Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 5/27/25: Trump Backs Israel Ceasefire Lies, Former PM Admits Israel War Crimes, Fake AI News Floods Internet

Episode Date: May 27, 2025

Krystal discusses Trump backs Israel ceasefire lies, former Israeli PM admits war crimes, fake AI news clips flood internet.   Majority Report: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-3jIAlnQmbbVMV6gR7K8aQ Aaron Bastani: https://www.amazon.com/Fully-Automated-Luxury-Communism-Bastani/dp/1786632624   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. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. But there were some dark truths behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. Enter Camp Shame, an eight-part series examining the rise and fall of Camp Shane and the culture that fueled its decades-long success. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus.

So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. DNA test proves he is not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father? and subscribe today. his irresponsible son, but I have DNA proof that could get the money back. Hold up. They could lose their family and millions of dollars? Yep. Find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. I'm also the girl behind Boy Sober, the movement that exploded in 2024.

You might hear that term and think it's about celibacy, but to me, Boy Sober is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's flexible, it's customizable, and it's a personal process. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it.

Listen to VoiceOver 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,

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This is a young girl who is wandering through the flames and the wreckage after a school turned shelter was bombed by Israel in a mass casualty murder slaughterhouse event in Gaza. Dozens were killed in this school strike, I believe 36 were killed here. And at least 52 people overall in the Gaza Strip were killed on Monday alone, just on Monday. You can see people grabbing buckets of water here and trying to put out the flames. I will tell you that little girl did escape. I saw an interview with her. She escaped, but her mom and all of her sisters i think five sisters were killed and her dad is in the icu so um that's the fallout of just this one horrific strike on the school turned shelter um at the same

time i don't know if you've watched emma some of the coverage of trey yanks over on fox news which appears to be he's he's always been a little bit critical and he's been very courageous in speaking out on behalf of Palestinian journalists, which I've really appreciated. But he's now produced multiple reports out of Gaza that are quite searing and, you know, quite significant, given the audience that they are going out to there on Fox News. He in particular did a piece on this doctor, female doctor, whose children were all except one and there were nine of them who were killed in an airstrike. And so he brought this piece to the Fox News audience. Let's go ahead and take a listen to a little bit of that.

Inside Gaza, the death toll is mounting. Over the weekend, a single Israeli strike killed nine children from the Al-Najjar family. New video shows first responders at the site of the strike in the city of Han Yunis. Many of the images too graphic to show as the charred bodies of young Palestinians are pulled from the rubble. At Nasser Hospital, their mother, a doctor, received the remains, identifying each child as she wept. She said, this is Rivel. Give her to me. Look at her instinct as a mother, as if her daughter was still alive. She asked to hold her in her arms. She's a pediatrician. See the subconscious reaction. She wanted to embrace her daughter,

forgetting that her daughter was burnt in front of her eyes. With the war grinding on, we do know mediators in both Doha and Cairo are going to still try and reach a ceasefire agreement. But with those ground operations ongoing, it may be difficult. It's just absolutely unimaginable. Like, it's literally unimaginable. You're there at a hospital trying to do your job, and the bodies of your medical personnel by Israel. That's right. Right, which was when there were, I think, over a dozen first responders who were zip-tied, hands behind their back, and basically shot and then covered in mass graves. And the Israelis initially tried to deny it.

Then there was footage that came out that Yanks put to the fore in that report, which contradicted it, as did other outlets. And, I mean, it's amazing to me that they even kind of bother with the excuses at this point, right? They've almost moved away from it entirely. Um, like you have, uh, Ben Gavir basically openly saying we're targeting civilians. Um, this is the purpose of what we're doing here. It, it, it, these are the kinds of things that, uh, it's just a new atrocity every day. And last week, I'm sure you covered this a little bit too, Crystal, the reaction to Miss Rachel having that girl with the double amputee girl on her show.

Rahaf. Yeah, Rahaf showing her the joy that she had on her face when Miss Rachel was singing and she got to meet her in person was so deeply moving to me and heartbreaking because you see that little girl engulfed in fire. Thankfully, she's OK, but her whole family is dead. And you think about the level of trauma that that child has to endure. And then you see that video with Miss Rachel and how that for a moment, she smiles and laughs, even though she can't really stand up anymore because she's still getting used to her prosthetic legs. How many tens of thousands of Palestinian children who don't know any better are their lives are being completely destroyed, whether it be by trauma or whether it be by maiming, because this genocide continues unabated and because the United States is complicit in it. And so back to the Trump policy on this. Yes, I'm happy that they have been speaking directly to Hamas and they conducted these negotiations around the Israelis. But does

that mean that they're also going to restrict arms to Israel? We have not seen that happen. And that is the number one thing that needs to happen to stop this slaughter. We said this under the Biden administration. We have to say it under the Trump administration. That's right. And we can put D4 up on the screen to your point, Emma, that, you know, there was direct talks between U.S. delegation and Hamas. Jeremy Scalon drops. I really could cannot recommend their reporting more. They're always ahead and always more accurate than the mainstream sources. And basically, the TLDR here is that Hamas and US had some level of understanding agreement on a ceasefire deal. And then Israel

came in and said no, and you know, they don't want the war to end. And then rather than the Trump administration calling out Israel as the obstacle to some sort of a ceasefire deal here, instead, they threw Hamas, you know, they said Hamas was the obstacle and took Israel aside once again. So it's like, okay, well, then, you know, we're just seeing the same patterns play out as we did under the Biden administration of these secret leaks about, oh, they're really frustrated. And oh, we had a tough conversation with BB and oh, they're really upset, blah, blah, blah. And oh, Trump wants the war to end. If you are still sending the bombs, you don't want the war to end. It's really that simple. Like until I see you say and do, okay, we're cutting off all weapons. We are not supporting

and funding this anymore and by the way if an american president whether it was biden or now trump called bb and said we're cutting off the weapons that's it you're done guess what they would be done yes we do have that level of power and control that is the reality of the situation and so until that, then we are still funding, supporting, providing diplomatic cover for the most horrific atrocity of our time. And it's not even close. I mean, this it truly is. It's a moral issue of our time. And you're right at this point. If you are an American taxpayer who's even semi-aware of what's going on and you aren't thinking about this every day and speaking, so doing something.

Like, it is a moral failing at this point. It is a moral failing at this point, given the, just thinking about the children alone that have been murdered, starved, bombed, amputees, maimed, traumatized. None of these kids will ever be the same after living through this. And there's been polling that has showed this overwhelming majority of Israelis support Donald Trump's plan to purely ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip and move the however many Palestinians remain. You know, you hear Trump and other people kind of sometimes slip up and say figures that indicate what is likely that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have actually been killed. The figure that's being circulated in the mainstream press, I think, almost borders on lies and misinformation. So I don't even like to use it

because of how inadequate it is. But when you see that kind of polling, this is just an indication that this is not going to come from inside Israel. This has to be like South Africa. Sorry? It has to be imposed by us from the outside. Imposed. Exactly. I mean, and it's an even more extreme situation given the level of slaughter of the genocide that we're seeing in South Africa.'s incursion into that area and its increasing sphere of influence. But they're doing it by things like, okay, helping build infrastructure in the continent of Africa, or by negotiating, setting up a brokering a deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia to stop the blockade and slaughter in Yemen, which I still think gets under not discussed enough because that was actually a positive diplomatic, uh, negotiation that was brokered by China around the United States.

And so the U S is most, that's how I think foreign policy has to be viewed in the middle East right now, which is they're trying to create a bulwark against China and they're doing it by supporting a wholesale slaughter of an indigenous population. Emma Vigeland, thank you so much for hanging out with me this morning. It's always a pleasure to see you and hear your brilliance. Thanks so much, Crystal. Yeah, and tell us anything you want to plug, tell people where they can go and watch the show and all that good stuff. Sure. I'm the co-host of a show called The Majority Report. We're live every weekday, noon, Eastern. You can find us on The Majority Report, youtube.com slash samcedar.

And check us out today if you have the time. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight-loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and re-examining the culture of fat phobia that enabled a flawed system to

continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. DNA test proves he is not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father? Well, Sam, luckily it's your not the father week on the OK Storytime podcast. So we'll find out soon. This author writes, my father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son, even though it was promised to us. Now I find out he's trying to give it to his irresponsible son instead. But I have DNA proof that could get the money back. Hold up. So

what are they going to do to get those millions back? That's so unfair. Well, the author writes that her husband found out the truth from a DNA test they were gifted two years ago. Scandalous. But the kids kept their mom's secret that whole time. Oh my God. And the real kicker, the author wants to reveal this terrible secret,

even if that means destroying her husband's family in the process. So do they get the millions of dollars back, or does she keep the family's terrible secret? Well, to hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever thought about going voiceover?

I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind VoiceOver, the movement that exploded in 2024. VoiceOver is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal,

and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high.

And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to Boy Sober on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Emma there just mentioned the

extremism that has become pervasive throughout Israeli society, and I've got two particular examples. I'm also going to show you the poll that she referenced as well of where you might see just outright genocidal sentiments expressed. We have a woman here speaking about how you must destroy the offspring of Palestinians. Far right Israelis storming through Jerusalem, chanting death to Arabs and also harassing and assaulting any random Palestinians that they happen to encounter. Let's go ahead and take a look at both of those things.

When there is a war, it doesn't matter who your enemy is. You need to destroy their offspring to prevent them from creating more offspring. And by the way, that is an annual event, the racist mob violent assault march through Jerusalem. And, you know, maybe you think, oh, maybe these are just the, maybe this is just the fringe of Israeli society. First of all, note whether you saw any Israeli politicians condemning these genocidal chants and violent actions. Second of all, take a look at this poll that just came out asking Israelis, specifically Israeli Jews, how they feel about various actions vis-a-vis Palestinians. So you've

got 82%, according to this Penn State University poll, 82% who support ethnic cleansing of Gazans, that would be the Trump plan. Solid majority, 56%, support ethnic cleansing of what they call Israeli Arabs, which are Palestinians who live within Israel. And nearly half, 47 percent, support killing all Gazans in cities captured by the IDF. So when Emma was saying, you know, this is not going to come organically from within Israel, even though I really want to praise, you know, there were some brave Israelis who were putting themselves between the racist mob in Jerusalem and Palestinians. There was also a march that said Palestinian Lives Matter recently to the Gaza border. I want to praise those courageous individuals, but we have to acknowledge that the majority of this society, majority of the citizens,

especially Israeli Jews of this society, have been gripped by a genocidal fever. And the only way this war comes to an end is from the U.S. taking action and imposing some sort of peace and ultimately some sort of peace and ultimately some sort of political settlement, you know, on Israelis and, you know, to uphold the rights of Palestinians. Could put this next piece up on the screen.

There have been some indications that most of the world is starting to realize the way that the genocide in Gaza is going to be viewed by history. And this came from a very surprising place. So the Israelis have been trying to push forward this quote-unquote aid plan, which effectively amounts to using aid as a lure to bait people to be ethnically cleansed out of certain areas of Gaza, force them to travel to be able to avoid starvation and then close the door behind them. That's the way Jeremy Scahill was describing it. And they hired to implement this aid plan. They hired this group of American mercenaries and set up this what's called the Gaza Humanitarian

Foundation. By the way, there's a lot of sketchiness going on of where the funding's coming from. Dropside is doing some reporting on that as well. But this guy, Jake Wood, who is this, you know, ex-military, effectively like mercenary who was hired to run this quote unquote aid effort, he has resigned as executive director of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation that has really planned for aid distribution in Gaza that bypasses established NGO and UN channels. According to a drop site, quote, Wood cites an inability to implement an independent aid delivery plan without violating core humanitarian principles as the reason for his departure. In a statement shared by CNN's Jeremy Diamond, Wood said he was horrified and heartbroken by the hunger crisis in Gaza and had sought to build a neutral, secure mechanism to get food to civilians. But he concluded GHF could not maintain humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence under current conditions. He urged Israel to significantly expand the provision

of aid into Gaza through all mechanisms and urged all stakeholders to pursue innovative new methods for the delivery of aid without delay, diversion, or discrimination. So their plan was so unethical that even this American private military contractor mercenary guy was like, I don't want to be associated with this and resigned as executive director. Now the foundation still exists. Someone else took his slot. They are still moving forward. Last I saw too, by the way, it doesn't look like aid trucks are getting into Gaza at all. People are still starving to death. Images of emaciated children at the hospital are absolutely horrifying. We know that dozens have already died of hunger, starvation because of this. And, you know, this is the plan that they're

moving forward with is using food as a weapon of war to effectuate their ultimate plan of ethnic cleansing. Here's another very noteworthy person who is objecting to the war crimes that are being committed by Israel. So Ehud Olmert, who is a former Israeli prime minister, put this next one up on the screen. He wrote an op-ed accusing Israel of war crimes, saying in part, what we are doing in Gaza is a war of extermination, indiscriminate, unrestrained, brutal, and criminal killing of civilians, a policy dictated knowingly, intentionally, viciously, and maliciously by the government. Yes, we are committing war crimes. And, you know, this guy is a war criminal himself, by the way. He was Israeli prime minister during a brutal operation

Cass led. So this is no like lib hippie squish. This is also a war criminal who even for him, he's like, okay, this is just undeniable that it's not a few rogue actions taken by undisciplined. I don't know if you guys remember at the beginning of Israel's assault on Gaza, you were told, oh, these are just rogue actions here or there. If guidelines aren't followed, these soldiers are just being undisciplined.

And there was all sort of media commentary of like, when are they going to take the phones and make sure they stop posting these things on Instagram? No, this is not rogue actions of this or that IDF soldier. This is a government policy of extermination and war crimes. And even a former Israeli prime minister can no longer deny that fact. This one is also wild. Put this last one up on the screen. So the chancellor of Germany, Murs, blasts Israeli offensive in Gaza. Frankly speaking, I no longer understand what the goal of the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip is, he said in an interview aired on public television. To harm the civilian population

to such an extent as has increasingly been the case in recent days can no longer be justified as a fight against Hamas terrorism. So if you have been tracking any of the actions of Germany, they have been brutal and crushing any sort of pro-Palestinian dissent within their own country. Germany, because of their own history of perpetrating the Holocaust, self-genocide against Jewish people, has been, you know, steadfast in wanting to always back up Israel as a sort of atonement. The irony, of course, now being that Israel is committing a genocide. So if you want to say never again, that should obviously apply to any group of people, even an ethnic group that was previously themselves

subject to the most horrific and barbaric, you know, mass killing that you can possibly imagine. So when even Germany, when even the German chancellor feels the need to come out and say, you know what, this is too far, even for me. That is really pretty wild. And we've covered before some of the statements from Canada, from the EU.

You know, there seems from Piers Morgan, from Theo Vaughn, there seems to have been a sort of dam that was broken with regard to i wouldn't say with regard to an increase in morality but i think it's just become undeniable when you see these you know this collective starvation when you see the bombing of the rubble when you hear israeli politicians just go completely mask off and say yeah we you know they you know, they're doing my plan now, Smotrich says, of bombing civilian infrastructure. When you hear them talking openly about ethnic cleansing, when you hear them saying openly, Smotrich in particular saying openly, and Netanyahu as well, that the aid is just a cover to allow them to continue their total war and their, to forcibly relocate the population, it becomes undeniable what the judgment of history is ultimately going to be. Now, the question, of course, the only question that really matters isn't whether these people will be able to cover their asses in the judgment of history or not. The only question that really matters is whether or not lives are going to be saved, whether or not there's going to be some sort of ceasefire and political solution that ends the slaughter and the abuse of Palestinian people.

And unfortunately, really only the U.S. president can effectuate that outcome at this point. And what we've seen from Trump has been really a continuation of the Biden BB bear hug strategy, where occasionally he'll say, oh, you know, oh, I'm frustrated to Axios is Brock Ravid. But, you know, they still ship the weapons, they still provide the diplomatic cover. They still use this, you know, this onslaught as well as a justification for stripping our own rights here in the US. We haven't seen anything recently that would be encouraging from the Trump administration. So even as the dam breaks worldwide, and even as I feel confident that in the history books, when people look back, they'll be horrified that this wasn't stopped. They will want to know who said what and who provided the, you know, the propaganda cover for these crimes to be

committed out in the open, announced to the world, justified and celebrated by many publicly with all of the means and the methods, you know, described. Even though I feel confident that will be the judgment of history, it remains to be seen how many Palestinian lives can be saved before that ultimate judgment occurs. All right, guys, the great guests coming up. I'm really looking forward to speaking with Aaron Bassani who wrote a book called Fully Automated Luxury Communism,

which is very mind expanding. It's very like, it's this sort of techno optimist take from the left on the possibilities of AI. If we had a society structure to make sure that the benefits of not just AI, but all sort of like bleeding edge technological developments, if those benefits were actually widely shared, of course, we know we don't live in that society. So I wanted to talk to Aaron about what he makes of some of the latest AI developments. Let's go ahead and get to that. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society

obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and reexamining the culture of fatphobia

that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. DNA test proves he is not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father?

Well, Sam, luckily it's your Not the Father Week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This author writes, My father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son, even though it was promised to us. Now I find out he's trying to give it to his irresponsible son instead, but I have DNA proof that could get the money back. Hold up. So what are they going to do to get those millions back?

That's so unfair. Well, the author writes that her husband found out the truth from a DNA test they were gifted two years ago. Scandalous. But the kids kept their mom's secret that whole time. Oh my God. And the real kicker, the author wants to reveal this terrible secret, even if that means destroying her husband's family in the process.

So do they get the millions of dollars back, or does she keep the family's terrible secret? Well, to hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. Voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships.

It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves.

Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There have been a bunch of wild developments in AI technology, which seems to be moving extremely rapidly, even more rapidly than some of the most optimistic prognosticators had anticipated. And so to break down what this means for the world going forward, we're lucky to be joined by Aaron Bassani, who's the co-founder of Navarra Media and wrote an excellent book that I really recommend to everyone. Put this up on the screen. Titled, Fully Automated Luxury

Communism. Aaron, great to have you. It's a pleasure to be with you, Crystal. So the reason I wanted to talk to you is because I told you I read your book before and I just reread it now because it felt timely and appropriate given the AI shift. And it really takes a sort of lefty techno-optimist perspective, arguing effectively that these technologies can be used to transform all of our lives in a way that is fully positive. And to use, you know, a term that you use in the book, and then there's also apparently the term of the moment, can create abundance for really everyone and completely transform the way that we relate to work and undermine the power of these capitalists, et cetera. But obviously, that would require a dramatic rethinking of the current social contract. And so I just wanted to

get some of your thoughts on, you know, how you're viewing this rapid AI development. Do you think it's a hopeful sign or are you concerned, you know, as many people are, that as we're sort of barreling towards the possible cliff of AGI and, you know, workforce displacement, et cetera, we really haven't grappled either in the UK or here in the US with the consequences and what the fallen is going to be and the way we need to radically reorient our societies if this is going to be beneficial for all but a small handful of people. So I'll start there with your final point there, Crystal, which is that right now, where we're headed in terms of trajectories is a very good place to be for a tiny portion of people. The best part of a decade ago now, Mark Cuban, of course, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, a dude on Shark Tank, I think,

your version of Dragon's Den over there in the States, he speculated the world's first trillionaire would be in the field of artificial intelligence as it captures value across white-collar industries like accountancy, legal services, medical services, all kinds of support work in things like planning, architecture, database management, payroll, everything, everything that, you know,

we were told if you study hard, go to university and get a decent degree, you'll have a stable job in that industry. Mark Cuban said all that value is going to be captured by AI. First people there with first mover advantage, the meta, the alphabet of AI is going to get all that. And those people, the Zuckerbergs and the Bezelses of that industry will be trillionaires.

There's a reason why there's a ton of people in this race right now. So that's where we could be headed. A few things, though, going back to what you started with and things I got wrong. Firstly, remember, this book, I think it was published in 2018 in England. I was writing it really from 2016 to 2018. I did not think we would be where we are now. You had the recent AI report. In terms of the pace of technological change you're talking about?

100%, I didn't think that now. And that's with regards to things like machine learning, the stuff you're seeing with generative AI. It's also the case with the human-like robots you're now seeing, particularly in places like China. I also didn't think that China's electric vehicle industry would be anything like as powerful as it is. Obviously, the book isn't just about AI and robotics. It's about renewable energy. It's about, you know, off-world asteroid mining, etc., etc. Pretty much on every count,

I didn't expect us to be this far advanced. And so those questions that I raise in the book are actually far more salient in 2025 than I thought they would be. Finally, and it's again something I overlooked, I kind of regret overlooking it, is the role played, Crystal, of geopolitics and great power politics. This rivalry between the US and China is clearly what is going to drive forward AI, technological change. And it's one of the reasons now being given by people as to why we shouldn't have guardrails. If the US has guardrails, well, then China's going to develop something really powerful and leave us behind. And the exact same conversations are happening in China. So lots of big questions.

And, you know, I thought we would have maybe 20, 25 years before they were relevant. But I think before the end of this decade, Crystal, there's stuff for the left, progressives, basically anybody who cares about the future of society needs to get on top of, not just intellectually, but actually with a policy response. So let's take a look at some of the indications of that rapid development, focusing in sort of on AI. There have been a bunch of these. There's a new product out. I don't remember what it's called.

That would have been helpful. But it allows you to create these video clips with simple prompts that are indistinguishable from reality. And people have been sharing these around, these like fake newscaster clips. Let's go ahead and take a look at a couple of those. In shocking news, JK Rowling's yacht sank with her on board after being attacked by orcas off the coast of Turkey. Breaking news, a Scottish fold cat named Big White has led an army of felines to seize Buckingham Palace, declaring itself the new King of Britain. Those are shockingly realistic, even if the content is a little preposterous. You also have a couple of troubling indications.

And there's been research to this effect already that some of these chatbots already engage in scheming to try to avoid having their priorities changed or avoid shutting down. There was this bizarre situation I'm sure you followed with Grok deciding to talk all about South Africa and white, quote, unquote, white genocide and kill the boar, which was in some ways, you know, different from what it's humans. In some ways, it was consistent with what the humans wanted it to do, but it was in some ways different as well. We can put, though, E3 up on the screen. Chat GPT ignored an explicit instruction to switch off in some tests that were being run. We can put the next one up on the screen, which is really wild. There was a test that was done with the Amazon backed AI model where it, in order to again, avoid being shut down, it tried to blackmail an engineer about not a real affair, but they'd given it access to these emails that indicated

that an engineer was having an affair and tried to blackmail this person with the affair to try to keep from getting shut down. I mean, it's funny, but it's also terrifying because we're only at this level of development. It makes you wonder, it seems like already humans don't have total control over these things. It makes you wonder when we get to that next stage of development, you know, how sort of autonomous and out of the hands of the human developers, these technologies are going to be. That's entirely right. The report I referred to a few moments ago, AI 2027, you know, speculates the Q3 2027. So a little bit over two years from now,

you will start to see the full automation of research units within big artificial intelligence companies, which is to say AI will be building the AI, at which point we may see, this is pure speculation, we may see a J curve with regards to the computational power, the problem-solving ability of artificial intelligence. Now, what I've seen in terms of people criticizing that, pushing it back, is, oh, that's far too soon.

That won't happen in two years' time. Well, even if you think it's going to happen in 10 years' time, that's not a particularly good rebuttal. Even if you think it's 20 years' time, I don't think that's a particularly good response. But it could happen within two years' time. And I think we should politically respond in such a manner as to presume that it's very soon, it's very imminent.

And there's a few ways to look at this. So on the one hand, you might get an AGI, of course, right? You might get something which sounds like the Matrix or Skynet. Park that for a moment. Because I think almost the conversation about an existential threat masks the far more likely and far more pernicious impacts of this stuff. Park that for a moment. If you do get a business, a private corporate entity with AI that can augment its own intelligence to such an extent that all of a sudden you have just overwhelming superiority in pretty much every field of affairs, every industry, imagine the value capture that's available to that company. It would be like a business discovering the steam engine and having patent rights so nobody else can get it.

Of course, that happened in the 19th, 18th century, rather, with Watt and Bolton. But it was a very different, there wasn't a global market, there wasn't patent law like there is now necessarily. You would see something like the steam engine competing against the horse and cart in every major global industry really quickly. You would not want a single firm to have that kind of monopoly.

You wouldn't want that kind of oligopoly either. And I think the far more pernicious threat rather than an AGI is basically what we've seen with big tech over the last 20, 25 years. Look what Amazon's done to your high street, okay? Look what Meta and Alphabet have done to kids' attention spans.

Look what it's done to reported self-harm with regards to teenagers, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. All these social harms from big tech, negative externalities, you know, high streets in this country, Crystal, they're destroyed because all that value has been captured by these really powerful global corporations in the United States.

I would say 5x that, right? Yeah. And that's the best case scenario. That's not the AGI scenario. That's the better case scenario. And I almost feel that people like Sam Altman, Elon Musk want to talk about AGI so we don't talk about the wealth inequality,

the regional inequality, the global inequality. Because the only two countries in this race are China and the US. The only two countries. The European Union is not at the races. None of the Global South is at the races. And so that, to me, is the big conversation. Even if you think AGI is not at the races. None of the global South is at the races. And so that to me is the big conversation. Even if you think AGI is not plausible,

this is still a massive political challenge. Yeah. No, that's absolutely right. And to your point, some of the consequences may already be here. We can put E5 up on the screen. There was an article in the New York Times. I'm a LinkedIn executive.

I see the bottom rung of the career ladder breaking. And, you know, it makes sense that the type of work that new college grads tend to do, sort of like entry-level office, white-collar jobs, that that would be the first place that you really spot an impact. So in particular, college grad unemployment is at 30% here in the US, which is quite high. We also see a huge spike in applications to law school, which is also, it tends to be a recession indicator because people feel like, oh, you know, I don't want to go out in the job market now. So let me just continue my schooling. But it also could be an

indicator here of, you know, people realizing those entry level desk jobs where you're doing spreadsheet analysis or you're, you know, when you're coming out of law school be the first things to go where maybe instead of hiring 20 new fresh on a law school students, maybe you hire five and give them chat GPT to do your first right of, you know, whatever you're drafting. So in some ways, it seems that the pernicious effects are already starting to show up. You know, Aaron, what are what are some of the areas where you think we should be sort of most, if we're thinking about triaging this situation, what are some of the areas that you think we should focus on most immediately?

Well, I think you've hit the nail on the head there. So with the emergence of general purpose robotics and manufacturing, you know, we saw white collar communities be destroyed basically over the last 35, 40 years, particularly in the UK, also the US, much of Western Europe. Many of those jobs went abroad,

as people like Donald Trump like to talk about, but many, many, many more were automated. I think we're going to see something similar with regards to machine learning and white collar jobs, like you say. They won't be replaced, just like, you know, we still manufacture cars here in the UK with a far higher productivity per person per hour worked,

there's far fewer people doing the work. I think something similar is going to happen to these kinds of jobs. And I think the first implication that you should draw out of that is a political one. Peter Turchin did a great book a few years ago, and he talked about this idea of elite overproduction. And I do think that when automation deprives lots of ambitious, often moderate to highly intelligent young people

of a career that they expected, they've put themselves in a ton of debt. They feel that they've played by the rules. They've done everything that was asked of them. And then they're still back at square one. And you have the elite overproduction and they think, well, I should be a part of the body politic, I should be a part of

the body politic, I should be playing a role, I should have an impact on public life like anybody else. These are people who believe in the idea of citizenship and shaping politics and having agency. You know, that's generally how the middle class conceive of themselves. If you see those people all of a sudden being annihilated by the jobs market, I think that's going to create all kinds of really weird political outgrowths. And I think actually, if you look at, for instance, Europe right now

with the growth of the far right, there's a cliche in places like England that older people tended to vote for Brexit, which is true. Older people tended to be more right-wing in this country. That's true. But if you look at Italy, the Netherlands, France, these are countries where actually the younger you are, the more likely you are to vote for the far right.

I wonder if within that set of circumstances, immigration, stagnating living standards, you know, all the things that were already there, I feel like if you throw into that job losses for middle class people who may just have had otherwise moderate politics, I wonder what happens. And it feels like a bit of a tinderbox over the next 10 to 15 years. I think you'll have many of those people go to the radical left. I think you'll also have many of those people go

to the radical right, identity politics of white supremacism, white nationalism, you know, euro nationalism, etc. And so that to me is the big thing that happens next, Crystal, because we're in the game of politics and analysis, but also persuasion. And that's something I'm really worried about, is that the young guys today who are going to go work for McKinsey or for Deloitte or Magic Circle law firm, that's all taken away from them

and they get highly politicized. They become proletarianized, downwardly mobile, and they break to the right. I think that's politically very, very concerning over the next decade or two. And so as a leftist, how do you think about that? And how do you think about the program that should be offered to combat that? Because I think it's abundantly clear that neoliberalism does not offer anything approaching an adequate solution to the problems of today, let alone the problems of tomorrow. Yeah, well, I think, you know, we're going to have the right analysis on this.

And like you say, the next question is, well, what's the propositional response? Right now, the nativist right will say to these young people who've just lost everything, maybe I'm being a bit dramatic because they still have wealthy parents, they still inherit some wealth, but they certainly won't be as wealthy as their parents were,

generally speaking. The response should be, if you want a future, if you want to be part of a constructive political project, if you want to be somebody, if you want to be part of something bigger than you, then only the left can provide that. And I do think that's going to be tied up with a word that's now en vogue in the US, Crystal, which is abundance. i do think that's going to be tied up with a word that's now en vogue in the u.s crystal which is abundance i do think that's going to be tied up by that agenda you can have a future of scarcity or you can have a future of abundance scarcity and this doesn't mean you have to adopt open borders as a leftist i'm not saying that but the emphasis on excluding others only constructing a society where we all look and

sound the same, I think if you look at the political economy of that project on the nativist, you know, white supremacist right, I think going hand in hand with that is no real political, technological answer to the stuff we've just talked about, AI, machine learning, etc. Who owns these? Who benefits from these? Because ultimately, these are extraordinary tools. They have the ability to either create the world's first trillionaire, as I said, predicted by Mark Cuban. Or we can have free, publicly available, universal access to high speed rail and buses within 10 to 15 years. Why not? And I think that has to be the agenda that

we offer. But I think what's interesting for me, and again, it's something I got wrong, is I feel like the future will have aspects of the past. And I didn't really understand this when I wrote the book, but I feel like we're going to see a re-emergence of 19th century politics, territorial annexation, ethnic identity politics, et cetera. That's going to go hand in hand with some really advanced, hyper-advanced technologies. And that's what makes the situation so hard to read.

And a good, you were kind enough to sort of invite me here because you read my book. A good book, a good novel to think of this all through is the book Dune, I think which offers a really interesting prism. On the one hand, you have hyper-advanced technologies accompanying, effectively, a quasi-feudal political order. And, you know, we always presume that technological advance

will go hand in hand with, you know, social, political advance, or at least be linear progression. Right. I suspect we may start to see that sort of disconnecting. You know, we might see societies moving away from equality under the law back towards feudal kind of,

feudal social ties combined with artificial intelligence. I know I might sound a bit crazy here, but I think that's the political project at hand, I think. I think anyone who's really paying attention already sees the signs of that. You know, Naomi Klein, who actually came up earlier in the show, and I was talking to Emma Vigeland, she talks about this prepper mentality, but at the nation state level, where you're, you know, and you see it in the US with Trump, you Trump. We're going to take Greenland. We're going to take Gaza. We're going to take Panama.

We're going to do this exploitative, colonial-style minerals deal with Ukraine where it's, okay, we're not pretending that we care about democracy and human rights anymore, except when it comes apparently to white people in South Africa. That's all out the window. But we are going to do old school territorial acquisition and imperialism. I mean, he models himself after William McKinley, who was like a turn of the century president and who was the first to sort of expand the US empire. He talks about manifest destiny. And it really is this like prepper mentality,

except applied to an entire nation. And then, of course, Curtis Yarvin, who's been intellectually influential with this administration, especially with like the tech, but Peter Thiel's and those people, and J.D. Vance, Elon Musk within the administration, you know, they, he explicitly argues for a techno-feudalist future and peter teal has funded some of these techno-feudalist societies um as little you know trial runs on what that could look like so i i don't think it i think if you're paying attention to those things you already see the signs of the direction that you're um that you're predicting here well i'm glad you i'm glad you agree. But, you know, if you listen to people in legacy media, most mainstream analysis, although it's slightly changing, they think that stuff is for the birds.

But I couldn't agree more. Take Trump, for instance, with this, his enthusiasm to have Afrikaner migrants, refugees come to the United States. You can almost see, and look, I don't know. I don't know Donald Trump. I've never met the man. I'm certainly not, I'm not in the habit of ventriloquizing

why people are doing things and what they might say to excuse their actions. But you can almost see Trump and the people around him saying, well, look, it's good European Afrikaner stock. You know, I don't know if you watch Rugby Crystal, but, you know, the South Africa team, they have lots of big Afrikaners, six foot 10, 230 kilos. That's what they have at the moment.

A good white European stock comes to the US. And like you say, it's a mindset that sounds like something from 150, 200 years ago. But I feel like that's the world we're moving towards. And you have right now, and who knows, right? It's a very volatile political coalition that Trump has. But you have this extraordinary political coalition that includes people like that.

And at the same time, you know, people like Thiel, multi-billionaires, very, very powerful people who are at the forefront of technological innovation in the United States. But, of course, the big question is, is the United States going to remain at the forefront of global technological innovation? Because the other player in this whole story

is the Chinese Communist Party. And for better or worse, they have a very different model with regards to politics. Implicitly, I think, has a critique of capitalism. It's a market society. But the politics of that society is not determined by big C capital. It's very different.

It actually has a national interest at its heart and a people's interest at its heart that I think is fundamentally different to the United States and to European countries. So that to me is the intriguing conflict of the next several decades as we move, I think, towards AGI is what is that technology going to be programmed with?

What's the social software that's going to accompany it? I don't think it's going to be the sort of liberal mores of the 20th century. I just don't think that's going to happen. I think we're seeing the end of the post-Second World War socially liberal order. It's over. And the question is, what's it going to be replaced by? I think the left has hindered itself by repeatedly, well, for at least 15 years,

by repeatedly tying itself to a failing, collapsing liberal social order. We have to understand that if we continue to do that, in the West at least, certainly in the Anglophone countries, there'll only be one game in town, which is the right. And again, that might sound, you know, hyperbolic. You're seeing signals of it now. You know, I think particularly with young men, this is what really alarms me. I think if the next five years are like the last five years, you're almost looking at a hegemonic politics of extremism amongst younger men. And that should really worry people, I think.

Last question for you, Aaron, before I let you go. I really appreciate you taking the time. You're very insightful to get your thoughts on this. If you were advising a presidential candidate in 2028 and put aside actually what the polls would say, but just think in terms of the right policy, would you advocate for a freeze on AI development? Would you advocate for the government basically like buying and nationalizing these technologies?

Like, what do you think is the correct direction at this point? I suppose if you had something of a freeze on it, the American deep state would get rid of you quite sharpish, right? I don't know. I don't really believe in the American deep state anymore. I feel like they would have taken out Trump long ago. The bond market, that's the real deep state, I think. True. No, you are right. That's true. But, you know, I think there's a very real possibility that China, if you did put the guardrail, and this is something which people who I don't like politically, this is something they're saying, which is probably true, that if you didn't put guardrails on this stuff,

I'm sorry, if you did put guardrails on this stuff in the United States and the Chinese develop it, you are at a massive disadvantage. I think that's true. So you have a couple of options, right? You work together to put guardrails on it. That would be my priority. Work with China to put guardrails.

Yeah. 100%. Short of that, and if China's, you know, short of that, my policy would be my priority is a global compact. Work with China to put guardrails. Yeah. 100%. Short of that, and if China's short of that, my policy would be that the US government should have equity shares in any major company with a market cap above a certain amount, developing AI. The United States government, the federal government has to have a 5% equity stake in that business. We have to have people on your board. Sorry, it's just too important. That might sound quite radical quite extreme that's still a market economy right you still got private businesses but the point is people representing the body politic the american citizen writ large they'll be

reflecting the kinds of decisions that those companies make i mean that's something i would do anyway the french do that by the way. All their big, successful companies, the French government has a nice equity share in them. And it means they're involved. Yeah, so they're involved in those decisions. Now, you can have stupid people in those organizations and they screw those businesses up. That's not good. But you know, the Gulf States seem to do pretty well, right? The Norwegian seems to do pretty well. Their sovereign wealth fund is managed by government officials. They're doing a great job. So, I mean, that would be my one thing would be, you know what, the United States government should have a 5% equity share in Apple, Nvidia, Tesla, you know, Meta, etc, etc. That's probably what I would do. And I'd also say you want domestically produced microprocessors,

which is probably something that Trump gets right. But the policy would be rather different. And again, the business that's doing that which would be a little bit like what the Taiwanese have done over the last 30 years with TSMC that would, I think, have to benefit from public funding and so it should probably be publicly owned. Yeah, I agree with all of that.

I mean, it should not be left to like Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos to decide the future of society, which at least get to have a little bit of a democratic say in in what happens. Because otherwise, you know, regardless of whether you like them or not, no one person should have that level of power. And we know who it would come at the expense of as well. Erin, tell people where they can find you and anything else that you that you want to plug and share with them. And again, I really recommend to people your book because I think it is very I think it's very thought provoking. And I also think sometimes on the left, we can think sort of

small ball in a sense. And so just to read something that was, you know, expansive in its vision was also very mind opening for me. That's very kind. I mean, I do agree with you there. And the people that think big right now are the right, you know, people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, they think big, logistically, but also in terms of their vision. They're thinking really big. You know, they're very serious about their projects.

Peter Thiel is thinking big. You know, this guy funds journals for really obscure, you know, minor French intellectuals because in his mind, he's trying to build something which outlasts him. And I think we on the left should be doing something similar. You know, at Navarro Media, we've been going for more than 10 years now, well, close to 15.

You know, I want this organisation to be here for long after I'm gone. And whether or not that happens is another question. And I think that's what the left needs to do, is think big, think long term. You know, we are people within history. We're people within a movement which was around a long time before us, and hopefully a long time afterwards. And we need to leave it in a much better state than we found it, sitting in the English-speaking world.

In terms of where people can find me, I'm on x.arambastani, I'm on Instagram, that's mostly my family and my dog. In terms of Navarra Media, you can find us on Instagram, x, TikTok, everywhere. YouTube, of course, Just Navarro Media.

We're closing on a million subscribers on YouTube. Let's go. We're trying our best to imitate you guys over there. So if people can subscribe to us as well, then, you know, that's good. Might help us get over the million mark. Amazing. Well, you guys do fantastic work.

So I know you will reach that milestone in no time at all. Erin, thank you so much. I hope you'll come back. All right, guys, that does it for us. Thank you so much for watching today. Ryan and Emily will be in tomorrow. Thank you for bearing with whatever's going on with my face. I also, if my brain seemed a little bit out of it today,

my cat was missing for a while. She has now returned. I was very freaked out and worried about that. But Kitty is back. My face will be fine. Thank you guys for watching. And I will see you on Thursday. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight-loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results.

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