Chapo Trap House - 856 - Bear Market feat. Jeff Stein (8/5/24)

Episode Date: August 6, 2024

The Washington Post’s Jeff Stein stops by to discuss his extensive new piece investigating the ever-ballooning U.S. international sanctions regime. Despite Biden recently bragging he’s leaving office with the U.S. not involved in any foreign conflicts, the U.S. now has sanctions in place in over a third of all nations around the world, including more than 60% of “developing” nations. Jeff walks us through this increasingly central policy of worldwide economic coercion, how it shapes American imperial aims, and some intended & unintended consequences of the exponential expansion of sanctions in the 21st century. Then, we take a quick look at the state of the Veepstakes, Josh Shapiro’s whole deal, and of course, RFK Jr. and the road-kill bear. Check out Jeff’s sanctions investigation here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2024/us-sanction-countries-work/

All I wanna do is hit the drum. Hello everybody, it's Monday, August 5th, and we've got Chapo coming at you. Joining us on today's show, joining Felix and myself today, is the Washington Post's Jeff Stein, who is here to talk about his new article or beginning of a series of articles about how the US uses the policy of economic sanctions and its effects on the world and the United States. But Jeff, since we got you here, you're an economics reporter. I'd like to kick things off by asking global financial collapse. Is it happening? Is now the right time to launch the Chapo meme coin?

Should our listeners call their brokers? Haha, I kid. None of our listeners have brokers. But seriously, what's going on with the markets today, Jeff? I feel like this is my second Chapo appearance. And the last time I was on there was like another market panic, I'm pretty sure. So I feel like there's probably going to be like an ETF now trading on my like chapter appearances. Like you're causing it.

Every time I'm on. So like I was like last night, I was going to bed last night and they were like, everybody's scared about the Japanese stock market, the Asian markets are cratering. What is what's going on with the market today? Is this does this augur some sort of global economic collapse? Should we start investing in canned food and shotguns? Or what like what's going on right now? Yeah, I mean, I think the main thing that's happened basically

is we got a very weak jobs report relative to what we've been getting. And for like months now, months and months and months, like the left has been yelling at the White House to tell Jay Powell to cut rates because the economy is weakening. But just on the extremely boring mechanics of this, when you have a signal that the economy is slowing down, people take money out of riskier assets

that seem like they're going to not pay a high enough dividend and then they put it in the really safe stuff, you know, like US treasury. So we saw, man, this is too boring for the Chapo audience. No, no, no, no, no. Stick with me. Stick with me. Yes.

We go where they come to our podcast for financial advice. Yeah. The Chapo Bloomberg heads. Uh, they, they basically pulled all the assets out of equities and put them into sort of the safe treasuries. And the like self-fulfilling part of that is that like now across the globe, every stock exchange is seeing people be like, I don't know, like maybe the US is about to slow down. Maybe that means other countries will slow down.

Let me just put it in the safest thing possible. And so then that becomes like a very Self-fulfilling prophecy. I was talking to Someone from the government today who was like, yeah, I just think people are Following everyone else and overreacting and it's like that's true. But it's also probably what someone said in like 1929 You know, like it's not really reassuring if everyone is thinking the same way. So I don't know. This is the kind of thing where it's like people have been texting me all week, like who's the VP pick going to be?

And it's like, I'm not like just like sitting on the answer, just like waiting. You work for the Washington Post. You know where all the money is. You know what the future holds, Jeff. This is what comes with your job. You're for the Washington Post. You know where all the money is. You know what the future holds. Jeff, this is this is what comes with your job. You're behind the veil. You're in the rooms. I know people like why do you work in mainstream media? It would be so much thicker if we got like those things like it would make the trade off makes much more sense to people. Well, we shall see if there's any synchronized swan dives out of windows on Wall Street later this afternoon when the market closes or maybe the markets already closed. I don't know what time does the market close Jeff?

4pm. Okay, so it's already closed. Just finished for the day. Yeah, it's done. All right. The Chappo meme coin we're gonna wait for the we're gonna wait to roll that out until the markets have calmed down. I feel like the thing that I would do if I was like ethically allowed to that it's like surprising to me that more people don't do this is you can make like a good amount of money on predict it Just like looking at the like top political reporters what they tweet about who the pick is gonna be and then Buying I read today. It's like you can make up to 10 grand a year just doing this

Like you don't need the Pelosi ETF. You just have to follow like three reporters in Washington. Well, we're going to get to the Veepstakes in a little bit, but it's probably going to be announced tomorrow. I'll put my marker down now. I will be astonished if it is anyone other than Josh Shapiro, but we'll get into the reasons for that later. But Jeff, the reason we have you on is that you had a very interesting piece in the Washington Post the other week about basically the US led sanctions regime that has...

I'm just going to read the first paragraph of it because it's pretty extraordinary. You and your co-author, Frederica Coca, write, today the United States imposes three times as many sanctions as any other country or international body, targeting a third of all nations with some kind of financial penalty on people, properties, or organization. They have become an almost reflexive weapon in perpetual economic warfare, and their overuse is recognized at the highest levels of government.

But American presidents find this tool increasingly irresistible. So like a third of the world under some form of economic sanction by the United States government is fairly extraordinary. But just like in the simplest terms, to begin this conversation, what are sanctions and how do they work?

Like for instance, if we see in the news that the United States is considering further sanctions on Venezuela or another round of sanctions on Venezuela. What do those sanctions entail and what does it mean for countries that are on the receiving end of them? Yeah, and thank you guys so much for the plug and the intro. I mean, the way sanctions work, it's a little technical, but I actually think it's really important to understand sort of the way this works in practice is basically the US government has assumed virtually unlimited power where if it deems any foreign government, any foreign person, any foreign company, any foreign sector,

it can say, make a determination that that entity is a risk or a threat to the US economy. There's three criteria to the US economy, to the US's national security, or the US's foreign policy, which is an incredibly broad definition. And if the Treasury Department reaches that determination, it can say that it's placing that entity on a list of sanctioned people sanctioned entities That list is now as we report in the story balloon to over 15,000 entities around the world so it's a huge list with all these different governments all these different countries all these different people and companies and interestingly being sanctioned is not being accused of a crime you're not able to

Go to court and say hey you accused me of doing this. In fact, I didn't do it and I'm innocent and here's the evidence why. The US can just sort of unilaterally accuse you of being a sanction, being a threat to one of these three criteria and then you're sanctioned. So what does that mean if you're sanctioned? What it means is that it is now a crime for anyone else essentially to do business with you, to transact with you. And what that essentially means is that you are cut out, excommunicated from the global financial system because to be part of the world economy, you need to have a bank account. And almost every country around the world, with some exceptions, relies on the US dollar system,

the US backed global financial system. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there's really been no alternative to the Western financial system through which the US has its tentacles through the banking system that controls basically, I don't know what the number is, but it's over half, maybe over 75% of the global banks in the world have a nexus with the US. So if you're, you know, in Serbia, for instance, and you're sanctioned, what that means is that your bank to work with you would have to give up working with anyone with a US tie, with anyone with a Western basicallyS. tie, with anyone with a Western basically

backed financial asset or financial system. And so that essentially means that the U.S. can basically cut off your livelihood. It can basically make it impossible for you to open a bank account even if you have nothing really to do with the U.S., even if you're not trading with the U.S. or even if you're not a U.S. citizen, you can, by falling under this US sanctions regime, you are effectively excommunicated from the global financial system, and that can make life impossible for a country,

or a person, or a government. I hope that wasn't too long-winded. No, yeah, that's a very succinct and... Erudite. Yeah, practical definition. I think what people don't quite realize about sanctions is that they're certainly marketed as these things that are geared not just towards governments, but towards specifically the worst individual actors within those governments.

But in practicality, I don't think people realize how impossible it makes life for people living under sanctions Regimes, I mean, I know I've talked about it on the show before but when we did a fundraiser for Palestine in 2021 Just getting money to people in Palestine just you know eight orgs that were not blacklisted that were as uncontroversial as far as financial institutions go was incredibly fucking difficult. It's one thing to be taken out of the U.S. banking system, but what that means in practicality is that you can't use probably like 80% of payment processors that people actually use. It locks you out of PayPal, Venmo,

companies that are owned by PayPal and other concerns. It's really like, I mean, this word has kind of lost meaning but it is sort of like an unpersoning. Yeah, there's ways in which that precise thing that you're talking about Felix is Incredibly counterintuitive. This wasn't in our story I'm working on seeing if it can be in one of our follow-up pieces Our sanctions on Iran for instance have we've had them since the 70s

But only recently we've kind of there's been some more attention to this incredibly perverse situation where Americans basically people from Iran who came here have been trying to get their money out of Iran, right? Let's say let's say you're an Iranian who was born in the US But your grandfather stayed in Iran and then he died and you're trying to inherit your grandfather's assets. It could be a lot of money when you add up the number of Iranians who have come here. But US sanctions mean that it is now a crime for you to work with the Iranian government on getting your family's assets back, which is, you know, maybe not the biggest crisis in the world. But what it means is that the Iranian government is now taking control of these assets.

So it's like U.S. sanctions intended to deprive Iranians, you know, the Iranian government of financial tools and financial assets, are in fact giving them more money because the people in the U.S. can't access their funds. So you're saying an unintended side effect is taking money away from Iranian expats and giving it directly to the Iranian state? I'm starting to see the appeal of this sanctions regime. There's never a story I've worked on where it's like the number of things I found has just gone on.

And I started working on this story over a year ago And I was like, maybe this will be like a quick one offer, you know maybe one or two pieces and I mean I've become kind of obsessed by the whole thing because the number of Of things that it touches around the world. I mean Felix or well you read, you know a third of all countries It's actually a third of all countries. But when you look at the number of poor countries, it's 60 percent of the countries in the developing world. That's over half the country over half in the quote unquote developing world. You think that, like, you know, the official U.S. like State Department line on this is obviously we want to help these countries develop.

But like, what are some of the things that like mark countries in the developing world as a target of US sanctions? And then like as a follow-up on that, obviously like sanctions have been part of the sort of like the statecraft playbook for quite some time. But the interesting thing about your article is you show the exponential growth of the use of sanctions, particularly in a kind of post-Iraq, post-war on terror, like during the Obama presidency. Like you talk about like why is it that 60% of the developing world is under US sanctions when I guess officially we should be trying to help them develop and at the same time what accounts for this exponential growth in the use of sanctions as a tool of sort of, I don't know, enforcing compliance with other countries who are outside the fold

of the US policy. Yeah, I really think it's two main factors. One you just alluded to, right? After the sort of disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan, thousands of American troops dead, trillions of dollars expended, there was a move on both, within both parties, you know, Trump going out there talking about how, you know, at least he didn't support Iraq, unlike Jeb Bush. And obviously with Bernie Sanders in 2016, there was a move on both parties to say that American wars abroad were something that were bad, that, you know, that there was the lack

of domestic political will to send troops overseas. And a lot of people would say, you know, that's a great thing that we've sort of recognized as a country, that there are huge downsides from sending American troops abroad. Simultaneously, you know, after, you know, at the end of the eighties and into the nineties, the collapse of the Soviet Union meant that the entire global banking system really ran on the U S guardrails. As I was sort of explaining earlier that

Basically to have a bank account almost anywhere in the world You need a bank that is dependent on some form on the US backed financial system and so those two factors like the ease with which we could affect the bank accounts of people in every corner of the world essentially and The fact that we were unwilling to spend money on wars, which you know, may be a good thing that the US has pulled back on wars, has meant that the options between doing nothing and going to war have, you know, that those are the only two options they have outside of sanctions. Do nothing or go to war.

And every single day, there's something that happens in the world where someone will send a memo to the State Department that says, hey, could you take care of this thing or that thing or that other thing? There are constantly, sometimes good reasons for, I don't want to get too ahead of this, but one of the stories I'm working on that will come out in September is about a firm that had a pretty bad record of treating its workers and that the US sanctioned, but in so doing left this part of the world a lot poorer. So it's not to say that every single sanction is in response to just some malevolent person in the State Department trying to punish poor countries.

It seems to be motivated by the fact that, you know, there are dictators, there are, you know, people committing crimes, there are abusive bosses, and absent going to war, this is the logical alternative. Of course, the counter argument to that is like, why don't we just do nothing at all? Like, when would you say, I know this is kind of like a open-ended question, but it seems like sanctions sort of became the other option for sort of left liberal, not anti-interventionist, but people who are, you know, more skeptical of military intervention. Someone like Elizabeth Warren or maybe AOC is now more prone to suggesting sanctions as opposed to any type of military action or sending a battle group to whatever sea

is adjacent to the country in question. When would you say that kind of started? Because it seems like it was, it's been a somewhat recent development in American international politics. Yes, every president has massively increased the number of annual sanctions from his predecessor over the last four administrations. So it's really like a, like Bush had like something like three or 400 sanctions a year. Obama brought that to like closer to 800, 900, a thousand. Trump increased that to like 15, 16, 1700 a year. And then under Biden, we've seen more than 2000 sanctions annually in 2022 and 2023.

So that's just sort of a, like almost like a linear progression up over each of the last four presidencies I think the the one of the things that just so enticing to these to each of these presidents is that like You know when you go to war you have to say to Congress like hey like we need Money to do the thing to pay the troops and there's like none of that here There's no budgetary cost at all. It's like you literally just put someone's name on a list. That's all you have to do.

There's no congressional, there's no even like AUMF question. It's pure unilateral executive branch function with no functionally zero congressional role. So I think that has been a huge part of what's made this more and more appealing, coupled with the desire not to go to war. I think the other thing from the liberal interventionist crowd, Felix, that you mentioned, we can debate whether this is in fact the case. But to them at least, in, Obama worked with Congress on approving really tight sanctions on Iran, which was followed by the Iran nuclear deal in 2015. And you probably know better than I do, Felix, like the backstory of like why Iran sought

to make that agreement. But for the sanctions proponents on the left, they see that as evidence that this tool, you know, at least sometimes can be effective, like that they saw the Iranian regime respond to a downturn in their economic options and said, okay, we may as well work towards a deal with the Obama administration that will leave this economic pressure in exchange for lowering our nuclear ambitions. Now, obviously that's a contested history. And more to the point, to state the obvious, like Trump tore up that deal and left, you know, the Iranians without, you know, sort of holding the bag there. And so that meant that other countries

had even less of an incentive to decide to negotiate after they faced the threat of sanctions because it's like, well, if you're going to do what you did to Iran, why would I give up my nuclear ambitions in exchange for relief on these economic penalties that the next guy is just going to slap even harder on me the next time anyway? Yeah. I mean, like one of the defining features of them is that they can just be put into place by executive fiat. As you said, there's no process or anything like that.

So you know, I understand the liberal case for it when the Iran deal was still in effect. But yeah, it's a very self-defeating argument just by the nature in which these things are like put into place. I would say the other thing that is a very big topic, a little hard to describe, but like I think in the last 10 years, there's been a sort of a growing feeling among both parties that, you know, that this is not America's world anymore, that we're dealing with this sort of Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela nexus that feels like a bigger threat than ever before. And it's this like incredible thing where they like, they're hitting the same. Button, you know, and the button is like people or countries are working with those adversaries that we don't like.

And so like, we're going to punish you for doing that with the aim of pulling you back into the U S network. But the thing is like the more countries and the more businesses you push out of the U S network by imposing sanctions on them, the more they start to work together. Right. So it's like, yeah, like you're saying like an unintended consequence of this is the United States by imposing an economic blockade on roughly a third of the world is putting that third of the world into the orbit of, you know, like bigger countries like

China, Russia, who they can provide some sort of banking or can provide what the you know, US dollar backed global market would have in the past is like, is it like is it like pushing these countries closer together? And I guess like, in your article, you have like the countries that are on that under the highest level of sanctions, which are Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Syria, and Cuba. Cuba has been under economic sanctions since 1962. The list of countries on that, I just want to read for a second if you don't mind.

Yeah, please. The number of countries on that list because like I think just hearing it out loud is indicative. And this is not, this is an incomplete list of the number of countries under some form of US sanctions. Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Syria, Cuba, Yemen, Afghanistan, Russia, China, Burma, Libya, Sudan, Belarus, Lebanon, Mali, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Nicaragua, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. That is a partial list of the number of countries we're talking about here. And like, so in terms of like, let's say Iran or Venezuela, like, what is the intended

consequences of the sanctions regimes placed on those countries? And then what are some of the unintended consequences that you're now referring to? That like you mentioned in your piece, I think like the sort of the money paragraph, pull quote, you cited an occasion of a 2011 Hollywood, sorry, a 2011 holiday party at the Hotel Harrington in downtown Washington, where Adam Zubin, then director of the OFAC, sang the song Every Little Thing We Do Is Sanctions to the tune of Every Little Thing She Does With Magic by The Police. And I'm just wondering, you know, you know, you know, you know something evil is going

on in DC when they're reworking the lyrics to popular songs to glorify their behavior and, you know, justify their existence. I got this tip like six months ago and I emailed this guy. I was like, hey, I heard you sang this song at the holiday party. Is it true? Can you confirm or deny that you sang a version of Every Little Thing That She Does Is Magic at this holiday party? And he just didn't respond for months.

And I was like, you know, every time you publish a big story like this, like you're very nervous that like there's going to be something that you like may have gotten wrong or someone told you the wrong thing or the cat of detail off. And this guy hadn't responded. And I was like, okay, I'd really like to know if he's going to contest that he's saying this song. And like a few weeks before the story published, he emailed me and was like, no, that's incorrect. I was like, okay, what is it?

And he was like, no, no, no, you got the lyrics wrong. I was singing every little thing they wanna do as sanction, not every little thing they wanna sanction. I was like, okay, not denying that you sang the song. I've noticed a lot of, they really love song parodies in American interventionist foreign policy. They really do. Yeah, everyone always brings up bomb, bomb, bomb,

bomb, bomb, Iran. That's the McCain one? Yeah, McCain and Lindsey Graham were doing that one. That's awesome, I feel like that would be a fun, I don't know, in the presidential debate, if we can get the candidates doing versions of that. At the top of the list here, you've got Russia, Iran, and Venezuela. US policymakers are attempting to, without using our military directly, enforce compliance

in some way. From their perspective, what is the intended effect of these sanctions? And now what are some of the knock-on effects that are actually leading to a point where like U.S. policymakers are beginning to worry that we've actually sanctioned too many countries? One of my favorite things about Washington, I know you guys don't live here, but people are always like, wow, this food is really good. You know, like it'll be like some food from some foreign country. And then it'll be like Afghanistan, which is like, oh, there's a new Venezuelan place. And like not realizing that the people they work for may have had a role in like the new

restaurant down the street that they're really excited about. Yeah, that's how fat America is. Even foreign policy is grub hub. But I think Venezuela is like a really sad and striking example. And I think also like to get back to Felix's earlier question about like, when did this take off? I think it's partly the fault of the media, partly the fault of just people's attention spans where, you know, every American knew about what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan, right?

But like how many people know about the US role in what happened in Venezuela? Like I think it's probably, I mean, this is like totally made up. Like I don't have any numbers behind this, but if you like took the, even like my friends, like just average people, you were like, what role did the US have in Venezuela's economic collapse? Like they probably wouldn't even know that much about like the Venezuela collapse generally, you know? And I think that like the way in which sanctions have operated at a lower profile than sending troops has enabled this whole thing to fly under the radar.

Venezuela, I mean, we did a whole separate story about this that came out right after our initial sanctions story. We had basically we broke the news that the Department of Homeland Security, as Trump was tightening the sanctions on Venezuela, DHS was sending classified reports to the White House that were warning that the sanctions could exacerbate out migration in the region, out of Venezuela. And the mechanism there, of course, would be by impacting the economy broadly of Venezuela, it would lead to more people having to flee the country.

And we've seen over 7 million people leave Venezuela since the start of their economic collapse in 2014. We reported, and I took some flack from a friend on the left who was disputing this conclusion. I think he's wrong about this, but what we reported, and what seems clear to me, is that the economic collapse in Venezuela predates sort of the intense sanctions imposed by Trump starting in 2017 and through 2020. That's really when we started squeezing their ability to issue debt on international markets, their ability to operate their number one source of revenue, which is Para Vista, the

state-owned oil company. Those sanctions really squeezed in 2017 through 2019, 2020. But to me, there's also very little doubt that those sanctions dramatically exacerbated this economic catastrophe, which I'm so staggered by and even more staggered by the fact that there are so few people who know, seem to know about the extent of it. We are talking about the single largest decline in any economy in the modern era for any country not at war and also larger than the economic contractions of some countries at war, including Yemen, Iraq in 2003 and Ukraine in 2022.

This is a 71% collapse of the Venezuelan economy, which is unfathomably large. It's just enormous. And a lot of that seems genuinely to have started. I mean, you have inflation hitting over 600% before the sanctions are really tightened on Venezuela in 2016. But the sanctions, I mean, I talked to John Bolton, a top Trump White House advisor for this story. And he told me like the point of the sanctions was to hurt their economy and

lead more people to leave in an attempt to get Maduro, the president, to surrender and give up control. Their strategy at the time was to basically say, we will target the Venezuelan economy in a way that leads the Venezuelan military to break ranks with Maduro and support Guaido. Do you guys remember when Trump compared him to Beto O'Rourke? Yeah, yeah. That's why I knew it was curtains for that guy. That was the, that was, you know, what the conscious strategy was, was to make the economy of Venezuela worse. And our story reports that there were people at Treasury, at GHS were saying, if this doesn't work, you're gonna, you're gonna hurt a lot of innocent people.

And lo and behold, we now see a few years later that one of the top political issues, obviously, in the US is a surge of migrants across the US-Mexico border. That didn't start until a few years after the sanctions bit, but this is, you know, we're talking about hundreds of thousands of migrants from Venezuela fleeing an economic catastrophe that the US had a role in exacerbating. So yeah, I mean, that's to me one of the most striking examples of an unintended consequence. And to state the obvious, Maduro is still in power. Yeah, it seems like there is a self-contradictory core with sanctions where like the State

Department will, whoever they're sanctioning, they'll say, you know, whoever it is. And sometimes this is kind of true, sometimes it's like a complete projection. But if we're sanctioning them, we're saying that the leader in question is a psychotic madman and he will do anything to stay in power and he doesn't care about his own people. We love that line, he did X to his own people. Because it's fine to do it to people overseas, but God forbid you do it to your own people. But okay, so we're going to put pressure on the economy so that he'll be so ashamed that

he'll step down. You just said he'll do anything to stay in power. And I know, you know, you obviously like they want either the military or the intelligence apparatus depending on the country to, you know, play a very active role in getting rid of that guy. But how many times does that actually happen? You're treating them as a rational actor. The guy that you're saying is inherently a rational actor. I think to sort of riff on what you're saying here, one of the things that like the academics who study this closely will point out that I think

is really interesting is that like the people who could be rational actors in some of these horrific situations, take Syria for instance, often those are the people that the sanctions hurt the most, right? The rival power bases for authoritarian leaders are often sort of the middle class, the private sector, civil society, groups that operate independent of the authoritarian regime. And when you cut off economic activity broadly in a country, that sort of weakens the power of those sort of parts of the society to do anything on their own, on their own volition. And that creates a vacuum that tends to be filled by the authoritarian leader himself. So we have this other story out of Syria where Bashar al-Assad, he was obviously, I think

a good example of the contradiction you're discussing, Felix. Bashar al-Assad was accused of committing horrific atrocities and lots of evidence that he committed horrific atrocities against his own people to use that phrase and we sanctioned the Syrian economy and part of the effect of the sanctions on the Syrian economy were to make it so that the business sector which was at times opposed to Assad was essentially taken over by the Assadist government the allies of Assad including it seems like members of his own family have played a role in Syria rising as the number one dealer of Captagon, which is a synthetic opiate that's now flooded

parts of the Middle East. It's a small correction, it's not an opiate, it is a stimulant. A stimulant. Yeah, apparently it's weaker than Vyvanse. That's what I've heard from people. I need to apologize to the Assadist regime Stimulant abusing community you guys all have my apologies. Yeah. How do you think I do this show twice a week?

It's not for a cap to gun No, Jeff I The other the other big example I want to turn to is Russia. Russia is under 6,000 different economic sanctions. None of these sanctions have... To what extent have those affected the Russian government or Vladimir Putin's ability to wage war or continue to be a a semi-functioning state by my lights doesn't seem much at all because I mean they have a huge military huge

petroleum reserves and they like have their own defense industries they can keep churning out or rather than turning out have reserves of military hardware that they can just keep putting into Ukraine like I mean like what what is the sanctions regime done to Russia? And what are we intending to accomplish there? Yeah, the thing with the Russia sanctions is that the number of sanctioned entities can be very misleading.

You can go after hundreds of little businesses that no one's ever heard of in the East, in Siberia or whatever, and have no effect on the Russian economy. But then you can do a press release. That's like, we sanctioned 200 Russian entities today. But like the fundamental thing since the war started is, and I don't want to be too editorialized here, but like many of the experts I talked to will say that the fundamental issue is that we continue to buy hundreds

of billions of dollars of Russian energy. So it's all window dressing to suggest toughness when the primary source of revenue that funds the war effort has been, with exceptions, the White House will talk about the oil cap they've done to basically keep oil flowing but limit the amount that people can buy it, the price that people buy it at. That fundamental issue has been completely unresolved because we don't want the price of oil to go, you know, past, you know, $100 a barrel, which maybe that's the right policy. Maybe it's not, but it speaks to the way in which

Like we it's like saying like, you know, it's like the reverse mark of the beast You know, we're saying like you cannot buy or sell anything unless it's something we really want like oil And then we'll just like keep your economy going because Europe needs I don't know their houses heated in the winter I saw that one of the entities that America has sanctioned, one of the Russian entities, was Vimple. Who, they're... I don't know what that is, but I'm excited. Who the fuck is Vimple?

Vimple is, it means pendant, apparently. It's a synthetic opiate. No, yeah. But they make short range air short range air to air missiles. They make a missile that is basically like a copy of the famous aim nine sidewinder, the famous American short range missile. But it's like, oh, good. Like the Pennsylvania Air National Guard won't buy any fucking weapons

from Vimple, which I'm sure they were going to do. And like, forgive me if I'm wrong. Didn't Russia just like surpass Japan as far as like the size of their economy? I mean, I guess what the administration would say is that like they've pivoted to a wartime economy and you can grow a wartime economy in the short run. But in the long term, their prospects have been damaged by sort of restrictions on what they can buy for AI and chips and all this other stuff. But like, if the point of the sanctions is to punish them for the, to punish Putin specifically

for the war, it's really hard to see how he's paying any significant cost. And this just gets back to what we were saying earlier, which is like, okay, maybe it's better than going to war. And maybe you want to sort of signal your disapproval of the invasion of Ukraine. But then like, let's not delude ourselves that this is like hurting Putin. He's like sitting there stewing over how the sanctions have hurt him, you know, like, it's fine to be like, this isn't a super effective weapon, but maybe it's better than going to war or doing nothing.

But then don't also, you know, want the press and want the public to be like, you have achieved this incredible result. Yeah. And does it like, okay, oh, they have a wartime economy and they only benefit from like, you know, petroleum and natural gas sales and weapons contracts, unlike America. But, like, let's say that. We've got software companies in this country, right? Yeah. Unlike, you know, their economy, they will only see returns during wartime.

This doesn't at all incentivize them to be in a state of perpetual warfare somewhat somewhat like a country has those exact Exactly fucking exports in industry Yeah, oh But Jeff I want to go back to me you said about like if we are now like sanctioning like a third of the planet Are we like are to what extent, like you mentioned that like people are concerned that we are creating in effect like by denying access to a third of the planet to like the global economy essentially, or just like any financial institution that

uses the dollar. Are we creating now like a third of the planet that's like a sort of, I don't know, a counterbalance to shadow banking system that is like, you know, that will, perhaps if we keep sanctioning countries will be like, half of the planet now getting off of the dollar, or our banking system. I mean, like, what, what, what are they like, they take this? Yeah, I asked a friend before I went on Chappo, what I should say, and he was like, you should discuss how economic sanctions are kind of like how Queen Marika attempted to punish her hometown and the horn scent by isolating them in the shadow realm.

I have no fucking idea what he's talking about. Well, that, no, that worked. When Marika used the sealing magic of the skadu tree to seal the horn scent, and, you know, but I don't want to hear any of this bullshit about how like the cycles of violence are bad or like they shouldn't have killed the horn sent. They're freaks, they were putting these nice old women in jars, it's not okay.

Mesmer will be judged kindly by history. I'm told it didn't shy around from becoming a place of resistance and that has resonances for US foreign policy but. How is it a place of resistance? They're just getting murdered over and over by best I was also like is this the game elder ring and he was like no It is old and ring but it's old array

He has he played this game like the shadow realm is a site of resistance What I'm so excited to show this person being dunked on. Mesmer is putting them into the blender. Mesmer is owning them. Yeah, I'm sorry. I agree with that. Totally.

But just like the book, there's like 60 percent of the developing world is under some form of U.S. sanctions. Like isn't that pushing them into the orbit of you know what could be like a counterbalancing force to the power of the US dollar? Actually just a point to clarify and I think that's important to say because you'll get pushback on this. People will say hey it's not like 60% of all governments are sanctioned. It's just 60% of countries have some form of sanctions.

So that could be on a person or whatever, a company. Now the response to that, however, is that you can sanction. This is what sometimes people will say, proponents will say, like, we're just targeting this guy who works in the government. But if this guy in the government who you don't like has to sign the papers to authorize imports of food and medicine, it's not just a sanction on this guy, right? It's like actually a sector commodity wide restriction. Just to like put that caveat and back and forth out there, because I think it's important to understand that it's

not like, it's not like It's not like 60 of all poor countries governments or their entire countries are sanctioned But it's also not the case that that means that these are totally ineffectual You know, like let's say like our government wasn't sanctioned Let's say like we were subject to similar sanctions and it wasn't just our government It was just people who work in our government. We would fucking experience it the same way Well, you know, like no one would be fucking confused about what I'm talking about here. I think we would be in some sense subject to a kind of economic warfare being waged on us by other countries.

So one of the revelations I had in the story that I thought was pretty telling is we reported that heading into the Biden administration, sort of when we were turning over from Trump to Biden, there was a recognition among a number of Biden administration staffers, people who would end up serving in the Biden administration, that this rise in US sanctions had gotten out of hand. The volume was too much and that something had to be done to rethink this process. A bunch of treasury staffers, we wrote this report that went 40 pages long and had a bunch of recommendations for sort of imposing some limits on the rise of sanctions. Even if you think that this tool is bad, or rather even if you think this tool is good,

there's a real politic sort of question here about like As you're saying well, like if we just put everyone outside the US financial system through sanctions Then the sanctions themselves become meaningless and ineffectual. Yeah, like they only work because you're singled out, you know Like exactly you're you're you're like a loner now Stu stands apart from the rest of the world But now it's like if it's a third of the world that we're now putting into this exile category, that's a, that's a lot of people. That's a lot of governments. That's a lot of money. Yeah.

And so there's been, the Wall Street Journal had a good piece about sort of like how, since they've been more and more sanctions, Russia, China, um, Venezuela and Iran have like just started their own payment systems that they interact with each other on. And the more countries that get put in that box, as you're saying, will start working on that system. And yet it's just this thing where you talk to US officials and they say, overall, we recognize that the volume

is out of control, and yet each individual one, one to us seems like it can be justified. Now, I'm not endorsing that for you, but I'm just explaining that when you have these constituencies that see human rights abuse in Africa, for instance, and they say, and then someone comes to them and says, can you help with us? It won't cost you any money. You won't have to put any troops anywhere. You just hit this button. Essentially, they have a really hard time saying no.

And what we report in the story is that there were disagreements with the state department and treasury, the report never, the report came out, but it was a lot of the recommendations that they had made to limit the rise of sanctions were stripped out of the final report. Um, and so when you you when you look at that, the inertia just seems to be pushing towards more and more sanctions. And, you know, it's hard to see how that changes. Before we move on to a few domestic political stories, when when Joe Biden announced that

he wasn't going to stand for reelection, when he sort of passed the torch to Kamala Harris, when he finally gave his sort of Oval Office address, he said, you know, now for the first time in my life, you know, I leave a country that for the first time in a long time, America is not at war with any country on the planet. I mean, leaving aside the obvious, you know, exceptions to that, to what extent can it really be said America is not at war with anyone in the world when we sanction a third of the planet? I mean, is it in some sense we are in some way maybe not a hot war, but we are in a state

of economic warfare with like a third of the planet? Yeah, I'm just not sure the Cubans, the Venezuelans, the Iranians, the Syrians would agree with that notion. You know, it's not to say that, you know that the decline in US active hot wars, it doesn't mean that that's not an important trend. I think the story lays out quite clearly and as a lot of people inside the government themselves believe these economic tools may not capture the news, you know, the sort of the media attention or sort of the public imagination the same way that bombing a foreign country does. That

doesn't mean that they can't still leave a sort of trail of people hurt in their wake. I mean, I think it would be instructive to like imagine what the same US, like our federal government's response to like, if large US firms were sanctioned or prevented from, let's say, having access to foreign markets or foreign resources or cut out of a global financial system, I think we would take that as an act of war and we'd probably go to war as a result of it. I hope you guys have me on for my next story in this series. It's hard to say that. I hope you guys have me on for my next story in this series.

I don't want to preview too much. All right. Well, OK, I'd like I'd like this. I'd like to switch over now to the presidential election. And I want to talk about the the VEEP stakes for the Democrats. Before I get into that, Felix, I got to ask you, did you see the Trump interview with Aiden Ross today? Yeah, I was really well, I have complicated feelings on Aiden Ross. I like a lot of people. I was shocked to find out this was a Jewish man. I didn't. And I consider this like a Jack. Well, yeah, yeah, but you have to like look at him and listen to him. And my point is, this is like a Jackie Robinson type thing in reverse, perhaps.

We're like, I didn't know we could have like guys named Aiden who like were white but tried to give themselves waves and like got addicted to stuff from the gas station and were this stupid. I thought like the dumbest Jewish kid that age is at least going to like tish. But no, like we can be- Just for the record, The Washington Post doesn't endorse the Aiden Ross, Jackie Robinson, and Parison. The Washington Post doesn't think this. They're not as, they don't think about the world the same way I do. But I think it's nice. Who is Aiden Ross? He's a gamer twitch guy He's a gamer which guy his his rise to fame was like

He would pretend to be gay around his friends and like try to kiss them and that was really big But I I think it's great I think this will end anti-semitism because it shows we're just white people like if we can be that We're just normal white people and I think that's great. I think Trump was trying to put pressure on Harris to pick Shapiro by like making a play for the Jewish vote. Well, we'll get to that in a second. But the thing I wanted to highlight from the Aiden Ross Trump kick stream today is the footage of Aiden Ross gifting Donald Trump a personalized Tesla Cybertruck.

This was great. With a screen, like a wraparound print of the Trump assassination photo where his fist is up and he's like, here, I got you this. You can already see the gift. Yeah, I can. Wow. You can't miss it. That's an Elon.

It is an Elon. Wow. Shout out to Mr. Musk. Beautiful. And like, first of all, the idea of giving a presidential candidate a car or giving Donald Trump a car as a gift is so funny to me. But his reaction upon receiving this gift was one of the funniest things I've ever seen. It was like you when you're eight years old and you really want PlayStation, but you get a... Like something's gift wrapped and you can feel... There's no hard

corners. It's all soft. And you're like, like sweater time to kill myself this shit sucks like he was so so disappointed he was just like yeah it's great also we know we have the image already of trump in the truck like screaming yeah do you remember that's a real truck not a cyber truck that's yeah that's what he likes Trump literally in that exact interview shit talk EVs. He hates EVs Elon Musk gave me money Yeah, he hates EVs Here's so here's an EV with the like scariest moment of your life plastered on it. Are you almost? life plastered on it. Were you almost died?

Yes. Think how insane that would be for anyone to drive a vehicle around with an image of when you almost died. Just like you in the hospital bed. And driving probably the most dangerous consumer model of car you can possibly drive. The car that is most deleterious to your life and health and safety would be is a little Trumpian about the Cybertruck though, right? Well in that it's ugly and stupid. Jake from Pendejo Times said the same thing, like this is a terrible gift for Trump because Trump is pathologically afraid of death.

He wants to live forever. So you're right, like gifting him something that reminds him about the time he came that close to dying surely and you know Also someone who probably doesn't like driving cars to begin with unless they're a golf cart But what an amazing gift to give to a president Here's this shitty car with like it's like giving Jackie Oh a fucking screen print of her on Dealey Plaza Crawling over the roof of the fucking Lincoln Town car It's like it's literally on the side of the car.

Yeah. Yeah. It's not a photo in the car. But it's also like a cyber... Do you think Trump can't afford one? Yeah, I know. Like one of Aidan Ross's shithead friends would be thrilled with that present. Not Donald Trump. The guy owns his own golf club. There's several of them actually. Yeah. There are several of them actually. Yeah, there are, like, literally you stay at a hotel and it's his hotel to the point

that, you know, if you order a martini there are grapes in it. He's swell off. It's in it, yeah. You're dead on in that, like, this would be a great gift for the other guys on kick like mr. Base or Any of those any of those guys? How do you think Trump feels when he'd like is introduced these like twitch streamer guys? These aren't his people right like He met he met um Logan Paul, and it was the happiest he's ever been He met he met Logan Paul and it was the happiest he's ever been But he likes like Logan Paul is To him is like a boxer now and he likes that like he likes fighters

He really enjoyed his time on the impulsive podcast, but they're like a little older They're a little different than the streaming economy I think he kind of understands it as much as like a man his age can in that it's like you know, this is what we have instead of like reality TV stars now like this is as like a man his age can in that it's like, you know, this is what we have instead of like Reality TV stars now like this is just like a public freak for all of us. Omarosa, his old friend. I'm kind of imagining like Trump is looking at like internal poll numbers that are like Half the country thinks your vice presidential pick is too weird

This is like your number one political liability And then like the next thing his handlers drop him off at is a cyber truck with his face on it having been shot. Well he had, JD Vance actually, he went on the Nelk Boys podcast. Oh. Which is, it's a collection of like, I would say optimistic but very stupid men.

And it was, I don't know, it was, what do you even call like a good JD Vance outing but they're but they're they have a very like you know young man's internet focused strategy but like most of the audience for this shit are like kids they're not even old enough to vote I would have to guess exactly there are ways off from being able to vote. But yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's just like people speculate. Like, is this another Don Jr. pick for the old man? Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, speaking of another pick, I said at the top of the

show that I mean, this is likely to be announced tomorrow, if not by the time we get them recording here. But I will be astonished. I will be dumbfounded if Kamala picks anyone other than Josh Shapiro. And the reason I'm saying that is because like if he wasn't going to be the VP pick and if that wasn't already a done deal, we would not see dozens, and I mean dozens, of the same article being written about how if you don't like him you're an anti-Semite. Quoting here from Joe Scarborough, the whisper campaigns against Josh Shapiro have dark undertones. Breaking news, he's Jewish. But just as Thatcher was identified as a game-changing

force in politics instead of a woman, Josh Shapiro's strengths and talents would easily transcend bigotry and identity politics. And like, okay, and one more from Matthew Stroller. The attacks on Josh Shapiro for having the same views on Israel as everyone else is the political class and the political class are noticeable. I think that's because he's an economic politics populist and the identity left hates that. How can you how can you say

that he represents a break with identity politics and this asshole volunteer deserves the IDF? Yeah, and his entire career fucking glazing Israel. Can you read that one more time? Sorry. Okay, the attacks on Josh Shapiro for having the same views on Israel as everyone else in the political class are noticeable.

I think it's because he's an economic populist and the identity left hates that. Josh Shapiro punished ice cream for doing very mild. Yeah, Josh Shapiro went to war with ice cream, but he's going to stop identity politics. It's such a confusing tweet because like when you talk to Democrats in Washington, like the Shapiro as an economic populist thing is like not what anyone would say, you know? Because the predicate of that tweet is wrong.

It is like, I don't know, maybe like Matt Stoller has a theory about that that I haven't seen. But like everyone I talked to is like, we like Josh Shapiro. Like all the business friendly Democrats are like, we think Josh Shapiro will be like sympathetic to us. The bar for economic populist is so fucking low. Literally, if you just say the words corporate greed in his speech, you're fucking Wallace. You're Henry Wallace. But like by the standards, by those standards,

by which Josh Shapiro is an economic populist So is like dick get part So it's like like like I'm sure that like Rick Scott has mentioned corporate greed in a fucking speech I guess this Senate is a hundred percent populist populist win incoming I mean the thing the thing with that Felix is that like now the Republicans can kind of play that game too You know like JD Vance gets lots of credit hours like he criticized Wall Street in his RNC convention speech Like he's a populist too, you know, like that is a double-edged sword for the party. John McCain did that in 2008 Like how fucking stupid are people I yeah

I'm like but it's a match point about how his position on Israel is no different than anyone else in the political class. I would say like, you know, that's not totally wrong. But like, I mean, his the tenor of his comments certainly mark him apart from let's say, I don't know, JB Pritzker or Tim Walls or, I don't know, Mark Kelly was clapping for Netanyahu but the point is like our good friend of the show Don Hughes said the other day that like all this has the tenor of arguing over who you want to be your high school principal which is just like all these guys kind of suck like I like so I mean but Shapiro seems to be absolutely the worst of the lot and I just there's there's one one more I want to quote from this is of course, Yair Rosenberg writing in the Atlantic. The headline here is, Who's afraid of Josh Shapiro? And it ends here by saying, it has become hard to escape the conclusion that some of

the activists imposing this inquisition have a problem not just with Israel or Zionism, but with Jews who they assume are serving a foreign power, no matter what they've actually said or done. Josh Shapiro did serve a foreign power. I'm sorry. He literally did. Also, you can't say, to say like they are motivated by like a specific racial animus to Jews, but not all of them, wouldn't, if you actually believe that, you would name

the ones that you think are doing that, it would be important enough for you to go, OK, here are the ones that are virulent anti-Semitic Nazis and here are the ones who are doing it because they care about school vouchers. You wouldn't just go, I get like some of them. I don't know. I don't know off the top of my head. Is it important or not? And like like like I said, this is this this is a done deal I don't know. I don't know off the top of my head. Is it important or not?

And like I said, this is a done deal because, you know, like going on the... I have like 10 op-eds here, including one from Mark Penn, who's closely associated with Democratic majority for Israel. I want to throwback. Yeah, yeah. Mark Penn says he's by far the best choice. And like, and I think more than anything, I just think that like the narrative has been set that like the progressives really like Tim Walz, because, you know, he seems like kind of a nice guy and you know, like a little bit softer on, you know, some of the issues that they care about. But I mean, obviously, like what recommends Tim Walz

over anyone else in this conversation is that he's never been a lawyer. And I really want to I want to shout out friend of the show, Chase Madar, who pointed out that something like every Democratic president, for a long time now, pretty much every Democratic politician has gone to law school. And just not having ever been a lawyer would be a big breath of fresh air for the Democratic Party.

But the narrative is set that the progressive left doesn't like Josh Shapiro. So that is exactly why he's going to be the VP nod. Because this, I think, it has to, the party has to exercise discipline and they have to make it clear from the get-go that nothing is going to change and you will still vote for this ticket. I don't know who the VP pick is going to be, but I do feel like it's like one of those

things that reminds me very much of like the 2016 like people are being rude on the internet discourse whereas like right oh it's like the left is being unfair to Shapiro it's like who who are you talking about because like i don't know like has Bernie Sanders or AOC or like Rashid It's like have like any of i don't think any of them have been like we have huge problems with Shapiro over His record on Israel. It's just like people on Twitter like doing jokes that you're like Well, yeah, what is like what is like the mechanism by which you want to effectuate like you know what I mean? like the I mean the thing that drives me specifically the most crazy about this is This line that like well, he's that he has the same position as anyone else i okay i'm sorry i didn't know that a fucking governor of one of the biggest states in the

country who has clear national ambitions i didn't know he was so fucking shy about his foreign policy positions i didn't know this was like a personal thing that he didn't like talking about that It's unfair to bring this up Do you do you want people to take him seriously as a candidate or not? Well, then they're going to interrogate his positions on yeah exactly and you're like I saw some like argument being made that like oh like if you know if it's just if he's just a Jewish guy whose beliefs are the same as every other Democrat and like If he's just a Jewish guy whose beliefs are the same as every other Democrat, then singling him out for not liking him bespeaks a certain kind of bigotry.

Just the expectation that he has to be everything you want him to be bespeaks some sort of bigotry or prejudice, to which my attitude is like, well, if you're seeking my vote, I in fact would like you to be everything I want you to be, and nothing short of that. So, sorry, I guess I'm a purist, but you're asking me to vote for you and I'm assessing your record and finding it horrifically lacking. And one of the things I will say about Josh Shapiro's record, and Jeff, I'd like your take on this. To what extent will that murder slash suicide in Pennsylvania come back to haunt him should

he be the nominee? Because I'm speaking about a case in which he, his office as a prosecutor ruled the case of a woman who had been stabbed in the back of the head like 20 times, a suicide because her fiance was a... Oh, I saw that crazy image on Twitter. Well-connected political family. Yeah. I have no idea. But I thought I saw...

You heard it here first. The Washington Post, Jeff Stein said Josh Shapiro personally murdered a woman in Cover to Die. The Washington Post, Jeff Stein said, I have no idea. Yeah. Okay. Like... Josh Shapiro murdered murdered a woman in cover to cover. The Washington Post, Jeff Stein said, I have no idea. Yeah. Okay. Josh Shapiro murdered her. Got it.

This woman was stabbed multiple times in the back of the head. Her fiance arrives in his version of events, the fiance arrives on the scene and sees her dead body. The first guy he calls is his uncle, which if my fiance was dead, that would be the first. Unc is my first call as always. You always call on always called the closest uncle or old head that you know. But Unc does an uncle move and takes all the like all his like devices, his laptop, his fucking phone, all this shit. The corridor rules that this woman committed suicide by stabbing herself in the back of

the head multiple times, which like, I guess if you do a lot of skull crushers and you have really strong triceps, you could do that. Shapiro fought against, as AG, fought against getting the courtiers report changed from suicide to obvious homicide, and he is very close with Unc. Jeff Shapiro is childhood friends with Unc. So if he is that, like if this isn't corruption, if this isn't Shapiro getting this guy off, getting Nephew and Unc off, he's too stupid to drive a car. If he legitimately is like, this woman killed herself,

he shouldn't have kitchen knives. That should be taken away from him. The kitchen knife was sticking out of her chest when the police found the body. This is so criminal intent. Yeah. I wish Vincent D'Onofrio was- D'Onofrio was doing so we could get rid of this guy.

So you heard it here first, it's going to be the murderer confirmed by the Washington Post. Josh Shapiro will be Kamala Harris's VP. But there's one last domestic political story I'd like to talk about before we get away today. And that is, of course, the RFK Jr. bear dumping story. Folks, if the stories of this guy associated with dead animals just keeps getting better and better. And the best part about this is that he posted a video of himself talking to Roseanne Barr about this incident to like sort of get out ahead. Why is Roseanne Barr there?

What is the backstory? Well, they're friends. They're friends. She's a supporter. So I pulled over and I picked up the bear and put him in the back of my van because I was going to skin the bear and it was very good condition and I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator and you can do that in the York State. You can get a bear tag for a roadkill bear.

This is the BBC's account of this story. There are so many details in this story that really are extraordinary. It says, independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has posted a video on social media in which he admits that he dumped a dead bear cub in a New York City's Central Park in 2014. The clip posted to his ex account on Sunday shows him with controversial U.S. comedian Roseanne Barr as he describes bizarre circumstances that led to an incident that mystified New Yorkers 10 years ago. Mr. Kennedy said a woman had hit and killed the bear with her car when he was

driving behind her outside of the city. And he put it in his van with the intention of skinning the animal and harvesting its meat. It appears he shared the anecdote to get ahead of the story in the New Yorker magazine published on Monday. According to the New Yorker, Mr. Kennedy was tickled by the discoverer of the bear while on a falconry outing in upstate New York.

But he discovered the bear. Did I just say, like how bad it is to be, if you're running for any office, to be involved and be the central figure of an event that baffled. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's death for most people. Most people can't get out of a baffling event

and this is very baffling. When he discovered the bear, he loaded it onto the back of his truck. An image included in the article shows Mr. Kennedy grimacing with his hand inside the dead bear's bloody mouth. Citing an anonymous person with knowledge of the incident, the magazine reported that Mr. Kennedy thought it would be funny to make it look like an Aaron's cyclist.

The video account is broadly similar to the one provided by Mr. Kennedy over the weekend. In the video, Mr. Kennedy, seated with a rolled up sleeves at a table covered with food, tells Ms. Barr that he was driving to meet a group of people to go falconing near Goshen, New York, 10 years ago when the bear was killed. Did anyone think it was a cyclist? Did a single person have had fun? This is funny because I've actually done a raptor hunting excursion in Goshen, New York, and I'm wondering if it's the same people that I went with. If you've seen the pic, if you've seen the photo of me online with the owl, so that was taken in Goshen,

New York. Who could kill a bear with a bicycle? Like it would have to be like the mountain would do that. Well, like, why was he trying to stitch up cyclists? What was the point of this? He was like, was this some sort of anti-bike lane false flag? But the really weird aspect- That didn't work on anybody.

Like there's not a- Yeah, no one. There weren't any temporary reports, but none of them were like cyclists suspected in bear in Central Park. 0.0 people were like, oh my god, the cyclists are killing bears. My favorite part of the tweet was,

let's see the New Yorker try to spin that. They don't need to spin anything! They're just like, they're reporting your exact words on this! You're like, there's no spin needed here. And it says here, I was going to skin the bear and it was in very good condition and I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator, he says, and you can do that in New York State. Get a bear tag for a roadkill bear. New York State does allow people to take bears killed on roads, but the law stipulates that

a person has to notify law enforcement or the state's environmental conservation to acquire such a tag. Mr. Kennedy does not appear to have done that. Instead, so is... Well, he says another great sign, another great sign when you're running for office and you clarify, I followed all the rules about finding meat on the road. Yes. But, no, but here's the weird thing, because he says he wanted to skin it and put his meat

in the freezer to have some bearer sauces later. But he says here, instead he continued to the Falconing event, which went late into the evening, then went to dinner at Peter Luger's Steakhouse in New York City, about 70 miles, 75 miles south of Goshen. At the end of the dinner, it was late and I realized I couldn't go home, Mr. Kennedy said. I had to go to the airport and the bear was in my car and I didn't want to leave the bear in my car because that would have been bad a dead animal has been in

his car for probably seven hours so the meat is unusable at this point he has a moldering corpse of a rotting carcass in his car, and then he was like, oh, I'm gonna go to the airport. That's what he's gonna leave you in long-term parking or something. He said- He treated that bear like they did with Adriana's car. I've got a stilter. He says- Come here, you fucking whore.

I had to go to the airport and the bear was in my car. That is when he says it occurred to him that there had been a series of bicycle accidents in New York and that he had an old bicycle in his car. That is when he says it occurred to him that there had been a series of bicycle accidents in New York and that he had an old bicycle in his car. What is this guy's car like? I remember Olivia Nuzzi had a piece about RFK Jr. that mentioned how disgusting his car was. And that it smelled like dog piss. It was like, he has this car that's like where every seat is just chewed by dogs and everything is covered in hair and the smell of you know the bouquet of animal is quite strong. I love that his whole campaign is like we're gonna take on the elites. Yeah. At my falconry

excursion. Yeah. So one more piece I want to read from this he says he tells Barra that he had the idea of staging a bike accident with the bear carcass in Central Park which several drunk people with him endorsed. Hera that he had the idea of staging a bike accident with the bear carcass in Central Park Which several drunk people with him endorsed he emphasized that he had not been drinking So we did that and we thought it would be amusing for whoever found it or something. I'm sorry Why you are this is like something the zodiac killer would do it's just like I just thought it'd be amusing to stage a dead bear Accident in Central Park and maybe the person who found this dead bear would find it an amusing bit of a...

Well, to be fair, I think he was, you know, in his 40s or 50s at this point, right? Yeah, he was only like 51. Yeah, he was pretty young. I also, like, I have to say, I have watched enough videos called, like, this disgusting murder will make you throw up. Um...

Um... Um... Like, to the subtext here of like oh I just found this carcass and I thought it would be funny to do this This is what everyone who like kills their wife does oh I like I found her body and I thought it'd be funny if I put it in a barrel paging Josh Shapiro barrel paging Josh Shapiro in this guy's apartment that I killed this be honest this the subtext here is that he probably ran over this bear I know he definitely killed the bear yeah like yeah he killed the bear it was like oh

no fucking grubhub driver oh no I'm late to my eyes wide shut truffle pig hunting Left a business card with Fidelio in the mouth of this dead bear But now there's one more. Sorry. There's one more amazing for this. There's one more amazing It's gonna win Felix I Sorry, there's one more amazing. Who is voting for this? There's one more amazing detail. Who likes this? Who's going to win after this? Well, Felix, you know Muslim Tom on Twitter, he had a really good point. As the joke, he's the sort of the dummy candidate who's actually been too successful. And the two other candidates are so weak and so disliked that he has to keep, it's gotten too far so now his orders are to keep it's gotten too far.

So now his orders are keep telling the insane bear stories. You need to tank your candidacy as the dummy candidate. You've actually this has gone too far or rather it's just a knock on effect of how unpopular Trump and Kamala are. Keep telling the weird bear stories and say, hey, there are more me twos of me coming out. Get ready for those. I did a lot of those. There's one more incredible aspect to this story, because like people

people discovered on Twitter, like this story from 2014 and people were like, what the fuck? A bear, dead bear in Central Park. And then The New York Times wrote it up in 2014. However, The New York Times story was written by Tatiana Schlossberg, the granddaughter of John F. Kennedy. Two of them got killed and we have let the rest of this family run riot for generations now and it has got to stop. Sometimes I feel like you, as a reporter, you're like, I can't believe I didn't get

that story first. It's your own family. like, oh, I can't believe I didn't get that story first. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like it's your own family. Like no one told you. Well. Let's see if the New Yorker can try to spin that. Honestly. Yeah.

I love that. I love that. Hey guys, there's another story of me acting weirder than anyone has ever acted and being a gross, insane guy. Let me guess, you're going to say that I did exactly what I said I did? Did you guys see the story we had about how it was a little written between the lines, but the implication was that Kennedy came to Trump and was like, could I get a health and human services secretary type job in exchange for an endorsement?

Yeah. Vaccinations are. Trump at the time was like riding high, you know? And it seems to have been like, who is this weirdo? Like, go away. But if Trump, like the race has gotten tighter since then. And like, I think it's pretty clear that RFK Junior, to the extent that anyone is going to vote for him,

will only take away from Donald Trump's vote total, not the Democrats. I texted a friend like after that story came out like man, I bet like if RFK is like the HHS secretary he would do something like condition school funding on like not getting vaccines and Then like a few days later Trump just like said that exact same proposal. Yeah Well, I think that does it for today's show. Yeah, like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. another. Let's, let's see how the New Yorker spins me behaving like the Sawyer family from Texas chainsaw massacre.

Just a fun prank to do with a dead animal. Let's you know, let's see what can I make out of this? What's a what's a fun prank I can do with this bear I ran over with my car? And also, like, he was trying to eat the roadkill meat. Come on. I mean, look, you can do that, but not if you already have brain worms. Okay? Maybe that's where he got the brain worms. This guy has got to stop giving advice on health. Okay? He's got to stop giving advice on medicine and health. Shouldn't he like cyclists? It's like outdoors, it's organic. I don't know. It's natural.

He's probably hit too many of them with his car. All right. All right, gang. That does it for today's episode. Thanks again to Jeff Stein for joining us today. And please check out his article or what will soon to be a series of articles in the Washington Post about US economic sanctions. Jeff, thanks for your time.

Hey, thanks so much for the plug guys. Really appreciate it. Yeah, we'll have the link to the article in the show description. That does it for us today. Till next time, everybody. Bye bye. Big Bear, he don't take no guff, he's Big Bear! Going down the road got the fellas on the back Chicken on his fingers and a butt six pack Drinking in the morning little hair of the dog He's sweet as a bird but it smells like a hop Big Bear, he's iron tough

Big Bear's got a chest like a rug Big Bear, he don't take no guff, he's Big Bear!