I have technology or we in the United
Speaker 8: States have technology to assure that they won't do that.
Speaker 4: Right, So it's it would be enormously provocative for him
Speaker 4: to go and ABC Nightly News and just say hell, yeah,
Speaker 4: we want to kill the guy. That would be absurd
Speaker 4: and never happen. On the other hand, Donald Trump doesn't
Speaker 4: want to look like he's making a deal with people
Speaker 4: who want to kill him. And when I think about
Speaker 4: the way Donald Trump approaches some of this, even just
Speaker 4: seeing how the ceasefire negotiations are transpiring right now, he
Speaker 4: doesn't want to be humiliated. He doesn't want America to
Speaker 4: be humiliated. He doesn't want to be personally humiliated. Could
Speaker 4: you talk to us just a little bit about even
Speaker 4: the psychology or the politics of a negotiation with Donald Trump,
Speaker 4: you know, when whether it's Iran or Israel a Gaza
Speaker 4: on these three potential Nobel Peace prizes, which we also
Speaker 4: psychologically know would be very appealing to him. Indeed, what
Speaker 4: is the leverage if you're Iran? What is the leverage
Speaker 4: if you're on the other side of the table from
Speaker 4: Donald Trump in any of these three scenarios.
Speaker 8: Well, I think right now Ron is at a low
Speaker 8: point in its strength and its influence in that area,
Speaker 8: you know, with what happened with Hesbola, what happened with Hamas,
Speaker 8: what will probably eventually happen with the huties He's the
Speaker 8: Iranians are facing a situation where they are weak and
Speaker 8: Donald Trump has an air force that can destroy their
Speaker 8: nuclear program. That's my sense is that Donald Trump likes
Speaker 8: to negotiate from strength, and he likes to actually, in
Speaker 8: a way not make clear what he's doing, which is
Speaker 8: an interesting approach and seems to have worked, right we
Speaker 8: at least hopefully seem support with the Israelis and Hamas.
Speaker 8: So I think it puts him in a not bad
Speaker 8: position to say, you know, here's a deal that gets
Speaker 8: you what you want and prevents you from getting a
Speaker 8: bomb which you said you don't want, and if you
Speaker 8: don't take it, they'll be hell to pay.
Speaker 1: And so let's go to this.
Speaker 5: Let's go to the second one then, which actually, which
Speaker 5: one would you call a second you know, Europe or
Speaker 5: the comprehensive of you. I'd say Europe is kind of
Speaker 5: makes makes the most sense to talk.
Speaker 8: About next, Yeah, I think. So then we go to
Speaker 8: the biggest picture. Yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 5: So where do you see the possibility of a Nobel
Speaker 5: Peace Prize in Europe and Ukraine?
Speaker 8: Well, obviously there's been horrible death going on in Ukraine,
Speaker 8: actually on both sides, and it's crazy. Where it comes
Speaker 8: from ultimately is that if Ukraine were to join NATO
Speaker 8: and NATO where to station missiles in Ukraine, then there'd
Speaker 8: be a situation where Ukraine or NATO from Ukraine could
Speaker 8: mount a decapitating they call it nuclear strike on Moscow
Speaker 8: and just take out Moscow's leadership with a missile that
Speaker 8: would take less than ten minutes to arrive.
Speaker 1: And do they not have that? Does NATO not have
Speaker 1: that capacity currently?
Speaker 8: Well, it's an interesting story, but yes, at this point
Speaker 8: we do not. It's got to be a much more,
Speaker 8: much longer distance attack so that there is a chance
Speaker 8: for decision making in Moscow, for people to get into
Speaker 8: a protected position, stuff like that, so that currently we
Speaker 8: don't have that decapitating strike, that very quick decapitating strike capability.
Speaker 8: But if nuclear missiles got located in Ukraine then that
Speaker 8: would be a big problem. I mean, that was the
Speaker 8: sort of there was a whole lot of dressing around this.
Speaker 8: You know, Ukraine has historical ties to Russian so farth
Speaker 8: and so on. But the strategic issue is really the
Speaker 8: expansion of NATO, and the problem with the expansion of
Speaker 8: NATO if they can put missiles in Europe is this
Speaker 8: decapitating strike, and there isn't an equivalent thing that Russia
Speaker 8: can do to us, so there's no balance there. So
Speaker 8: the smart thing to do at this point, in my opinion,
Speaker 8: is to make a deal where there are no US
Speaker 8: or Russian missiles anywhere between Iceland on the one hand,
Speaker 8: and the Ural Mountains which are far to the east
Speaker 8: of Moscow, so that if there are no nuclear weapons
Speaker 8: in that area, you lose the whole hair trigger situation
Speaker 8: of sudden strikes, and you also lose this problem of Ukraine. Now,
Speaker 8: the problem in Ukraine loses its strategic salience, and you've
Speaker 8: got a possibility again, I think probably arguing from a
Speaker 8: position of strength. You know, I sense that Donald Trump
Speaker 8: doesn't like to say, you know, I'll put NATO troops
Speaker 8: into the Ukraine, be specific. But there's a situation on
Speaker 8: the battlefield that maybe a deal could be made, but
Speaker 8: it needs that broader context.
Speaker 5: And so then the third Nobel Piece prize you talked
Speaker 5: about is something that you don't hear talked about in
Speaker 5: the news, which is a more global nuclear treaty between
Speaker 5: the three major nuclear powers China, Russia.
Speaker 1: And the United States.
Speaker 5: Can you talk a little bit about the technical innovations
Speaker 5: that have led us to a place where some of
Speaker 5: the previous agreements are either obsolete or actually dangerous at
Speaker 5: this moment.
Speaker 8: Well, yeah, sure. What's happened is that we are pushing
Speaker 8: forward with missile defenses that mostly scientists think can't really
Speaker 8: stop an attack from Russia or China. We have forty
Speaker 8: four missiles, and they have hundreds and hundreds of missiles,
Speaker 8: so there's no way that we can stop even a
Speaker 8: large fraction of them, even with a miraculously good missile defense.
Speaker 8: But we do need those missile defenses to be sure
Speaker 8: that if a rogue state like North Korea or god forbid,
Speaker 8: Iran gets a nuclear weapon, that they can't attack us.
Speaker 8: So we need to make an arrangement where we can
Speaker 8: verifiably show that we have a certain number of launchers
Speaker 8: that can that can take out icbm's intercontinental ballistic missiles,
Speaker 8: so that that you don't need these crazy responses that
Speaker 8: the Russians and the Chinese are coming up with. The
Speaker 8: Russians are coming up with nuclear powered cruise missiles that
Speaker 8: can go around over the South Pole and attack us,
Speaker 8: and with this gigantic torpedo that can run across the
Speaker 8: ocean and destroy a city like Washington. So you need
Speaker 8: you need so make just.
Speaker 1: On that point, so we would not be able to
Speaker 1: detect it underwater.
Speaker 8: Is that the Well, that's a that's the sort of question.
Speaker 8: If I answered it, you know, you'd have to shoot
Speaker 8: me or shoot myself or something.
Speaker 1: Maybe we don't want to, but that's the but that's
Speaker 1: the idea.
Speaker 8: Well, now, the idea would be that they have they
Speaker 8: have submarines. These are these are very big torpedoes, and
Speaker 8: there would have to be an inspection protocol just the
Speaker 8: way they'd have to be an inspection protocol to show
Speaker 8: that we didn't have too many launchers. And in that
Speaker 8: situation you can get to a point where you could
Speaker 8: start bringing down some of the some of the things
Speaker 8: that are already there. We currently have about four hundred
Speaker 8: missiles on hair trigger alert in silos that you can
Speaker 8: find on Google Maps, and that the Russians obviously can
Speaker 8: find on Google Maps. The Chinese have are now building
Speaker 8: up a similar capability. The Russians have about the same capability.
Speaker 8: And these are just crazy items because you have very
Speaker 8: little time to decide to use them. And then you
Speaker 8: also worry that if you're a significant part of your
Speaker 8: arsenal is vulnerable, then you're more worried about a first strike,
Speaker 8: and the rut and the Chinese could be more worried
Speaker 8: about a first strike, and so then that puts everything
Speaker 8: right on a hair trigger. And these are warfighting things.
Speaker 8: You're going to have to use them as soon as
Speaker 8: a war starts, otherwise they'll get destroyed. So there's a
Speaker 8: deal that could be made that pretty quickly that would
Speaker 8: bring down about four hundred warheads from both sides. And
Speaker 8: then it's an interesting thing if you have three countries competing,
Speaker 8: and I think it's a good idea for us to
Speaker 8: try to decouple Russia and Moscow, Russia and China as
Speaker 8: best we can. Then you have a situation where if
Speaker 8: I take away one warhead and the deal is that
Speaker 8: each of China and Russia takes away a warhead, that's
Speaker 8: a pretty good deal. I've got two less facing me
Speaker 8: for one that I've got less that I've shot off.
Speaker 8: So I think there's a possibility if you really work
Speaker 8: on it, and if you look at the sort of
Speaker 8: root cause problem of these missile defenses that they worry
Speaker 8: might work and we worry won't work, there's a way
Speaker 8: to get down to much lower numbers with both sides.
Speaker 4: And let's talk about China because and I Ran and
Speaker 4: I were just discussing how we could look back one
Speaker 4: hundred years from now and as gross as the conflict
Speaker 4: of interest between Elon Musk Tesla and the Chinese government
Speaker 4: looks right now and could bear some really toxic fruit,
Speaker 4: it's possible that you look back one hundred years from
Speaker 4: now and say this was a huge contributor to diffusing
Speaker 4: tensions and spared conflict and was helpful and negotiating with
Speaker 4: the Chinese government. So talk a little bit about why
Speaker 4: you see this as an especially right moment when it
Speaker 4: comes to China as well. Well.
Speaker 8: I think the the story is China is just now
Speaker 8: doing a build up. If we don't do a build up,
Speaker 8: it'll save us about a trillion dollars, which is a
Speaker 8: noticeable amount of money and part of Donald Trump's goals,
Speaker 8: And it would also save them a lot of them.
Speaker 5: Did you hear that Elon Musk one trillion dollars here?
Speaker 5: It is so you can go after medicate all you want.
Speaker 5: You're not gonna find a trillion dollars.
Speaker 1: Go ahead, So if you.
Speaker 8: Can if you can cut back this huge expansion in
Speaker 8: particularly these missiles I was telling you about. We're planning
Speaker 8: on renewing all of them, were basically replacing all of
Speaker 8: them and their control structures and everything. If you could,
Speaker 8: if you could back down on that stuff, it would
Speaker 8: reduce the tensions with China.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 8: I think you have to be worried about Taiwan, of course,
Speaker 8: so you need to have ships that can help defend Taiwan.
Speaker 8: But you could put this back on the track that
Speaker 8: we were on before. You know, it seems to me
Speaker 8: a lot of the inflation we've had is because we're
Speaker 8: not getting the achieved things from China. So there there's
Speaker 8: a there's a complicated situation there that could be diffused.
Speaker 8: I think one thing we have to recognize is their
Speaker 8: economy is about the same size as ours, and so
Speaker 8: sort of trying to make them be a third class
Speaker 8: a second class player is not not practical.
Speaker 7: You know.
Speaker 1: It's interesting.
Speaker 5: One of the reasons that is taken as kind of
Speaker 5: the conventional wisdom for why the Soviet Union imploded was
Speaker 5: that they tried to keep up this arms race with us,
Speaker 5: and because we had a bigger and faster growing economy.
Speaker 5: They they increasingly ate into you know, their domestic capacity
Speaker 5: to grow their economy and distribute the the goodies to
Speaker 5: the Soviet people and helped lead to collapse. You know,
Speaker 5: if the Chinese economy is growing, you know, significantly faster
Speaker 5: than ours, and we are spending a trillion plus dollars putting,
Speaker 5: you know, building things that we hope we're never going
Speaker 5: to use that at best, building things that we never use.
Speaker 5: At worst, building building things that we use and destroy ourselves.
Speaker 5: So just you know, siphoning money out of the economy
Speaker 5: and it going to nothing other than you know, boosting
Speaker 5: kind of Northern Virginia real estate prices. Do we face
Speaker 5: some of the same risk as the Soviet Union that
Speaker 5: that in this blind competition with China, If they grow
Speaker 5: faster than us and we continue to spend a trillion
Speaker 5: dollars on this nuclear capacity, could that end up kind
Speaker 5: of bankrupting us?
Speaker 8: Well, I don't think we're in quite the situation of
Speaker 8: course that Russia was in the you know, people were
Speaker 8: saying they were spending eight percent of their GDP on defense.
Speaker 8: It was crazy. But but of course they weren't spending
Speaker 8: much more than we.
Speaker 1: Right at we're at what we're at? Five percent? I
Speaker 1: don't know, people could google that. It's a lot though, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, if we have a fourteen to fifteen what's.
Speaker 5: Our GDP, something like fifteen trillion, we're up to eighteen now,
Speaker 5: and he's going to google this chicking.
Speaker 8: Out, yeah, and it's the better and our defense budget
Speaker 8: is the better part of.
Speaker 4: A trillion though twenty seven trillion.
Speaker 5: Oh, we're at twenty seven trillion now, Okay, so one
Speaker 5: percent anyway, got so?
Speaker 8: So I mean we're not in the situation that we
Speaker 8: have a non functioning economy and we're we've got a
Speaker 8: population that's a third the size of the other guy. Oh,
Speaker 8: I guess you know, actually our population is quite a
Speaker 8: bit lower our but our GDP is way higher than Russias.
Speaker 8: So people used to say Russia is spending much more
Speaker 8: fraction of their economy on weapons, but in fact they were,
Speaker 8: you know, that a much smaller economy. So I don't
Speaker 8: quite see, you know, maybe if you talk one hundred years,
Speaker 8: it's a different story. And I don't see in the
Speaker 8: next decade or two that will get bankrupted. It's just
Speaker 8: that the national debt is a big problem and it's
Speaker 8: certainly going to hurt us to spend this money.
Speaker 4: Q four, by the way, has our GDP at twenty
Speaker 4: nine trillion.
Speaker 1: Okay, well there we go. I'll be yeah.
Speaker 5: I don't mean the next ten years. You know, China
Speaker 5: thinks in terms of fifteen one hundred years. They're happy
Speaker 5: to wait us out.
Speaker 8: Oh yeah, Well, certainly you want to get this path.
Speaker 8: You want to get this on a path towards eventually
Speaker 8: eliminating nuclear weapons. Ronald Reagan even said that, so you
Speaker 8: want to get to that place, and going up isn't
Speaker 8: necessarily the right way to get to go to eventually
Speaker 8: come down.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: And the last point, I think the thing that makes
Speaker 5: your case more plausible is that you pointed out in
Speaker 5: your piece. Donald Trump hasn't cared about a whole lot
Speaker 5: consistently throughout his life. But one of the things he
Speaker 5: has cared about curiously has been nuclear war.
Speaker 1: Can you talk a little bit about that?
Speaker 8: Well, so Rag, I shouldn't say Reagan. It's true of
Speaker 8: Reagan too in a way, but Donald Trump has spoken
Speaker 8: from his first apparently it was a Playboy interview where else. Yeah, well,
Speaker 8: you know, they talked about other things too, but he
Speaker 8: focused on the fact that the nuclear situation is really
Speaker 8: really dangerous, and he used the metaphor that it's like
Speaker 8: being ignorant of the fact that you could get sick,
Speaker 8: and so you don't even pay any attention to your
Speaker 8: health and then you get sick and you're surprised by it.
Speaker 8: You shouldn't be in that situation with nuclear weapons, and
Speaker 8: he has repeated that. It's clear that it's something that
Speaker 8: is a high priority to him, and it is certainly
Speaker 8: a high priority to the Nobel commit So if they could,
Speaker 8: if there's going to have to be some sweet talking
Speaker 8: to get China to the table, clearly they have to
Speaker 8: be brought to the table as an equal because they
Speaker 8: have the capability to build up to being an equal
Speaker 8: and they're sort of on that path, and they have
Speaker 8: an economy that's like ours, not like Russias. So I
Speaker 8: think you need you need to have a situation where
Speaker 8: all three of you are kind of sitting on the
Speaker 8: same side of the table trying to solve this problem
Speaker 8: that you're all threatening each other, that that's going to
Speaker 8: then put you on this path, so that out in
Speaker 8: the long term, frankly, out in the long term, there
Speaker 8: is a long term, right, Yeah, we use all these weapons.
Speaker 8: There is no long term. There's one hundred years from
Speaker 8: now where there's any civilizations to speak of.
Speaker 5: Left right, So Israel, Palestine and Iran deal in the
Speaker 5: Ukraine War and then World Peace.
Speaker 1: I'd give them those nobels.
Speaker 4: There you go.
Speaker 8: They may be a shamed that they didn't give Ronald
Speaker 8: Reagan the Nobel Prize when they gave it a go
Speaker 8: the job, So maybe they'll pay attention.
Speaker 1: That's right, that's right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it will be like a makeup call from the reps.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much, professor. This is fascinating. We really
Speaker 4: appreciate you coming on.
Speaker 10: Right.
Speaker 8: I enjoyed it very much.
Speaker 1: Well, that's fascinating to talk through.
Speaker 5: And I hope that you know, Trump does have, even
Speaker 5: though he pretends he doesn't, an interest in validation from
Speaker 5: those types of people. And absolutely somebody can float in
Speaker 5: front of him that look, these accolades are available to
Speaker 5: you if you do these things. I think he already
Speaker 5: leans in that direction. He loves you know, the art
Speaker 5: of the deal. What what what bigger deal you get
Speaker 5: than ending you know, the ceasefire, Ukraine Iran deal and
Speaker 5: then a nuclear treaty between Russia China and the US.
Speaker 1: I mean, somebody should do it. He's not Trump.
Speaker 4: And he's also so completely right about Reagan. Something that
Speaker 4: gets completely forgotten about Reagan is that he disrupted the
Speaker 4: Cold War inertia that we were in the nineteen eighties,
Speaker 4: although I think rhetorically it was a little bit different,
Speaker 4: but just by his negotiations back channel, if you read
Speaker 4: his diary with Soviets, he immediately was shocked into realizing
Speaker 4: how dire the situation was, how dramatic the situation was,
Speaker 4: and started to talk less like a Cold warrior from
Speaker 4: the nineteen sixties and started to make inroads. And I
Speaker 4: think Trump, in an interesting way, is like that level
Speaker 4: of unorthodox on a bigger scale. He doesn't feel beholden
Speaker 4: to the Cold War inertia. He never has. He doesn't
Speaker 4: play by those rules. He actually despises that status quo.
Speaker 4: So there's some real potential here. It just speaks to
Speaker 4: how easily we lose sight of nuclear politics that this
Speaker 4: gets tossed to the side. And this isn't a bigger conversation.
Speaker 5: And speaking of which, and we didn't get yes a
Speaker 5: chance to talk about this in the show where there
Speaker 5: was interesting news yesterday from the Biden administration, which announced
Speaker 5: that it was taking Cuba off of the State Sponsor
Speaker 5: of Terrorism list. We've covered this before, and it'll be
Speaker 5: interesting to see how the Trump administration responds to this.
Speaker 1: Obama normalized relations with Cuba.
Speaker 5: Trump then came in at the very end of his
Speaker 5: term put Cuba on the State Sponsor of Terrorism list,
Speaker 5: which is a more effective and more devious kind of embargo,
Speaker 5: because what it does is it says that what it
Speaker 5: does is it blocks companies from around the world from
Speaker 5: doing any business with Cuban companies. It's really insidious, and
Speaker 5: the US will say.
Speaker 1: Not that the fully happens, but yeah, although so, we
Speaker 1: have a.
Speaker 5: Great piece I can put it in the note down
Speaker 5: here from Ed Augustine, a reporter who writes for US
Speaker 5: from down in Havana, who've talked to a bunch of
Speaker 5: Cuban businesses right after they got put on that list.
Speaker 5: European banks, European companies just stopped. They'd say, look, the
Speaker 5: US says.
Speaker 1: Maybe we can do this.
Speaker 5: Our lawyers aren't sure. It's just you're not a big
Speaker 5: enough market. It's just easier for us to say, you
Speaker 5: know what, we don't do business in Cuba anymore, and
Speaker 5: if you're an island that hurts. It was expected, and
Speaker 5: Biden was pressured to and Biden campaign saying that he
Speaker 5: thought what Trump did was wrong. Biden was expected to
Speaker 5: come in and take Cuba off the state sponsor of
Speaker 5: Terrorism list immediately. Instead, he did it yesterday, and he
Speaker 5: did it after something like a third of the population
Speaker 5: has left Cuba. Enormous numbers of those, by the way,
Speaker 5: flew to Nicaragua then came up to the US border.
Speaker 1: Chris sparking, is this migration crisis.
Speaker 5: We were talking to somebody in Cuba a couple months
Speaker 5: ago who she's in her twenties, and she said, I
Speaker 5: don't have a single friend left in Cuba. They have
Speaker 5: all left, and it was because Biden took four years
Speaker 5: to take them off of this list. Why people people
Speaker 5: have lost significant amounts of weight, like the like absolute misery,
Speaker 5: you know, island wide blackouts like what he put people
Speaker 5: on Cuba through for four years to then at the
Speaker 5: very end, so in never mind, it's just.
Speaker 1: Infuriating.
Speaker 4: So you will see how Trump panels the Secretary of
Speaker 4: Saint Marco Rubio obviously as hardcore. Yes, because to the
Speaker 4: point that Trump is stuck in the Cold War inertia.
Speaker 4: It's on issues that his his sort of people in
Speaker 4: the cabinet and even middle range folks dictate the policy.
Speaker 4: Trump sort of exports that our outsources like, it's not
Speaker 4: his top concern, so he lets little Marco handle Venezuela
Speaker 4: Cuba in Central America.
Speaker 1: You'll see if he does or not.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Right, But to the point that Professor Goldsen is making,
Speaker 4: there's an argument to be made of Donald Trump that
Speaker 4: breaking that pattern could it could actually really help his image,
Speaker 4: historic player's legacy, I guess going forward, So we'll see.
Speaker 5: But yeah, but the fact that hit the very end
Speaker 5: of his term, he threw Cuba too the bus last
Speaker 5: time doesn't really bode well this time.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 5: The fact that he named Marco Rubio secretary's day doesn't
Speaker 5: bode well either.
Speaker 1: Those we'll see.
Speaker 4: Reporting right now. Marco Rubi is literally about to begin
Speaker 4: his confirmation hearing as we are recording this, and the
Speaker 4: report is that he is coming out swinging against the
Speaker 4: foreign policy consensus.
Speaker 1: Yeah, don't after the globalists.
Speaker 4: And it sounds like it's at least rhetorically a very
Speaker 4: populist opening statement.
Speaker 1: And that again Brake part had it last night. I
Speaker 1: think I saw you sharing it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's right, Mappa Will got it. So it doesn't
Speaker 4: mean that's going to translate into policy, but it's an
Speaker 4: interesting start, so we'll certainly be following it throughout the
Speaker 4: entire ride. We'll be here. You can go to Breakingpoints
Speaker 4: dot com for a premium subscription if you want to
Speaker 4: be here for the ride with us, and make sure
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Speaker 1: Yeah, do that sounds great? All right, see y'all.
Speaker 14: Only few