Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 1/8/25: LA Fires, Trump Threatens Canada, CNN Meltdown Over Zuck, TikTok Ban & MORE!

Episode Date: January 8, 2025

Ryan and Emily discuss fires sweep across LA, Trump threatens Canada and Greenland, CNN meltdown over Zuck Trump bromance, SharkTank host to buy TikTok, Trump threatens Hamas with 'hell', Israel's real plan for Gaza revealed.    To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.com   Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. is still out there. Each week, I investigate a new case. If there is a case we should hear about, call 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Sometimes as dads, I think we're too hard on ourselves. We get down on ourselves on not being able to, you know, we're the providers, but we also have to learn

to take care of ourselves. A wrap-away, you got to pray for the providers, but we also have to learn to take care of ourselves. A wrap-away, you got to pray for yourself as well as for everybody else, but never forget yourself. Self-love made me a better dad because I realized my worth. Never stop being a dad. That's dedication. Find out more at fatherhood.gov. Brought to you by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the perspectives that matter 24-7 because our stories deserve to be heard. Listen to the BIN News This Hour podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, Sagar and Crystal here. Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election, and we are so excited about what that means for the future of this show. This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else. So if that is something that's important to you, please go to BreakingPoints.com, become a member today, and you'll get access to our full shows,

unedited, ad-free, and all put together for you every morning in your inbox. We need your help to build the future of independent news media, and we hope to see you at BreakingPoints.com. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to CounterPoints. Ryan, how are you doing? You're in the studio making me look bad. Well, I didn't read the memo, so here I am in the studio making sure everything is locked down and ready for us when we get back in here officially next week. Got some crew in here too, so we're in good shape. Thanks for checking in on things. But it's a great shot, actually. And you still have the winter monitors behind you, so it really works out well because

there's about seven inches of snow in DC, which usually it's really warm outside when we have the winter monitors on. Yes, indeed. All right. So we have a big packed show for everyone today. We're going to be starting with the tragic wildfire that broke out in Palisades yesterday outside of Los Angeles. Then Donald Trump held a wild press conference. We'll break down all of the key elements from it for you. Mark Zuckerberg, obviously, as Chris Lohan Sager covered yesterday, changed the free speech policy on Meta and some other things as well. But the reaction to it is what we're going to cover today because it's been very, very interesting. Kevin O'Leary is poised

to buy TikTok. Obviously, oral arguments in the case at the Supreme Court will begin on Friday, so this is a very high-stakes game. Congestion pricing has gone into effect in New York City, and man, the reactions there, and there's just a lot to talk about, actually, with that entire story, and I'm curious to get your thoughts on it, Ryan, but the reactions have been fascinating to watch. And Ryan, we're also going to do updates from Gaza. This is something that Donald Trump touched on at his press conference. And there's a lot more going on with the UAE and other countries as they look for some type of settlement there. And we have a guest. Yeah. And it might not be in this show that goes out on the podcast, but we're going to be joined by Ahmed Khan. A few weeks ago, we had talked about how he had spent something like six months and managed to get his own shipment of aid into Gaza working with the on-the-ground organization, ARENA.

We'll talk to him about – and he went in with the shipment. So we'll talk to him about like what he saw on the ground there. He also has been kind of at the forefront of what is kind of considered to be a niche issue, but it shouldn't be. There's something like 25,000 to 50,000 people in Gaza who need kind of critical medical care, and all they need is permission from Israel to leave, and they have a hospital that is willing to treat them. Israel is blocking them, and he's working on a lot of those cases.

He's also been in Ukraine recently. So he's going to update us on a bunch of what he's working on a lot of those cases. He's also been in Ukraine recently. So he's going to update us on a bunch of what he's seen. Fantastic. Well, let's start with the tragedy outside of Los Angeles and the Palisades, where 30,000 people have been evacuated. Around 3,000 acres have already burned. And the fire, as we come to everybody right now, is zero, zero percent, zero percent contained. There are two other fires raging in the area as well. But this this fire, the images that are coming in are just we're going to put some of them up on the screen for everybody right now. Images are coming in right now and they are stunning. So if you're listening to this, what we're looking at here is just

the hills in complete flames. People taking video from West Hollywood, for example, just showing how close the blaze is, looking down. Ryan, this footage that we've been seeing come in, I'm going to share another tab here. This is footage from KTLA from the perimeter of the fire. They've actually started clearing these. This is just shocking. People abandoned their vehicles because of the gridlock. Obviously, that's a very LA thing. that people left as they fled on foot out of the way by using a bulldozer, just so that the firefighters can get in and have access to actually save lives and save property and contain the fire a little bit. But as of right now, it's not contained basically at all. What have you made

of this just in the last, honestly, Ryan, 24 hours as we've started to see some of these horrifying images? Yeah, I was talking to a few friends who live in Los Angeles last night, and they said the winds were unlike really anything that they had felt before. These Santa Ana winds whipping through. Measurements have clocked them at up to 99 miles per hour. They're expected to continue at that pace through much of today. It seems like it's been at least 10 years since there have been Santa Ana winds of that forest. And so they're picking up embers from fires, tossing them through the dry air, landing them on new rooftops, burning new houses, new fires sparking throughout the Los Angeles area, creating

a real kind of hell on earth situation. Like you said, 0% contained. Seems like there were reports of a lot of fire hydrants running out of water. And the traffic on the best of days in Los Angeles is just brutal. It absolutely, you know, the most poorly designed urban area you can possibly imagine. And trying to imagine escaping raging fire with those normal traffic patterns in your way turning into panic traffic patterns. You know, every one of those cars represents a family or a person who was fleeing their home and then believed that they couldn't make it anymore in their car and just left it right

in the middle of the road, which of course then leads to, you know, complete and total gridlock. Yeah, I do want to share one video of two men escaping, because I think it's a glimpse into the experiences that a lot of people in California have had over the last 24 hours. And it's apocalyptic. It's like a horror movie come to life. So let's take a look at this video here Sorry bro. Gotta get out of here. Oh shit. Holy shit. It's a dead tree. And Ryan, what I think is especially horrifying about that video is you can see in real time the fire spreading because they're obviously running through the embers that are falling like snow onto trees, onto houses. And it really does look like it looks like snow. It's snowing in hell, essentially, like it's raining fire onto them. And you can see they're in the middle of how it's spreading so wildly and why it's not contained, just like a horror movie. I

mean, it really looks like a scene from a horror movie. And it's unlike, unlike a lot of things, it's not sparing the rich either. You know, it's going after, you know, you know, properties worth, you know, well, well into the millions, really rocking the city. It's winds die down and they can get this under control and we don't have kind of apocalyptic level damage despite the scenes that we're seeing. Right. And so LA Mayor Karen Bass is actually not in town right now, but immediately people have started to wonder about the $23 million that she had recently proposed as a cut to the fire department. This is a headline from back in April. You can see if you go down here, she proposed a decrease of about $23 million from the L.A. fire department.

And, you know, that for Karen Bass is going to be a huge, huge problem going forward when she gets back into town. Let me share another element here as well. A lot of people wondering, understandably wondering, this is a post on X, where are our tax dollars going as the city of LA goes broke? One of the many questions we get, this is from the account of the LA city controller, Kenneth Mecha. He says, the city just started a new fiscal year. And if you want to know how the mayor and a majority of city council decreased or increased department's operational budgets, see below. So what you're seeing on this chart, if you can make it out, is a huge increase in the police budget. And as you go down, you start to see, you know, decreases that are going to now come under the microscope. Public Works is one of those that's, you know,

there's a big cut there. Fire, you can see that down towards the end. That's the second. If you're listening to this, indeed, you see a significant cut out of the fire budget. And Ryan, the other thing I wanted to mention is you probably remember this. Obviously, the infamous company PG&E, Pacific Gas and Electric, ended up being under the microscope, just as Karen Bass's budget cuts likely will be in the Dixie fire. A Wall Street Journal reporter wrote a whole great book about how PG&E, they just hadn't updated all of their equipment, and that was like the literal spark in the Dixie fire. And oftentimes, as we peel back the layers, this isn't just a force of nature. It isn't just an accident. It isn't just, you know, there's usually some level as you're peeling back of incompetence or corruption or human error that

gets to the heart of this. And that's going to be the question moving forward. And if you step back kind of out of the, I think it's very difficult to look at Los Angeles in particular from inside of our perspective as Americans, because it's sort of like fish and water. Like it just kind of is what it is. But if you try to step back and look at it from outside the United States or in a more objective way, what you see is a city that spends tens of millions of dollars on individual homes for individual people with the most, you know, lavish artwork and swimming pools and luxuries that anybody could possibly contemplate, say, like 200 years ago while starving kind of the rest of the city of needed public improvements so that they can – so that people can actually move around efficiently and so that public services are decently funded. And so we often say, well, you know, can we afford, you know, an effective fire department? Can we afford, you know, better schools? The question that you might have to ask

about Los Angeles in particular, and maybe the United States more generally, can we afford this billionaire class? Because we are the ones that have produced that billionaire class. It's our society. It's our system. We are somehow deciding or through not deciding, allowing this flourishing of this extraordinary inequality that is sucking up all of the resources that could be put in other directions. And the question is, can we afford it? And when you look at what's happening in Los Angeles now, to me, it says, no, we can't afford it. I mean, it gets harder to afford it in that sense, Ryan, when you're also allowing the billionaires to corrupt the system and to just live in a sheer state of oligarchy, which is sort of, it's tragic. It's tragic comedy in California because, you know, tragic comedy when there's not actual human life on the line,

because you look at it and you're like, this is, you have the system of referendums, like you have as close to direct democracy as exists in the United States. And yet the billionaires really run the show. So this may be a total force of nature situation that would not be uncommon or crazy, but California has seen some PG&E as a company that gets just enormous benefits from the government. We've seen, you know, massive slashing from Karen Bass. Fire was second to last on that list of the highest cuts. So, yeah, there's there are going to be a lot of significant questions, I think, asked here, rightfully so, about the oligarchy in California, right?

Yeah. And we're entering a phase where the, you know, the climate is going to be more difficult for our human population to live in and more expensive. And we're going to have to decide whether or not we want to invest in that or, or else, or else whether we want to see it just burn down in front of us. Horrible. Well, let's hope that things get better today, although it's not looking like they will. But stay tuned. We'll have a lot more to come on this story for sure. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast hell and gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country

begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her. And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking.

Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The summer of 1993 was one of the best of my life.

I'm journalist Jeff Perlman, and this is Rick Jervis. We were interns at the Nashville Tennessean, but the most unforgettable part? Our roommate, Reggie Payne, from Oakland, sports editor and aspiring rapper. And his stage name? Sexy Sweat. In 2020, I had a simple idea. Let's find Reggie. We searched everywhere, but Reggie was gone. In February 2020, Reggie was having a diabetic episode. His mom called 911. Police cuffed him face down. He slipped into a coma and died. I'm like thanking you, but then I see my son's not moving. No headlines, no outrage, just silence. So we started digging and uncovered city officials bent on protecting their own.

Listen to Finding Sexy Sweat coming June 19th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun?

Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. All right, Donald Trump met with the media for over an hour yesterday describing his plans for military slash potentially economic coercion against Panama, against Greenland, poked some fun at Canada along the way.

We're going to talk about a bunch of what he said, but let's start by playing some of the key clips. And I'm going to share these. Bear with me. I'm a bit new. This was at a wild press conference that he held in Palm Beach yesterday. It was like very, I saw one journalist post on X, like the Trump era is back. It did remind me a lot of those press conferences he held during the transition in 2017, before he was inaugurated in 2017. And some of the early press conferences in that administration too, even some of the COVID press conferences. I mean, this is Donald Trump at his Trumpiest when he's interacting with reporters and just goes for a really long time. We'll talk about literally anything. So there's a wide range from these clips you're about to see. But Ryan queued up a great one.

This is about Greenland, right? Canada? I think this was Canada. Here we go. But why are we supporting a country 200 billion plus a year? Our military is at their disposal. All of these other things, they should be a state. That's why I told Trudeau when he came down, I said, what would happen if we didn't do it? He said Canada would dissolve. Canada wouldn't be able to function if we didn't take their 20 percent of our car market. You know, we again, they send us hundreds of thousands of cars. They make a lot of money with that. They send us a lot of other things that we don't need. We don't need their cars and we don't need the other products.

We don't need their milk. We got a lot of milk. We got a lot of everything and we don't need any of it. So I said to him, well, why are we doing it? He said, I don't really know. He was unable to answer the question, but I can answer it. We're doing it because of habit and we're doing it because we like our neighbors and we've been good neighbors, but we can't do it forever. And it's a tremendous amount of money. And why should we have a $200 billion deficit and add on to that many, many other things that we give them in terms of subsidy? And I said, that's okay to have if you're a state, but if you're another country, we don't want to have it. We're not going to have it with European Union either.

Love it. Right. I always love it when he says not – sometimes he just drops the the in front of something. So instead of saying the European Union, he just says European Union. We're not going to do it with European Union. Yeah. And I love that he just talks about Canada being one state. You can imagine there might be more than one state in that giant thing in there.

But we'll talk more about Canada because this is fun. But let's look at some of his other good times. Greenland, Donald Trump Jr. here visited Greenland, a little provocation. Maybe this is the effort to plant the flag. He's been in Greenland for the last couple of days with Sergio Gore and Charlie Kirk, and they've been posting pictures and videos with the good people of Greenland. So the timing of the press conference was quite interesting yesterday because it was happening as these pictures were being posted of Donald Trump Jr., you the people in Charlie Kirk posting, the people of Greenland just want their freedom, et cetera, et cetera.

I'm paraphrasing them. But they actually made the trip. So it was good timing for Donald Trump to make these remarks after a question he got yesterday. Yeah, here we go. Back on Greenland, their position is clear. But have you tried to take specific actions to drop plans? And can you elaborate again? You didn't rule out military coercion.

Well, we need Greenland for national security purposes. I've been told that for a long time, long before I even ran. I mean, people have been talking about it for a long time. You have approximately 45,000 people there. People really don't even know if Denmark has any legal right to it. But if they do, they should give it up because we need it for national security. That's for the free world. I'm talking about protecting the free world.

You look at, you don't even need binoculars. You look outside, you have China ships all over the place. You have Russian ships all over the place. We're not letting that happen. We're not letting it happen. Okay, we're not letting that happen. Let's see. Where is the right on Greenland while I'm doing up the next clip? Entirely in favor, but the rights trolling of Canada is what really has me confused recently. If you add Canada to the United States as a state or as individual states, you're adding actually by GDP, which is not the best measure of these things, but it is a measure of these things. It would be one of the poorest states in the union.

This is, I guess, national defense, obviously, advantages that would come that and in Canada controlling more of the Arctic. But that one baffles me a little bit. I think a lot of it is trolling. Greenland is not trolling. That's completely serious. It goes back to obviously Seward. Alaska panned out well, so maybe it wouldn't be such a folly to take on Greenland. Yeah, fair point.

Yes. Seward's folly was what? The purchase of Alaska, right? Right. People said it was absolutely ridiculous. That seemed to work out pretty well for the US and Seward also wanted to get the other Alaska on the other side. Here's Trudeau's response. There isn't a snowball's chance in hell, Trudeau tweeted, Trudeau who has now resigned. There isn't a snowball's chance in hell, Trudeau tweeted, Trudeau, who has now resigned, there isn't a snowball's chance in hell that Canada would become part of the United States. Workers and communities in both our countries benefit from being each other's biggest trading and security partners. I'd like to know how that conversation that Trump described with Trudeau

actually went. You know, I think, you know, I'm not somebody who's here to give the United States advice on how to be a better global hegemon, because I think we're actually a genuinely destructive force in the world. So anything that strengthens us is probably a bad idea. But to me, it does actually seem that the U.S. as a hegemon would be strengthened by basically absorbing Canada into the United States, not just for the resources but also for – the number one thing that the U.S. kind of has going for it is that it's the global reserve currency backed by the U.S. currency, the Canadian dollar goes away and they just have American dollars, it adds a non-trivial circulation of currency around the world, which would then counteract the efforts by BRICS and generally by BRICS, but by other countries to start doing bilateral or multilateral trading that goes around the dollar,

which is the main threat. Because if we're not actually manufacturing anything and we're just the center of capital, but capital isn't circulating in US dollars anymore because we've thrown away our kind of imperial privilege that we have, then what do we have left? So to that extent, I would say for the U.S., it's probably a good thing. And Canada, from its perspective, does seem to have lost the plot. Like there was a stretch where you could look at Canada and say, oh, they've got something interesting going on up there. They've got a little different version here. They've got a different culture. They've got some stronger, you know, communal politics.

Now they just – nothing impressive going on up there. So I think it's probably a wrap for Canada. People hate when we talk about Canada. They're really going to hate what you just said, quote, nothing impressive going on up there. I'm probably wrong. Yeah, the country is in dire straits right now. There's no question about that. And actually, your point about currency is a really interesting one.

The natural resources in Canada and Mexico, I mean, Mexico, while we're just talking at the 30,000-foot level, that would be, I think, a spectacular addition in terms of like natural resources, shipping. And that's what a lot of this comes down to, shipping not just for commerce, but for defense. That's the conversation that's being had about Panama. Donald Trump talked a little bit about Panama in the press conference yesterday as well. It was obviously very timely because of Jimmy Carter's funeral. And I'm sure, Ryan, you have a different perspective than I do on Panama. But one of the things I will say is the Overton window is shifting right now. And this is something that Trump, I don't know if it's genius, if it's incidental, but we've never ever, it's

only Trump that broaches something like this and gets taken seriously. We never, ever had these conversations before. And just for the, I mean, we have, but not in recent contemporary politics, you'd just sort of be laughed at if you talked about adding Canada as the 51st state. Well, I am kind of laughing, but. Well, yeah, but he's like, Canada's not laughing. They really aren't laughing. And, you know, Denmark isn't finding this whole thing all that amusing either. But that's like this is going to change the way that we talk about our neighbors, not just in terms of trade. Literally, literally change the way we talk about our neighbors. Speaking of laughing. $60 trillion worth of assets. We're going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, which has a beautiful ring that covers a lot of territory. The Gulf of America, what a beautiful name. And it's appropriate. It's appropriate. And Mexico has to stop allowing millions of people to pour into our country.

And so, yeah, that goes along with his kind of Trumpian Monroe Doctrine, where, like you said, he talked about how, look, hey, we built the Panama Canal. We built it for us, basically, but let Panama take care of it now. We've turned it over to the Chinese and that's outrageous. You know, I do think from an American perspective, like the dominant power having influence, you know, having the dominant influence in its sphere seems reasonable. It seems also kind of hypocritical

for us to then tell China that, you know, they ought to have, you know, no influence on their side of the world. That we're going to completely control this, and also we're going to completely control everything around China as well. You can imagine from China's perspective, like, wait a minute. Okay, fine. Panama Canal, you want that thing back? All right, whatever.

It's tiny. It's like the big ships can't fit through it anymore. You need to do a lot of upgrades on it. But then get off our back about Chinese influence over in Asia. So the conversation Crystal and Sagar had yesterday about Trudeau as the kind of symbol of the neoliberal arc over the last 10 years, and that sort of winding down as Trudeau is the beacon of the new neoliberal future, and then is kind of unraveling as Donald Trump comes back into office and has been selected by voters again, is interesting. And in the context of what you're just saying, Cold War Western politics were this like soft imperialism or this like apologetic imperialism where you have people like Jimmy Carter negotiating the return of the Panama Canal to Panama.

Which Trump ripped Carter for in the press conference. Right. Right. While waging a cold war and doing it, you know, in different ways that I think are arguably very imperialistic. And you and I would definitely agree on that. And so what Trump, I think Trump is like just shifting that. It's like that is, who knows? I mean, you go from Carter to Reagan and things flip back and forth. But Trump seems like he's ushering in this new era of just like brash imperialism, return to brash imperialism, which is like, this is hard power. This is our hemisphere. This is the Monroe Doctrine, to your point, which you do hear a lot of conservatives talking about now in a very reverent way. So I do think it's like just the conversation that he's broached and

brought into the Overton window or stretched the Overton window to bring it in is a pretty fascinating one. It is nice to be at least able to, you know, talk about it out loud. And talk about it in clear terms rather than smuggling it in through the language of democracy promotion or – Right. Like would you rather have the CIA run Panama or at least have like transparently out in the open that the United States is trying to run Panama? Yeah, if these are our choices. Yeah. So in any event, it's going to be interesting.

That at least we will be gifted with. Yes. So in any event, it's going to be interesting. That at least we will be gifted with. Yes, the Gulf of America, of which, by the way, we have a state called New Mexico. Gulf of New Mexico. Well, yeah, it wouldn't really work. But anyway, yes, quite a moment yesterday at that Wild Press conference, and we'll see what happens going forward. What is that wokeness that's going through and renaming everything, by the way? Oh, it is a sort of iconic class. Not a bad point, Ryan.

Well, we have more meltdowns to cover, Ryan, so let's move on to Brian Stalter. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Catherine Townsend. I've received hundreds

of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. I've never found her and it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case,

bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never

gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The summer of 1993 was one of the best of my life. I'm journalist Jeff Perlman, and this is Rick Jervis. We were interns at the Nashville Tennessean,

but the most unforgettable part? Our roommate, Reggie Payne, from Oakland, sports editor and aspiring rapper. And his stage name? Sexy Sweat. In 2020, I had a simple idea. Let's find Reggie. We searched everywhere, but Reggie was gone. In February 2020, Reggie was

having a diabetic episode. His mom called 911. Police cuffed him face down. He slipped into a coma and died. I'm like thanking you, but then I see my son's not moving. No headlines. No outrage. Just silence. So we started digging and uncovered city officials bent on protecting their own. Listen to Finding Sexy Sweat coming June 19th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, Have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no.

Across the country, cops call this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated,

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Add free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. After Mark Zuckerberg made his major announcement yesterday that Meta would be changing its approach to speech, actually reversing its approach to speech policies on the platform, fact-checking policies on the platform, reactions have been pouring in from people on the left and the right. Let's just start with, in case you missed it, part of this video, Mark Zuckerberg posted. Sagar and Crystal covered it yesterday. It actually sort of happened early in the morning. This was posted right before 7 a.m. East Coast time and was accompanied by a statement from

Meta that kind of fleshed out their approach a little bit, getting rid of those third-party fact-checkers, moving towards community notes. Mark Zuckerberg mentioned Elon Musk directly, at least X directly, the platform that Musk has started using for community notes. So let's take a look just at a brief clip from Mark Zuckerberg's statement yesterday in case you missed it. So here it is. You focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms. More specifically, we're going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X, starting in the U.S. So, Ryan, one interesting thing there is he says, back to our roots, and talks about how he had started Meta as a way to give people a voice. So it's pretty interesting to see this like

recycling of the ethos that they had a lot in that sort of early Obama era when they were the cool kids with the ping pong tables in their offices. And now they're saying, listen, we're just getting back to internet 1.0 ethos. This is all about free speech. I'm wearing a gold chain. I look like I would be sitting on a UFC bench with Elon and Trump even more. I fit in even more than Mike Johnson. Yeah. And there is some real truth that some of the early tech DNA had roots in kind of an anarchist, information wants to be free version of the world. In fact, going back to the kind of hippie acid creation of the internet in its early days, a lot of those founders really believed that they were building kind of revolutionary technology that was going to overthrow the powers that be. Move fast and break things was, for a very long time, Zuckerberg's motto for Facebook. And so there is actually some truth that at some point in tech's life, it did have that ethos and did move away from it.

No, that's, I think, a very worthy point. So Brian Stelter then appeared on CNN and had quite an interesting conversation about it. So let's roll a little bit of Stelter here. It gets to this broader sense that when people like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg talk about free speech, everybody wants free speech, but it oftentimes seems that these tech CEOs actually are favoring or preferring a certain kind of speech, right? They're favoring their own speech or their own political preferences and not the actual entire user or the community's speech. You know, the changes announced by Meta today are very much a MAGA makeover, a pro-Trump makeover. And that's going

to win Meta some conservative users, but it may repel some liberals. That's the same thing we've seen happen on Elon Musk's text. He's turned it into more of a right-wing platform where he's pro-free speech when it's really pro-Musk or pro-Trump speech. So Ryan, that's interesting because we just talked about how Facebook was sort of informed by that early ethos of the Internet. And now in 2025, you have Brian Stelter referring to that as a MAGA makeover. And honestly, there's something of a point to that in that it is the same argument that you've started to hear from people on the right who were skeptical of these early internet guys, conservatives, not libertarians so much. Obviously, libertarians were always a part of that movement.

But it's just, to call that a MAGA makeover, it's true in some sense, but also misses the broader context that it's actually more of the traditional, like, ACLU old left approach to speech that the right kind of happened upon because it suddenly was turned against them. Yeah. And I think it's wrong for Stelter to conflate what's going on at Twitter X and what's going on at Facebook. I think, you know, both are flowing from the same kind of political project that we're seeing. You know, Zuckerberg was very clear that he's explicitly making this change because elections have consequences. Like one admirable thing about his video is that it did not include

corporate speak. It was, he was, he was very direct. It's like, and he was very plain about what they're going to do. We're going to shut down our trust and safety team in California. We're going to move it to Texas. Uh, there's just straightforward, uh, things like that, which you can agree or disagree with, but like, wow, that's – this is really blunt stuff. And he pinpointed it directly to the election. With Musk, he kind of drove the in the face of his demonetizing of a whole bunch of his enemies that he engaged with on the H1B controversy. And then all of a sudden, they all start losing their like blue checks and their promoted stuff and their subscribers and

everything else. So it's like, all right, well, anybody who really put their faith there, I guess, found that to be a little bit misplaced. It's oligarchy however you slice it. It is. And actually, before we get to the next element, I want to pull one up that's not on the rundown, which I think is – Going rogue. Yeah, going a little rogue here. But we can do that because we've got this more nimble system here. So this was Lena Kahn on CNBC with a bit of a different take on

what the problem is here. An economy where the decisions of a single company or a single executive are not having extraordinary impact on speech online. And I know that's a concern that we hear bipartisan members of Congress talk about. And so it'll be interesting to see what happens. We, of course, have litigation ongoing. There's going to be a trial starting this spring, FTC versus Facebook, alleging that their prior acquisitions were illegal. What do you think, though, of the relationship that we're seeing between big tech and the next administration. What do you make of the meetings and pilgrimages with which we're seeing Mark Zuckerberg go to Mar-a-Lago or seeing

a Jeff Bezos or Tim Cook? I mean, this is a very different kind of relationship than the administration, the Biden administration had and specifically what you represented to the business community. So I approached my job with a focus on faithfully enforcing the law and making sure we were doing that across the economy without fear. Yeah, I mean, leave that for there. But basically, what she's saying is probably something that the right would have agreed with several years ago, which is we shouldn't have to hope that Mark Zuckerberg wakes up one day and makes the right decision. Yep. Nobody elected Mark Zuckerberg to be in that position.

And Elon Musk. And Elon Musk, right. We shouldn't have to hope that Jack Dorsey wakes up one day and looks favorably upon the conservative case when the New York Times is coming down on you. And yeah, Lena Kahn won favor on the right. I mean, she continued a Trump administration suit against Google because that argument, it wasn't just that she was going after big tech. It was that this very specific argument about single oligarchs who control a wide swath of the public square with private platforms, whether it's Instagram, Facebook, Meta as a whole, or Twitter, now X,

that was always a problem. And so yes, it's great that they're saying, at least publicly, that they're taking a lighter approach to the suppression or censorship of speech. That is obviously a step in the right direction and saying we're not going to put our thumb on the scale as much as our previous policy suggested. But what Lena Kahn is saying is that we have an economy structured so as that they can put their thumb on the scale at any given moment. And that is the problem in and of itself. Not that they've decided that they're going to do it less, but the fact that they have the power to begin with is the problem. And conservatives used to agree with that. The question is whether Zuckerberg and Musk are convincing them they don't have to worry about it or they don't have to worry about

it as much. So then it becomes a lower priority. Doesn't Ken Paxton in 2026 hypothetically care as much about going after big tech if big tech isn't going after conservatives? Exactly. Yeah. You know, a lot of Lena Kahn's antitrust stuff has its roots in kind of right-wing free market oriented approaches to, you know, how markets ought to be structured, even though she's, you know, gotten a lot of favor on the left. And what she's describing there is an ad monopoly where Facebook has built a moat around an ad monopoly which prevents other social networks from coming in.

It's difficult because you have size and scale difficulties. You have to get to a threshold level in a social network or you're not a social network. You need the social part in there, not just a handful of users. But she's saying because of the way they've built the moat, other people can't get in. And you're exactly right that you don't want politicians to be deciding on the policy of the structure of an economy based on just whether or not those companies are culturally with them at a particular moment. Right.

And this is not something that's going to be in the rearview mirror for the right or the left, frankly, if you are, as administrations switch and you have people trying to curry favor with the left and the right. Obviously, it wasn't quite as bad for the left when the Biden administration was asking, directly asking people like Mark Zuckerberg to censor the right. But if you don't change the fundamental structure of the economy, this becomes a problem, you know, for any side. And that doesn't go away unless you change the structure of the economy. And so what we're looking at now is having a wide swath of our discourse exported onto these

private platforms that gamify that discourse and that have control over what is said, have control over the algorithms that amplify or de-amplify what is said. And that's our future. That doesn't go away. That doesn't change. And we desperately, desperately need a solution to it. So unfortunately, it looks like some of that enthusiasm may be blunted on the right. If you have Zuckerberg putting a million dollars into the inauguration fund, it's not just whether the principle of the argument is still embraced by the right. It's whether there's any momentum or energy to have their own sort of lean a con when the donors are like, this is a backbench issue. Give us the tax cuts.

Let's focus on this. Let's focus on that. You're right. It's not ideal. So it could be a quite unfortunate turn of events, and Zuckerberg could be getting exactly what he pays for. So I saw Ben Shapiro was in here. Anytime I look at the top performers on Facebook,

it seems like Shapiro and his alliance that he had built with Zuckerberg over the years was really paying off. What's his take here? Yeah, everyone could see a post that he put up yesterday along with a segment from his show. He says Facebook has just completely reversed course on censorship. He posted this on X after years of doing the Democratic Party's anti-free speech bidding. It's beyond time. Good for Zuckerberg. And let's be real, this happened because Trump won. Then in all caps, he said, still not tired of winning. Let's go to Donald

Trump himself because he actually got asked that question directly at Mar-a-Lago yesterday. Meta said today it would stop putting fact checks on its website and set a lot of community back up. Well, I watched their news conference, and I thought it was a very good news conference. I think they've, honestly, I think they've come a long way. Meta, Facebook, I think they've come a long way. I watched it.

The man was very impressive. I watched it. Actually, I watched it on Fox. I'm not allowed to say that. Say it. Do you think he's directly responding to the threats that you have made to him in the past? Probably. Probably. So, Ryan, this gets to exactly what we were just talking about, which is as this, like this, this better policy, although I do wonder how community notes is going to work on Facebook

when the only people left on Facebook seem to be elderly. Sorry, no offense to everybody still on Facebook. It's not just the elderly, but it sort of sounds like a sitcom waiting to happen. Give me a sitcom inside the community of Wikipedia editors except it's Facebook community notes. Yeah, I mean, I told our drop site team last night, I was like, look, if Zuckerberg is going to actually allow politics back onto Facebook and maybe even threads, then we might as well post there again. Like we don't even have – Dropsite, we don't even have a Facebook page but we're

going to start one. Because it is a very boomer heavy audience but there are a lot of boomers. Yeah. And it's an audience worth reaching if you can reach them. The reason we hadn't done it isn't because we hate boomers. It's because Zuckerberg was basically blocking anything interesting that wasn't just fluff content. Right. I'm getting shared. I'm actually going to share this, uh, post that

Joel Kaplan, who is the new, uh, longtime Republican lobbyist, uh, the head of their like global affairs, public global affairs outreach. It used to be Nick Clegg. Many people remember he wrote this as a supplement to what Zuckerberg said yesterday, and actually talked exactly about what you talked about, Ryan, in that the policy at Facebook for a long time was actually to suppress political content because they were under the impression that it's why it's not what people wanted to see sort of clogging up their news feeds on Facebook. And I think you're right that that actually probably sent a lot of younger people away from Facebook because the old saw about not talking about

politics or religion. We actually, as a people, like to talk about politics and religion. It's healthy for us to talk about politics and religion. And we love to see everybody's dogs and their puppies and their graduation pictures and their families and their babies and all of that. But you can also do that in text groups and all of that other stuff now. So they said that they are going to stop suppressing political content, that they realize people want to do that. So they didn't actually just roll out this fact-checking program or the death of the fact-checking program, which has wide consequences because obviously they used to partner with all of these third parties that actually got money for being part of the program, you know, traditional news

outlets, things like PolitiFact and there were others, you know, even I think the Daily Caller was like the one conservative group other than the Dispatch, which I don't really count, that cooperated in all of this. But they also say they're going to allow more speech and a personalized approach to political content, they noted. So quite a significant reversal, not just on those third party fact checkers, which is very significant in and of itself, but actually on everything political, for basically on everything political, which was pretty interesting, Ryan. Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's turn to this post from Glenn, because just as we were talking about sort of the

realignment implications of this, I thought it was worth bringing in Glenn here. He says, it's hard to overstate how angry and upset Brazilian officials like this are. He has a post from Joao Brandt that he's quote tweeting, along with other supporters of its secret due process-free judicial censorship scheme about Zuckerberg's announcement. The meta CEO's announcement gutted the core weapons of speech suppression. And he's absolutely right about that. It did. And he's pointing out that people on the left are angry about it. Now, Brian Stelter didn't sound angry to me. Maybe frustrated is a good way to put it but there are some people who are flat out angry about this especially ryan people who had been using threads um and and saw that as an escape

from from x so it's like a test for the left um i think i think threat threads um at least as far as i can tell, lost basically all of its momentum specifically because it was refusing to allow politics and news into the feed and because it was insisting on not doing anything remotely chronological. So whenever you would log in, it would just give you what it thought would be the most interesting thing to you, even if it was seven days old or 25 days old. And so the people who wanted news out of a social feed went over to Blue Sky. The liberals went over to Blue Sky much more than Threads sky is really outpaced threads um at least culturally

among uh liberals who knows if this change in threads will um will pull people in because it has that it has the scale it has you know it has millions of people in there because of their connection to facebook and instagram um but it might be so trashed that that's impossible. Now, the flip side of Glenn's point is an interesting one. I'm curious what you take on this. I think it was Alon Mizrahi who I saw, I mean, it was Arnaud Boutran on Twitter. Somebody was saying that the same way that Democrats have used democracy promotion to intervene imperially in other countries' internal affairs and push an American hegemonic agenda. They worry that Republicans are now going to use free speech as its wedge to get into other countries' internal domestic politics and drive their own political agenda in another country.

So that free speech will be a fig leaf for American intervention in just the same way that democracy promotion was a fig leaf for American intervention for Democrats. In other words, you would come in and take on the EU or take on the Brazilian center left around their speech policies. But what you're actually trying to do is regime change, overthrow the government, put in a different government, which just as in the mirror example of democracy promotion doesn't actually care about democracy, doesn't actually care about free speech, is actually just trying to implement an allied right-wing agenda. And so you kind of just use those aspirational values along the way. Hopefully that's not what we end up seeing, but I think it's something to be on the lookout for.

It's definitely something to be on the lookout for because it's being talked about in those kinds of spaces right now. And honestly, it could be – there's an argument that it's for the better. Like if we're pushing other countries to adopt juster standards of free speech, it's still imperialism, but we're going to be doing the imperialism no matter what. Right, same with human rights and democracy. Yeah, we're not. Everybody's for human rights. Human rights are great. Yeah, we're not. countries that do have terrifying speech policies that hopefully are not canaries in the coal mine for the United States, then I'm all for it. But it's exactly going to test the argument that we were just talking about with Lena Kahn, where the right got really uncomfortable with some of this

coercive imperialism, the sort of soft power. And this could test it in the exact same way. I think you're right, Ryan, that it's something to be on the lookout for. Yeah, just be clear-eyed about what we're doing while we're doing it. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country

begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband. It's a cold case. I've never hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her. And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking.

Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line

at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The summer of 1993 was one of the best of my life. I'm journalist Jeff Perlman, and this is Rick Jervis. We were interns at the Nashville Tennessean, but the most unforgettable part? Our roommate, Reggie Payne, from Oakland, sports editor and aspiring rapper. And his stage name? Sexy Sweat. In 2020, I had a simple idea. Let's find Reggie. We searched everywhere, but

Reggie was gone. In February 2020, Reggie was having a diabetic episode. His mom called 911. Police cuffed him face down. He slipped into a coma and died. I'm like thanking you. But then I see my son's not moving. No headlines, no outrage, just silence. So we started digging and uncovered city officials bent on protecting their own. Listen to Finding Sexy Sweat coming June 19th

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes, but there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multibillion-dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission.

This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts binge episodes one two and three on may 21st and episodes four five and six on june 4th ad free at lava for good plus on apple podcasts

the fight over tiktok is coming down to the wire. A new buyer is now jumping into the fray. Let's play this. And then midday, 12.05, Trump will be who we have to work with to close the deal in the months ahead. So I wanted to let him know, as well as others in his cabinet, that we're doing this and we're going to need their help. So this is Kevin O'Leary, a right-wing businessman from Canada, which is still currently a sovereign country to the north of the United States, but may at some point be another state in the United States. Either way, he's a shark tank guy, ally of Trump, and coming in at the last moment to try to rescue TikTok from potentially being banned if the sale is not successfully forced and if the Supreme Court does not give it some reprieve. So Emily, what's the latest here? Yeah. So just to be clear on the timeline, that law that was signed last year in April

means that TikTok needs to be sold by January 19th to a US buyer. So January 19th, you will note is the day before- I guess obviously not a US buyer, right? It's like a non- A US company. Somebody from China, Russia, Iran, and some other places that we consider adversaries. Because otherwise, Trump would have to hurry up and make Canada a state before January 19th. Well, I don't know if...

If Kevin O'Leary is going to be able to be a qualified buyer. That's an interesting point, because I don't know if Kevin O'Leary is going to be able to be a qualified buyer. That's an interesting point because I don't know if Kevin O'Leary is actually an American citizen or whether he's negotiating on behalf of an American company that he has a stake in, something like that. There's also a billionaire, Frank McCourt, who's been making moves to try and, conservative billionaire, to try and buy TikTok. January 19th is the day before Donald Trump's inauguration. That is when TikTok is set to be banned. And Trump has said he's got a, quote, warm spot for TikTok. The Supreme Court is considering a Trump-backed effort to overturn the U.S. Court of Appeals decision to uphold the law that Joe

Biden signed on Friday. So those arguments are happening on Friday, the deadline. So that's the 10th. The deadline is the 19th. So this is all playing out. TikTok is right now. And people can understand why. This is the Axios tear sheet, Ryan, is now sending people to what's it called? Lemon eight. Because they're panicked. They don't know that this is actually going to work out at all because they're, I mean, if they lose control of the company, obviously they're losing a lot of power. They're losing a lot of revenue. ByteDance is based in Beijing. Obviously they still have other revenue streams that are very powerful. This one is extremely powerful, though, and they would like to keep a slice of it at the very least ahead of what could be transpiring. Now,

it's possible the Supreme Court does not decide in Trump's favor, in favor of people who are trying to prevent this from happening. That's actually, we don't really have a clear indication of where the Supreme Court is going to go on this um at all now a lot of people have said if you look at what happened with the u.s court of appeals it's uh unlikely that the conservative court is going to change it just based on you know the arguments that they found compelling the court of appeals find well they basically rejected like they upheld the law, right? Right, yeah, they upheld the law because it was passed through the democratic process. I mean, it was something that was done by Congress, signed by the president, and that's going to be a persuasive argument probably.

And maybe it should be a persuasive argument. And what's important is not to conflate that. You know, there are a lot of laws that we might like that go through that process and are fine, but it's important not to conflate that with whether or not the bill was a good idea. Even as somebody who's been pretty sympathetic to the idea of banning TikTok, you and I have talked about this before for different reasons. That bill was horrible. It was like a deep state power grab, essentially, for the reasons that you just talked about in terms of naming our foreign adversaries and ways that the power could be expanded, sort of Patriot Act type

of manner to suddenly have government control. I mean, we already have a lot of that. But anyway, all this is to say that's a separate argument. What the Supreme Court does is a separate argument for whether that original bill was good. And that's a separate argument in and of original bill was good. And that's a separate argument in and of itself from whether it's good to ban TikTok. Yeah. And ByteDance also owns Lemonade, which would mean by the strictures of that law that was passed, it would also be banned.

ByteDance seems to think that because it's much lower profile, it might be able to slip through. And I think also they're being smart. They're thinking if we're going to lose access to this site, to this app, TikTok, very soon, we should use the app while we have it to drive as many people to something that we'll still control after this. Because presumably if they do ink a deal to offload TikTok to an American or a Canadian buyer, then they will leave that lemonade alone because it's not a significant threat. And if they've boosted the value of it in the meantime, that'd be an advantage to them.

But the reason I've always thought that this won't actually come to pass is that, you know, the deep state had wanted to ban TikTok for a very long time. It was only after October 7th that they were able to get enough congressional buy-in to pass the law through Congress and get the president to sign it because members of Congress and members of the establishment in both parties were horrified, not at the images that were coming out of Gaza, but at the fact that young people were able to see the images that were coming out of Gaza and were repelled by them and were in opposition to the genocidal assault that they were seeing. Mitt Romney, and we played the clip here on the program,

if you remember, like six months ago or whenever it passed, said very explicitly, the reason that the Congress wants to ban TikTok is because it was generating images out of Gaza that was making it difficult to continue to unapologetically support Israel's war effort. He straight up said it in an onstage with Antony Blinken, who acknowledged and agreed that TikTok was making the U.S. support for Israel that much more difficult. So the reason I think it won't come to pass is that the genocide is nearly complete. Like the depopulation is complete and almost complete in northern Gaza. Ninety plus percent of people have been dislocated from their homes. The Gaza Strip is effectively uninhabitable yet continues to be inhabited.

And so Israel and the U.S. won. And so at that point, it doesn't matter if the public is able to see what's going on via TikTok. So that's why I think that they you end up having so much of the media in explicitly right-wing hands. Elon Musk, an active partisan with the Republican Party at this point. Fox News, the biggest cable channel, is an active partisan. And then the broadcast networks to its right, they're not trivial anymore. Those are significant. MSNBC completely collapsing. CNN is a disaster. And then if you also have TikTok owned by an explicit right-wing person, not just a billionaire who has kind of billionaire tendencies, but somebody who's kind of a partisan conservative like O'Leary.

It sets up an extraordinarily difficult situation for the center left and left. significantly rival government power and are under the control of a CEO with this massive swath of the discourse about politics under their sway at any given moment. And what's interesting, Ryan, is the reason I think the deep state still cares a lot about TikTok, Israel aside, is China. And what they want to do, really, the reason that they want this sold to a US entity, I mean, I think there's some very legitimate reasons for wanting that. And we've talked about some of those before, but I think they also want TikTok to function in the way that Twitter and X, I'm sorry, X and Meta do, which is they'll give you access if you are trying to spy on Americans. They will share the data. They will, or Google is another example. They will cooperate. You will have a way

to access it if you're in the FBI or CIA or whatever. You don't have to go ask Beijing for data. And TikTok would, it's kind of interesting because TikTok would say, well, we're all functioning in America anyway, but that's not necessarily true. But anyway, all this is to say, I think, you know, the benefit for the quote unquote deep state of having TikTok owned by a US entity is more spy powers for them to snoop on Americans domestically. So whether or not there's good reasons for wanting it not to be spy powers for just Beijing, different question. Meanwhile, do you notice that Lev Parnas' kid has blown up on TikTok the last couple of days? He's doing like one minute news reports. He's up to like

one and a half, two million followers in like just weeks. It's the funniest thing ever. Like what is Lev Parnas' kid doing on delivering news to people on TikTok? Also, I'm told that Taylor Armstrong is going viral on TikTok for the baby there's no play meme that Real Housewives Bravo fans of us have known about for like a decade plus. Taylor Armstrong is famously the woman who's yelling at the cat in the meme for the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, but now she's going viral again. So you never know what pops out of TikTok. It's a global and national treasure. It must be protected. There you have it from Ryan Grimm. All right, Ryan, let's move on to congestion pricing in New York.

Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her and it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never

got any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The summer of 1993 was one of the best of my life. I'm journalist Jeff Perlman, and this is Rick Jervis. We were interns at the Nashville Tennessean. But the most unforgettable part? Our roommate, Reggie Payne, from Oakland, sports editor and aspiring rapper.

And his stage name? Sexy Sweat. In 2020, I had a simple idea. Let's find Reggie. We searched everywhere, but Reggie was gone. In February 2020, Reggie was having a diabetic episode. His mom called 911. Police cuffed him face down.

He slipped into a coma and died. I'm like like thanking you. But then I see my son's not moving. No headlines, no outrage, just silence. So we started digging and uncovered city officials bent on protecting their own. Listen to Finding Sexy Sweat coming June 19th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time,

have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley

comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad.

Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1. Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st, and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Well, congestion pricing is officially in effect in New York City as of this week, as of the 5th, actually.

So we're a couple of days into it, which means we have the benefit of seeing all kinds of reactions now. Here's just a quick map that was posted the day before it went into effect in Manhattan. So this is from Morning Brew. NYC congestion tolls start tomorrow, that was the 5th, for motorists entering Manhattan at 60th Street or below. Cars, SUVs, pickups, $9. Non-commuter buses, $14.40. Big rigs, $21.60. Motorcycles, $4.50. The MTA wants to raise $15 billion for mass transit improvements and ease gridlock. So this is the congestion relief zone. If you're not super familiar with New York, it's basically that part of Manhattan that, I mean, this sounds obvious, but it's like the most congested. It shows their West Side Highway excluded.

It goes all the way down to the southernmost tip. FDR Drive excluded. Those are those bright green boundaries. But in the middle there, man, that is affecting a whole lot of people, Ryan, and raises some fascinating questions about class and all of that. So let me run a video here of one man. This is a man on the street that was done. Ryan, you actually posted this a couple of days ago. Let's take a listen to this man on the street. We get to affect $9 each day that you pass 60th street and while i disagree with it for many reasons for me in particular it really hits home because i live right here on 61st street in this building

and my car is right there parked in front of my building and if I want to go to turn around to go uptown to visit my kids who live on 79th Street, I have to pay $9 to go around the block because this is a one-way street and that's a one-way street and that's a one-way street. And there's no way for me to get uptown without going around the block and paying $9. And I think something has to be sorted out for Manhattan residences. Ryan, that's quite an interesting clip because it gets to the class dynamics here. You posted this yourself, so tell us what you mean. Yeah, I mean there's a couple interesting dynamics here. First of all, the real estate where that guy is standing is some of the most expensive in the entire world. So this is not a working – it's very unlikely.

And I think actually somebody found this guy is like a pretty rich dude. So like set that aside. The reason the news camera was there, the same reason when I did my man on the street interview, they were standing outside the emergency department and grabbing people coming out of the hospital. Yes, we missed Ryan on Sky News who went viral. I think you actually went viral on TikTok. On TikTok, yes. And on X.

They were looking for people angry at the healthcare system and insurance industry. They went to 60th Street and 61st Street here because that's where the line is. And so, yes, whenever there's a line it's going to suck for the people who are like you know five feet from it and what he's saying is like in order to go north i actually have to go south go one block over and then go north and boom now i had to bing bing through it the other funny thing though is that okay it's kind of that is kind of a funny predicament that the guy is in, that just because of where he is, he's going to get dinged every possible time.

And you know what? If he has a good alderman or whatever, a good city councilman, everybody in that block can get half off, whatever. I don't care. What's funny, though, they're talking like 18 blocks. It's a 20-minute walk. This is not a long distance. And the point of living, a point of living in a city like Manhattan is that it is walkable, that you can get places by foot.

And that's good for you. It's good for the planet. It's good for your kids to do that walk. So that guy is not, for any of the arguments, kind of a sympathetic character there. But I think there are some more sympathetic arguments that we should entertain and see if we can grapple with. Yeah, let's take a look at this headline. This is from the New York Post map shows congestion pricing will cost up to $27 to drive into Manhattan. Firefighters, teachers and businesses can't afford it. So here's the map. And if you're looking at it,

it's similar to the first map that we showed, but it actually gets even more specific about if you're commuting through particular points in New York City, if you're super familiar with New York, it'll make sense to you. Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan Bridge, Williamsburg Bridge. You can see some of these exact pricing for different folks, toll by plate versus toll by E-ZPass. This is really expensive. Actually, this is really expensive. I saw one man on the street interview with a guy who was just a blue collar worker who was commuting into the city. And so it would cost him an extra $200 a month if he didn't start taking the subway. The subway, of course, is not something that a lot of people who aren't using it regularly want to start using right now because there's fare evasion that leads to some unfortunate experiences with law enforcement.

There's also, like we just saw last week, the horrifying video of a man who somehow miraculously survived after being pushed onto the platform as a train was coming on by someone who was just doing it for the hell of it, seemingly. The woman who was burned alive as passersby were helpless, and some of them may have been able to do something, but didn't. Law enforcement didn't do much at all. Everyone has seen these images and people are not keen to leave the safety of their vehicles. And I say that safety, not in terms of car crashes,

which are obviously very significant there as well and everywhere, but, um, putting themselves vulnerable onto the subway is something that a lot of people don't want to do, especially, um, you know, when they, it was previously, they had organized their commutes around, uh, budgets that were totally doable for them. And now the city is asking them to, to pay more money. When, let me just share this next screen and get your thoughts on this, Ryan. You had Uber and Lyft spending millions of dollars pushing for the congestion pricing because it helps them while it doesn't help other people. I think that's pretty interesting. This is a New York Post saying they poured millions of dollars

in efforts to legalize the congestion tolling, and they stand to be among the biggest winners. They hired top lobbyists to help persuade key state and city officials to approve the controversial levy, including Governor Kathy Hochul and the MTA. So that brings this into interesting perspective as well. I'm curious what you make of it, Ryan. Yeah, so Uber and Lyft lobbying for this and getting a sweetheart deal out of it where it's cheaper for them, you know, and it makes it easier for them to compete, you know, that's BS and, you know, they ought to, that, you know, that shouldn't be the case. I think the opponents there have a very reasonable argument because not only are they getting a sweetheart deal, then there's going to be less congestion and they're going to be able to zip around more.

On the other hand, people who use Ubers and Lyfts pretty frequently are going to benefit from that because their trips will be quicker. There's a kind of a chicken and egg problem here that the city is trying to address. To your point about the subway being trash, I lived there about 20 years ago or so, and I used to take the subway to work. And people who live in New York have a real fondness for and defensiveness around its subway and the character that it has. But it's also, you know, compared to other major cities around the world, particularly around the world, and even in the U.S., it's trash compared to a lot of them. And it should be a lot better.

So this is supposed to be the greatest city in the world. And it definitely does not have the greatest subway system or not even probably in the top 100. And so in order to upgrade that, they're trying to come up with money through this congestion pricing scheme. And so it's going to push people to use a system that is not yet upgraded. But if you don't do something like this, then it never gets upgraded. And people have both over-congested traffic and a completely degrading subway system. So there's a low-income discount that has been worked into the law, which is just woefully inadequate. If you have a gross income of $60,000 or less, you're able to get half off of your fare,

but only after your first 10 trips. And I think the $60,000 is pretty absurd. Most people who are coming into New York, the reason they're driving into New York is because they're making a little bit more than that. But it's still extraordinarily difficult to live in New York on, say, 70 or live in the New York area on even 70 or $80,000, especially if then all of your, you know, you're spending hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars on tolls and fares.

So they really should have made that discount a lot more generous and make it easier for the middle class to get. But if it works, and this is the argument that I would make to people who don't want to pay it but end up paying it because they don't live near transit and it's just not feasible for them to use the transit. Like, look, if you actually shave off a half an hour of your commute each way, and let's say you make $40 an hour, you make $30 an hour. If you shave off an hour of that, that's $30 or $40 that you, not to get too, you know, economics bro or neoliberal, but like people's time is valuable. And so if it works, and that's a huge if, so far we're seeing it working. Like so far we're seeing that commutes, traffic does seem to be moving faster. You know, let us know in the comments if you live in New York and if you've been driving around the city what your experience has been. But if you can actually save that time, time is money.

You could work an extra hour on your shift if you can get those hours. Or you have an extra hour to yourself a day, which is that worth $9 to you? To a lot of people, I think it would be, especially if that money has been going into improving the subway system in the long run. The obvious benefit while we're doing the sort of advantages and disadvantages, pros and cons, is also for emergency vehicles is a serious problem in New York. That when traffic's not moving and you need to get ambulances through, that's a significant reason just in and of itself to start thinking about how to deal with congestion. But I just think what sucks, and this is not just New York based, but New York in particular, where people are, the cost of living is really high and people are taxed to hell and have been for years. It's like you're punishing them. You're punishing them for the city's mismanagement of

their own taxpayer dollars. And people have organized their lives over the course of years around commutes that work for their budget, that work for their schedule. And so the sudden, it just feels like a punishment for people who have been dutifully paying their taxes for years. And now, because the reason the subway is a disaster, it's not really just because they lack resources. They lack resources, financial resources, because of the mismanagement. It's in a complete vicious cycle right now. People have been paying into the system. And it just, again, it's going to, it's going to, it's one of those things that just is going to, the middle class is going to bear the brunt of it, which obviously sucks. Although, meanwhile, Dave Weigel pointed out a really

fascinating class dynamic in the New York Post coverage. I don't know if you saw this, but the Post was writing about drivers who were cleverly evading the fare. People have different tricks. You put this gloss on your license plate, which is illegal, but if you can get away with it, nobody sees it, then the camera can't catch your license plate

or other tricks to not get nailed with this fare. He's like, I've searched the New York Post and was unable to find any articles celebrating the cleverness of subway fare evaders. That to them is like a cover story worthy crime. But a driver who evades the fare, that person is clever and an American hero. And it does go back to this unspoken assumption that car culture is just better because who built the subway? The public built the subway.

Who built the roads? The public built the roads. But there's this belief that one of them just by natural right ought to be free. And the other one ought to cost people money. And that if you're stealing one, you're a hero. If you're stealing the other, you're a villain. And if you peel it back, there's no philosophical, logical, political rationale for the argument that different transportation modes that were both funded by the public should be treated so radically different. Not in the post. Yeah, I think that's a great point. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder.

I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her. And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking.

If you have a case you'd like me to look into, who is still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The summer of 1993 was one of the best of my life. I'm journalist Jeff Perlman,

and this is Rick Jervis. We were interns at the Nashville Tennessean, but the most unforgettable part? Our roommate, Reggie Payne, from Oakland, sports editor and aspiring rapper. And his stage name? Sexy Sweat. In 2020, I had a simple idea. Let's find Reggie. We searched everywhere, but Reggie was gone. In February 2020, Reggie was having a diabetic episode. His mom called 911. Police cuffed him face down. He slipped into a coma and died. I'm like thanking you, but then I see my son's not moving. No headlines, no outrage, just silence.

So we started digging and uncovered city officials bent on protecting their own. Listen to Finding Sexy Sweat coming June 19th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops call this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple.

Cops believed everything that Taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st,

and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. So President Donald Trump has promised hell on earth if there isn't a hostage deal by the time he's sworn into office. Meanwhile, over at Dropsite News, we've gotten a statement from Hamas appealing directly to President Trump. I'm going to read some of that. They write – Hamas spokesperson says, quote, we believe we can reach an agreement immediately if Netanyahu and his government stop their stalling and obstructing the deal. We are ready to proceed with an agreement immediately that guarantees a permanent ceasefire, the withdrawal of all Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip, the return of displaced people to their homes without restrictions, a serious prisoner

exchange deal from both sides, and the immediate launch of a comprehensive relief and reconstruction process for Gaza. Therefore, we look forward to President Trump and his team exerting pressure on Netanyahu and his government to move forward with the deal before his inauguration. post-deal reconstruction process, the UAE, which is a very, very close ally of Trump himself and the Trump family, has said that it would take a lead in kind of overseeing with the U.S. security and reconstruction until a reformed Palestinian authority could start taking control in Gaza. Now, what's interesting about this is several things. One, the U.S. having some role in security and reconstruction in Gaza suggests boots on the ground. How would the U.S. play a role in security without boots on the ground?

I guess one possibility would be just financing it and sending enormous amounts of weapons and money so that the UAE can hire Colombian mercenaries to patrol Gaza. So it remains to be seen what those details are. But what's also interesting is that, you know, the Gulf countries had been insisting that a pathway to statehood was essential for their involvement in a post-conflict reconstruction. If these reports are accurate, that would suggest that the UAE at least is backing off of that piece of the deal as Saudi Arabia and Israel are continuing their talks towards normalization where Saudi is

insisting on some type of language, you know, about a pathway to statehood being included, or there won't be normalization. You know, when we were, I guess, when we were last speaking a couple weeks ago before the Christmas and New Year's break, there were, there was a lot of talk that a deal was, you know was just moments away from being inked. Trump putting the January 20th deadline on it to me has always meant that Netanyahu will take every day that's available. It's January 8th. That's at least 12 days that he has a free hand to strike Gaza. And the airstrikes have heated up, they've expanded, they've been almost around the

clock, according to people in Gaza. So I would not expect him to strike a deal a moment before he's absolutely forced to by Donald Trump. But let's play a little bit from Trump to get a flavor of how he's framing his approach to this. And these are comments from his press conference yesterday. We played some clips earlier in the show on other things, but he was asked by everyone different questions and touched on Israel here. Yes, here you go. All hell must be paid if they don't release the hostages. Do I have to define it for you?

All hell will break out. If those hostages aren't back, I don't want to hurt your negotiation. If they're not back by the time I get into office, all hell will break out in the Middle East. And it will not be good for Hamas. And it will not be good, frankly, for anyone. All hell will break out. I don't have to say anymore, but that's what it is. So there's some real gallows humor going on in Gaza.

And we're going to talk to Ahmed Khan, who was in Gaza recently. He was telling me that when he was there, Trump made similar comments, all hell will break loose. And every one universal that he spoke to is like, does he have any idea what's going on here? Like, what would that look like? And it goes from a rhetorical question to an actual question where it's like, wait a minute, what would hell on earth look like if it wasn't this, which is starvation, rampant disease, it's cold at night, you're living in tents, your tents are flooding, and airstrikes are continuing relentlessly, and all the hospitals are shut down. So if that's the status quo, what's hell look like? I think Hamas in a strange way has some leverage with Donald Trump in that respect because –

Yeah, they've taken hell off the table by already bringing it to Gaza. There's that. There's also that Trump doesn't want – he wants to be the guy who looks like he secured a deal. And so if he has to get to a deal, just described, Ryan, and be the guy who was behind what he already described for Netanyahu, what, six months ago was a public relations problem? Does he want to be overseeing that? Or does Hamas have, I guess, some real leverage in they want a deal and Trump wants a deal. He wants to be the guy who solved the problem, ended the conflict, and secured what he will say is peace, whether it's lasting is dubious. But that does actually sort of give Hamas their position, some leverage going into a

Trump administration. Yeah. And over at the Dropside News Twitter account, you can find a report from Israeli media that a May document that was approved by Netanyahu's cabinet describing the terms that they would agree to for a ceasefire was leaked to the Israeli media. And it's consistent effectively with what Hamas is asking for and is consistent with what Israel is now expected to get from an upcoming ceasefire if one really happens. And actually, I have this right here. So think about that uh this is may the the hostages have been held since may some some many perhaps have died since then to get nothing extra,

to get an agreement that was already on the table last May, is such an extraordinary and fundamental failure when it comes to what the leader of a government's mission is, which is to protect their own people, their own citizens. If you're one of those hostage families, you're asking why? Like, why is it now January? And we're about to ink a deal, potentially we're going to ink a deal that was available to us in May. Like, what did we achieve between May and January? And the answer can only be satisfaction of a lust for the complete and total destruction of Gaza as a habitable place. Because nothing else has improved from Israel's perspective, from the perspective of the hostages from May until January, unless I'm missing something.

So Trump, we may see something similar. If we see something like that in Israel, we may see something similar also in Ukraine, where there's a peace deal that's... A deal that was available in like February, March 2022. Probably better, actually, than will be available now. People will say that what really changed is the seriousness of the negotiations. You have this presidential transition in the United States, and that changes the positions and the leverage that the dealmakers have. So that's the argument I'd expect to hear. But I think it's a valid point. Before we leave, let's just comment a little bit

on some of the... Antony Blinken has been making the rounds and doing some exit interviews. He spoke with the New York Times here. Let me play a little bit of that. To what has become the defining crisis of this era, which is the conflict in Gaza. You came in thinking you could broker a historic agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel.

And then Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th with the horrific results which we saw. And Israel's response has been extreme. The latest UN figures put the Palestinian death toll at 45,000. Over 90% of Gaza's population is now displaced. The population is starving. All hospitals have been destroyed. In November, a UN committee released a report that found Israel's warfare practices, quote, consistent with the characteristics of genocide. I know you don't agree with that estimation. But do you believe that Israel's actions have been consistent with the rules of war? Let's step back for a second and think about where we were on October 6th,

and then where we were on October 7th, and where we've been since then. You're right, on October 6th, we were very much pursuing normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel. And in fact, I was scheduled to go to Saudi Arabia and Israel on October 10th. A trip, obviously, that didn't happen because of the events of October 7th. But the purpose of that trip was to work on the Palestinian component of any normalization agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel. in Israel because we believed, and the Saudis also said it was usually important, to make sure that if there was going to be normalization, there was also a pathway toward a Palestinian state. Let's end it there for now because a lot of it from there is just him kind of humiliating

himself by trying to present the world in a way that it just simply isn't. But that piece is interesting because what it reveals is just how flawed the American strategy was that to ignore the Palestinian piece of a Mideast peace deal. Notice that he's saying on October 10th, he's going to go to talk to Israel and Saudi Arabia about the Palestinian issue. Anybody who's like hearing that and isn't completely absorbed in the propaganda here would be like, wait a minute, you're going to talk to Israel and Saudi Arabia about the Palestinians? Like, what about the Palestinians? You're going to talk to them about the Palestinians? Are they going to be involved in this conversation about them at all?

And if they were involved in a serious way, then it's very difficult to imagine there's an October 7th. Hamas was very clear that one of the motivations for October 7th was that they felt like they were being written off of the historical stage. That they were being sidelined by the United States in an effort to normalize relations with Israel, normalize and effectively normalize the occupation and just keep the status quo in place indefinitely. And it was a, they described it in avert, as a version of a flip the table moment. And if that's the case, then that is a fundamental failure of the, of the policy that was being carried out by all administrations, whether it's Biden, Trump, and everybody since Clinton effectively, or actually maybe since Bush. I mean, what you heard Blinken just responding to from the New York Times there was totally unspoken, but it was him embracing the Trump policy, doubling, tripling down on the Abraham Accord Trump policy.

I don't know that I agree that it's hard to imagine October 7th happening without the Abraham Accords, but I do agree that it's clearly pushed them to a flip the table moment. It doesn't in any way justify the flip the table moment, but I do agree that that's a component of it. And it makes me wonder, as many people are, whether Donald Trump and his negotiators – Right. It wouldn't just be an absence of the Abraham Accords. You'd have to have real genuine peace talks going on that everybody believed were serious. And if those were happening, my argument would be, then there wouldn't have been an October 7th. Yeah. That's interesting. But I mean, Hamas would have to be bought into them

as the power in Gaza. Yeah. And that's an if that is impossible to conceive of because the purpose of Israel helping to prop up Hamas in Gaza was that so those talks aren't happening. I mean, the Hamas charter, which was changed from obviously to just talk about the Israel, like the foundational principle of Israel's existence. I think there's an ideological part there, an ideological component there that makes it, I think, likely that, you know, an October 7th could happen sort of at any given moment until there's something. That's why peace talks are always so depressing because there's – It's interesting how an organization like Hamas can get its hand forced. It wasn't because they necessarily had a change of heart that they changed their charter

in I think it was 2017 to embrace the two-state deals. There was public pressure from Palestinians to move in that direction, which then led to the 2018, the Great March of Return, which was these nonviolent protests in Gaza that would march to the fence, were organized by Gaza civil society and initially had an arm's length at best relationship with Hamas. Hamas saw them as not helpful to their – and not part of their ideological project. Hamas eventually, because they were so popular, had to come around for political reasons and kind of embrace them. Everybody knows how those ended. IDF troops outside of the fence shot something like 40,000 people, unarmed people, almost all of them unarmed,

and were shooting people's legs for sport, as a UN report has laid out. And then with the collapse of that nonviolent movement, Hamas then has more political capital to organize toward a violent response. Yeah. What's interesting to me is, is there a, does the Trump camp recognize that there's something serious when Hamas says that the Abraham Accords were a factor in sort of pushing them towards October 7th. Do they take that seriously? Do they believe that Hamas is sincere when they say that? Or do they continue to think the Abraham Accords were the sort of triumph of U.S. policy to Israel? And the answer to that is they continue to think the Abraham Accords were just sort of an indisputed triumph. And that doesn't mean you can't recognize that

keeping Palestinians out of the loop had downstream consequences, but it doesn't seem like there's recognition of that. And so I think it's really hard to predict the particulars of Trump's Israel policy in this next administration. We can predict, obviously, the broad swath of it as deep support. But what does it look like in practice? How does he influence negotiations? That, I think think is less easy to predict. Yeah. So we'll see. I think it's reasonable that we might actually get a ceasefire deal right around the 19th or 20th. Whether it holds, I think, is a totally different question. Yeah.

And what that looks like. It might be a deal on paper that Israel violates regularly. If you notice the Hezbollah-Israel deal is getting very close to completely collapsing, but Israel has bombed Hezbollah dozens, scores, maybe hundreds of times since the quote-unquote ceasefire deal. So we'll see. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received

hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. I've never found her, and it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never got any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The summer of 1993 was one of the best of my life. I'm journalist Jeff Perlman, and this is Rick Jervis. or wherever you get your podcasts. name? Sexy Sweat. In 2020, I had a simple idea. Let's find Reggie. We searched everywhere, but Reggie was gone. In February 2020, Reggie was having a diabetic episode. His mom called 911. Police cuffed him face down. He slipped into a coma and died. I'm like thanking you. But then I see my son's not moving. No headlines, no outrage, just silence. So we started digging and uncovered city officials bent on protecting their own. Listen to Finding Sexy Sweat coming June 19th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them.

From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1. Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really

bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1 Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th.

Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Up next, we're going to be joined by American philanthropist Ahmed Khan. Ahmed, thanks for joining us here. Really appreciate it. Thanks, Ryan. Thanks, Emily. And so with you today, we want to talk about a couple of things. One, you were fairly recently in Gaza. You organized a shipment of humanitarian supplies

into the Strip and you went with your shipment or you went alongside your shipment. And we had promised our viewers at the time that we would get your take on like how how did you do that how did you how on earth did you pull that off and also what was you know what did you see that we're not seeing just through the images that we get out of gaza we and we've also um done some coverage of something else that you're working on which is the the need to get the tens of thousands of people who need critical medical care out of Gaza to places that are willing to take them in, whose lives are at risk at every moment that they're not being allowed to get that treatment. So I'll just start here by you had shared this one. Here's one video of your trip. Tell us a little bit about where you are and what your impression was as you're getting here.

That's called the middle area of Gaza, Khan Yunus al-Mawassi. There are a series of tented camps. And you can see that it's children, and that's what you see everywhere in Gaza. You see children. You don't really see anything else. You see children. This was a community-building exercise and just sort of a kids' activity. Obviously, the schools are all destroyed.

And they just try to keep the kids busy. So we just walked into it. The kids were dancing the Dubka, Palestinian dance. And there were various performers. And sort of we just came in to view it. And, you know, you're just overwhelmed by what these kids are experiencing. What they're experiencing is something no child should ever have to experience and actually no child has experienced what they're experiencing. They live in tents almost every night of the year.

They listen to 250-pound bombs, 500-pound bombs, and sometimes 2,000- pound bombs landing near them. They have friends that have been killed and they don't know when their time will be, but they just continue. So, you know, you can see them smiling and cheerful and it's almost amazing because none of these kids have had protein for a month or two. None of them have had – they mainly eat that one time a week or one time a day. But they still smile.

So you're struck by that. And is it bread? Like what's the thing that they're able to get for the most part during today? There really isn't anything that you can count on. It just depends on what the Israeli authorities will allow in. And it's sort of idiosyncratic. It just sort of happens. Sometimes there'll be enough food in the markets and sometimes there won't. Sometimes the food will be very expensive in the markets and sometimes it won't.

So there's no rhyme or reason to any of it. You know, I sort of, I've told you, I think, from the beginning that the, essentially the Israeli government has decided they don't necessarily want to kill everybody at once because they think it's probably not something they can get away with. But what they do is allow sort of the minimum calorie count in. So, you know, people are just getting by on whatever, whatever's available that day. a lot of dry goods, sort of canned stuff. But it's nothing – I don't know. It's nothing anyone sort of – any of your viewers would be comfortable with. I don't know how many people would survive in the US on this.

And then I'll let Emily – let you jump in. So shortly after October 7th, you had told me as Israel unleashed its response, what you thought their plan was. And now here we are a year and a half later, and it feels like everything is going according to the plan that you kind of thought that they were playing out at the time. And so I think that that kind of gives your assessment an extra layer of credibility because it's really been borne out the last year and a half. What did you see coming and what have you seen unfold? Well, I think very clearly the Israeli government wants all Palestinians out, right? And they can't do it all at once. So they have created conditions that are unlivable.

And at some point, and I think all American officials are aware of this, and probably all European officials are aware of this, because it's just, it's pretty black and white. You know, they don't want to kill everybody. They just want everybody out. So they've killed plenty of people. And people are living under horrible conditions. And they just want to get rid of all Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank and sort of remake Judea and Samaria. And I think that's, you know, that's Prime Minister Netanyahu's plan. I mean, it's just very clear. So I suppose now that will be up to President Trump to decide whether that's going to happen or not. You know, I don't know. There really aren't any world leaders who seem to – they've sort of been detached from any sort of empathy of the situation because what – the situation inside inside it's truly unlivable i mean it's sort of

bombs non-stop uh artillery non-stop f-15s f-16s f-35s dropping massive bombs you're sort of every 15 minutes you're shaking the you know whatever wherever you're staying if you're in a tent it's shaking if you're in some kind of structure, it's shaking. And, you know, the trauma is just unimaginable. If you were to, and I'm sure you have, but talk to American officials, let's say operating in good faith and tell them or persuade them that it is possible to not just provide the minimum calorie count, but to bring in more food, to make the situation for people living in Gaza more livable while also protecting their security concerns, for instance, what would you tell them? How would you explain to them that it is possible to feed these children and also just bring in more aid? Maybe you have had those conversations.

Yeah, I mean, it is possible. I've done it in Ukraine, right? Like, so the, you know, the Russians don't bomb all the border crossings and they don't bomb all the food trucks. I think the, this administration just doesn't care, right? Like, so it's just not, you know, they'll, they'll just lie about every word out of their mouth. It's just lying. So I'm, I'm optimistic that maybe President Trump will not want to see these images and not want to see this situation and sort of burned babies and little kids in their tents sleeping and then sort of next thing you know they're dead. I don't know.

But for American officials, let's say middle-level American officials, yeah, I think they're all horrified by what's going on. They know what's going on. They see the briefings. But the decision-makers in the Biden administration just don't care. They're just very dishonest about all of it. They know exactly the numbers that have gone in. They know how many people.

They know what it takes to keep these people fed and healthy. I mean you're looking at 1.1, 1.2 million children. It's over 50% of the population. What security risks do these little girls, you know, sort of hold against the Israelis? Like, you know, it's mind-boggling. I try not to pay attention to the stuff that comes out of, like, sort of the armchair quarterbacks and the conference goers.

But I mean, it's all nonsense. I challenge all of them or any of them to come to Gaza and spend 48 hours to see if they, number one, make it out alive, and number two, are still repeating these idiotic talking points about human shields and security and et cetera. Right. Or about smuggling things that can be turned into weapons through the food shipments or what's another example, like the Hamas hoarding everything that gets into Gaza.

From your perspective, you would say if you go on the ground, it's entirely possible for the United States to back humanitarian aid that's done in a way that gets to the children. I mean, to be honest with you, I could do it myself, like, you know, with a sort of group of collaborators. I don't even need the United States government because I would just make a mess of the whole situation. But yeah, it's not complex at all. There's nothing, don't let anyone tell you it's complex. I've done it. I've delivered humanitarian assistance to every war zone the last 25 years. It's very doable. I mean, it's just a matter of whether you're going to kill everybody delivering humanitarian assistance. It's just a decision someone makes. But if the United States cared about this, it would be done. It would be easily done.

Have you been in touch with any people in the incoming administration or tried to get, I mean, Trump had that. No, I mean, I don't really know anyone. I mean, like, I'm not, you know, I'm out here in the world. I'm not really just, I mean, it's sort of maybe my weakness is I don't go to cocktail parties or sleazy hotel bars and stuff. So, I mean, that's where all these people hang out, I guess. It is. They don't really run into me in places like the front line in Ukraine or Gaza or Syria, any of these places.

You don't really see these kind of people around. So I don't know. I try to get the message out. Can you give us some examples of – because I've been following your attempt to get this shipment in and some other shipments in over months and months and months. Can you give people some examples of the kind of holdups that you wound up getting along the way? And what did it take to get in? Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. Essentially, I made a decision. Well, WFP is great on the food, and that's their mandate, and they do that. I sort of did a survey in Gaza and understood that there were specific medicines that were not getting into Gaza for whatever reason,

and I decided to go and source them. And I purchased medicines around Europe, and, you know, a few containers worth of medicines. And I've done this a few times. And there's a process through the Israeli government. The Israeli government agency is called COGAT, which I think you know that everything has to go through COGAT. So I apply through COGAT and say, look, this is what I have. This is where I purchased it from. This is where it was made.

This is how much it costs. This is how much each item is. This is what's in this box. This is what's in this box. This is what's in this box. And this is pallet number this. And everything has to be totally itemized. And, you know, sort of they approve it. And then it's just a long process of getting the actual stuff physically in.

So in my case, one time I tried to send it over. You know, like I'm somehow still optimistic to try to make things work. So on one of the shipments, I tried to send it over J-LOTS, the Joint Logistics Over the Shore, which was the pier that the United States government tried to work. Yeah, and it didn't – Your first pallets. Yeah, it actually went and then was stuck by the the next to the pier and then the pier closed. And so then I had to look for another solution and wound up shipping it from Cyprus where the J-Lots was based to Ashdod, Israel. And then there's just a process like the ship, the stuff's on the ship.

The ship has to be cleared to come into port. That's a few days. Then the ship, the ship has to be cleared to come into port. That's a few days. Then the ship – the stuff has to be cleared to unload off the port. That's another few days. These sort of things like – it's just not something that anyone has really taken too seriously in the United States government or really cares about to be honest with you because this is all urgent stuff. Is any of that normal when it comes to humanitarian relief? No, of course not. You know, sort of if you need this stuff, you need to get it in, right?

Like there's no, you know what it is. You know exactly every detail. You know how much I paid for it. You know how I paid for it. Like I provide like bank account, like everything. And, you know, it's just like one reason after another to, you know, one day the truck's about to go in and the generator breaks at one of the borders. And I'm like, this is the one of the most sophisticated countries in the world. And their generator broke and now the border's closed.

You know, so, I mean, I got lots of stories that I won't border you with. It's kind of ridiculous. If you get into the minutia, like, I think I try to forget all the stuff that happens because I might, you know, sort of just get depressed. That's actually really interesting. I think we would welcome any examples and not be bored by them. And maybe you could also flesh out the parallel that you're talking about with Ukraine is a great example right now, because the same people who are, you know, saying Israel has to do this would say the opposite about Putin. If you could maybe flesh out what you've seen, like the ability to get humanitarian aid to people over there, that would be really instructive. Yeah, no, it's easy. And Ukraine is very easy because the borders are open. You know, not the Russian border and not the Belarus border, but you have Poland, you have Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Moldova.

And those are all relatively friendly countries and there are no issues. You can get whatever you want. You know, you declare it. There's a process, but it goes right over and into wherever it's needed. In the case of Gaza, and like I said, there's nothing, there's no corollary for Gaza. There's never been a situation where all the borders are closed and one entity controls what goes in or out. So I sort of say, and you know, people take in or out. And so I sort of say,

and you know, people take this the wrong way, but I sort of say it's as if the Russians, if you want to think about Gaza, it's as if the Russians controlled all the borders. So they controlled Poland and Hungary and Slovakia and Romania, like they controlled what was going in. I mean, they could, they literally could bomb those borders, but they don't. But in the situation of Gaza, there's just no other way to get anything in other than through Israel and through sort of the good graces of the Israeli authorities. And I think there are some good actors in the Israeli government, but they have their marching orders, and their marching orders are very clearly, uh, let the absolute minimum in and no one's pushing us. And, you know, the Biden administration, again, just, you know, fumbled whatever leverage they had and they have all the leverage because two to three giant, uh, Air Force planes land full of weapons every day for the last, uh, over a year. Um, but they just never pushed it. And so the Israelis understand like, look, this is not important to the United States. So we'll just – we'll keep doing what we're doing.

Can you – since you've spent so much time in Ukraine, can you compare how Israel approaches Palestinian civilian infrastructure and how Putin approaches Ukrainian civilian infrastructure? I mean, there are some similarities, but, you know, there's literally nothing left in Gaza. I mean, you see my videos, like there's literally, you essentially, when you enter Karim Shalom, ironically named border crossing, you drive alongside of Gaza in Israel. So to your right, as you're driving south, is Gaza, and to your left is Israel, and your sort of life is normal in their shopping malls and gas stations, etc. And when you enter Karim Shalom, there are giant reinforced walls 30 feet high that are one after another, and so you sort of zigzag through these walls. And once you've crossed those walls, all you see is devastation. As soon as you enter,

it's just rubble in every direction. And the first thing you see are kids playing in the rubble. And so there's no corollary for that. You know, it's kind of wild that the amount of rubble in Gaza, which is the size of Philadelphia or Las Vegas, is I think twice to three times the amount recently went directly from Gaza to Ukraine and I said, uh, and I actually went to the front and I said, uh, you know, I'm here to relax after Gaza. So that was, uh, everybody laughed because what else do you do? Well, yeah, cause I, you, you had sent me one video from, um, a place where you were sleeping where it's just, it seemed like the windows were rattling all night long. Yeah, it's bombs. It's the GPU-39. It's a glided air bomb that has electronics on it, which you can guide it.

They're just massive bombs, and they just drop them over and over and over again. No matter where you're sleeping, you'll hear them all night long, and they shake the ground ground and they shake everything. Essentially, what they do is if there's a guy they're looking for who they think is Hamas, if anyone's around that guy, he's dead or she's dead or the four-year-old kid is dead. These bombs aren't checking people's IDs. They're just killing people. The New York Times just confirmed in that long investigation. Yeah, I mean, it's indisputable. Like, literally, you know, sort of,

there's nothing precise about any of it. They could be precise if they wanted to. And sort of, you know, when you're driving around Gaza, it's kind of like in your thoughts, because if some sort of character that they're looking for happens to wind up next to your car, you're gone. They're not, you know, they're not really asking questions or confirming or anything.

And that's just, that's, that's, you know, like literally nobody can deny this. And again, the entire United States decision-making authority knows this and that's just the way it is. So there's no corollary actually. The Russians don't do, I mean, they, they've killed plenty of civilians, but, uh, it's just a different level. If the Israeli goal is to, to depopulate Gaza, why don't they let at least the injured people out?

Like it feels like they're working across purposes to that goal. I think it's part of the plan, right? Like you get the people so desperate to the point where once you, you know, sort of move onto that mechanism of getting everybody out, then everybody just goes. But until that point, you're going to make life as miserable as possible for everyone. So we have this situation now where they're between, I mean, they're probably about 10,000 kids who either have preexisting conditions conditions like cancer or have been injured significantly and can't get out. And there is a process with the World Health Organization to get people out. And Israelis will sort of approve 5 to 10 percent of the cases. And, you know, I know these cases.

I've seen these kids and they're literally sitting in a tent with no chemotherapy just just dying and their case was rejected and you don't get an answer as to why it was rejected and again this is another failure of the u.s administration and sort of it's like they just don't care right like there's no other answer for it why would you why would you let you know five ten fifteen000 kids who are in urgent need of medical care and can be evacuated out just sit there? But, you know, it's across the board. Like, there's no blood pressure medication. So people just die of heart attacks in their tents. I mean, it's on and on and on and on. Well, I was just going to ask a hypothetical. If President Ryan Grim were being inaugurated on January 20th, is it on the humanitarian front, not the military front, but on the humanitarian front, is it in the power of an incoming United States administration almost to flip a switch on the humanitarian stuff and use the leverage and say you are letting these in? Like how theoretically simple would it be if someone wanted to, you know,

increase the input of humanitarian aid? Yeah, if you decided that you don't want little kids to be suffering 24-7, you could scale up the amount of humanitarian aid in days. The United States government knows exactly what the needs are. You know, the United Nations knows exactly what the needs are, what the calorie count is, medicine, et cetera. And it could happen immediately.

I mean, the resources are out there, the stuff's out there, and you would just tell the Israelis, look, I can't abide by this. This is wrong. And change it tomorrow, literally. Well, Ahmed, I always appreciate your insights and also what you're doing for the people of Gaza. Thank you so much for joining us. Anything else you'd want to add for people? Yeah, I mean, you know, like I think people are frustrated and trying to figure out how they can help and what they can do.

And I think they should just keep keep at it. It's it's tough. It's really it's really sad. But the people in Gaza appreciate them. They they they hear them. They understand that there are people with them that feel their their their plight, that are aware of them. And I think people just need to really just push the decision makers. Unfortunately, we're at a point in this world where there are just no world leaders who really, you know, there's just no empathy. It's just sort of apathy, I suppose.

And, you know, there are certain things like with regard to the children's evacuations, that's something that has to happen. Increasing the amount of humanitarian aid, it has to happen. It's again, the population, you know, when they keep talking about Hamas, Hamas, it's like, there are about 20,000 before, like 15 months ago, there were, let's say, 20,000 Hamas soldiers or whatever you want to call them. I don't know how many there are now, but it's a war against women and children, essentially. 70% of the population are women and children. And literally when you drive around Gaza, you just see children. Like that's the thing you're struck in, just rubble and children. And you're wondering like where is this Hamas? And I'm sure they're there, but you just don't and children. And you're wondering like, where is this, you know, Hamas? And I'm sure they're there, but you just don't see them. Um, so I tell everybody to keep the faith and,

uh, you know, we'll, we'll make a change one of these days. We'll see. Ahmed Khan. Um, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks, Ryan. Thanks, Emily. All right. Well, that'll, that'll do it for us today. Thanks, everybody. Also, thank you, everybody, for the kind words over the last couple of weeks. It's really meant a lot to me and my family. I'll keep you updated as we continue on that front. Emily, anything else? No. Your family is amazing and all the Breaking points subscribers and viewers are amazing so thank you to everybody thank you for supporting us into another year and we'll see you back here soon

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