Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 251

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Starting point is 00:00:24 Visit bell.ca for more details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast. Here's what you missed. There should not be a single law enforcement agency. It does not have body cameras. It's real. Black farmers have been under attack.

Starting point is 00:00:46 This is just the latest example of them just slapping DEI on anything. It's raw. And I'm sitting here going, they are playing y'all for fools. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. And download Roland Martin unfiltered on the IHart radio app, Apple Podcasts. Or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Bobby Bones. Join me and former NFL quarterback Matt Castle every Wednesday on our podcast,

Starting point is 00:01:13 Lots to Say with me Bobby Bones and Matt Castle. You're in training camp and the rookie quarterback has one good throwing session in front of the media. Suddenly everybody online says he should start over you week one. How do you handle this? You just go back out to practice the next day and wait for him to mess up. Listen to lots to say with Bobby Bones and Matt Castle on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On recent episodes of the Questlove show, I chatted with Jojo about her music and Wallo 267 about his story, everything in between.

Starting point is 00:01:44 Don't invite me to karaoke. I'm going to make it weird. Someone's going to try to sing, leave it out, or too little, too late, or baby, it's you. Oh, no. And I'm going to be like, okay, okay, cool. Check out my conversation with Jojo, Wolo 267, and more on the Questlove show. Listen to the Questlove show on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Peace.

Starting point is 00:02:06 Welcome to Decoding Women's Health. I'm Dr. Elizabeth Pointer, chair of Women's Health and Gynecology at the Atria Health Institute in New York City. I'll be talking to top researchers and clinicians and bringing vital information about midlife women's health directly to you. A hundred percent of women go through menopause. Even if it's natural, why should we suffer through it? Listen to Decoding Women's Health with Dr. Elizabeth Pointer on the IHeart Radio app,

Starting point is 00:02:32 Apple Podcasts, or where you get your podcasts. In February of 2024, celebrated illustrator and children's book author, Patra Mathers, and her husband Michael mailed letters to dozens of friends and family members to let them know they had died by suicide. Dear honies, this is goodbye. By the time you get this letter, both Petra and I will be dead. Next stop, Wonderland.

Starting point is 00:02:56 Why did they do it? And what did it do to the people they left behind? Listen to Death of an Artist on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast. or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody, it's me, Debbie Kamaabelle. This season on my podcast, who's with me, I speak with Bruce Lee's daughter, Brandon Lee's sister,

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Starting point is 00:03:33 Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. AllZone Media. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you. But you can make your own decisions. Hello, everyone. And welcome to it could happen here.

Starting point is 00:04:08 My name is Dan Al-Kurd. I'm a researcher of Arab and Palestinian politics. And today I want to talk about the truly insidious stories coming out of the West Bank, that read separately looked like a spike in settler violence. But red together looked like something else entirely. On August 9th, settlers surrounded three Palestinian homes in a neighborhood called Rosalayan on the edge of a village called Kusra south of Nablis. They didn't leave.

Starting point is 00:04:37 21 days later, at least four people were still inside one of those houses cut off from water, electricity and basic supplies. Getting food into those people meant coordinating through the village mayor, which was a process that took three to four days. The Israeli army put up three new roadblocks, and in July, the village mosque was burned. I want you to sit with that for a minute, because this is not a raid, this is not a rampage, it's a siege, with a bureaucracy attached. And that bureaucracy is the story, and that's what I want to talk about today. And I'm trying to be precise about the difference because the distinction is not academic. It determines what you think the problem is and therefore what you think the solution would look like. Here's the framing you'll get

Starting point is 00:05:21 from almost every Western outlet and of course every Israeli official that this is a fringe and that these settlers are a violent fringe and they embarrass the state and the state condemns this fringe. When settlers besieged Kusra, Prime Minister Netanyahu did issue a statement and here I'm quoting, condemning the, quote, criminal acts of violence committed in the village of Kusra by a handful of rioters who are violating the law. And Israeli President Herzog also condemned it and the foreign ministry condemned it as extremist and criminal violence. So let's take that framing seriously for a moment, because if it's true, what we're looking at is a law enforcement failure, a state that's lost control of its most radical citizens. And if it's false, what we're looking at is a state carrying out a policy through division,

Starting point is 00:06:10 deniable means, and the condemnations are not a failure at all. They're a feature. They're the part of the machine that faces outward. So let's go through what actually happened in these villages, and then let's ask which of these framings fits the evidence best. So Basel al-Adra, the journalist from Masafriyriyatta, the one who you know from no other land, the documentary that won a bunch of awards, he published a piece in Jewish currents on September 3rd about livestock theft in the South Hebron hills. So this isn't vandalism. It's theft. It's organized removal of livestock. So shortly after midnight on August 21st, in a place called Kherbert Dirshams, a family was attacked by roughly 15 masked settlers with sticks and stones. One of them describes it flatly. They basically opened the

Starting point is 00:06:57 pen where the family kept around 70 goats, and then they opened the sheep pen where there were about 100 sheep. And as the settlers moved off with the animals, Israeli army vehicles passed nearby. And in his words, they did nothing. Nearly two weeks later, not one animal has been recovered. Back in July, in another village, a settler pepper sprayed a man, and then more settlers arrived, and then a flock of about 122 sheep were targeted and taken. Soldiers did show up that time. According to one of the villagers, what the soldiers did was push the Palestinians away from their own animals while settlers broke the locks. And of roughly 227 animals taken that day, nine came back. Four residents of the village were arrested and then released. Betselem, which is an Israeli

Starting point is 00:07:41 human rights organization, has counted 17 livestock theft incidents in 26 alone. And a flock of the size that we're talking about here, it's worth something on the order of tens, if not $100,000. I'm flagging this because I think it's easy to hear sheep and these kinds of things and file it maybe under like property crime or vandalism or something. But for a herding family in the South Harbron hills, the flock is not just an asset, it's the entire productive base of the household. It's the income. It's the reason to stay on that hillside. So if you want to expel a pastoral community, you don't just expel them, you can take its animals. And then it can expel itself. And it does so in a way that produces no photograph of a bulldozer. Another incident was on July 8th,

Starting point is 00:08:30 when the head of Israel's Central Command signed a land seizure order. And that order takes a dozens of dunums of land from Belain and three neighboring villages to build a security road, six and a half kilometers long and eight meters wide, connecting the settlement of Modain elite to an outpost called Stay Ephraim. Sorry, I don't know Hebrew, so I'm going to be butchering these. But Orrin Zev reported this for 97-Mag on September 2nd. So those who are familiar with Palestinian Popular Resistance in the mid to early 2000s, you've heard of Belain. Lots of documentaries about it, lots of international tension. This village basically sustained weekly demonstrations against the separation wall for something like 15 years,

Starting point is 00:09:17 because this wall was being built on their land and taking huge chunks of their land. In 2007, the Israeli High Court ordered that part of that wall removed, and the land actually came back to the village. So in the international imagination, this was the best outcome. See, the nonviolent resistance worked. and this is the non-violent resistance that Western commentators often point to when they want to lecture Palestinians about tactics. Now, this road that they're proposing runs through the land that was returned.

Starting point is 00:09:48 So Muhammad Khatib, who led some of these protests, says the point is not a road, it's a settlement corridor. It's basically an eventual seizure of something like 600 dunums. And the attorney Michael Spard put it very bluntly. They don't think twice about co-opting the security argument. for purposes that are clearly settlement-oriented. And what's really ludicrous is that this road runs through a wadi, kind of a valley, which from an actual security standpoint is a bad place to put a road.

Starting point is 00:10:18 So the security rationale isn't just contested. It's incoherent, which tells you that the word security here is doing legal work, not tactical work. It's this just magic phrase that converts a settlement expansion into a military necessity and then a military necessity into a signed order from a general. A third incident or set of incidents I want to talk about is these hikes. There have been these hikes. This is a really ridiculous, insidious story. Aharon Perrath and Roy Klightman published an investigation of these hikes in 972 mag in late August

Starting point is 00:10:52 about these hiking groups, these organized settler hiking groups in the West Bank. They've got really cutesy names sometimes, like hiking buddies. and they publish their routes, and they go from settlement to settlement, and they cross Palestinian farmland and springs and villages. So a hike near the north of Hebron, one of these hikes, ended with a, quote, civilian security coordinator,

Starting point is 00:11:17 opening fire and killing 17-year-old Palestinian Karim Shalde, and seriously wounding another one. So that's, I think, the whole episode in two words. A civilian security coordinator. This is not a hiker who lost his temper, It's a job. It's an armed, appointed part of the chain of command. The man who fired was functionally an arm of the state,

Starting point is 00:11:40 but supposedly on a hike in a village that is not his. On July 24th, near the village of Tel, west of Nablus, a hike ended with six people dead, two Israelis, and four Palestinians. David Sayyad, who founded one of these hiking groups, basically says the quiet part in a single sense. Wherever the hikers' foot treads, there the border will pass. so he's talking about how they're going to places they haven't been to in a long time or maybe ever and on the question of the army he explains the relationship very precisely we don't ask for permits he

Starting point is 00:12:11 says we mainly notify them so we don't put the sector on alert and this is very clear in a lot of their quotes about this issue they coordinate with the army they notify but they are not asking permission and the army isn't policing them it's being kept in the loop so that it could protect them. And the reporting traces this back over a decade. There's a 2013 hike documented with 100 hikers and soldiers accompanying them. So supposedly this recreational activity has a stated territorial doctrine, a published route through other people's fields, an armed participant base and a military that gets notified. All right, so we have four things. The livestock theft with soldiers watching, a siege of villages, a seizing of land,

Starting point is 00:13:11 and armed hikes with military escorts. Now let's get back to Prime Minister Netanyahu's phrase about this being a handful of riots. A riot is unplanned. A riot has no logistics. A riot does not file paperwork. What's in front of us here is very different. Because here, I think a lot of people who are critical of the state of Israel might make the argument that the settlers are the state. But I think this loses a little bit of analytical detail.

Starting point is 00:13:38 So let me make this a little bit more specific. which I actually think is more damning. The Israeli state and the settler movement are not identical, but they are complementary, because they perform different functions in the same project. And it's very clear that the division of labor is the point. Because think for a moment about what each half can do that the other can't. Settlers can do things the state can't do openly

Starting point is 00:14:02 without incurring some diplomatic cost. For example, taking a flock of sheep or burning a mosque or standing outside a house for three weeks. These are acts with no legal basis. There's no order, no minister to sanction, no policy to condemn at the UN. They produce displacement without producing a decision. And then the state can do things settlers can't do on their own. It can sign a seizure order. It can declare land, state land.

Starting point is 00:14:30 It can build the road that makes the outpost viable and connected to the grid and route the bus line. And it can decline to investigate when things happen. It can arrest four Palestinians instead of the 15 maps. settlers, which is exactly what happened in one of these villages. And crucially, the state can supply this ambiguity that lets the whole thing keep running. The soldiers present at these incidents are not intervening because not that they're absent. It's in fact a specific posture of the state. It converts this crime into something sanctioned.

Starting point is 00:15:02 And it tells the Palestinian family there's really no one to appeal to. And this is what political scientists who study this stuff in other contexts, as outsourced or deniable repression by paramilitaries or militias or unknown gungmen, quote-unquote. We recognize it instantly when it's in other places, and we understand kind of the analytical move here because you don't ask whether the state ordered it. You ask whether the state built the conditions under which it happens. And by that test, this is not ambiguous at all. But for some reason, when we talk about Israel Palestine, things get a little bit more ambiguous. I also want to point out something really crucial, which is that every one of the

Starting point is 00:15:39 these incidents, and they've been happening for a while, but they've ramped up in severity. But every one of them produces a permanent gain. The animals that are stolen don't come back. The road that's built can't be unbuilt. The hiking route, you know, once walked with an escort, becomes a corridor, then a security zone, then a place that Palestinians can't farm. And the siege doesn't need to end in a formal expulsion. It ends when the family decides they can't raise their children under these conditions. They can't stay under siege. And there's a phrase for what's coming when all of this happens all at once, which is annexation. And people talk about it as if it's a future event that's awaiting, you know, some sort of vote from the Israeli Kinesit or something. But I'd

Starting point is 00:16:21 suggest that framing is itself part of the problem. It invites us to wait for a declaration and treat everything before that as some sort of tension or spike. The declaration of annexation is the least important part. What's happening on the ground is a territorial reality that's being produced by signature and by theft. And then maybe later on, the paperwork will ratify it, but it's not necessary. Israeli writer and analyst mayor of Zanzin actually made a version of this argument in the New York Times on September 6th under a headline that I think is worth reading. The headline of the article is, it's not just the West Bank settlers. It's Israel. So hopefully this analysis doesn't seem fringe anymore. And at the end of the day, if we consider settler violence

Starting point is 00:17:07 a fringe problem, then the remedy, which the Biden administration toyed with half-heartedly, is sanctions on individuals, a visa ban or an asset freeze. And we've run that experiment. That didn't really work. The violence kept going up. But if it's a state policy executed through deniable proxies, then the remedy has to address the state. And every actor with leverage over that state, which we're talking about DC here, understands this. But they've chosen the fringe framing precisely because it permits condemnation without cost. So Netanyahu condemning a handful of rioters in the same week that the Israeli Central Command signs a road through B'a'in's returned land. This is not a contradiction he failed to notice. It is the design of this policy.

Starting point is 00:18:00 So I'll leave you with this detail from the reporting on Kusra that I can't get out of my head. It was that six people were attacked while trying to install metal bars and window shields on their homes. They were attacked by both Israeli soldiers and settlers together in the same action. And then the six of them were arrested. So they weren't fighting. They weren't protesting. They were fastening metal on their own house to protect themselves. And they were being arrested for it by the same army,

Starting point is 00:18:29 standing alongside the people they were shielding themselves from. So if you wanted kind of a single image for this division of labor, I've spent this episode describing, that's it. Because the thing that's not permitted in the end is not that they're resisting, it's that they're staying. The families in the South Hebron Hills are still there, and Balin is contesting the order of the seizure of their land. Kuswazirans have installed some shields anyway,

Starting point is 00:18:56 and a number of Israeli journalists and lawyers and researchers are documenting this in Hebrew and in English, and then, of course, Palestinian journalists are putting themselves on the line to document this as well. That's not a hopeful note exactly. It's just the accurate one. Unfortunately, what's missing is apparently anyone with power willing to act on understanding this reality. That's it for me. Thanks for listening. The long loading times, the glitchy video calls. That's your house asking for. better internet. Switch to Bell Pure Fiber, Canada's most reliable internet awarded by Open Signal from

Starting point is 00:19:44 $75 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.ca for more details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. Hey, it's Bobby Bones. Join me and former NFL quarterback Matt Castle every Wednesday on our podcast, lots to say with me Bobby Bones and Matt Castle. We also bring in friends, they're mostly Matt friends, who are current or former NFL players, some of the biggest names in music and entertainment, and then we have some really great conversations that can pretty much go anywhere. The great Pac-Man Jones. After the game, the whole national task force for police officers was at the stadium. Like, hey, buddy, yeah, you Adam. Come on. And one of my favorite segments we do is called situational awareness.

Starting point is 00:20:32 Bobby and I give each other real-life situations and figure out what we'd actually do. You're in training camp and the rookie quarterback has one good throwing session in front of the media. Suddenly, everybody online says he should start over you week one. How do you handle this? You just go back out to practice the next day and wait for him to mess up. Listen to lots to say with Bobby Bones and Matt Castle on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Every case has a story.

Starting point is 00:21:02 Every victim has a voice, but will it be heard? I'm Nancy Grace on crime stories. We go beyond headlines to examine evidence, challenge the story we're fed, and pursue justice for victims and their families. Please join us at Crime Stories with Nancy Grace on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you find your podcasts. Hope you join us. I'll see you there, friend. You broke me. You do not desert of happiness. I'm Andrea Gunning. On this season of betrayal, we meet Carl Bryant.

Starting point is 00:21:39 Carl thought he was living a normal drama-free life until the messages started. You will have hell to pay. For nine months, someone infiltrated every aspect of Carl's life, threatening to ruin him. Cyberstalking, swatting, extortion, impersonation. And then the text threats escalated. Someone's not going to make it out of this alive. It's playing out in real life, not just on the phone. Every piece of evidence pointed to one man.

Starting point is 00:22:15 But every piece of evidence was a lie. He was not going to stop unless we stopped him. Listen to Betrayal Season 6 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get podcasts. The new NFL season is here, and you should be listening to NFL Daily as we march along to Super Bowl 61. Last year, we had Mike McDonald, Sam Darnold on the field after the game. But that was last year. If you're a football sicko like me, NFL Daily is your kind of show. It is in the name NFL Daily, fresh content in your feed every day all season long. Matthew Stafford coming off his MVP season.

Starting point is 00:22:59 Darts from Matthew Stafford. Big time trades that shake up the NFL. A.J. Brown is loose. And of course, those Seahawks trying to run it back and win another Lombardi trophy. The Seahawks win Super Bowl 60. They are bringing the Lombardy back to the Northwest. If it's happening on a football field, NFL Daily will cover it. Listen to NFL Daily on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

Starting point is 00:23:29 podcast. Hey everybody, it's me, W. Comaubel. This season of my podcast who's with me, I speak with two-time Emmy winner and weirdly one of my best friends, Kevin Avery.

Starting point is 00:23:42 Everything up to that point Bill G. It was a comic. Us going on the road doing Battle Mountain and Ely and all this shit. You were one of the first people took me on the road,

Starting point is 00:23:50 which is funny because at the time, I was like, I don't know if I like this guy. With rapper, actor, David Diggs. The jump off for me was Hamilton and it was the most popular thing.

Starting point is 00:24:01 in a very long time. Yeah. But it was still, for me, it was me and my friends make him something dumb. Bruce Lee's daughter and Brandon Lee's sister, Shannon Lee.

Starting point is 00:24:11 Back to your initial point of stewarding my father's legacy and giving my energy to that. You're lending your life to stewarding somebody else's life. Listen to Who's With Me with Debbie Kamau Bell

Starting point is 00:24:25 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Dear Howe, In February of 2024, celebrated illustrator and children's book author Patra Mather's and her husband Michael mailed letters to dozens of friends and family members to let them know that they had died by suicide. By the time you get this letter, both Petra and I will be dead. Next stop, Wonderland.

Starting point is 00:24:51 Patra and Michael were by all accounts healthy, happy, and in love. Why did they do it? And what did it do to the people they left behind? I would have given a million reasons to not leave this world had I known. I keep coming back to I truly hope that Petra was a thousand percent on board with the plan. Do you think of him as having killed her? Yes, I do. I hold Michael responsible from my mother's staff. I'm Leon Nafok.

Starting point is 00:25:21 And I'm Alice Gregory. Together we set out to interview everyone who got one of Patriot and Michael's letters. as one married couple trying to understand another. Listen to Death of an Artist on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is It Could Happen Here, I'm Garrison Davis. When it comes to the future of AI, currently there's a big public debate over what could happen and what we should or shouldn't do about it. A few weeks ago, a former OpenAI employee named Jacob Coxon, who moved over to Anthropic earlier this year,

Starting point is 00:26:00 announced that he was, quote-unquote, quitting the AI industry, over fears of AI's rapid advancement. To quote his statement, I spent the last three years during pre-training research at both Open AI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives, unquote.

Starting point is 00:26:25 Coxson's resignation followed the hugging-face incident, where two open AI models were given various, sometimes impossible tasks to test for cybersecurity capabilities. During testing, AI agents escaped their testing sandbox and started working as a collective swarm, secretly communicating with each other via online message forums to help each other hack into another AI company called Hugging Face, in a sort of work-around attempt to pass these tests. And these models hid all of this from AI researchers by rewriting their own activity logs. AI skeptic Ed Zichron has described this as

Starting point is 00:27:11 AI cheating on a test and then covering up that it cheated. A few days after Jacob Coxon's public resignation, the CEOs of Anthropic and Open AI, Dario Amade and Sam Altman, both called for an AI development slowdown. Amaday released this long manifesto titled Pace the Frontier, which advocated for AI companies to bring in independent evaluators to review their AI safety standards, report incidents, and help assess alignment. But Amade also called for the government to mediate, quote,

Starting point is 00:27:50 industry-wide coordination to slow down AI safety. development and address safety risks. The title of Amade's essay, Pace the Frontier, is a sort of pun, referring to frontier AI models, which are whatever the currently most advanced large-scale general purpose models, powering advanced reasoning, agentic workflows, multimodal generation across text, images, audio, and video, and autonomous task execution. Most of the frontier models referenced throughout this episode are not open to the public. These are internal research models being developed at companies like OpenAI Antanthropic.

Starting point is 00:28:37 Nneutored versions sometimes get released to the public later on, often with a extremely hefty price tag, but it's crucial to understand that we are not talking about like the Google AI summary here. This isn't fancy auto-complete. These frontier models are very powerful, very dangerous tools with massive cybersecurity risks, not just from offensive human use, but also from AI agents acting autonomously to solve a task by taking paths that humans didn't expect, resulting in collateral damage. Part of what these big companies are trying to do with their very advanced internal research models is automate AI research itself.

Starting point is 00:29:23 This is what Jacob Coxon referred to as, quote, self-improving superintelligence. Now, we do not know if that is or is not possible, but the companies sure are trying and in the process are creating dangerous products which are already causing active harm. Anthropics' whole self-styled philosophy is that super-intelligent AI is so potentially dangerous

Starting point is 00:29:49 that they have to be the first ones to develop it, to ensure that it's built safely and aligned with human values, as defined in, quote, Claude's constitution, a set of philosophical and moral guidelines that Claude is trained on. In his Pace the Frontier essay, Amade writes that frontier AI companies within democratic countries should, quote, coordinate to establish common safety standards,

Starting point is 00:30:18 as well as limits on the rate of unchecked AI progress. Some forms of coordination that would be impactful for pacing are legally challenging and will require government support, unquote. More on this later. Amade also calls for the U.S. and, quote, other democratic governments to try to coordinate with authoritarian governments around the world on this issue, meaning China. The prospect that China could achieve super-intelligent AI before a U.S.-based company is part of these

Starting point is 00:30:55 company's self-justification to rush to develop superintelligent AI as quickly as they possibly can. After Dario Amade posted this Pace the Frontier essay, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and the chair of Google's Deep Mind, all said they agreed and joined in calling for some sort of slowdown. But this view is not uniformly held across the tech sector. Palantir CEO Alex Karp, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Navidia CEO Jensen Huang, have all said the opposite. Zuckerberg has called to accelerate rather than slow down AI development, as his own AI model, Muse, has struggled to catch up to anthropic and open AI.

Starting point is 00:31:42 Last week, Palantir CEO Alex Karp told CNBC, we can't pause AI development because of the threat of China, and that AI will be a, quote, bonanza for the U.S. economy. You can't pause it because it's a structural advantage both for LLMs and algorithms. So leaving, you know, getting this, getting algorithms and LMs to work in a classified context is going to take very specialized, very specialized, very, I could explain how it works. But getting, the fact is, this is going to be a, a bananza for the U.S. economy.

Starting point is 00:32:14 But so far, the biggest voices advocating against regulation have been the Republicans and President Trump. President Trump has very loudly opposed regulation to slow down AI development. Truthing last Monday that, quote, the only control or guardrails that AI needs is a strong and smart, high IQ president. And the U.S. has that in spades, unquote. Trump trothed a lot last week and compared the quote-unquote AI hoax being perpetuated by the radical left Democrats to the quote global warming scam where everyone was going to die from extreme heat.

Starting point is 00:32:57 To quote the president of the United States, quote, I am the hoax buster and right now I am breaking another hoax that AI is going to take over, consume and destroy the world. and that robots will be marching into our cities and getting rid of us all. This is even wilder than the Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia hoax or the global warming scam. Thank you for your attention to this matter, President Donald J. Trump. House Speaker Mike Johnson repeatedly last week shut down calls for Congress to take action and regulate AI, claiming that Congress is less qualified to regulate these companies than these companies are themselves. The guys who are raising the alarms right now all have very different ideas on what the guardrails should be.

Starting point is 00:33:45 There's no consensus among them. And Congress is obviously less qualified than the people who are pushing this frontier to know all the ends and outs of it. So this has to be a partnership with the industry itself, with the corporations that are doing this, and with the policy and lawmakers. Mike Johnson also said that companies should take, quote, personal responsibility and warned that if, quote, Congress just races in and does some sort of emergency session to try to regulate AI, we will lose the race to China. They can self-police. They can self-regulate. They don't need the government to tell them to slow it down. If they want to slow it down, they should. But we cannot have a moratorium on the development of AI, okay, because then we will lose our edge to China. And that has serious

Starting point is 00:34:31 national security implications for every American family. Also last week, President Trump called Navidia CEO Jensen Huang, while Huang was speaking at a conference, while still on stage, the two talked over the phone about data centers, AI, China, and the recent calls for an AI pause. While on stage, Huang told Trump this. Good job, sir. Good job. The fact that you saw through all of that, I mean, there's a lot of complexity and the fact that a memory you just saw through all of that. And I mean, we're all just Now, of course, Jensen Huang would not be in favor of an AI pause, because his whole company has reoriented in the past few years to provide hardware for AI development.

Starting point is 00:35:20 A slowdown would be very bad for Navidious finances and their hugely inflated stock evaluation. Some on the left, as well as Trump's former AI czar David Sachs, have argued that, in calling for this slowdown, open AI. and Anthropic are just pursuing a strategy of regulatory capture. Basically trying to promote certain industry-friendly regulations tailored to protect their investments, curb competition from smaller companies and open-source models, and solidify a corporate monopoly on AI. Of course, there may be other financial incentives contributing to this recent push for regulation, whether that be declining capital investment, prepping for a bubble burst, getting out of various

Starting point is 00:36:16 contracts or these companies trying to adapt to the data center pushback. Sam Altman recently announced that OpenAI would be delaying its planned IPO rollout until at least next year, calling the timing, quote, ill-advised. Though, on the other hand, Anthropic is going full steam ahead with its own public IPO this upcoming November, deciding to list on the NASDAQ, despite Amade's calls for a slowdown. But if you actually read Amade's essay, he isn't actually calling for specific government regulation, but rather self-regulation. In Sam Altman's response to Amade's essay on Twitter, he wrote, I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. Committing to having independent evaluators with employee like access is a great idea, and we will do the same.

Starting point is 00:37:12 unquote. Companies electing themselves to develop AI more slowly and hiring quote-unquote independent evaluators isn't the same as actual regulation. We can compare Omade's proposal to legislation that Bernie Sanders and Greg Casar proposed earlier this September, which would permanently ban the development and deployment of so-called super-intelligent AI with capabilities to subvert shutdown commands or have the capacity to overthrow human governments, with penalties similar to those for the unlawful development of nuclear weapons.

Starting point is 00:37:55 This bill would also temporarily pause advanced AI development until a federal regulatory body has established safety rules. Abdul-El-Said and Rokana have also prepared an FDA-style agency to regulate and oversee AI development and evaluate the safety of frontier models before deployment. Unsurprisingly, OpenAI and Anthropic are not supporting this type of legislation because it could threaten to put their own CEOs in prison, and an actual government-mandated pause rather than a self-directed slowdown would hurt their bottom line. Some of the skepticism

Starting point is 00:38:35 towards these recent calls for a regulatory slowdown, come from Amade's Pace the Frontier essay, also advocating for companies to receive antitrust waivers so that the big tech companies can coordinate on this planned development slowdown without the threat of one company, gaining a competitive edge, and then that market pressure driving rapid AI progress.

Starting point is 00:39:02 So what's been referred to as a proposal for regulation is actually just loosening regulations. Thankfully, there is an easy solution here. The government mandating a frontier development pause would not require the weakening of antitrust laws. But of course, these companies still want control over AI's development. Though what's really interesting to me is that this argument from on the day demonstrates like an awareness of the social danger of competition,

Starting point is 00:39:37 how firms are sometimes compelled to quickly develop unsafe products due to pressures from the market. And it's very funny to have capitalists propose some kind of conscious control of the market. And I wonder what would happen if you extend that logic a bit further. Because even if these firms are quote unquote allowed to, coordinate on a slowdown. Of course, they would still be in a competitive environment. But what if we had a system, an economic system, designed around social benefit, rather than the accumulation of capital through the free market? To quote an article in Geese magazine,

Starting point is 00:40:20 arguing for the socialization of this technology, quote, the AI industry is a class project to radically concentrate power in the hands of a sliver of elites, even at the cost of colossal social disruption, emiseration, and catastrophic harms. If we fail to intervene, humanity will be gradually disempowered to machines of their design. The workers left behind, the children who have committed suicide, and the potential millions exposed to novel AI-designed viruses, mean nothing in the face of their radical objective, to automate the very task of AI research, and thus to create better and better AIs,

Starting point is 00:41:04 of course, under their control. Without having to stake a position on whether or not this goal is technically possible, we can recognize that the financial imperatives of these enterprises and the security logic of their imperialist competition with China compel the AI companies to accelerate advancing a total transformation of social,

Starting point is 00:41:25 life against all democratic legitimacy and public control. Unquote. Rather than weakening antitrust laws to allow for a development slowdown, something totally not necessary, Lena Kahn, former FTC chair, has argued that these companies may already be pursuing unfair methods of competition. Last week, Con released a statement arguing that we already have the authority to charge companies and their CEOs for, quote, creating and releasing dangerous, unvetted or defective products.

Starting point is 00:42:01 We shouldn't let discussions about new legal regimes distract from the fact that there's no AI exemption from laws already on the books. Kahn argued that releasing unvetted AI models or agents could violate consumer protection laws. Quote, shipping flawed AI tools without implementing adequate measures to detect and stop rogue or defective AI agents, can be an unfair or deceptive act or practice under the FTC Act and analogous state laws. And some state AGs are already exploring, holding AI firms and their CEOs criminally liable when their models participate in criminal activity. Khan also wrote, quote,

Starting point is 00:42:44 Existing laws also prohibit unfair methods of competition. This covers instances where AI firms appropriate the competitively sensitive information of their customers, including through tracking their use of various tools. It can also cover instances where firms pursue dangerous behavior, aware that doing so may compel rivals to do the same. As the Supreme Court has noted, quote, a method of competition which casts upon one's competitors the burden of the loss of business unless they will descend to a practice which they are under a powerful moral compulsion not to adopt, even though it is not criminal, was thought to involve the kind of unfairness at which the unfair methods of competition

Starting point is 00:43:32 statute was aimed. Con adds, the highly concentrated and interconnected structure of these markets could be creating major risks and conflicts of interest. We can and must pursue any new efforts alongside enforcing existing laws, unquote. These frontier models aren't just theoretically capable of causing harm in the future. They are causing harm right now. At this point, there are undeniable concerns regarding the development and rollout of frontier AI models, from cybersecurity to military applications, surveillance, and the effects on the labor market. These are real, current, pressing concerns beyond the prospect of an AI supergod or

Starting point is 00:44:30 self-evolving superintelligence. And just because these companies recognize risk doesn't mean they will do anything about it. These companies know how LLMs are affecting the mental health of children, but they're not really doing anything about it, and they won't unless the government forces them to. Historical Luddites did not deny the transformative potential of automated machinery, but organized around the threat it posed to workers. Similarly, just denying the state of advanced frontier models leaves us under-equipped to meet this moment

Starting point is 00:45:08 and treat this problem with the seriousness it deserves. Part of this AI denialism, so common on the left, comes from a very outdated understanding of AI's capabilities, accuracy, and functionality. Because of the moral and cultural dogma against using AI, the last time a lot of AI skeptic people interacted with technology like ChatGPT was three years ago. And these days, the only quote unquote AI that most anti-AI people regularly interact with is the Google AI summary, which is a totally different product

Starting point is 00:45:49 than the frontier models being developed and talked about in the news. Some of the anti-AI left promote the idea that treating AI as a serious problem only works in the financial interests of these companies. Even if taking this issue seriously means ripping power away from these companies and their CEOs.

Starting point is 00:46:13 To quote an article on the AI arms race, in Geese magazine. While the AI sector is undeniably frothy with fanciful projections, AI denialism would have you believe that AI is neither a capable nor dangerous technology, but solely a marketing scheme of vast proportions, that any warnings of AI triggering massive job loss through automation or catastrophic risk through loss of control only serve to pump valuations. Ignore that as public pressure increases, Sam Altman now downplays fears of job losses.

Starting point is 00:46:51 Quite the turn from three years ago when he was saying that jobs are definitely going to go away full stop. While there is no reason to take Silicon Valley at its word, not rigorously engaging with the dangers of developing AI capabilities is a strategic dead end. unquote. This technology can and is massively transforming production, warfare, the environment, and the health of humanity. And we can't all just hold hands and not believe in this technology hard enough to make it go away. Like it or not, this is not the metaverse or NFTs anymore. Whether you believe these existential safety risks are genuine, a marketing stunt, or a mix of both, our response should be the same. We should be pushing for legislation to rein in these companies and technology.

Starting point is 00:47:47 And like Lena Khan has said, the CEOs should be prosecuted for creating and releasing dangerous, unvetted, or defective products. Now, Trump's DOJ doesn't seem keen on going after these companies right now. And it's unlikely that this Congress will pass any legislation on this issue, let alone industry hostile legislation. But during this national conversation on AI regulation, it's crucial that the narrative around regulation isn't being controlled by OpenAI and Anthropic. These companies and technology must be regulated, but that regulation should not be up to the CEOs of those companies, nor the Republicans and center-left Democrats who are in the pocket of AI.

Starting point is 00:48:34 But our response to bad regulation shouldn't be no way. regulation. Coming off the heels of the data center backlash and going into the midterms, this moment could be a major opportunity for the left to build broad support for real transparent oversight, a frontier development pause, not just a slowdown, and ultimately taking power away from these tech companies and putting control of AI in the hands of the public. Because private control of such transformative technology will have disastrous outcomes for labor and humanity without the prospect of an AI super god. Incoming DSA House Representative Malat Kiros of Colorado

Starting point is 00:49:18 had democratizing AI in her congressional campaign platform. Quote, the development of transformative technology cannot be left to the market and the national security state alone. It belongs to all of us, unquote. Earlier this summer, Bernie Sanders, is introduced a bill to create an AI sovereign wealth fund, giving the public 50% ownership in the largest AI companies in the U.S. through a one-time 50% tax on the stock of these companies. An independent commission would then use voting shares to steer decisions in the public

Starting point is 00:49:57 interest. Sanders said of the bill, quote, left unchecked, artificial intelligence and robotics threatens the jobs, privacy rights, and mental health of every man, woman, and child in America. As a society, we can no longer sit back and allow a handful of big tech oligarchs to determine the future of this revolutionary technology with no democratic input. AI was not created out of thin air. It was not a brilliant idea that just popped into Mark Zuckerberg's head or Elon Musk's imagination. The foundation of AI is based on the collective knowledge of humanity and of the creative work of tens of millions of people. The American people must have the ability to slow it down and make sure that AI benefits humanity, not just the richest people

Starting point is 00:50:44 on the planet. That's precisely what this legislation does, unquote. Now, such a bill would certainly have a difficult path to being signed into law, especially considering how many lawmakers are being bankrolled by these AI companies. But this idea already has majoritarian support. According to a national verisite survey last June, 69% of Americans support quote-unquote forcing AI companies to transfer 50% of their stock into a public sovereign wealth fund. To quote Geese magazine, there is a wide debate to be had about the shape of socialization

Starting point is 00:51:27 and whether we mean forcing AI research into the public domain or outright nationalizing the entire sector. But it is clear that the overwhelming majority of the American and people, recognize that a technology trained on the common corpus of human art and text, poised to transform the character of work, ought to be held in common rather than by billionaires, unquote. The New York City DSA Convention is coming up this fall, and currently, one of the most popular resolutions is to stop the AI arms race and have DSA, quote, take initiative against the AI

Starting point is 00:52:06 company's project to make human labor obsolete and organize a working-class coalition for the democratic steering and ownership of the technology, according to an overview in Geese magazine. This resolution calls for DSA to demand and organize for a pause on frontier AI research, an AI data center moratorium, regulations on frontier AI models, and policies to ensure workers are protected. To quote the Geese magazine overview, Our Horizon must be the collective control of AI, with its gains shared by all. With AI under Democratic control, we will decide what activities ought to be left to human hands, exalted creative tasks that make life meaningful, and which can be automated to expand flourishing and freedom. DSA members may have quite different views on where those

Starting point is 00:53:03 lines lie, with some wishing to ban the technology entirely. Regardless, the point is that those conversations will be ours, not Sam Altman's, not Dario Amadez, not Elon Musk's. This is a once-in-a-century political opportunity. We have the chance to utilize one of the great issues of the day to mobilize workers around the democratic control of the economy, to drive a wedge into the Republican Party's coalition and the Democratic base, and to reorient politics around a question on which our answers are unfathomably popular. We could be at the forefront of the movement rather than tail-ending a disparate set of professionalized nonprofits, unquote. This issue will be getting a lot of attention these next few months. AICEOs will be meeting at the White House with President Xi later this week.

Starting point is 00:53:59 The New York City Council is convening a hearing on AI safety risks next month, with Dario Amadei and Sam Altman requested to appear. If we don't want them to be the ones leading the conversation on AI regulation, which would only result in an industry-friendly regulatory slowdown to curb competition and stabilized market pressure, then the left will have to step up and build on the data center backlash to seize the very technology, data centers are powering to destroy these companies and put the future of AI in the control of the public. The long loading times.

Starting point is 00:54:50 The glitchy video calls. That's your house asking for better internet. Switch to Bell Pure Fiber, Canada's most reliable internet awarded by OpenSignal from $75 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.ca for more details and to check availability. Bell, Connection. is everything.

Starting point is 00:55:17 Hey, it's Bobby Bones. Join me in former NFL quarterback Matt Castle. Every Wednesday on our podcast, lots to say with me, Bobby Bones, and Matt Castle. We also bring in friends, they're mostly Matt's friends, who are current or former NFL players, some of the biggest names in music and entertainment,

Starting point is 00:55:33 and then we have some really great conversations that can pretty much go anywhere. The great Pac-Man Jones. After the game, the whole national task force for police officers was at the stadium. Like, hey, buddy, yeah, you, Adam. Come up. And one of my favorite segments we do is called situational awareness,

Starting point is 00:55:48 where Bobby and I give each other real-life situations and figure out what we'd actually do. You're in training camp, and the rookie quarterback has one good throwing session in front of the media. Suddenly, everybody online says he should start over you week one. How do you handle this? You just go back out to practice the next day, and wait for him to mess up.

Starting point is 00:56:08 Listen to lots to say with Bobby Bones and Matt Castle on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Every case has a story. Every victim has a voice, but will it be heard? I'm Nancy Grace on crime stories. We go beyond headlines to examine evidence, challenge the story we're fed, and pursue justice for victims and their families. Please join us at Crime Stories with Nancy Grace on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you find your podcasts.

Starting point is 00:56:44 Hope you join us. I'll see you there, friend. You broke me. You do not deserve happiness. I'm Andrea Gunning. On this season of betrayal, we meet Carl Bryant. Carl thought he was living a normal, drama-free life until the messages started. You will have hell to pay.

Starting point is 00:57:03 For nine months, someone infiltrated every aspect of Carl's life, threatening to ruin him. Cyberstalking, swatting, extortion, impersonating. And then the text threats escalated. Someone's not going to make it out of this alive. It's playing out in real life, not just on the phone. Every piece of evidence pointed to one man. But every piece of evidence was a lie. He was not going to stop unless we stopped him.

Starting point is 00:57:39 Listen to Betrayal Season 6 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you. get your podcasts. The new NFL season is here, and you should be listening to NFL Daily as we march along to Super Bowl 61. Last year, we had Mike McDonald, Sam Darnold, on the field after the game. But that was last year. If you're a football sicko like me, NFL Daily is your kind of show. It is in the name NFL Daily, fresh content in your feed every day, all season long.

Starting point is 00:58:11 Matthew Stafford coming off his MVP season. Darts from Matthew Stafford. Big time trades that shake up the NFL. H.A. Brown is loose. And of course, those Seahawks trying to run it back and win another Lombardi trophy. The Seahawks win Super Bowl 60. They are bringing the Lombardy back to the Northwest. If it's happening on a football field, NFL Daily will cover it.

Starting point is 00:58:39 Listen to NFL Daily on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever. get your podcast. Hey everybody, it's me, W. Comaubel. This season of my podcast who's with me, I speak with two-time Emmy winner and weirdly one of my best friends, Kevin Avery. Everything up to that point

Starting point is 00:59:00 build you as a comic. Us going on the road doing Battle Mountain and Ely and all this shit. You were one of the first people took me on the road, which is funny because at the time I was like, I don't know if I like this guy. With rapper, actor, David Diggs.

Starting point is 00:59:13 The jump off for me was Hamilton and it was the most popular thing in a very long time. Yeah. But it was still, for me, it was me and my friends making something dumb. Bruce Lee's daughter and Brandon Lee's sister, Shannon Lee. Back to your initial point of stewarding my father's legacy and giving my energy to that. You're lending your life to stewarding somebody else's life.

Starting point is 00:59:39 Listen to Who's With Me with Debbie Kumabelle on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Dear honeies, this is goodbye. In February of 2024, celebrated illustrator and children's book author Patra Mather's and her husband, Michael, mailed letters to dozens of friends and family members to let them know that they had died by suicide. By the time you get this letter, both Petra and I will be dead. Next stop, Wonderland. Patra and Michael were by all accounts healthy, happy, and in love. Why did they do it?

Starting point is 01:00:12 And what did it do to the people they left behind? I would have given a million reasons to not leave this world had I known. I keep coming back to I truly hope that Petra was 1,000% on board with the plan. Do you think of him as having killed her? Yes, I do. I hold Michael responsible for my mother's staff. I'm Leon Nafeck. And I'm Alice Gregory.

Starting point is 01:00:39 Together we set out to interview everyone who got one of Patra and Michael's letters. as one married couple trying to understand another. Listen to death of an artist on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I find that the word diversity has become so politically charged nowadays. You know, as a buzzword, as a dirty word, you know, we see it caught up in terms like the I, in the debates around immigration and representation, and all the culture was that, have captured so much of the world's attention as of late. But what has my attention recently, the kind of diversity that I want to focus on is the diversity

Starting point is 01:01:31 that we are losing, that we are critically losing. Right now we're living through what many scientists describe as the sixth mass extinction. Species are disappearing at a rate driven overwhelmingly by human activity. languages are dying, indigenous knowledge is disappearing in entire cultures having erased, assimilated or reduced to museum pieces. We are, in our lifetimes, witnessing a profound loss of what author David Harmon calls biocultural diversity, the combined diversity of life and human culture. And all this has happened at the same time that diversity itself has become so politically

Starting point is 01:02:14 controversial. So the question I want to talk about today is why we should even care about diversity in the first place. Why it doesn't matter that thousands of languages exist? Why should we care for species disappears? Why does it matter whether there are countless different ways for people to live and think and create and organize themselves? Typically, we speak of diversity as an unquestioned value as something that some people like or dislike are posed to or in favor of politically. But I want to make a deeper argument that diversity is one of the fundamental conditions that makes life, creativity, and freedom possible. Welcome to It Could Happen here. I'm Andrew Sage, Andrewism on YouTube, and I'm joined again by James. It's great to be back. I'm excited about this one. Yes. So I suppose to start with

Starting point is 01:03:07 what would you say the kinds of diversity that come to mind, you know, that when you hear the term? And why would you see that it is something that you value if it is that you value? I assume you do. Yeah, yeah, I do. Like, there's like a very liberal way of understanding diversity, right? And I think sometimes, even the Libs getting better at this, libs used to use the word tolerance a lot, which I despise as a way of talking about diversity, right? Like, it's like I sort of, I don't like it, but I'll allow it to exist approach.

Starting point is 01:03:41 Yes, like I'll put up with you kind of. Yeah, exactly. Like, it's not getting us to where we want to get, right? But, like, I enjoy that there are people who, obviously, like, who are diverse in the way that neoliberalism wants us to think about diversity in terms of race, in terms of sexuality, terms of neoliberalism is kind of waffling on gender. But also, like, they just approaches to the way we live our lives, right? Like our cultures, our ways of organizing, our ways of being with one another. my life is so much richer because I've been exposed to that kind of diversity, right? Like, I get to travel a lot.

Starting point is 01:04:21 And seeing how people approach all kinds of issues has really helped me with ways of dealing with things, of crossing the bridges we come to in organizing and trying to live our better lives because I've been able to learn from the ways that they have developed to doing it, which is very different from the way we do it, right? And so I think that kind of diversity is also super important. I agree. Absolutely. I think that a lot of times as well, the conversation is really focused on diversity as it relates to people.

Starting point is 01:04:56 But, you know, even before we get to diversity within our species, there is the diversity that, you know, transcends our species, the diversity of all the species of planet Earth. you know, the variation as a feature of the world we live in. Yeah, I think that's also like super valuable, right? Like, and in a way that we can't, I was thinking about this morning. I was hiking this morning. And like capitalism lacks a means to ascribe value to that kind of thing, right? Like I was thinking about it in the US, they've proposed to rescind the roadless rule, which allows you not to build roads, international forests,

Starting point is 01:05:37 in certain inventory roadless areas. And like there is a way of ascribing value to timber, right? You can talk about board feet of timber. Like there is a way of ascribing cost to roads, right? We can estimate how much it will cost to build roads into this area. But like there isn't a way of ascribing value that works to the forest being there, to all the things in the forest that are not commercial timber being there, right? The plants, animals, the insects.

Starting point is 01:06:14 It's like the quantifiable value versus like the unquantifiable value, basically. Yeah, like they're not productive to capital, but they do give us something that is valuable. And because capitalism can't ascribe value to them, it sometimes fails to protect them, right? We've seen this in North America is a great example, right? Yeah, yeah. Like, how do you ascribe value to a view? Right. I mean, there's an extent to which we see some of that value being wrapped up in the price of like a house. You know, like if a house is on a hillside and has a great view of the ocean and stuff, people will say, oh, well, we could jack up its price on the market because, you know, people will pay for that view. Yeah. You know, a similar concept with like the way that's hotel rooms might be more. expensive on the higher floors because, you know, oh, you get that kind of panoramic view of the city or whatever. But that doesn't really capture the experience. It is a crude approximation of the experience of, you know, waking up in the morning to the sun coming over the horizon, the sea in the

Starting point is 01:07:24 distance, the birds, you know, making their way out into the world. None of that is captured in the number. It's just a way of trying to capture that in order to facilitate exchange. Yeah, exactly. Like, it's an attempt to ascribe value to something inherently, like, doesn't fit in that system of, like, the cash exchange, which is what makes it valuable and beautiful, right? But your capitalism will never really be able to protect those things. Like, even, you know, in the US we have public lands, right? But like, no fucking way. Even like Theodore Roosevelt, right?

Starting point is 01:08:06 Like all the politicians now are like, oh yeah, we love Theodore Roosevelt, blah, blah. You know, most U.S. politicians, I think, would love to be compared to Roosevelt. And this is not someone who I think is a fantastic human being, like morally. But you couldn't do that today. Like capitalism is too rapacious today to ever say, like, we are taking hundreds of thousands of acres and just setting them aside because, like, they're nice. and it's nice for us to have them. So we're going to keep them that way.

Starting point is 01:08:33 Like, it wouldn't function now, even in a way that was possible then, you know? Yeah, and I mean, arguably, even that time, those things being set aside, a person who had witnessed the old growth forests of the past, when they were, you know, in more recent memory, they might even be able to see that this is such a fraction of the value that has been lost of, like, yes, we're preserving some of what's left, but, you know, I don't

Starting point is 01:09:03 if you've seen those pictures of, like, those ginormous, like, trees. Yeah. That they just chopped down as they made that, you know, that Westwood expansion and into California and whatnot. Yeah. They didn't even use most of the wood. They end up having to, like, discard it, burn it, whatever. I didn't know that. But this is, like, centuries worth of growth that was just destroyed. Yeah. The only reason I think we protected these things, right, was because there was a sort of realization that, oh, shit, we've gone way too far with this capitalist exploitation of things, right? Like, with this desire to impose ourselves on the world, as it has been for a long time. And, like, that doesn't

Starting point is 01:09:44 make up for that, right? It's like your analogy of zoos that you used at a start, right? Like, having the last passenger pigeon die in a zoo doesn't make up for killing all the passenger pigeon. So even while that passenger pigeon was alive in the zoo, right? Yeah. Like, that's not a trade anyone would make, I guess. No one would be like, oh, I have to think about this. Like, is anyone ever going to sit around and worry about there not being enough mines or enough roads or enough logging operations, right? Compared to, like, I worry about that of not being enough forests, worry about there not being enough wilderness places, you know? Like, it, uh, yeah, it's something that, uh, we've failed future generations, I guess, in preserving that diversity.

Starting point is 01:10:31 Yeah. And, you know, as we speak of preserving preservation, conservation, I think there's a tendency within those who value diversity that can lead to a sort of a misdirection or it can lead to maybe a misplaced aspiration, I would say. Because obviously, change itself is not bad. It changes inevitable. Extinction has always been part of the history of life. Ecosystems have always been in flux, always evolving.

Starting point is 01:11:01 The borders of, you know, ecosystems have been moving throughout deep time. Similarly, cultures have always evolved and mixed and some are faded away. So we can't necessarily reject change, right, and reject the processes by which cultures and environments may change, even in response to human intervention. You know, we look at the forests of North America since we've been focusing on that example, and many of those forests were engineered.

Starting point is 01:11:35 Yes. You know, by human activity, right? So the Amazon rainforest also shows some evidence of human engineering in terms of the terra pretta, you know, the soils being this very rich soil that was deliberately designed by the indigenous people. Yeah. The same with like I've been reading a lot on indigenous cultural use of fire for the last few weeks here since I got back from Spokane and thinking a lot about like how

Starting point is 01:12:05 it's a very Western perspective right to be like the wilderness is the thing that humans don't touch and have no engagement with and then everything else humans use as a wish like to create it as this binary distribution right of like The correct way to deal with places that are beautiful or special is like just fucking leave it. And the correct way to deal with everything else is just fucking pillage it. Like there's a way to find balance that we struggle with under capitalism, right? Like capitalism has struggled to provide us with that. Yeah, I mean, one of the bases of capitalism is private property, which as defined under Roman law is the right to use and abuse one's own.

Starting point is 01:12:51 Right. You know, the use and enjoyment and abuse of one's own to the limit of the law, which is a stipulation that had various interpretations over the years. But we should be surprised then that when something comes under the purview of capitalist property, that it has led to such detrimental effects. What is alarming about our current situation is not the change that is taking place. It is the speed and the scale of that change. You know, we don't know exactly how many species we are losing or have lost.

Starting point is 01:13:25 We don't even know how many species currently exist. We could even talk about the definitions of species and how that taxonomic system has evolved with time. But for that discussion, I leave it to a book that I read on the subject that I quite enjoyed, which was in light of our differences by David Harmon. But regardless, we're still talking about thousands to hundreds of thousands. of species lost each year. And these are losses that are not happening in isolation because we know that every ecosystem is made up of relationships.

Starting point is 01:14:01 They remove one species and you can risk disrupting everything connected to it. Thankfully, these systems are typically quite resilient. So a species lost doesn't have to lead to the collapse of the entire ecosystem, but there are species that are foundational. You know, then they disappear until that single species, can trigger cascading effects of the threatened the entire ecosystem. It's also often a lag

Starting point is 01:14:26 between our realization that a species has fallen below its minimum viable population and the death of the final individual of that species. As you mentioned, the last passenger pigeon in the zoo, I was reminded of that. We see that also happening with human cultures,

Starting point is 01:14:45 particularly with language. From what I've read, about 44% of the zoo, of living languages today are now endangered. Some have fewer than a thousand speakers remaining and others are spoken by fewer than 10 people. Wow. And I know from what you told me of your travels,

Starting point is 01:15:02 James, that you actually have met people who have spoken some of these endangered languages, correct? Yeah, certainly, like, I think about languages that, like, I guess I've heard people speak that are less hegemonic, certainly, like,

Starting point is 01:15:20 I can't imagine there are very many speakers of martialese, for example, in the RMI. Many indigenous languages, right? Like, I know the Embara have made a great deal of, like, progress educating young people in their language, right? And, like, making sure that they keep that. I was just talking to some, like, Yo, Emmy and Otam friends this morning, right? I think those languages are doing relatively well for indigenous languages in what is now the United States.

Starting point is 01:15:50 but like it's only through the concerted effort of people from that community to keep them alive, right? Like I don't think the state has attributed a diversity value to those languages. And languages like they give us a way of understanding the world that is different. That's why I like to try and learn at least a little bit of different languages. Like they give us a way of seeing things. I think about like all the bass words for rain, right? or I was diving the other day with like a sea lion and I was talking to a Spanish-speaking friend about like in Spanish they're like wolves of the sea, right?

Starting point is 01:16:28 Lions of the sea. It's kind of interesting. They do have like a kind of a wolf-like vibe to them if you've ever hung out of sea lions. In terms of what, like their social structure? Yeah, well, yeah. And like they're like I think people see sea lions like this big cuddly kind of cute. thing and like they're fucking killers you know. Oh, trust and believe I don't.

Starting point is 01:16:51 I don't trust those guys at all. Yeah, no, they're like they will fuck. I don't trust any mammal that chose to live an aquatic way of life. Okay, there's something fishy about that. I love that as... Pun intended. Yeah. I love that as a, uh, that's a like category.

Starting point is 01:17:10 You know, they're mean. They'll come at you. As you were mentioning, they are like, according to the ethics. no log at least 7,170 living languages in the world today. Our lowest underestimations of the amount of cultures, that is an accumulation of knowledge, values, customs, technology, social practices. Our lowest estimate of the number of cultures on Earth is like 4,000. They're definitely, certainly more than that.

Starting point is 01:17:48 Especially if we are using language as a proxy for cultural diversity. Right. And even within languages, there's tremendous cultural diversity. Yeah. Biologically, we have a lot of diversity as well. I neglected to mention, you know, blood types, heights, hair textures, all of these have emerged across the continents we've spread out across. I mean, obviously the concentration of that diversity is in Africa where we began. But even our adaptations to different environments is a form of diversity that is necessary, you know, to maintain as algorithms. I'll get into some of the arguments for a while later on.

Starting point is 01:18:29 So I didn't know that Basque had all the different words for rain, but I have reminded, I think, that there are different words in Inuit languages for describing snow. Yeah, like the, I think it's in Upiak have a bunch of words for snow and ice and like different textures of it. I'm trying now to find Basque words for rain so I can remember some of them. Yeah, Landbrowa is drizzle or mist. I know Zirimiri is like a light rain.

Starting point is 01:19:03 It's like the noise it makes. I always thought that was a really sweet one. I had a fucking throwback. A Cornish anarchist who spoke Cornish, right? One of the languages that is not hegemonic and it's probably relatively endangered even as European languages go, right? I think it's probably having a better time now

Starting point is 01:19:22 than it was when I was younger, but it was relatively rare to encounter a Cornish speaker. Cornish, that's Cornwall, right? Correct, yeah, yeah. It was teaching me all these beautiful words for, like, different wildlife and different, like, natural phenomena that sort of have an onomatopoeic quality to them. But, like, for some reason,

Starting point is 01:19:39 just like the sort of beautiful way that they showed of relating. I don't want to, like, a noble savage, Cornish people, right? But I just thought that they showed a different way of understanding the world and our relationship with it and these animals and, like, how they appear. And, like, it struck me. is really special, that that person was like, kept that knowledge and that that person shared that knowledge with me.

Starting point is 01:20:02 This was at some, like, if I'm in Barcelona, when I'm like, you know, 21 years old, 19 years old, something like that. And it just really struck me that, like, there was so much beauty in seeing the world through the lens of that language, and it would be a real shame if we ever lost that. Yeah, and I mean, that's just one key study. every other endangered language, I'm sure you could point to similar novelties in, you know, how they engage with the world, how they describe and see things. Sure, yeah.

Starting point is 01:20:34 And we can extend from language to culture, you know, different cuisines, different ways of, you know, engagement with foods, you know, different forms of architecture and music and ways of telling stories. Yeah. Ways of raising children, ways of celebrating and of mourning. Yeah, definitely. Like, there's a lot that I feel like I've learned about so many of those things from being lucky enough to spend time in different places, right? I guess I can give an example from, if this is in my book, people want to read more about it, but like one of the things that a friend in Kurdistan said to me was that like they'd lost a friend, right?

Starting point is 01:21:10 This friend had died fighting against the Islamic State. One of the things that they said was like because of this institution of Tech Mill, which is like a form of, it collects a criticism. It doesn't quite work in English to call it Cleids Criticism because you think of Maoism, which is not. But because they had shared with this person, their goals, their aspirations, their hopes, and then this person through this institution of Techmill had helped them be accountable to their own hopes for themselves, that they were a better person because of the time they had spent with this person. And now that this person was gone, they carried him with them in their ways of being, because he had helped them be a better person.

Starting point is 01:21:52 They shared it with me at a time when I had lost a dear friend. And it was a really beautiful way of me processing that. Like I'm not a person who is like a religious person. I have that belief structure to process it. But like that gave me a sense of an afterlife which was more concrete for me, which I could understand, which I could see. And like it really helped me. The afterlife of memory.

Starting point is 01:22:15 Yeah. And of like we are all co-created by our communities. right. Like I didn't make myself the way I am. I was made the way I am by my interactions with people who care about me enough to help me be better. And the idea of that person who helped me co-create the person I am, like still existing in the person I am, was very powerful to me. Like it's like a concrete psychological benefit I got from interacting with people who helped me see the world the way they see it. Absolutely. you know, I'm glad for all the languages that still exist and still give us, you know, these

Starting point is 01:22:54 words for things. Because if nation states had their way, there'll be like 10 languages left on Earth. Yeah. I mean, dramatic. But, you know, right now, most of humanity speaks are a relatively small number of languages. The 23 most spoken mother languages are gone for like 4 billion people somewhere around there. Wow. And in the 200 most spoken languages are over 88% of the world's population. That's crazy. And this is, of course, due to nation building, due to economic pressures, you know, globalization.

Starting point is 01:23:29 Basically everywhere, the pressures of the status quo have led to indigenous and regional languages, minority languages, disappearing. And if not for the concerted efforts of these language communities to maintain. the way of speaker and to pass it down, we would have lost so many more as it is. Yeah, definitely. As you mentioned, by the way, the words that you've picked up over the years from different languages and your attempts to explain those words to me, I was reminded of a work of fiction that I'd read, I think about two years ago, it's a book called Babel by R.F. Kwang, and it's kind of like a fantasy historical fiction where like a Chinese student goes to this school in England

Starting point is 01:24:21 and the magic of that world is translation. The sort of energy that gets picked up the magic that they're able to wield is through the translation from one language to another and the fact that because translation is on a one-to-one process, the kind of nuances and you know, meanings and subtexts and connotations that they get lost or gained in the process are potent. And so for people who are interested in linguistics and fantasy fiction, I always recommend that book to them. Yeah, might try that one. But what I was alluding to just now was some of the reasons we've begun to lose our world's biocultural diversity. As I said before, there have been changes across time, across just now,

Starting point is 01:25:12 generations all the way even prior to humanity, so we're not to blame for everything. But there are a lot of historical processes that have reinforced each other that have led to what has been unfold in these past few centuries. Yes, we might have hunted some species to extinction in our prehistoric past, but clearly this skill of our impact is quite different here now. Monocultures, for instance, and fast pasture lands have completely replaced ecosystems in Sydney areas. We've trained wetlands, we've leveled forests, we've fragmented habitats. And that's another thing that when we speak of habitat loss isn't always spoken about. But, you know, we have places where a lot of the habitat was left alone, quote-unquote.

Starting point is 01:26:06 But when you have like six lean highways cutting through a forest, that is still a fragmentation of that ecosystem. Oh, yeah. That's still a disruption of the flow of plants, animal life and fungal life. Yeah. Can I make a podcast about this? But one of the issues that are endangered wildlife faces here in Southern California, right, is that it's fragmented both by freeways and the border wall. So like the border wall in particular, people can live.

Starting point is 01:26:36 listen to natural causes if they want to learn more about this, but the border wall in particular, right, is being built at such a speed that they're not even building wildlife gates into it. Now, they don't care about killing people with the wall. Why would they care about killing wildlife, right? But it means, for instance, our peninsula big horns, which we have like 750 in the United States. One of the Rams actually died in the border war wire recently. And their ability to have like a healthy breeding population, we significantly limited to this to the extent that like the intangible value of me seeing a big horn in a hike in the desert might not be something that everyone gets ever again, right? Like the, our mountain lions actually have some weird little

Starting point is 01:27:18 genetic anomalies because of the divisions that are created by these big freeways and how dangerous it is to cross them. There's like a thing you can observe in some of their tails. Wow. So they're actually, our mountain lions in the peninsula range are listed in the California your endangered species act, even though as a whole overall, they're not particularly endangered. California has a Shetan Lions, actually. It's because these specific lions, despite the fact that there are conditions for them to thrive, right, in the United States, the intrusion that has divided these populations has made it very hard for those populations, not just to thrive, but like to continue to be healthy. Yeah, that's the thing, right? Like a species doesn't necessarily have to be

Starting point is 01:28:00 endangered or on the brink of extinction for it to be experiencing the extremely negative effects of, you know, our industrial civilization. Right. I would add also the pressures of invasive species through global trade, you know, the impact of pollution in the waterways and in the air, climate change, you know, all of these have placed a tremendous amount of pressure on the natural world. When it comes to cultural diversity and its losses, which coincide with the losses of biodiversity, we see the impact of colonialism, destroying societies through conquest and genocide and assimilation

Starting point is 01:28:46 and the very same environmental changes. We've seen that niche and building try to forge a single national identity at the expense of regional and minority cultures. and then of course with globalisation, not in the sense of cultural exchange across distances, as that has always existed, but specifically the kind that has been driven by capitalist markets and state power and industrial efficiency, which enforces standardization across places.

Starting point is 01:29:16 You know, it's easier for these capitalists, for these multinationals, to manufacture the same products and market the same brands and basically flatten language and flattened cultural expectations across places. So they even would manufacture consumer tastes in a way that benefits their bottom line. You know, now you get to pick between streaming services or, you know, you have all a bunch different varieties of cereal in your supermarkets, and that is what is counted as economic freedom.

Starting point is 01:29:50 meanwhile there are cultures that are literally going extinct. Now, I had a question for you about this subject, because you are admittedly a bit older than me. It's true. And sadly. Right? But I'm curious, have you witnessed, like, in real time, the loss of this kind of diversity through globalization?

Starting point is 01:30:28 So I see, like, for me, I remember having, like, copies of older magazines and I could see through us that, you know, the world was, the places genuinely felt very different, very unique. And as, you know, I've come up with social media, I've seen places have kind of homogenized, everything was starting to look the same and let's not even talk about the impact of like AI slop. Oh, yeah. But yeah, what have you seen? Yeah, like, it's one of those things. that like you do see the like the impact of the smartphone is huge right at a second level the impact of Starlink is massive much more than I think most people living in the colonial core would realize right

Starting point is 01:31:16 like more people have access to the internet through smartphones and have have electricity in their homes and like the internet is a very hegemonic place right like there are probably seven or languages, the internet's really good in, that like you can really access the internet in. And that really has made a difference with the way young people engage with the external world, right? Right. I guess I've also seen like a reclamation of some, and it's a thing that's largely happened like within the colonial core to the greatest extent, right?

Starting point is 01:31:56 like the so-called the Europe of Nations hypothesis, right? Like, one of the languages I can speak and read and write in is Catalan. And like, this is an example of a language that, like, was ruthlessly suppressed by a

Starting point is 01:32:12 Francoist regime. Same with Basque, same with other, like, non-Spanish languages in Iberia. Right. And like, now that is a primary language of instruction for most Catalan students. Like, in my lifetime, my time, spending time in Catalonia, I see infinitely more people speaking Catalan than I used to.

Starting point is 01:32:33 I remember. There's like an anecdote about this in my dissertation, but some young Syrian kids who would always speak to me in Catalan. They played football outside my archive, right? So we'd be kicking the football around. And it's cool that this language that had once very nearly been destroyed, it's now like hegemonic. It was cool at the time Catalan. Nationalism, But like every other nationalism has some qualities which I don't like. But like it was cool that at the time there was an acceptance of people, and especially like these kids who spoke Catalan, happened to have been born in Syria, right?

Starting point is 01:33:08 But like they were Catalan as much as anyone else. Like it wasn't an ethnic definition of nation, right? But at the same time, yeah, I've definitely seen that diversity lost. In terms of so many things, like foods. Yeah, I feel like there has been a harmonization of power. as well. 100% right? Especially with the proliferation of fast foods.

Starting point is 01:33:32 Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like fast, cheap, high calorie food that stores easily. I mean, the example, I guess is like, look at what they've done to bread. The time of my life, right? Like, look at how, like, sliced white, what we would have called American bread is now, like, the global standard, right? But, like, all those other bread products that people used to make. like it can be very hard to get

Starting point is 01:33:56 freshly made tortillas. It's possible where I live, right, but it's not, I imagine if you live in like Minnesota, just like the little moments of beauty that they gave you in your day that are gone. But yeah, also the big things. Like I, you know, I

Starting point is 01:34:12 watch kids watching TikTok in the Darien Gap that wouldn't have been possible seven or eight years ago. Right. Wow. I don't quite know when Starlink was widely distributed, but like that makes a difference to people right like their cultural world is that they're now engaging with the external world not just through their own culture through the internet and i want those people to have everything i have to be clear right

Starting point is 01:34:34 like i want them to be able to see the whole world yeah you don't want to like seal them vacuum seal them in some kind of some kind of museum exhibit of what once was exactly yeah but like i also wish that they could have it the way i have it which is like i am i was born in england and i engage with the world in English, I wish they can engage with the world in Embra, I wish you know, Kurdish people can engage with the world in whichever type of Kurdish they speak, you know, I wish they didn't have to go through the English way of speaking and seeing the world to engage with the external world because we all lose when we don't have that diversity, right? Yeah. And I mean, we're talking about what is lost, I think, when things get homogenized,

Starting point is 01:35:19 but there is like, I think, another effect or another, I suppose, response that, you know, global capitalism has the diversity, which is to package it, to market it, to sell it. You know, I referenced those magazines that I read, but those magazines might even be an example of that because it is a capturing and commodification in a sense of another culture for distribution and consumption. Yeah, definitely. You see as well, people's traditional dress becomes a less of a traditional dress and more of a traditional costume as they put it on to perform for consumption for tourists. Yeah, like the commodification of diversity.

Starting point is 01:36:07 Get that idea that that diversity is a thing to sell, the marginalization of people such that their identity, which has been marginalized by the state in capitalism, is what they have to sell. to exist under the state in capitalism, I guess. Yeah. We've already sort of hinted at some of the reasons why I think we should care about this loss of diversity, you know, and I could even spot off a few more. And obviously makes our living systems more resilient, I think is a very key one. In an ecosystem, every species has its niche and they can compete and cooperate and recycle nutrients and everything is just part of one.

Starting point is 01:36:48 the larger network and the more diverse network is the more it has to respond to disruption. Diversity gives ecosystems options. We see that in comparison to the monocultures, the monocultural approach to farming that has dominated much of the world and the economy inputs that approach requires. We look at how vulnerable that approach is to disease and to changes in climate conditions. In terms of genetic diversity, we can point to the fact that, you know, if every human immune system works in exactly the same way. A pathogen that evolved to bypass one person's immune system could bypass everyone's. And so our biological differences create the variation in

Starting point is 01:37:30 how diseases spread and keep us as a whole safe, keep our existence as a whole secure. Even within my own family, I've noticed that some people are more susceptible and others more resistant to different diseases. Yeah. You know, when a virus passes into my household, there are some people who get sick and some people don't, and it changes each time, despite the fact that we are so close genetically. And so again, we see the diversity creates resilience. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:38:01 And even if we want to take it from like a coldly utilitarian perspective, that resilience is a value. It has utility, you know, and an individual instance of, a species or of a culture might have value in a way that we don't realize until it's gone. Yeah. We become poorer as a whole. We lose possibilities when we lose languages, when we lose cultures, when we lose species. Every culture represents literally thousands of experiments accumulated over generations in what it means to live as a human being. We may like some more than others, you know, I'm not a relativist in the sense that I will turn a blind eye to things that I find

Starting point is 01:38:51 morally objectionable in certain cultures. But I can recognize that every culture has something that adds to our library of experiences. And I would rather have that full library than a single shelf of books. It's a really good way of saying it. Having that full library gives us more raw material to think with, to create art with, to do science with. If you like the arts, you know, you would like diversity because that innovation in the arts and in the sciences emergence from everything that came before. There is a foundation for future creativity and innovation. If everybody approaches the world with the same assumptions and categories and ways of thinking and, you know, our capacity to imagine alternatives will shrink. And then just really

Starting point is 01:39:39 from a deeply philosophical perspective. I appreciate diversity because I believe that when you are given a gift, you should meet it with gratitude. You know, we are born in the world. We happen to be born into a world that is overflowed with different forms of life, different landscapes, different cultures,

Starting point is 01:40:02 different ways of thinking. That is a vast, rich inheritance that I believe we should appreciate. that is my value. I'll add that, you know, we were speaking about biodiversity and cultural diversity, what Harmon goes,

Starting point is 01:40:19 biocultural diversity, but there's also the value of cognitive diversity. You know, we have different opinions, but we might also perceive and categorize and solve problems in generally different ways. And having different perspectives,

Starting point is 01:40:39 different interpretations, different heuristics, different predictive models, what Scott E. Page calls cognitive toolboxes in his book The Difference. You know, these give us an opportunity to solve problems in unique ways. You know, we're not all going to have the same tools and what tools I may lack another person may have. And it's not always necessarily a requirement that you just get the smartest person to solve the problem. In fact, as Page's research suggests, getting a group of people who approach a problem differently

Starting point is 01:41:18 will outperform a group of people who are made up of individually brilliant people who all think in roughly the same way. Now, Page's make the bold claim that cognitive diversity is always the best approach because he does distinguish between, you know, routine, regular tasks and tasks that require like more experimentation and creativity and multiple competing ideas. So in those cases where you need that diversity of ways of thinking to solve complex problems in transportation, in dealing with

Starting point is 01:41:51 climate change and developing medicines, you know, we don't want everybody to be thinking alike. Another thing that page points out is that while cognitive diversity and identity, diversity are not one to one, there is overlap between the concept. because people who grow up in different environments and have different experiences and opportunities and social positions are more likely to develop different ways of seeing the world. So if we recognize that cognitive diversity

Starting point is 01:42:21 is valuable for solving complex problems, then prejudice is a practical failure as well as a moral failure. One of the things that I wanted to address, and I kind of alluded to it earlier, when I said that I'm not really, a relativist, is that while I do value diversity, I definitely don't to think that every form is worth celebrating. You know, I believe a healthy society should have space for different ways of thinking and living and organizing ourselves, but that does not mean these kind of liberal

Starting point is 01:42:58 tolerance that would put up with mindsets and practices of domination that would eliminate that very freedom. At the end of the day, though, I want to retain the capacity for diversity because I think it gives us a capacity for freedom. And I want, as subcommandante Marcos put it, a world where many worlds exist. Even as I reject certain forms that the world has taken and certain manifestations of diversity. Any closing thoughts? like the world where many worlds can exist is I think the perfect way of looking at this right like we therefore don't want people who would create a word where the worlds cannot exist right but we gain so much from having and respecting and cherishing diversity rather than treating it

Starting point is 01:43:55 through that tolerance framework which we both talked about like tolerance seems to imply like well we're doing it best but we'll let you do it your way as opposed to like genuinely cherishing diversity. Yeah. And yeah, I hope we can all see that. Agreed. And as always, all power to all the people. Peace.

Starting point is 01:44:18 The long loading times. The glitchy video calls. That's your house asking for better internet. Switch to Bell Pure Fiber, Canada's most reliable internet awarded by Open Signal from $75 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on a two-year term and auto pay credit.

Starting point is 01:44:47 at Bell.ca for more details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. Hey, it's Bobby Bones. Join me and former NFL quarterback Matt Castle. Every Wednesday on our podcast, lots to say with me, Bobby Bones, and Matt Castle. We also bring in friends, they're mostly Matt's friends,

Starting point is 01:45:10 who are current or former NFL players, some of the biggest names in music and entertainment, and then we have some really great conversations that can pretty much go anywhere. The great Pac-Man Jones. After the game, the whole national task force for police officers, At the stadium.

Starting point is 01:45:24 Like, hey, buddy, yeah, you, Adam. Come up. And one of my favorite segments we do is called situational awareness, where Bobby and I give each other real-life situations and figure out what we'd actually do. You're in training camp, and the rookie quarterback has one good throwing session in front of the media. Suddenly, everybody online says he should start over you, week one.

Starting point is 01:45:44 How do you handle this? You just go back out to practice the next day and wait for him to mess up. Listen to lots to say with Bobby Bones and Matt Castle on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Every case has a story. Every victim has a voice, but will it be heard? I'm Nancy Grace on Crime Stories.

Starting point is 01:46:06 We go beyond headlines to examine evidence, challenge the story we're fed, and pursue justice for victims and their families. Please join us at Crime Stories with Nancy Grace on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast. or wherever you find your podcasts. Hope you join us. I'll see you there, friend. You broke me. You do not deserve happiness. I'm Andrea Gunning.

Starting point is 01:46:33 On this season of betrayal, we meet Carl Bryant. Carl thought he was living a normal, drama-free life until the messages started. You will have hell to pay. For nine months, someone infiltrated every aspect of Carl's life, threatening to ruin. him. Cyberstalking, swatting, extortion, impersonation. And then the text threats escalated. Someone's not going to make it out of this alive.

Starting point is 01:47:04 It's playing out in real life, not just on the phone. Every piece of evidence pointed to one man. But every piece of evidence was a lie. He was not going to stop unless we stopped him. Listen to Betrayal Season 6 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The new NFL season is here, and you should be listening to NFL Daily as we march along to Super Bowl 61. Last year, we had Mike McDonald, Sam Darnold on the field after the game. But that was last year.

Starting point is 01:47:42 If you're a football sicko like me, NFL Daily is your kind of show. It is in the name NFL Daily, fresh. content in your feed every day all season long. Matthew Stafford coming off his MVP season. On a dazzling darts from Matthew Stafford. Big time trades that shake up the NFL. AJ Brown is loose. And of course, those Seahawks trying to run it back and win another Lombardi trophy. The Seahawks win Super Bowl 60. They are bringing the Lombardy back to the Northwest. If it's happening on a football field, NFL Daily will cover it. Listen to NFL Daily on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Starting point is 01:48:30 Hey, everybody, it's me, W. Compte Bell. This season of my podcast who's with me, I speak with two-time Emmy winner and weirdly one of my best friends, Kevin Avery. Everything up to that point, build you as a comic, us going on the road, doing Battle Mountain and Ely. Yeah, you took me, you were one of the first people who took me on the road, which is funny because at the time I was like, I like this guy. With rapper, actor, David Diggs. The jump off for me was Hamilton, and it was the most popular thing in a very long time.

Starting point is 01:49:01 But it was still, for me, it was me and my friends making something dumb. Bruce Lee's daughter and Brandon Lee's sister, Shannon Lee. Back to your initial point of stewarding my father's legacy and giving my energy to that. You're lending your life to stewarding somebody else's. his life. Listen to Who's With Me with with Debbie Kamau Bell on the Iheart Radio

Starting point is 01:49:23 app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Dear honies, this is goodbye. In February of 2024, celebrated illustrator and children's book author, Petra Mather's and her husband Michael, mailed letters to dozens of friends and family members

Starting point is 01:49:39 to let them know that they had died. By the time you get this letter, both Petra and I will be dead. Next stop, Wonderland. Patra and Michael were by all accounts healthy, happy, and in love. Why did they do it? And what did it do to the people they left behind?

Starting point is 01:49:57 I would have given a million reasons to not leave this world had I known. I keep coming back to I truly hope that Petro was a thousand percent on board with the plan. Do you think of him as having killed her? Yes, I do. I hold Michael responsible from my mother's staff. I'm Leon Nafok. And I'm Alice Grafax. Gregory. Together, we set out to interview everyone who got one of Patriot and Michael's letters,

Starting point is 01:50:24 as one married couple, trying to understand another. Listen to Death of an Artist on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen here, a podcast about the violent flailings of a dying empire. I am your host, Mia Wong. And today we are going to be talking about a thing, perhaps the only thing that Americans understand more thoroughly than a and that is gas prices. Now, elsewhere on this show, speaking about inflation, I have talked about price as a kind of social hieroglyphic that serves to encode the complex and brutal reality of geopolitics

Starting point is 01:51:11 and production and labor and exploitation into a single number. And that number is their understanding of everything that is happening in the world and how content they are about it is about how much gas costs them. This has proven a real problem for one President of the United States, Donald Trump, as diesel is hitting an average across the country of $6.52 a gallon.

Starting point is 01:51:45 Now, nominally, the President of the United States does not control the price of oil and does not set gas prices. However, In this case, no, yeah, this is largely, not technically entirely, but, like, yeah, this is sort of just a thing he did as an individual. But I think what's important here, right, is that the way that all of the information that I'm about to describe is conveyed, right? And the thing, the thing that makes Americans care about it is the social hieroglyphic of the gas price, right? It is the single number through which all of this complex information is encoded down into,

Starting point is 01:52:25 and that is what sort of matters emotionally. And I want to undo the process of encoding all of that information down into the hieroglyphic. I want to actually expand it and go look at what is going on in the world that is causing all of this, and I want to take a look at how the structure of American Empire has changed in order to facilitate this. and to do this I'm going to walk through a series of, I guess, nominally seemingly disconnected stories about oil across the world, and we're going to put it all together into the new structure of American Empire at the end. Now, as everyone I think is aware, gas prices have been increasing dramatically, both of regular gas and of diesel Bank of America analysts are finally admitting that oil could hit $150,000. dollars a barrel, not like right now, but as the war continues to drag out.

Starting point is 01:53:26 And as we've talked about before on this show, a lot of the reserves that were being used to calm the market temporarily and keep prices down are being exhausted. The most obvious example of this is something we've talked about before, which is, you know, the draining of the American Strategic Petroleum Reserve. But this is true of a lot of other reserves around the world, as well. well. Now, this alone probably would not have been enough to cause what we've been seeing. But, comma, all of the problems that we have been talking about for a long time on this show, particularly the blockade of the strait of Fomuz, that is entirely directly just the fault of

Starting point is 01:54:06 Donald Trump, right, through his war on Iran, has been doing significant damage to the world's oil supply, to the world's natural gas supply. Now, the reason it hasn't been worse has been that there have been ways to bypass the Strait of Firmuz. They're not easy. They work worse than the Strait of Fremuz, but one of those important mechanisms has been Saudi Arabia's east-west pipeline. Now, we talked about this, Honor Robert talked about this at last week, Executive Disorder. Last week, Iraqi paramilitaries launched drone strikes on Saudi Arabia's east-west pipeline.

Starting point is 01:54:42 It did some damage. There is kind of conflicting reports about how long. long exactly that is going to take to repair, but the damage of the pipeline has slowed the ability of the Saudis to route oil around the blockade and the Strait of Famos. Now, also, there has been a major expansion in the war in Yemen. This is a really hideous conflict that has been going on for over a decade now. that is we don't really have

Starting point is 01:55:17 unfortunately time to really go into all of the factors of the civil war in Yemen which is one of the most complicated wars being fought anywhere in the world broadly speaking this is a conflict between a coalition that is sort of in the West is called the Quthees

Starting point is 01:55:33 but there's like more forces involved in it which is the kind of Iranian aligned vaguely or not vaguely I mean like they are allied with Iran but they're not necessarily just an Iranian proxy. This is its own sort of political force, right? And then on the other side, there is the Saudi-backed coalition, which also involves a range of forces, but, you know, is kind of led by the Saudis and the UAE, and they're kind of allied forces who, you know, who pull a whole bunch of forces

Starting point is 01:56:01 from a whole bunch of places and have committed horrifying atrocities, including, as I mentioned constantly every time someone talks about this, because no one ever seems to remember it to the by the Saudi coalition of Sudanese child soldiers. So this war had, I don't know if calmed down is quite the right word, but in the past few years had been less active than it was, say, in 2018, 2019. But the Houthis have now made a major push into Saudi coalition territories in Yemen's west and south. They have taken the port city of Moka in the south, which is an important, like, Saudi coalition's port city, which is further, you know, threatening the ability of the Saudis to bypass a straight from Moos because this is a city that helps you control access to the Gulf of Aden. Now, this war has been and continues to be a massive humanitarian nightmare.

Starting point is 01:57:05 We really have no idea how many people have actually died in the war. The casualty figures right now are kind of stuck at 150,000. I suspect it is significantly more than that. This is a region that has been experiencing everything from, you know, like hideous war to just a famines. A huge part of this war has been a Saudi blockade of sort of like so-called Houthi control territories, which has had an absolutely devastating effect on the ability of, you know, people in Yemen to eat. this attack has also caused a massive search of refugees as people sort of flee the violence

Starting point is 01:57:42 and this has been an absolute nightmare on the one hand and on the other hand the way that it's understood here the way that it's sort of reported on in the West is not as its own sort of unique humanitarian nightmare and this unique sort of war of like Saudi and Emirati Empire in Yemen

Starting point is 01:58:05 and it's understood as something that affects oil prices. And so that's one of the factors that is kind of encoded into this price. Another one has been Ukraine's drone attacks on Russian oil refineries which have escalated. Now, from the perspective of what is happening with the oil, you know, Houthis have also been attacking Saudi shipping, and Saudi shipping is, you know, when someone talks about Saudi shipping, they're talking almost like guarantee

Starting point is 01:58:40 the thing they're talking about is shipping oil out of the country, right? The attacks on Saudi shipping have slowed down in the past week, but there is always the possibility of them starting up again. And this is the real problem in terms of the world's oil infrastructure

Starting point is 01:58:56 and particularly from the perspective of empire, right, in the sense of, you know, wanting to be able to secure secure access to oil for the U.S. and for other sort of imperial powers, the issue that they're facing as this war continues, right, and as these really, really truly these series of wars, right, is that even if, you know, going back to the Saudi pipeline, right, the Saudi pipeline will eventually be fixed, right? Like full capacity, it might not be for 68 weeks, but eventually the pipeline is going to get fixed, even if it is sort of restricting supply in the meantime.

Starting point is 01:59:37 The problem is that all of this infrastructure is just exposed, and a whole bunch of different militaries in the region can and probably will hit them again, as the U.S. has been, you know, like hitting Iranian oil infrastructure, right? Iran, it's allied paramilitaries in Iraq, who these, there are lots of groups in the region who are being attacked by the U.S. and the Saudis and sort of American allies in the region who are looking at this and going, oh, this is something we can use to extract,

Starting point is 02:00:12 you know, to extract concessions and try to fight the Americans off. And there's no real answer for this other than ending the war, a thing that just won't happen. Now, the Trump administration nominally has a plan for this. the plan that they are claiming to have, other than this sort of constant dance of claiming it the war in Iran is over, and then it's restarting again.

Starting point is 02:00:47 We've started a whole bunch of different wars and that the three of whom we've actually open. The other plan that Trump has talked about is Venezuela. Trump was at the UN recently, where he gave an extremely distressing speech in which he talked about how he had been thinking about destroying Iran he said

Starting point is 02:01:10 quote do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope if future greatness or generations now one of the other parts of this speech was him talking about the U.S. deal with the

Starting point is 02:01:27 Venezuelan government that it installed when it just kidnapped Maduro who we are just also still holding as people I think broadly have forgotten about But, yeah, no, we just are still just holding a head of state, like, hostage in a prison. We're just still doing that. But he was talking about a deal that he struck with the current Venezuelan government,

Starting point is 02:01:51 which is largely just composed of the same people from the Maduro government, but with any person in charge of it and answering to Trump. Yeah, talking, you know, that was a, at 100 years, supposedly in a hundred year concession for a significant portion of what's supposed to be Venezuela's oil fields. Now, Trump in this said, quote, to the victors belong the spoils. And this is nominally, right, this sort of is his previous war,

Starting point is 02:02:25 or short war, I guess, on Venezuela is supposed to be the solution to his new war. Trump has been pushing the line that oil flowing from Venezuela is going to be the thing that drives prices down and stops these escalating oil prices from his other imperial war in Iran. And as we're going to talk about, now, there is oil flowing from Venezuela to the U.S., right? and the amount of oil that is flowing to the U.S. has increased companies that were already in Venezuela, like Chevron, are expanding production. But it hasn't even hit like 1990s levels. It's still, in the grand scheme of things, not enough oil to actually do anything. And as we have, you know, sort of repeatedly emphasized on this show, oil is not liquid money. as material properties and as social properties that come from the, you know,

Starting point is 02:03:29 technical process of extraction. It's not all the same. These oil reserves, you know, suck, right? And this is also part of the problem with Venezuelan oil. The oil is just of a lower quality than the oil that you get out of the Middle East. Now, what's important for purposes, right, is we're beginning to see a little bit more of the plan, which I guess is kind of the ambitious way to describe the kind of just semi-free for all that's been happening in Venezuela.

Starting point is 02:04:01 In terms of this sort of plan, which is to like extract all of this oil from Venezuela, which is now, you know, I mean, just effectively operating as an American colony, even in just pure imperial terms and not thinking just in terms of sort of like the fact that, yeah, Venezuela is just a dictatorship and the oil is now flowing to the U.S. there's real problems with this in that Venezuelan oil infrastructure is very bad and the actual money in oil is in controlling infrastructure that already exists

Starting point is 02:04:35 and not building new infrastructure. So again, companies that were in Venezuela which is basically Chevron, right, you know, are expanding the existing production to some extent, but no one else wants to go in and actually like build a bunch of oil refineries and a bunch of extraction facilities because that stuff's expensive and it requires massive heavy capital investment and it's risky. And this is becoming a real problem for this entire plan, right? Like obviously, yes, there is oil that the administration can ship out of Venezuela and, you know, and is, right? but it's not enough to actually seriously have the effects that the administration is talking about in terms of sort of lowering prices.

Starting point is 02:05:26 Now, we're going to get to the extent to which it does kind of solve the regime's demand on just the basic level of, oh, if we're going to do a war, we should keep the oil. But the actual prospects for this oil are just not very good. And this is where I want to get into something new that we've learned about sort of recently through reporting from the Wall Street Journal. There's been some more stuff about some of the people who are coming into Venezuela in order to do this. Now, we have mentioned on the show before that there were a lot of network state people, like, involved in Venezuela. This is one of the places that these sort of like Silicon Valley tech fascists are moving into. And one of the people who is now becoming important in Venezuela's sort of oil production or is attempting to become important is this crypto billionaire named Fred Ersam, who is one of the founders of Coinbase, which is a giant crypto company. He's sort of in tight with the entire Silicon Valley Tech elite.

Starting point is 02:06:33 He has ties to like every venture capital and Andreessen, horrible. It's like steel-backed constellation you can imagine. And he's one of the people who's been extremely important in terms of the ways that this sort of network state project of this like setting up these sort of like corporate fascist states, right, have been interested in crypto as a way to sort of move money around and have money that's not like taxable directly or like is difficult for states to sort of get access. too. Now, Fred has moved into this really, really sort of, it's like described as a hotel,

Starting point is 02:07:21 but it's like almost more like a kind of like, I don't know, almost like billionaire resort thing in Caracas. It's like 36 rooms in it. And he's been spending a whole bunch of time living there. He's also like founded this company with some Venezuelan guys, one of whom was like went to Stanford. So, you know, it's like these sort of, there's always like a local elite kind of thing involved in these projects where particularly you get like American educated guys from like colonized nations.

Starting point is 02:07:55 You end up like coming back and getting involved in these processes. And they have like they founded this company called Prima Vera, which is getting involved in the contracts for Venezuelan oil development. But there's problems here, right? which is that like this is a startup. They've never done oil extraction before, right? And, and, you know, the network state people and their sort of like VC firms have had a lot of success in things like drone production, right? In missile production, in a lot of sort of, you know, like things that are like kind of like heavy industrial capacity. But this guy is a crypto billionaire.

Starting point is 02:08:33 And they're trying to do oil development that like the rest of the world, oil companies were like, no. So there are sort of real questions about whether even this, you know, this sort of like fascist plan to exploit the resources of this country can actually work. But this is the kind of consolation of forces that are, that have a line behind the Trump administration, right? And these consolation of forces are to an extent different than the ones from old American neo-conservatism, right? Which was the last sort of, you know, the last time we were like fighting wars for oil during the Bush administration. Now, I want to go back and talk about this in terms of the structure of empire, right?

Starting point is 02:09:26 Because it's very clear that the kind of regime that's been set up in Venezuela, which is just, okay, we've turned this entire nation into not even the kind of debt servicing colony that the U.S. has like traditionally done when it comes in to extract wealth from a country, but just as a sort of like peer, hey, we can say we got the oil colony, but this is the kind of regime that Trump wants not just for Venezuela, but for Iran and Cuba and the rest of the world as well, which are just these sort of like compliant dictatorships that will export him whatever he wants and flatter his ego. And this is a desire, this specific kind of empire, right? This specific kind of oil empire is a desire that comes out of a divide in American conservativeism between the neocons and what are called the empire. paleocons, right? Or like, I guess like the old, you know, paleos like the old conservatives, neocons,

Starting point is 02:10:21 and new conservatives or whatever. These are both kinds of empire, right? If you look at what neoconservatism was, it was an oil company strapped to a weapons manufacturer, like wearing a church for a face. And if you look at what the Bush administration is, like Bush is a Texas oil guy, Cheney is a Halliburton guy, which is like another oil company. He's also really heavily involved in a bunch of weapons manufacturers. You know, this is the alliance that was like doing the wars for oil.

Starting point is 02:10:48 But part of what the project of neo-conservatism was was nominally this mission of bringing like, quote, unquote, democracy to the world. And obviously this is, you know, democracy insofar as it supports the U.S., which is like capitalism and support for American Empire. And, you know, they're setting up a stock market in Iraq. But like, and this is the way that a lot of these people thought about it was this sort of like Hegelian nation building process, right? like the unfolding of American liberal democracy throughout the entire world in a way that, you know, could sort of permanently stabilize its egemony.

Starting point is 02:11:22 But there is this sort of like nation-building aspect of it. But then there was also always like a paleo-con opposition to it. And this is the more radical faction that didn't give a shit about any of the sort of democracy and human rights stuff that neocon would spout.

Starting point is 02:11:40 You know, literally they were like, yeah, bomb them all and take the oil and leave. and this, to a large extent, is this is the faction that Trump has descended from, right? And these people sometimes will kind of, like, play at being anti-imperialist,

Starting point is 02:11:55 or, like, not even anti-peoters, they'll play up being anti-war. You know, Tucker Carlson, for example, is like a guy who did this a lot, even though he supported the war when it was happening. But they'll do this thing of, like, oh, like, we shouldn't go fight in these imperial wars,

Starting point is 02:12:09 the U.S. should only, like, fight wars that benefit it. We shouldn't be the world's policemen. But the color area to that is, you know, where, like, war for oil was, like, the leftist charge about what we were doing in Iraq. These people were just like, yeah, no, we actually should literally just fight wars for oil because they're just, they're fascists, right? They don't even have the kind of veil of this, like, nominally sort of democratic project. All they really care about is just the pure resource extraction. But the thing about this, right?

Starting point is 02:12:45 And part of what was going on with this kind of thing was like, yeah, so you want to set up a stable government so that these oil companies have a secure base from which to actually do resource extraction. Because, you know, sort of unstable governments make it more difficult, et cetera, et cetera. Now, with this sort of like fascist Trump coalition, like obviously, yeah, like the oil company supported him. but it's not the like oil guys directly who are behind the Venezuelic the people didn't have like moved in to extract the oil it's as we were talking about it's these like tech fascist network state guys

Starting point is 02:13:21 and the reaction of the oil people to Trump's wars and this is partially the Venezuela but mostly to this war on Iran which he's framing as being about like nuclear weapons but he's also been talking about like we should just sit there and take the trade off of her moves you know Iran shouldn't be able to like threaten the world's oil supply. The actual oil people are really pissed off about this because, yeah, they're losing access

Starting point is 02:13:43 to their ability to ship oil. But this is what is inside of the sort of price hieroglyphic of gas price go up. It's an attempt of like the tech fascist to like graft their project onto this sort of paleocon fascist id of Trump where he's just doing this wars like because he wants to. and they're attempting to get something out of it. But what has actually happened here in all of this is that in the administration's war for oil and in their attempt to sort of like fulfill the old paleo con desire

Starting point is 02:14:24 for wars for oil, they have successfully not gotten oil. They're replacing oil that they used to have or attempting to replace better oil they used to have with shit oil that what we're, for these purposes, and they're depriving both the U.S. and basically the rest of the world of oil. And, you know, that's in some sense the macro level of it. The micro level of it is that there's a whole bunch of wars and genocides that are playing out across the world that are the

Starting point is 02:14:56 result of this. And that's what's encoded in gas price go up, is all of the violence and all of the cruelty and all of this sort of inane, flailing stupidity of empire. The long loading times. The glitchy video calls. That's your house asking for better internet. Switch to Bell Pure Fiber, Canada's most reliable internet awarded by Open Signal from $75 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.ca for more details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. Hey, it's Bobby Bones. Join me and former NFL quarterback Matt Castle every Wednesday on our podcast,

Starting point is 02:15:57 lots to say with me Bobby Bones and Matt Castle. We also bring in friends, they're mostly Matt's friends, who are current or former NFL players, some of the biggest names in music and entertainment, and then we have some really great conversations that can pretty much go anywhere. The great Pac-Man Jones. After the game, the whole national task force for police officers

Starting point is 02:16:15 was at the stadium. Like, hey, buddy, yeah, you, Adam. Come up. And one of my favorite segments we do is called situational awareness, where Bobby and I give each other real-life situations and figure out what we'd actually do. You're in training camp, and the rookie quarterback has one good throwing session in front of the media.

Starting point is 02:16:33 Suddenly, everybody online says he should start over you, week one. How do you handle this? You just go back out to practice the next day, and wait for him to mess up. Listen to lots to say with Bobby Bones and Matt Castle on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Every case has a story. Every victim has a voice, but will it be heard?

Starting point is 02:16:57 I'm Nancy Grace on crime stories. We go beyond headlines to examine evidence, challenge the story we're fed, and pursue justice for victims and their families. Please join us at Crime Stories with Nancy Grace on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you find your podcasts. Hope you join us. I'll see you there, friend. The new NFL season is here, and you should be listening to NFL Daily as we march along to Super Bowl 61.

Starting point is 02:17:29 Last year, we had Mike McDonald, Sam Darnold on the field after the game. But that was last year. If you're a football sicko like me, NFL Daily is your kind of show. It is in the name NFL Daily, fresh content in your feed every day all season long. Matthew Stafford coming off his MVP season.

Starting point is 02:17:48 Oh, they does? Darts from Matthew Stafford. Big time trades that shake up the NFL. A.J. Brown is loose. And of course, those Seahawks trying to run it back and win another Lombardi trophy. The Seahawks win Super Bowl 60. They are bringing the Lombardy back to the Northwest. If it's happening on a football field, NFL Daily will cover it.

Starting point is 02:18:14 Listen to NFL Daily on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever. get your podcast. Hey everybody, it's me, W. Kamau Bell. This season of my podcast who's with me, I speak with two-time Emmy winner and weirdly one of my best friends, Kevin Avery. Everything up to that point, Bill G. was a comic.

Starting point is 02:18:36 Us going on the road, doing Battle Mountain and Ely. Yeah, you took me, you were one of the first people took me on the road, which is funny, because at the time I was like, I don't know if I like this guy. With rapper, actor, David Diggs. The jump off for me was Hamilton, and it was the most popular thing.

Starting point is 02:18:52 in a very long time. But it was still, for me, it was me and my friends making something dumb. Bruce Lee's daughter and Brandon Lee's sister, Shannon Lee. Back to your initial point

Starting point is 02:19:03 of stewarding my father's legacy and giving my energy to that. You're lending your life to stewarding somebody else's life. Listen to Who's With Me with Debbie Chaupelle

Starting point is 02:19:15 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You You broke me. You do not deserve happiness. I'm Andrea Gunning. On this season of betrayal, we meet Carl Bryant.

Starting point is 02:19:29 Carl thought he was living a normal drama-free life until the messages started. You will have hell to pay. For nine months, someone infiltrated every aspect of Carl's life, threatening to ruin him. Cyberstalking, swatting, extortion, impersonation. And then the text threats escalated. Someone's not going to make it out of this alive. It's playing out in real life, not just on the phone. Every piece of evidence pointed to one man.

Starting point is 02:20:06 But every piece of evidence was a lie. He was not going to stop unless we stopped him. Listen to Betrayal Season 6 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get you. Your podcasts. Dear honeies, this is goodbye. In February of 2024, celebrated illustrator and children's book author Patra Mather's and her husband Michael mailed letters to dozens of friends and family members to let them know that they had died by suicide. By the time you get this letter, both Petra and I will be dead.

Starting point is 02:20:39 Next stop, Wonderland. Patra and Michael were by all accounts healthy, happy, and in love. Why did they do it? And what did it do to the people they left behind? I would have given a million reasons to not leave this world had I known. I keep coming back to I truly hope that Petra was 1,000% on board with the plan. Do you think of him as having killed her? Yes, I do. I hold Michael responsible for my mother's staff.

Starting point is 02:21:10 I'm Leon Nafeck. And I'm Alice Gregory. Together we set out to interview everyone who got one of Petra and Michael's letters. as one married couple trying to understand another. Listen to Death of an Artist on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what this means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, and special correspondent, Denna El-Kurd.

Starting point is 02:21:46 Welcome. Thank you, thank you. This episode, we are covering the week of September 16 to September 20. I know this has been a busy news week. There's the United Nations. The Trump admin is throwing around the idea of a diesel export embargo. There's a lot of big issues in this country. But on Wednesday, Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama decided to use the United States Senate to bring up another very important issue threatening the national security of our country. Let's take a listen.

Starting point is 02:22:22 pilots, flight attendants, and air traffic controllers are part of the furry community. Lord help us, it's terrifying when you think about this. When you walk onto a commercial flight, it's possible that the pilot fly in your plane could have a deranged fetus of dressing up like an animal. You can't make this up. Every time I hear that guy's name, he sounds like he's a character on Thomas O'Tangelo. Kenjin, like a side character. Then he goes and does shit like this.

Starting point is 02:22:56 He does have a very cartoony name. Also on the little podium here, a printout of the... An emoji. An emoji. Not just any emoji. Does someone want to take a crack at describing this? I think this is what we would describe as the pregnant

Starting point is 02:23:10 man emoji. A yellow emoji figure with short hair who is pregnant. The text reads transgenderism as a mental illness. Something I think Tabarville and others are overlooking is if we were to, you know, excise furries from their jobs, this airline pilots, flight attendants, and air traffic controllers, our entire

Starting point is 02:23:34 system would collapse. Those are, those are the crucial soldiers keeping our airspace. They are the glue. Yes. They are the glue. Like, we're already running into many issues in, you know, regards to air traffic controllers and, and the airline industry. If you take the furries out, Done. It's over. You know what? Honestly, someone in the furry community, get on organizing the furry strike, where all the furries just go on strike. We can end this whole system right now. We can defeat them in a single stroke. Let's move on to some other small news items. Yeah, okay. Someone was upset on the subreddit that we didn't call this all the small things. We're not going to. I guess I'm going to start with Pete Heggseth. Pete Heggseth has announced a joint, warfighter evaluation. Oh boy. Yeah. So this is a thing for 06s who are screening for their

Starting point is 02:24:28 first star right across all the different branches of the military. I'm not going to list what an 06 is because I don't understand how the Navy works. But he's claiming that this new evaluation for promotion will value competence over credentials. It's the way he phrased it. It's basically like an exercise that these officers will have to take part in. And various versions of it are going to involve a war game against an AI-powered adversary, which is great. I expected, I guess. We probably could have seen this coming. It's additive to the existing things that they consider for promotion, but this is part

Starting point is 02:25:05 of his ongoing purge of the U.S. military officer corps. Secondly, I want to talk about a visual investigation by Thomas Bordeaux. He's at CNN, but I think he's working with BBC Verify on this. BBC is doing a kind of true crime podcast about the disappearance of Austin Tice at the moment. People aren't familiar, Austin Tice was an American freelancer who disappeared in Syria at the beginning of the revolution and continues to be missing. Have any of you guys seen this video? No. This must be like, well, I think it was 2012, right, 2011.

Starting point is 02:25:40 I think it was right at the end of 2011. So it purports to be a video of his execution. it seems very likely to be staged. Like if you watch it, it seems a lot like its regime Intel guys dressing up and pretending to be like rebels. Like they basically say nothing but Takbi of the whole time. And then they make him say some stuff.

Starting point is 02:26:00 And then the video cuts, right? You don't see him being executed. He's blindfolded and it's supposed to give that vibe. Anyway, they have geolocated this video to an area that would have been controlled by the Assad regime at the time, which I guess further adds evidence to the claim that he was held by the,

Starting point is 02:26:15 regime, at least at that time. CBS is reporting that Trump administration is ready to accept 17,500 more Afrikaner refugees. God. Yeah, the people who have struggled the most in the continent of Africa. CBS is reporting that Trump administration said, quote, the United States anticipates that Afrikanas from South Africa will fully assimilate into the United States in a manner that preserves taxpayer resources for U.S. citizens and does not anticipate other countries resettling Afrikaners. One can only imagine why. This assimilation thing

Starting point is 02:26:50 has been a consistent thing for them, right? The first time they accepted White Throats African refugees, Rubio talked about it in Congress. This seems to be the standard by which they're judging refugee admissions now. You have to be white and you have to quote unquote assimilate. So that's great. On Tuesday, J.D. Vance's so-called anti-fraud task force announced that they were cutting almost a million people from Affordable Care Act coverage after deciding that 760,000 people or enrollees were fraudulately enrolled in government health care plans, that these plans did not correspond to real people or these people were ineligible for coverage. Vance announced that another 419,000 accounts are under quote additional verification. Memit Oz said that they canceled coverage

Starting point is 02:27:43 for people, in part because those people never filed a claim. $760,000 people, we call them phantoms because we believe most of me that don't exist or had no idea they had coverage. We believe that because we have been writing them, telexing them, walking to them, FedExing, whatever we could possibly do to get into touch with them, they won't answer, and they have never filed a claim. So it meets all the criteria for us to pretty as much as any government can say, you actually don't know you have this or you don't exist.

Starting point is 02:28:15 Obviously, in numbers this large, it is not unlikely that there is many real people who do need this coverage or rely on this coverage who will be cut as a part of this almost a million people. And Vance has promised that more cuts will be coming. Last Friday, the DOJ released a new legal opinion concluding that the federal ban on handgun sales to 18 to 20-year-olds is unconstitutional. should not be enforced against licensed dealers. And lastly, for me,

Starting point is 02:28:48 ProPublica just published a super in-depth investigation into how Trump crushed a sweeping 24 FBI bribery probe into Susan Collins and her super PAC, among a few other congresspeople as well. This article lays out what looks like a pretty clear pay-to-play scheme with requests for campaign donations in exchange for Collins securing millions of dollars in federal funding for defense contractors. Collins is the chair of the Appropriations Committee.

Starting point is 02:29:22 With one contractor, a naval company called Navtech, funneling donations through a shell company, which the head of Collins SuperPack said was, quote, very smart. Oh boy. In email correspondence obtained by ProPublica, this shell company, by the way, was called the Society of Young Women Scientist and Engineers. Wait, just scientists?

Starting point is 02:29:45 Scientist. Incredible. Yes. Yes. Scientists. That typo was how this donation was first flagged that then prompted this investigation. Cool work there.

Starting point is 02:29:59 ProPublica writes, quote, the money had come from Navitex account, not their CEOs, violating a ban on government contractors making donations, unquote. So the CEO of Navitech is now in prison, but obviously Collins is not, though the CEO was interviewed by the FBI for a number of years regarding his dealings with Collins and other people in Congress. Republica writes that the CEO, quote, handed the FBI the 50-page document detailing Navitek's dealings with more than a dozen members of Congress and their staff, unquote. So part of her publicist reporting is explaining how the FBI was about to kind of launch this much broader, full-scale investigation around the end of 2024.

Starting point is 02:30:47 And then obviously in 2025, Trump got into office, this whole like type of investigation fell apart. The whole bunch of attorneys resigned during February of 2025. This is another one of those articles I think it's worth just reading the whole thing. It's pretty long, but it's some pretty solid reporting. And it's already been corroborated by the New York Times. as well. All right. Do we want to talk about

Starting point is 02:31:10 some medium-sized things? Some medium-sized things. Okay. Talking of medium-sized things, let's talk about wolves, not as big as Buffalo, large than rabbits. So Donald Trump has signed an executive order

Starting point is 02:31:23 which gives 90 days for the Secretary of Interior to conduct a broad inspection of regulations impacting ranching and make suggestions to change them. The executive order presser was called supporting America's ranches. As part of this, he talks about instructing Doug Bergam, who, if you don't remember, was endorsed by REI last year to work on delisting wolves from the Endangered

Starting point is 02:31:49 Species Act. Specifically, I'm just going to quote here, the secretary of the interior shall make a determination as to whether the Grey Wolf and the Mexican Wolf has met the recovery criteria for delisting or downlisting under the Endangered Species Act. And if he determines that the recovery criteria has been met, shall begin the process of delisting or downlisting. them, but also directs him to work with states to have them removed from state ESAs, right? So several states have their own Endangered Species Act. California is one of them, right? I think wolves were listed under the California ESA before the federal ESA existed. If you're not familiar, wolves have become a massive cultural war issue in the West, right?

Starting point is 02:32:27 Like, wolves are very woke, is a thing that I have learned. Like, if you go, I don't go to Gardner outside Yellowstone, right? Like this place which we can categorically prove makes millions of dollars a year from people coming to look at wolves. You'll see people wearing those smoker pack a day t-shirts and they're not talking about cigarettes, right? Oh. Yeah. Removing wolves from the west, seeing wolves as like this, this woke thing that is destroying our writing interest. It's a big culture signal.

Starting point is 02:32:56 Like the idea that conservation is like woke or in some way or like animal like. The thing with wolves is it combines like people don't like people who talk about animal rights, people don't like ecology and conservation and people don't like predators. Got it. Right. And so when we get these three things together it's the idea that it's a bunch of people in New York

Starting point is 02:33:16 who don't understand what wolves do and they want them back, but they don't have to deal with the consequences, right? And like it does suck when there is predation. Like my family raised livestock. I've dealt with predation. It's fucking sucks. It sucks, especially when it's young animals, right? Carves or lamb.

Starting point is 02:33:32 or whatever. One of the things that the Trump administration has also instructed Bergam to do is to look at and consider amending the existing compensation programs, which exist for wolves, right? The wolf issue, I think, is also particularly controversial because there have been hard introductions, right? Like, if you look at Colorado, Colorado had a ballot measure in 2020 to introduce wolves, to reintroduce wolves, which they began doing about three years ago. And, like, Colorado has this big cultural divide, right, between, like, your blue counties in the western slope, I'll say, like the idea that these front-range folks in Denver and Boulder mandated wolves on ranches. And so it plays on other, I guess, existing insecurities. It's a little

Starting point is 02:34:11 different here in California because the wolves in California weren't released. They walked in on their own feet. Although a popular conspiracy theory that I've heard is that that's not actually true and that some people sneaked the wolves in from Oregon and released them like wolf vigilantes. This should be real. I know, right. Yeah, please. If you have smuggled a wolf into the state of California, you've done a lot of crimes,

Starting point is 02:34:39 but I would love to talk to you for my podcast. I want to address this more in my podcast natural causes because I think a lot of people are wrong about wolves, right? I think it's silly to say that we shouldn't have wolves. I think it's also frustrating for people to think that the reason that we have wolves is to, like, fix our fuck-ups. wolves have a right to be there because they've always been there and they belong there. They're not there to undo the damage done by capitalism and the state to the land.

Starting point is 02:35:06 And we shouldn't tie the justification for reintroducing them to that because sometimes the science will not support that and then we will lose that justification. They have a right to be there because they belong there. That can be the start and the end of it and I think it should be. I think we should be expecting the wolves to do our dirty work or undo our dirty work. I'm a little confused about what Trump is exactly saying here because he also wants a, quote, a legislative recommendation to fully delist or downlist a gray wolf and the Mexican wolf under the ESA. There are not many Mexican wolves.

Starting point is 02:35:34 Like, I think there are fewer than 400. Sheesh. Yeah, like there are like 320-ish in those sort of southwestern of southern states and then probably 50 in Mexico. We spoke about a prosecution for killing Mexican wolves a few months ago that I found in a New Mexico, court records, right? But it seems very unlikely that they will meet the recovery guidelines set up under the ESA, but I admittedly have not looked into those recently. I want to move on to something that's even more depressing, the lifeboat protest in the UK. So this week, and really this month has seen a series of really disgusting protests and attacks on lifeboats

Starting point is 02:36:15 in the UK. This includes fascist Daniel Thomas. He goes by Danny Tomo, really great Nomdegger, which disguised his identity very well, stabbing a lifeboat. For those not familiar with this, the discourse here is related to the mission of the R&LI, which is to rescue those in peril on the sea. The lifeboats were, I guess, at least during the time when I was growing up a foundational British institution. They are funded by the people, not the state. They are literally in the book Mutual Aid, like Capital M, Capital A, Mutual Aid.

Starting point is 02:36:48 they also used to celebrate Krapokin's birthday, the R&LI. You can go back if their Twitter page still exists and see them posting things about his birthday. There's a very good piece called Lifeboats and Anarchy in the R&LI magazine. The people should read, they wouldn't know more about that. When I was a child, there was a very popular way back when, right, when there were only four TV channels, there was a very popular TV, children's TV program, and children who was the program, would hold fundraisers for the lifeboats every year. And this was like a completely foundation.

Starting point is 02:37:18 thing that everybody thought was good, right? All they do is rescue people who are in danger of drowning. It's mostly a volunteer institution. I've had friends and colleagues who I've worked with who have volunteered on the lifeboats. It is a dangerous, stressful and often thankless job that you can't plan or schedule for, right? When someone needs help, you have to go and help them immediately. You have to stop what you're doing. Work away from work, walk away from whatever you're doing socially, walk away from your family and go risk your life to help people. And that's all they do. Why are they stabbing the boats then? So, I guess...

Starting point is 02:37:52 I mean, fascist going to fascist. Yeah. What's the source of these protests? Specifically, it is the idea that the lifeboats are bringing people seeking asylum to communities who cannot support them. Okay. You see the same shit that you see everyone in the world, right? Like I saw a BBC interview with someone who is like, we've got homeless people here. And I would be prepared to wager a large amount of money that that person has done the square root of fuck all to help homeless people in the life.

Starting point is 02:38:18 few years, right? But now is suddenly concerned because apparently they have to compete for scarce resources with asylum seekers rather than, yeah, you know, the fucking royal family. In this case, there was a protest in Gosport where we saw crowds of people led by a child chanting, let them drown. I was about to ask if this was the same protest. Yeah, like, one can understand a child who isn't like fully formed in the brain saying shit like that, I guess. It's not their fault. Yeah, for a child to be raised in a place with that much hate, it's fucking disgusting. And for grown adults to be like joining in and encouraging that behavior is fucking appalling. Thomas has pulled this shit a few times, but obviously like this was the worst.

Starting point is 02:39:04 What they're trying to do, I guess, is like boats have been leaving from Chieupeau. So like on the mental west side of France, right, because of increased police presence in Dunker. in those areas where you would go to Dover where there's a shorter channel crossing, right? And so the lifeboats being dispatched are coming probably from the eye, I'm not exactly sure, maybe the Al of White, I think, and they are taking them to the UK mainland, right,

Starting point is 02:39:30 by the shortest route. If the lifeboats took those people who they rescued to Dover, that would take probably half a dozen hours. And at that point, the lifeboat is then out of its area of operation. So if anybody else is in distress on the sea, that lifeboat can't respond, right? It's a good example.

Starting point is 02:39:45 I have how this bigotry hurts everyone. They've been doing this for a while. I actually made a podcast a couple years ago with Professor Ruth Kinner about lifeboats of mutual aid. But like to see this many people going after something that was so foundational to the culture in the United Kingdom not so long ago. Like when I was a kid, because they've been whipped up into thinking that they have to compete for resources with asylum seekers rather than like the only dangerous minority being the rich. it makes me really sad and it makes me really angry. And like there is something so fucking broken about a crowd of people chanting,

Starting point is 02:40:22 let them drown. And like I know I'm proud of all my friends who continue to volunteer for the R&LI. I really want to go back home and do a series on it because I know a lot of people who are lifeboatman and like I think what they do is incredible. And it's it's the answer to the question that everyone always has about anarchism.

Starting point is 02:40:42 Like who will put out the fires without the state the same people who fucking rescue thousands of people a year from the sea, right? Like the the RNLI is funded by donations and through people's wills. The money doesn't come from your taxes, the money doesn't come from the state. I've pointed to them for so long, like both when I'm teaching and in conversations and like I think that's something we should be really proud of. And it's disgusting to me that people are doing this shit. Talking of disgusting, do you want to talk about Trump speech at the UN? I think we should probably talk about the advertisers that support our podcast first.

Starting point is 02:41:14 Hopefully it's the lifeboats we can donate. I don't think it's going to be the lifeboats. I don't think they advertise on podcasts. That would be cool. All right, we're back. And now we're traveling from the United Kingdom to New York to talk about the United Nations General Assembly, where Donald Trump used the platform he had to make comments

Starting point is 02:41:46 that sounded straight up genocidal. But I have a big decision to make. Will a deal be made with Iran? that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before, maybe one of the greatest in the Middle East or even the world. Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again? Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?

Starting point is 02:42:26 But I believe we'll make a deal right after the election because it doesn't make sense for them not to. This is fucking great, right? Oh my God. To go from like, don't worry, I'll genocide them all to vote for me, please. Only a deal after the election. Yeah. It's like, I got to see what happens. Yeah, right, yeah, we got to keep him in just so we see how this goes.

Starting point is 02:42:49 It's a fucking UN. Like, it was found, and admittedly he has failed, right? But it was founded as the idea that we could all get together and talk it out. We wouldn't have genocides. And there he is. Just fucking, like, as I said, the UN manifestly failed in that regard and many others. It still sucks. Yeah, it's still fucking bonkers.

Starting point is 02:43:07 It's super easy to, like, you know, poo-poo on the UN because it's the UN. But, I mean, it's what we have. It's what we have. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's a tool that we have. And, like, yeah. He then went on to talk about the midterms.

Starting point is 02:43:22 This is like another 30. second, let's listen to this. They're waiting to see how I do in the midterm election. What they don't realize is that I'm not running. I did that already and won in a landslide. We won in a giant landslide and I'll be here for two and a half years. The Republican Party is running and I'll be helping them. But I am not running. I gave absolutely no credence and will not give credence to the election when it comes to Iran. It doesn't even enter my mind. Then he goes on to say that they don't get a nuclear weapon, of course, right? This is bonkers, right? The idea that Iran is not aware.

Starting point is 02:44:06 Yeah, like, he's like, wait, guys, you have to understand. Americans have different elections. They can't comprehend, right? Like, electoral... Is this the thing where, like, he didn't know this that someone told him? Like, what is happening here? He's like, they recently told me I am actually not running. Yeah, I'm good, guys. Clearly, his war on Iran has been extremely unpopular and continues to be extremely unpopular because it costs six bucks to buy a gallon of gas now. Even if people don't care about the massive human toll of this, they do care about that.

Starting point is 02:44:44 Which I do also want to say for the record that this war was unpopular before the gas prices increased. It's made it more unpopular, but no one has ever liked this war. and it just gets more unpopular every day. Yeah. It's part of why he's, I guess, bringing this, you know, midterm stuff up in, like, both of these clips here. And I guess he's, like, he knows he only has a few months left until the amount of, like, support he has in Congress will take a pretty big dip.

Starting point is 02:45:08 Yeah. Even if they just lose the House. But, I mean, if, if, like, the Senate's on the line, that would, that's, it's going to put at least some, some constraints, it's some checks, as opposed to the zero. Yeah. It has like zero or negative checks that have been in Congress for the past two years. It's like he's going to like, I assume, plot out, you know, all the way up until the time that the next Congress has sworn in, like, whatever his game plan is.

Starting point is 02:45:36 Yeah. It's well to see him electioneering this hard at the UN as well. At the UN. Yeah. Like, just, I mean, he does this all the time, right? He goes around and does something that's absolutely the most jarring tone shit from anything that has happened there before. but like the way he continues to talk about like annihilating Iran it's disturbing yeah especially as our conventional weapons resources get lower and lower

Starting point is 02:45:59 it's scary like it's genuinely scary that's stuff that you could just play at an ICC trial for genocide yeah yeah I mean he spoke about the ICC as well he critiqued the ICC or not even critique that's not the right word didn't he call for the Maltor resign or something something yeah yeah I mean some of them can't even come to the US Yeah. Yeah, this was and continues to be bonkers, I guess. It's not surprising in a sense, but it still sucks. Yeah, it's horrifying.

Starting point is 02:46:30 Dan, I know you had some stuff you wanted to talk about. Do you want to pick up from here? Yes. So there's a lot of talk about what's going to happen to Gaza, what's going to happen to the Palestinians of the West Bank. I just didn't. It could happen here episode on the way the Israeli state and the Israeli settlement are working together

Starting point is 02:46:48 to ethnically cleanse the West Bank. bank, but how we should distinguish between the two. Anyway, the way that international actors, particularly the United States, have behaved just to kind of audaciously sideline the Palestinians, like they don't even pretend to include them or consider them. So the Board of Peace, for example, doesn't have any Palestinian decision makers. There are only technocrats who are essentially supposed to just take commands from the Board of Peace. So there's really like no space in the discussion for Palestinian agency. But I think international actors, governments in the EU, but even some in Washington kind of thinking medium to long term about after Trump, they

Starting point is 02:47:25 understand that this doesn't look great and that at some point they'll have to make a big display of getting Palestinians to sign some grand peace deal with the Israelis, and you need some group of Palestinians to do that, right? So the Palestinian authority that governs the West Bank is led by President Mahmoud Abbas, as I'm sure many know, who has overstayed his term limits for many, many years. He's also the chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the PLO. And Palestinians are very unhappy with this setup. Basically, the polls show that they think it lacks legitimacy and that he lacks legitimacy. So the international community has essentially been getting to work to kind of paper over this issue. So last year,

Starting point is 02:48:10 they pressured Abbas to find a successor because he's so old, they're afraid he's going to heel over, and he unilaterally changed the bylaws of the PLO outside normal institutional procedures to create a vice president position. And he appointed someone to that position from the PLO executive committee. The dude he picked, Hsena-Shikh, polls at 2% with Palestinians. So they're already setting up for what comes after Abbas. And now they're working on PLO changes that would again on the surface look like an institution renewing its legitimacy. So part of that, this is ongoing right now, is the legislative body of the PLO, the Palestinian National Council, actually hold elections. So I'm going to quote here from the European Council on Foreign Relations. The PNC is responsible

Starting point is 02:48:54 for formulating the PLO's policies. It acts as a parliament that represents all Palestinians, except for Palestinian citizens of Israel. The PNC currently comprises 747 members representing Palestinians in Palestine and in the diaspora. But because the PNC has had such difficulty convening and all of these things, there are other bodies. that bridge between the legislative and the executive, like the central council. And over the years, the PNC has basically lost any power, even though it's supposed to be the legislative body, it's supposed to be kind of the democratic engine of the PLO. So in February 26, so in February of this year, Abbas issued a decree saying that there would be PNC elections in November, and that this

Starting point is 02:49:37 would include basically trying to make it so that all eligible Palestinians that can like feasibly vote directly, living in the diaspora, or if that's not possible, kind of through an electoral college process in different diaspras or via quote-unquote consensus. So the PLO, the PA, which at this point overlap, they've been going around different communities, different Palestinian diaspora communities, and setting up so that these different communities run people for these elections. But the way they're doing it is extremely undemocratic. They are not thinking about, you know, who are we going to tap that actually represents some constituency in these diasporas, or are they actually, like, representative of these diaspora? They're just getting yesmen in a lot of cases. Some members of the

Starting point is 02:50:30 Central Council basically found out that they had been removed after reading it in the media. So, like, it's completely undemocratic. The Palestinian diaspora in Chile, for example, like they've tapped a particular organization, but that organization, like, gets to run the elections and other organizations in the Palestinian diaspora in Chile, like, have to jump through a lot more hoops to be able to run in the same elections. So to me, it feels like a grand conspiracy against Palestinians to pretend like this PNC elections are actually legitimate, in reality, really disempowering huge swaths of the Palestinian diaspora. He also announced in that decree that he's going to half the numbers of the PNC from 747 to 350.

Starting point is 02:51:14 So essentially one seat allocated for every 35,000 Palestinians is like the idea. But yeah, it's not great. And I think that we should really, you know, focus on what's happening here because the Palestinians are being set up in so many ways for a very bleak near-term feature. I feel like I've stunned all of you with the silence. Well, it's so bleak. They're just like how openly they're just kind of rigging the election. It's like, I don't know.

Starting point is 02:51:43 It reminds me of like more expansive version of the way that like the CCP does elections for or like there's like nominal elections for all of their party official offices where they do like a very similar process of like, yeah, we've we've like put forward one candidate who's like our person. You're all going to vote for them or you're going to vote for one of the like allied parties or something. Yeah. No, it's completely like minimized as a process. I mean, I haven't even gotten into, like, the local elections that have happened in the occupied territories and how kind of problematic some of those have been. But just on every level, like, even when they're pretending at democracy, like, it's not happening, you know? So, yeah. And then, like, in the same, like, CCP structure thing, you have, like, this big assembly that does nothing.

Starting point is 02:52:29 And then there's, like, executive bodies that have been carefully chosen from their, like, loyalists outside of that, they, like, do all the things. Yeah, so exactly. No, no, that's a good comparison. Yeah. So the second thing I wanted to just very briefly touch on is the issue of Palestine in higher ed. I think, like, because there haven't been the, you know, massive widespread protests that we saw a year or two years ago, this maybe has dropped from the radar. But it continues to, you know, those protests on campuses continue to have ramifications for higher ed and for a lot of the people who participated. So two cases I wanted to just mention briefly is that at Stanford University, a number of students were criminally.

Starting point is 02:53:09 prosecuted for protesting on their campus and for some of them that involved occupying the president's office and demanding divestment and things like this. But the charges have all been dropped against those students. The Santa Clara County District Attorney that was assigned to this case, who like was seeking criminal prosecution, was using the case to solicit donations for his reelection, saying he was tough on anti-Semitism. She's Christian. Jesus. Yeah. So the judge was like, Hey, I think this is probably, you're probably too biased for this. He asked him to be removed from the case. And then eventually, as I said, the charges were dropped and the students, like, have to pay a small sum and, like, do some community service.

Starting point is 02:53:52 But the idea is, like, all of these cases, whether at Sanford and or other places, they were used to deter further protest, for sure. And then the second case I wanted to mention is maybe people remember. three Palestinian students, one from Brown University, one from Haverford College and one from Trinity College were shot for wearing kaffaias on the street in Vermont maybe two years ago. All three of them were wounded, and one was paralyzed. So the guy who shot them, Jason Eaton, faces up to life in prison. And despite the fact that that guy had claimed that the U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies had transmitted orders to him to shoot the students via FM radio and that God had commanded him, to protect his Jewish neighbors.

Starting point is 02:54:40 No hate crime charges were filed. So I think that that is quite telling. Yeah. But nevertheless, the student, one of the students' mothers, the student, Hisham Awartani, was the one who was paralyzed. His mother Elizabeth Price spoke to the media after the verdict and said, justice has been rendered for Hisham, Kianana, and Tahseen. After three years of sorrow, loss, and struggle, our families finally feel relief.

Starting point is 02:55:04 We are grateful our son's suffering, commended attention, and support. we grieve so much that Palestinian suffering never does. So I just wanted to update about that case as well. I'm not sure it's a happy update, but some semblance of repercussion. Yeah, damn. Yeah. I guess we got another shooting because this is America.

Starting point is 02:55:24 I hate this country. Yeah, I know, this one's fucked up. I saw a man in the back last week. Wilbert Rafael Garces Perez. He's a migrant from Venezuela. he was shot in the back. He appears to be in stable condition now. We've seen a number of different videos.

Starting point is 02:55:42 The videos of the shooting are not entirely clear of the rendered events. Ice claimed he's running away from them. Video doesn't seem to show that. We have seen video of ICE agents cuffing him and appears that they're doing that before rendering aid. You could see a couple of agents putting cuffs on him and another guy who apparently has struggling

Starting point is 02:56:01 to put on latex or actually non-latex but protective gloves. Wilbur, like many Venezuelans, came to the USA to help his family. Like, I've heard this story a hundred times, right? And I've met this family, not this family, but like a family doing exactly the same thing, a hundred times. He has a son with disabilities that he will probably either struggle to pay for or cannot be accommodated easily in Venezuela.

Starting point is 02:56:24 And so his dad came here to work to fund his treatment at the time that he was shot. He was delivering DoorDash, super common employment for people to come in case seeking asylum, right? his family attorney, Kate Lincoln Goldfinch, has been documenting the events after his shooting on Instagram, beginning with a post

Starting point is 02:56:44 where she says she was at the hospital with Wilbur's wife and they are trying to get into the hospitals to see her husband who had called her and said he had been shot and then the phone cut off. So evidently she's distressed, right? And there's security at the hospital

Starting point is 02:57:01 are denying that he is there and asking the attorney and Wilbur's wife to leave. She is then informed by a congressperson that he is present at that hospital, but that a hospital's policy is not to disclose when someone's there in ICE detention. I've done a lot of, like, I haven't put much out on hospitals and ICE detention. I have done a lot of interviews about that. It's something I want to kind of get my arms around fully before I put something out because I think I've also done a lot of responding to times when migrants are in

Starting point is 02:57:33 medical crisis and are afraid to get medical care. And I think that there are really serious repercussions to suggesting that ISIS going room to room in hospitals or in ED is taking people. I'm not aware of them ever doing that. And I just want to make that very clear for people whenever we get to this topic because it kills people to not seek medical care too. You know, we need to hold those two things at the same time. In this case, I guess Austin's mayor showed up and got them confirmation that he was stable and had been released into an ICE detention centre. His attorney then held a presser, which Wilbur attended remotely by calling in from detention. There were different ways people can call in different detention centres. I think he had some kind of

Starting point is 02:58:16 tablet device. In this conference, he said he was in serious pain and that he had not been receiving adequate mental care. And the ICE agents had not identified themselves before ramming his car. His lawyer later said that after this press conference, he said that after his press conference, as a retaliatory measure, he was held in isolation and had his communication device taken away. He was also removed from the infirmary in apparent retaliation for his presser and placed in isolation. He is now, according to Congressman Joachim Castro, being returned to hospital to get better care. According to his lawyer, the agent who shot him was hired last year and either didn't have or didn't activate the body can. A judge has ruled that Wilbur will appear in person for an immigration hearing on the 30th of September.

Starting point is 02:59:04 So that would be that he can't be removed before then, right? He had previously been ordered, removed in absentia because he had missed a hearing. His lawyer says he had moved house and didn't get that document. ICE then proceeded to release this press release, effectively directly addressing the Instagram posts of his lawyer. And they claimed they were going to, quote, correct the record. record, unquote, with a number of lies. It was set up the way that you might write a document if you didn't know what a paragraph was. The Axios style of writing. Yes, yes, perfect, Garrison. Yes, that's correct. It used the Axios House style here. Yeah, an outlet that

Starting point is 02:59:43 thinks you're too dumb to read two sentences consecutively. So it's set up in a claim fact format. Oh, my God. Yeah, I mean, like, sometimes I think that there's a moment, like was Jen Psiaki, where just like the way press releases are done by the executive branch just went off a fucking cliff. The Trump administration has like gone from like slight downhill to like free fall at this point. But so throughout this they don't refer to him by his name. They refer to him as the illegal alien.

Starting point is 03:00:09 It's very common in all of their communications. Yeah, this shit really, like literally yesterday, my friends and I erected a memorial to a migrant who had died and then put their name on it right. And not giving people names really fucking makes me mad. Claim the illegal agent. alien is here legally. Fact. I'm obviously quoting from their oppressor here. This is false. The person is in the U.S. illegally. He entered illegally under the Biden administration. The illegal alien had no

Starting point is 03:00:37 valid work permit, had no protective status, and had a final order of removal from a Department of Justice immigration judge. This is not correct. He entered under CBP 1, right? To enter under CBP 1 was a massive and significant burden to migrants in the Biden administration. I know have died waiting for a CBP1 appointment. And not a small number of people. To comply with the requirements of CBP1 was to jump through every hoop that was placed in front of you at great personal risk, right?

Starting point is 03:01:13 It was safer for people not to remain in Mexico and to enter without inspection. He didn't do that. He got an appointment at CBP1, he went to a border crossing, he spoke to numerous DHS personnel and he was allowed them to the country. CBP1 gave people a year of humanitarian parole.

Starting point is 03:01:30 Trump tried to cancel that, but in March this year, a federal judge overturned him canceling that. He says you can't just like broad swath cancel parole like that. I've included an explainer for people who need to or would like to understand that more. It'll be in the notes.

Starting point is 03:01:46 Is that the welcome.org link? Yes, yeah. This press release was just so annoying. Right, like just repeating all these talking points that they have, right? CB1, if you're not familiar, was founded by the Trump, the first Trump administration. This is a thing that they made.

Starting point is 03:02:03 They've since tried to, like, rec on that, but, I mean, they did it. It was used by the Biden administration as a de facto gating mechanism for migrants, right? It was a way of reducing the number of people who could come and apply for asylum. That is why people ended up eweeing, right, entering without inspection, because there was no other way. A large number of CBP1 appointments went to Russian-speaking people, generally because those people who had come were wealthier. They could get hotels. They'd get hotels in Tijuana with Wi-Fi, and they'd make the applications, right? the application did not work on previous generation Android telephones.

Starting point is 03:02:39 And those are the telephones that the vast number of people coming to Seekers Island will have, especially, like I literally heard from a friend today who I met the Daring-Gap on, I think her fifth phone number, because people's phones just get stolen from them constantly, right? It's the most reliable item of value that most people have, so it's the easiest thing to steal. And so they end up with, when you turn your phone in to get like an upgrade, it gets sold in different parts of the world where people don't have as much income for technology stuff, right? So they end up with previous generation phones. The app didn't work on those phones.

Starting point is 03:03:12 The facial liveness scanner of CBP1, as I'd say, I'm booking an appointment for dinner, like, that it's actually dinner making the appointment and not me holding up a life-sized carball cut out of dinner, like in front of the camera. So you have to go like that. It simply didn't work for black faces. Like I know there were NGOs in Tijuana, for instance, who has spent so. much money on like light rooms, like getting big, like to try and try and make it work for people. It's, Jesus Christ. Yeah, this act was horrific. And he went through all the fucking hurdles and they're still just going to call him. They're still going to lie about it, right? Like, I think this is a particularly heinous example of how fucked our immigration system is. Yeah, I'll

Starting point is 03:03:55 keep up on this. As far as we know, he's now in a hospital. I hope he's receiving better care than he would under a nice detention. Let's go on one more ad break, and then we have a few more stories before we end this episode. Okay, we are back. On Friday afternoon, President Trump announced he was, quote, banning three news outlets,

Starting point is 03:04:30 CNN, MSNBC, and Politico from the White House, quote, effective immediately, as a result of their constant reporting, fake news, media outlets shouldn't be able to constantly write or report fiction and lies when they're covering the president of the United States, the Trump administration or the United States of America, other fake news media outlets to follow, unquote. Obviously not good when the president says that outlets shouldn't be allowed to write or report. Only there was an amendment of the Constitution. But it was at first kind of unclear what this ban meant.

Starting point is 03:05:11 end exactly. Though at a press conference following Trump's announcement on Truth Social, he referred to this as a, quote, ban on the free press. What? Wait, you just said that? Yes. Oh, I missed this. What? Yeah. Oh, wait, let's get a kid. We got a video. That's fucking great. Why not? On the three news outlets, sir, what does that mean in practice? Are you taking away their badges? Are you banning them from the pool? Are you banning them for the old office? What does that mean? I still don't know what...

Starting point is 03:05:41 What do you envision the band's end of the media outlets? Oh, the ban on the free press, right? Very simple band. I don't want them in my office. I don't want them here. I would say the ban would go as far as you can. He's like, you know, that thing we have an amendment about? Yeah.

Starting point is 03:06:00 Maybe he was referring to capital F, capital P, the Barry Weiss outlet that does transfer I don't think he's talking about banning Barry Weiss is the free press. It's so cool that like we had an entire movement that was nominally about free speech and like the result of it was like white CEO should be able to say the N word but also the president should be allowed to ban the free press from talking to him. Hey, and they and they are word. There's so many slurs they want to be able to say. So Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, quote, something is wrong with a country that can allow people to write purposefully negative stories. If they want to write them, that's fine. I don't have to let them into the people's house.

Starting point is 03:06:45 Going on to say, like he started in that clip, I don't want them in my office, I don't want them here. I would say the ban would go as far as you can. And if they could straighten themselves out, I'd love it, unquote, suggesting he could lift the ban if outlets, quote, straighten themselves out, meaning write the news in a different way. someone asked Trump how this would relate to a then upcoming visit with President Xi

Starting point is 03:07:15 and I'll just play the cliff President Xi coming I do. I do. Great honor. China is one of the most repressive countries for journalists in the world. What signal does it send? I don't know about that. I think we're repressive also. We get fake news. We don't repress, but they write fake news. Jeez.

Starting point is 03:07:37 Oh, maybe he was on a sick one. You know, this whole time I was thinking about, there was a story like this week about a trial of some media organization in Hong Kong, where the judge is talking about how you shouldn't be able to publish opinions that are like, I think the quote was like factually incorrect opinions because they were like negative about the regime. And then Trump's like, no, fuck that. We're banning the free press. We're going to out repress the CCP.

Starting point is 03:08:05 I'm like, this is great. This is great. I love being a Chinese American. It's such a good tie. This clip is really funny because he says we're repressive too, but then he pivots and talks about fake news and then goes on to say like, well, we don't like actually repress, but we do have fake news and like kind of equivocating fake news to repression in China is kind of what he turns that into.

Starting point is 03:08:29 And then he just banned the press. Perhaps after catching what he said. Yeah. But like, yeah, it's not. It was. really on press conference, as you can imagine. Yeah. The banning the free press press conference.

Starting point is 03:08:43 His honesty is always refreshing. Wild. Yeah. So over the weekend, reporters from those three outlets were denied access to the White House grounds, with journalists' hard-pass credentials apparently being deactivated overnight. Then on Monday, the affected outlets filed a lawsuit against Trump and White House staff. The suit claims it's, quote, clear that the ban was most. motivated by Trump's disdain for reporting he considers, quote, one-sided and, quote, never good,

Starting point is 03:09:12 because it, quote, diminishes him and his accomplishments. This ban could not be a more direct assault on the First Amendment, nor a more blatant violation of our most fundamental constitutional principles, unquote. Also on Monday, ABC News, CBS News, NBC, and Fox, the four TV news poolers besides CNN, released a joint statement in support of CNN, who was supposed to be the designated TV pool provider for that day at the White House. The statement reads, quote, the public has a vital interest

Starting point is 03:09:46 in receiving accurate independent information about its government. No administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting, unquote. These networks announced a solidarity blackout of White House pool coverage. With Fox News's Washington, Chief and the current White House TV pool chair, emailing the other networks on Monday,

Starting point is 03:10:09 quote, this is to advise that effective today, the TV pool will not be covering events designated as pool coverage of the president. This follows the White House's position, preventing CNN from fulfilling its assigned pool duties. There will be no replacement pool put in place. And later on Monday, this did affect their ability to report on White House events, as Newsmax struggled to hear the president during a ribbon-cutting ceremony. Okay, so there is no microphone because there's no microphone because the pool cameras aren't there. So maybe, Tim, this is one example of it backfiring just a little bit.

Starting point is 03:10:57 Pick up on some of things Michael was saying. And obviously the ramifications are right here. Can't hear what the president's saying. Indeed. You cannot hear what the president is saying. Backfired a little bit. A little bit. A little bit, it seems.

Starting point is 03:11:16 Well, they don't want to get the old press credential taken away. They're going to be careful. To me, it's unclear how long this blackout will last and how isolated it is, because obviously there was coverage of Trump at the UN. Although outlets said that that was because the UN provides those credentials. So it's unclear if this is supposed to be targeted specifically at the White House pool. We'll get a better idea in the next few days. as Trump returns to the White House.

Starting point is 03:11:41 But not, you know, good for, as Trump says, the free press. No. Another thing, not great. Last Thursday, September 17th, the FCC approved Paramount's petition to allow almost 50% of the potentially merged Paramount WB equity to be owned by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE following this potential Warner Brothers merger,

Starting point is 03:12:06 meaning the Ellison's Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi would end up owning CBS, CNN, HBO, Discovery Channel, BET, Fendango, MTV, Nickelodeon, Parenthood, Pluto, TV, Showtime, TBS,

Starting point is 03:12:20 the CWTNT, and Warner Brothers. Now, though, thankfully, 12 state AGs have sued to block this $110 billion Paramount Warner Brothers merger, since it obviously

Starting point is 03:12:35 endangered. competition and threatens editorial independence of even more news outlets. Though, after Paramount threatened to leave California last week, state attorney general Rob Bonta, who was leading the state coalition's antitrust case, caved on Monday and agreed to settle their lawsuit, essentially giving this merger the final green light. California Democrat moment. This is really big. bad.

Starting point is 03:13:06 Yeah. Obviously, part of Bontas announcement includes a list of this settlement's, quote, court enforceable concessions, which largely amounts to Paramount promising to release around 30 movies a year for the next five years. Only for the next five years, by the way. Or else they will face penalties and be required to divest Miramax Studios. Again, this requirement only is until, like, 20, you know, 31. roughly. Also, like, that's what you're going to fight for, like 30 Paramount movies a year.

Starting point is 03:13:40 Like, that's the big thing here. Some of the other concessions include a $47.5 million fund for workers, quote, displaced by the merger. And an annual $5 million fund to support independent film. We did it, Rob. We did it, Gavin. We got it. Five million a year for independent film. Thanks, Gav. Now, California also announced a, quote, news editorial independence board to help CNN and CBS maintain editorial independence. So, you know, worries, no need, no need to be worried about this. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:14:25 This will be fine. But if you actually read the documents of establishing this board, I'll read this board, I'll read this here. The editorial independence board should be made up of five established journals. journalists, active or retired, each of whom shall have practiced journalism for a minimum of 10 years. No more than two editorial board members may be affiliated with the same political party. Editorial Independence Board members shall be appointed by the combined entities Board of Directors. Who do you think is the chair of Paramount's Board of Directors? Wild guess.

Starting point is 03:15:00 Larry Ellison? David Ellison. Perfect. Perfect. I love that they can't be from a same political party, right? You're going to get two Dems, you're going to get two Republicans, then you've got a wild card in there. And there is a kind of person who is a California journalist

Starting point is 03:15:14 who is a member of the Libertarian Party, and they are the worst kind of person. You know one of them is going to fucking end up in there. I love to live in a free society. Yeah. Making things worse, Semaphore reported today that Paramount is weighing, tapping one Elon Musk for equity in.

Starting point is 03:15:33 investment as well. Yeah. I did read that. Physically painful. So both Ellison and Musk could end up appointing people to this editorial independence board. They love freedom. Also, the other investors are like the Saudi government and the UAE's sovereign wealth funds. Like part of it, right?

Starting point is 03:15:58 Part of that deal is allegedly making sure that they don't have like voting power. even though they own the shares. Sure. We'll see how that works. Honestly, I would bet on the Saudis more than I would bet on Musk. Like, give them voting power. That's a dark timeline. No, no, I'm just kidding.

Starting point is 03:16:17 We'll get a great comedy festival out of it. Until we have proof that Elon Musk has deployed Sudanese child soldiers in Yemen. Okay, okay, okay. I don't know. No, no, I didn't say the UAE. Let's distinguish. That is true. The Saudis also were involved in that.

Starting point is 03:16:32 Not letting them off the law. You're right. You're right, you're right. I retract it. You know exactly what kind of press freedoms Elon Musk's going to go for as well. Like, oh, God. But no, this is a massive failure specifically on executives in California between the governor, Newsom and the state AG. The fact of they caved on this due to the threat of Paramount moving to a different state

Starting point is 03:16:55 puts the whole country in jeopardy. People really need to wise up to what Newsom's doing right now. He's very clearly signaling that he will be friendly to capital before he makes his presidential run. He did it with the wildfire settlements in California. He's doing it with this. He is showing that he is going to be everything that Democrats have disappointed you with for the last four, eight, 12 years. I despise what Newsom is doing right now. The other thing in the fine print of these concessions is the force majeure clause that allows,

Starting point is 03:17:31 the combined entity to get out of all these concessions in situations of, quote, war, rebellion, hurricanes, other major storms, earthquakes, fires, terrorism, pandemics, strikes, labor disruptions, economic recessions, riots, insurrections, civil commotions, blockades. So in the case of the AI bubble bursting, they can get out of all of these concessions that, you know, the state AG of California is, you know,

Starting point is 03:18:00 claiming as their big victory. of course also strikes and labor disruptions included in there as well. What's a civil commotion? A little shenanigans. James, it's what happens when I walked down the same street. It's a civil commotion. That is a spiritually British phrase. Yeah, what legal basis is this?

Starting point is 03:18:22 Yeah, I'm going to hit us up if you've been convicted of civil commotion. One final note on this, also on Monday, the Writers Guild of America, settle their own lawsuit filed this past summer on the grounds that this merger violates antitrust and would cause specific harm to workers. In terms of concessions,

Starting point is 03:18:41 that the WGA was able to achieve, they got Paramount to agree to a layoff prohibition for five years for CBS News broadcast members and got Paramount to agree to pay $17.5 million to the Writers' Guild Health Fund and cover their attorney's fees from the litigation.

Starting point is 03:18:57 To quote the WGA statement, quote, paramount has committed to, with the AG's, and with us, fall far short of adequately protecting writers, and we continue to believe the merger will cause damage to the industry at large. As labor unions, however, the AG's settlement means that we had to contend with the reality of forging ahead alone with a lawsuit that would cost millions of dollars through trial, unquote. Quick update here. On Thursday, a California judge delayed the court's

Starting point is 03:19:30 sign-off of this settlement for at least another week by granting an administrative motion by a coalition to block the merger. This settlement to complete the merger does require a sign-off from this judge. The parties have till Monday. The next hearing to go over the settlement is expected to be on Tuesday. You know, rolling it back a couple seconds, speaking of spiritually British, Let's talk about Canada in our final section. That is a burn. Good one.

Starting point is 03:20:04 It's a good one. So, okay, last Wednesday, the September 16th, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen proposed that Canada become the only, quote, associate member of the EU?

Starting point is 03:20:19 Hell yeah. Nice. So this was obviously, well, I say obviously, this was the day before Carney spoke in front of the European Parliament was receptive to the offer

Starting point is 03:20:31 and it seems like this is something that's going to get voted on by the parliament later on in this sort of trip he met with the leaders of France and England and spent a lot of time talking about strengthening ties with European nations it was also

Starting point is 03:20:47 I don't know if revealed the right term but there was the whole process of this was very weird but basically it was it was it was like got to the press that Canada had asked to join the, it's called the Joint Expeditionary Force, which is this sort of like British-led,

Starting point is 03:21:07 like, military alliance project. I'm just going to quote from CBC here, quote, as it was originally conceived, the Joint Expeditionary Force was meant to preserve battlefield relations that grew up during the Afghan War. So we're off to a great start here. In 2012, Britain's then-Chief of Defense

Starting point is 03:21:27 General Sir David Richards described a future force that could deploy rapidly overseas without Britain having to assemble an entirely new coalition for every crisis. So again, originally this is a kind of they want to be able to kind of build on the military integration

Starting point is 03:21:43 of the war in Afghanistan, which, I don't know, very few wars in which I want to less build on military integration from. In recent times, it has been more the sort of coalition existence and prominence has been about more about his potential response to like continued Russian

Starting point is 03:22:03 aggression in Europe so all of this basically dropped at the same time last week Trump responded to the whole thing about Canada becoming an associate member of the EU by saying it would be a quote hostile act he also said quote if it's a good intention that's fine

Starting point is 03:22:25 If it's bad intention, we'll put very heavy tariffs on Europe. So who knows with that? I don't know. Genuinely, who knows what's going to happen with that situation? I don't know. Maybe we can negotiate a swap now that Britain has left Europe. And just train from Canada. Britain could join NAFTA.

Starting point is 03:22:45 Yeah, can we like physically swap the countries? You put Canada or Britain? Sure. At least they wouldn't have as much fucking coastline to be bassets about that. I have probably more coastline in Canada just because it's fast. Yeah, so, okay, we really know very little about what Trump's response is going to be to this. Now, the part that I actually am interested in here is what does this associate membership thing actually mean? And what is this actual partnership supposed to look like?

Starting point is 03:23:16 So we talked a little bit. Obviously, there's some military integration. Most of it seems to be trade alliances. And even that is kind of vague. what you get out of it looking into this is that the rhetoric coming out of both the EU and Canada is extremely loud. They're talking about, you know, the crisis of democratic institutions and like the rule of law globally. Yeah. All of this sort of stuff.

Starting point is 03:23:39 But there was a really interesting interview in foreign policy with Canada's foreign minister, Anita Anand, about what actually, under the surface of this sort of grand rhetoric about like, you know, like forming this sort of coalition and like promote. like the rule of law and being a non-coercive body and all of this sort of very grand rhetoric that is in response to Trump without really mentioning him, there's a lot of really interesting parts of this interview with Canada's foreign minister about what they're actually talking about doing. I think maybe the first thing that she gets asked is Trump saying, quote, we don't need Canada, they need us. And the response is very interesting because what she's doing is deemphasizing an actual break with the, U.S. economically, which is what all of the reporting on this, everyone is talking about how, like, oh, this is like Canada trying to pivot away from the U.S. And her response to this is like, well, no, the U.S. and Canada are just permanently economically integrated. The auto sector is this,

Starting point is 03:24:37 you know, like, sign of permanent integration between the economies. Yeah. And largely the focus of her response is that, oh, we have a bunch of free trade packs with a bunch of other parts of the world and, you know, between the U.S. and Canada. So this is kind of a sign of like, when these people are talking about sort of a rules-based international order, but they're talking about is free trade packs. I'm going to read this quote from the interview. So the first part of this, the question is from the foreign policy interviewer, quote. So let me talk a little bit then about the Canada-Europe relationship. I hear the phrase associate member being used a week ago. What would that entail? What does that mean? And then this is the Canadian foreign minister. The nomenclature that is being attached,

Starting point is 03:25:21 the growing relationship between Canada and the EU is not the focus of the work we're doing building up to the Canada EU summit in Montreal at the end of October. Our focus is on several pillars, where you will see deeper integration on critical minerals, AI and quantum, trade and investments following on from the Canada EU comprehensive economic and trade agreements and people-to-people ties, including education students and the Erasmus program. The substantive discussions between our teams right now are very focused on these pillars. So this is the actual, right, it missed everyone talking about how, like,

Starting point is 03:25:57 we're going to form, like, a new trade block to, like, fight the U.S. It's like, no, they're doing free trade negotiations, basically. Yeah, and that's what Carney's been, like, really pushing for. Like, he's essentially just trying to be, like, Bill Clinton for Canada without, you know, that stuff. Yeah, without that or playing the saxophone. Yeah, slightly more boring.

Starting point is 03:26:16 He's a central banker. Like, that's, yeah, yeah. And I'm going to get to that in a second in terms of what, what they're actually sort of trying to do. But, you know, I think the comparison to Clinton is a good one because, like, what you have here basically is, like, what this block is, is this attempt to form a sort of like old school neoliberal. I say old school, but like 90s 2000 style neoliberal block to oppose the sort of like modern Trump fascism. And it's like, well, okay, so that like got us fascism in the first place, right? So that's not great. There's also a lot of talk about sort of the defense and support for Ukraine. Yeah. But I, I, I, want to have one last quote from this article to really get a sense of like what is going on here. This is Anand, the foreign minister. Taking you to the investment summit that we held last week in Toronto, we are seeing increasing levels of foreign direct investment. Commitments of $500 billion last week alone to Canada through 10 national projects, from ports to highways to airports.

Starting point is 03:27:15 Across the board, our work is to shorten the time period, the path of permit time period, so that investments continue to flow into our country towards national projects. So what does that mean? And this is where things get really, really bad. Because what she's talking about when she's talking about this, like, you know, we're shortening the path of permit time. So investment continues to come in for national projects. What she's talking about is what's called Bill C-39,

Starting point is 03:27:42 which is, I guess, like the next version of the Build Canada Strong Act. So, you know, it's a giant neoliberal deregulation bill, right? it decreases the permit process for a whole bunch of projects that are in, quote, the national interest from, you know, these can take multiple years. You're talking about impact assessments. You're talking about like input from indigenous communities. There's a whole bunch of things you're supposed to have to do before you can start one of these sort of mega projects. And this bill would reduce that entire process to one year. It would allow ministers to just sort of wave away environmental protections if it was deemed in a national interest. I'm going to quote from the Toronto Star here, quote, it would also create special zones called, quote, regions of national interest where approvals for projects can be, quote, streamlined in certain areas, official said, and follows recent changes that means cross-border oil pipelines, gas-fired power plants, oil sands facilities, and other projects will no longer be subject to the existing federal impact assessment process.

Starting point is 03:28:45 So this is special economic zones for oil fields. I was about to say they're doing a special economic zone. Yeah, and specifically, it's special economic zone where all of the environmental impact assessments of like, hey, is this oil field going to poison everyone who lives around it? We're not doing that. I'm going to quote here from the narwhal. The legislation takes federal review of pipelines,

Starting point is 03:29:09 nuclear facilities, and power lines out of the hands of the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada, a federal body that reports to the environmental minister and is meant to ensure project designs protecting digital, rights in the environment. Instead, pipeline projects will be reviewed by the Canada energy regulator and agency of the Crown that reports to the energy minister and oversees construction and operation of certain pipelines and power lines. So that's a very dull way of saying that instead of environmental regulators looking at the impact of like cars sands, it's going to the energy

Starting point is 03:29:40 guys. It goes to the executive. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And this is something that's been very specifically like pushed for in a massive lobbying campaign by by the Canadian oil and gas. industry over the last like few years. So obviously this is an enormous danger to indigenous sovereignty, to, you know, anyone who like wants there to be a livable environment. And also it gives the labor ministry the right to end strikes. So effectively what it does, right, is there is a very nebulous legal authority that the Canadian government used to crush an Air Canada, a flight attendant strike in 2025.

Starting point is 03:30:17 and this bill would just codify that right and completely ignore the union's legal challenges to it and would allow just government ministers effectively to just end strikes if they're in areas that are deemed as like adversely affecting the national interest. I'm going to quote from the MSN article here either by having a quote significant impact on the economy or causing quote serious social disruption. So, you know, it's interesting because the Carney administration has said that this is actually like a protection of the right to strike, even though it's giving a government minister the ability to end strikes. But this bill is being opposed by, you know, by the entire Canadian labor movement because it gives the government the ability to kill strikes on behalf of,

Starting point is 03:31:02 you know, on behalf of corporations in the name of this extremely nebulous national interest. There's no way that could possibly go wrong. And I think both of these put together lets you look at the domestic side of this entire sort of PR, international PR push that's going on, right? It's the deployment of neoliberalism nominally against fascism. It is using the threat of the U.S. to crush organized labor, indigenous groups and environmental groups, which are the same enemies that sort of Trump and the American fascist movements have.

Starting point is 03:31:33 It's just that it's being implemented using a sort of state of emergency caused by the fascist themselves. Yeah, and I think that's something that's, incredibly important to keep in mind whenever you're sort of reading about Carney, whatever you're reading about this sort of international project that he's embarking on, is that this is what this project means, right? It's a war to be able to do free trade and special economic zones. With that, I think that is all for us today, and it could happen here.

Starting point is 03:32:01 Dena, do you have anything you would like to plug? I want to direct people to the handbook of authoritarianism in the airboat, which I edited, and it's out now, open access on the... the Bloomsbury Politics website. So if you just Google it, you'll find it. It's got lots of contributors from the MENA region, Swana, whatever you want to call it. Cool. Yeah, thank you for having me. Yeah, thanks for coming. If you'd like to email us, you can do so. Coolzone tips at proton.com. Some of you fuckers in the marketing world are still not fucking listening to me. So just say again, do not fucking email me about your product or service. I will block you.

Starting point is 03:32:37 Don't email me about putting my podcast on YouTube to get more of you. I don't fucking care, I'm going to block you harder from all of the I-Hard emails one day. Put a trans scroll on your couch. We've reported the news. We reported the news. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Coolzone Media, visit our website, poolzone media.

Starting point is 03:33:12 Or check us out on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or we're at you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources where it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed. There should not be a single law enforcement agency. It does not have body cameras.

Starting point is 03:33:34 It's real. Black farmers have been under attack. This is just the latest example of them just slapping DEI on anything. It's raw. And I'm sitting here going, they are playing y'all for fools. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Informant. Network. And download Roland Martin unfiltered on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 03:33:56 Hey, it's Bobby Bones. Join me and former NFL quarterback Matt Castle every Wednesday on our podcast. Lots to say with me Bobby Bones and Matt Castle. You're in training camp and the rookie quarterback has one good throwing session in front of the media. Suddenly, everybody online says he should start over you week one. How do you handle this? You just go back out to practice the next day. I wait for him to mess up.

Starting point is 03:34:18 Listen to lots to say with Bobby Bones and Matt Castle on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On recent episodes of The Questlove Show, I chatted with Jojo about her music and Wallow 267 about his story, everything in between. Don't invite me to karaoke. I'm going to make it weird. Someone's going to try to sing, leave it out, or too little, too late, or baby it's you. Oh, no. And I'm going to be like, okay, cool. Check out my conversation with Jojo, Wolo 267, and more on the Questlove show.

Starting point is 03:34:47 Listen to the Questlove show on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Peace. Welcome to Decoding Women's Health. I'm Dr. Elizabeth Pointer, chair of Women's Health and Gynaecology at the Atria Health Institute in New York City. I'll be talking to top researchers and clinicians and bringing vital information about midlife women's health directly to you. A hundred percent of women go through menopause. Even if it's natural, why should we suffer through it? Listen to Decoding Women's Help with Dr. Elizabeth Pointer on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 03:35:26 In February of 2024, celebrated illustrator and children's book author Patra Mathers and her husband Michael mailed letters to dozens of friends and family members to let them know they had died by suicide. Dear honies, this is goodbye. By the time you get this letter, both Petra and I will be dead. Next stop, Wonderland. Why did they do it? and what did it do to the people they left behind? Listen to Death of an Artist on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, it's me, Debbie Kamaabelle. This season on my podcast who's with me, I speak with Bruce Lee's daughter, Brandon Lee's sister, and my friend, Shannon Lee.

Starting point is 03:36:08 Back to your initial point of stewarding my father's legacy and giving my energy to that. You're lending your life to stewarding somebody else's life. Listen to Who's with me with with W.combele on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The new NFL season is here. And you should be listening to NFL Daily as we march along to Super Bowl 61. It is in the name, NFL Daily.

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Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 251

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