1/2/24: FBI Fumbles New Orleans Attack, Cyber Truck Explodes, Trump Goes Full Globalist & MORE!

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Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Breaking Points. Crystal, I'm in for Sagar. Thanks for having me. Always. Happy New Year, Emily. Happy New Year. Got off to a terrible but eventful start to 2025. We had two violent incidents that the FBI is investigating, actually looking to see if there might be any link between the two. So far, indications are no, but we'll break all of that down for you both in New Orleans and also in Las Vegas.

Trump did weigh in publicly on New Year's Eve about the whole Elon Musk H1B thing, firmly signing with Elon Musk and indicating that actually we need a lot more immigrants in the country. So a little bit different note that he's sounding now versus when he was on the campaign trail and certainly when he was on the trail back in 2016 and 2020. We also have some drama in the Republican caucus. Mike Johnson faces a speaker vote tomorrow.

And he can only, because the House Republican caucus has such a narrow majority, he can only lose one vote. He's already lost that vote. Thomas Massey said he's not voting for Mike Johnson. So if anyone else defects, he won't be able to get a majority will be in another like negotiation, Allah, Kevin McCarthy, maggates, et cetera. So we'll see where all of that goes. They're also facing a hitting the debt ceiling very, very shortly.

We're going to take a look. Emily's going to help me understand this Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni thing. He's firing back both at Blake Lively and at the New York Times, suing the New York Times, claiming that their reporting was false and that they were cherry picking and actually altering communications that they use for their blockbuster report, alleging that he had harassed her and also that he had retaliated against her. So I'll write all of that down for you.

The parents of the open AI whistleblower who was found dead authorities deemed that a suicide. The parents don't buy it. They have hired a private investigator to look into exactly what happened there. So we'll bring you those details. And we also are going to have an American doctor from Texas join us who is just back from his second trip to Gaza, obviously covered earlier this week. The horrific latest raid on Kamala Adwan hospital, the last functioning hospital in northern Gaza has been destroyed.

all the patients and medical staff, forced to leave some of them detained, etc. So he's going to tell us what he saw when he was in the Gaza Strip. Before we jump into the latest that we know out of New Orleans and this horrific terror attack that occurred on New Year's Day,

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Yes, let's start in New Orleans, Crystal, where the death hole has now risen to 15 people from the horrific New Year's attack on Bourbon Street. Now you've all in the audience likely heard the basics of what happened. Obviously a car, we have some video of this we're going to show in just one moment.

rammed into the packed crowd on Bourbon Street in New Orleans around three in the morning on New Year's Eve, but then really New Year's Day. People were still out in full force celebrating New Year's Eve, so it's clear that this attacker wanted to take out as many people as possible. Now President Joe Biden, late yesterday, finally addressed the nation in

I mean, there was nothing strange really about the script, but certainly about the delivery. So let me go ahead right now and roll this video of Joe Biden addressing the nation from Camp David, which is where he was for the holiday. I'm going to get this in full screen so you can actually see his face up close. Here's Joe Biden from Camp David last night. Our heart through the people of New Orleans.

after the despicable attack that occurred in early morning hours. To all the families of those who are killed, to all those who are injured, to all the people in New Orleans who are grieving today, I want you to know, I grieve with you, our nation grieves with you. We're going to stand with you as you mourn and as you heal in the weeks to come. I want to thank our brave first responders and law enforcement personnel

who stopped the attacker in his tracks before he could kill or injured even more people. And I want to thank you to everyone at the Department of the Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, including the FBI, for working nonstop to investigate this heinous act. The FBI is aiming the investigation to determine what happened, why it happened, and whether there was any continuing threat to public safety. Here's what we know so far.

The FBI has reported to me the killer was an American citizen, born in Texas. He served in the United States Army on active duty for many years. He also served in the Army Reserve until a few years ago. The FBI also reported to me that mere hours before the attack, he posted videos on social media indicating that it's inspired by ISIS, especially the desire to kill, desire to kill.

The ISIS flag was found in his vehicle, which he rented to conduct this attack. Possible explosives were found in the vehicle as well, and more explosives were found nearby. The situation is very fluid, and the investigation has a preliminary stage. And the fact is that, right now, excuse me. There you go.

The law enforcement and television community continue to look for any connections, associations, or co-conspirators. Well, Crystal, I feel better. I mean, like, this is the least important part of this at this point, given the loss of life and et cetera, but it's unbelievable this man is our president and that he still believes that he would have been able to be Donald Trump. But, you know, clearly this was a horrific, intentional attack.

Um, we are learning more about the, uh, the suspect who was killed after, you know, he fired at law enforcement and law enforcement fire back and, uh, shot and killed him. But, um, you know, the, the ISIS piece. So an ISIS flag was found in his truck.

And the president there indicates that according to law enforcement, he had posted some video sympathizing with ISIS. The more we learn about this dude, the more it looks less like an instance of some sort of like, you know, Islamic radicalization and more like some dude who went through a divorce and lost his mind. Because apparently he had first threatened his own family and was thinking of killing them and then decided got this ISIS

inspiration idea instead and goes and murders a bunch of innocent party goers on celebrating the new year. So we can go ahead Emily. I think you've got the TikTok video of this individual born and raised in Texas. Originally Christian converted to Islam in the last number of years.

According to his relatives and friends had become sort of like increasingly devout and increasingly withdrawn. He'd gone through two divorces and had a very troubled relationship in particular with, I think, the second wife it appears like. But this is a video of him. He was a professionally worked at Deloitte, actually. And this is a video of him when he was going through a phase where he was trying to launch a real estate business. And this in any case is how he presented himself in the context of that business.

I'm sitting to board property manager with Blue Metal properties and team lean at the Midas group at Core Realty. I just want to say hello and let you know a little bit about me. So I'm born and raised in Beaumont, Texas, and now live in Houston. And I've been here all my life.

with the exception of traveling for the military where I spent 10 years as a human resources specialist and IT specialist where I learned the meaning of great service and what it means to be responsive and take everything seriously dotting eyes and crossing T's to make sure that things go off without a hitch. So I've taken those skills and applied them to my career as a real estate agent where I feel like what really sets me apart from other agents is my ability to be able to one be a fierce negotiator. So not only do I

brilliantly market your property to make sure it gets sold as quickly as possible or gets least as quickly as possible. But I'm also going to take every ounce of energy and put it into negotiating for you and for your property to get the best deal that you can possibly get for it. So once we get to the closing table, all the eyes are going to be dotted, all the T's are going to be crossed, everything's going to go off without a hitch. And that is my word that I'm giving to you as your real estate agents.

And Crystal, what I'm sharing right here is from the New York Times. They say a man, they reported midday yesterday, a man who knew Shemso didn't behar Jabars. How's this that Jabar had converted to Islam? And then began acting erratically in recent months, according to Mike Baker. The concerning behavior led to him having limited contact with his children.

Certainly more reporting to that extent is coming in, no question about it. We're going to learn more. I just have to say, I mean, as the law enforcement response, Crystal transpired yesterday and the public eye, started with a news conference in which the FBI said that they were not investigating in active terrorism. We're going to get into some of this in just one moment.

And then obviously they had covered up the ISIS flag, which is going to lead to a lot of questions for years to come, certainly. But then hours later, actually moments later pivoted to saying, yes, they were investigating this as an act of terrorism, which I mean, it all seemed to be adding up pretty quickly to the point where they should be able to confirm that.

They then held a disastrous, disastrous midday press conference yesterday, and it wasn't just law enforcement. It was also Jeff Landry, the governor of Louisiana, Senator John Kennedy, Republican from Louisiana involved in this press conference. It was honestly just bizarre. It was like weirdly combative, and for no reason at all, it was just weird.

Yeah, it was horrible. I honestly thought it was just a disgraceful display. They were combative with reporters. Kennedy told a boomer joke about like NBC being on the left and the right in the middle of this press conference. Right, bodies were still in the street. It's really not the time when 15 people are dead and many dozens more injured and you're making like partisan weird boomer jokes.

Right. The bodies were literally still on Bourbon Street at the time, which was another thing that they were confirming in that press conference is horrific. They did not want to answer questions. They all seemed to be on completely different pages. They tried to end the press conference after delaying it for forever. They tried to end it like

quickly into the questions, a few questions in because they were threatening reporters essentially saying like you're not asking questions that we can answer. So we're just going to end it. I mean, it was outrageous how that happened. So let's take a look at some of the questions they were answering. And one of the biggest questions that they've faced going into all of this is how did this happen? Was there not adequate security? New Orleans obviously was hosting the sugar bowl. There were tens of thousands of people in town for the sugar bowl.

It was supposed to be yesterday night on New Year's Eve. They postponed it a day. That was an announcement from the press conference we were just mentioning. But they're also hosting the Super Bowl and just plainly should be able to keep obviously people safe on Bourbon Street now.

on a new year's celebration. Now this is video and it has some yellow boxes that you can follow of the car, which was rented on the app Turo. It was an electric vehicle. Let's go ahead and watch, follow those yellow boxes if you're watching this.

Thank you very much.

Terrifying. So what we just saw there was the electric vehicle go around a squad car that we're now learning from authorities was there because they're working to get barricades, basically the types of barricades that you put up when you don't want traffic to come down the street and ram a street full of people. This is what they're saying as of right now. They were using squad cars instead, but obviously you can drive around

a squad car. And if you can get onto the sidewalk, then you haven't fully barricaded the street crystal. Their answers to this have been utterly unsatisfying thus far. Yeah. And apparently all they had up were just the little like orange gate barricades that you can easily barrel through. To your point, it seems like the most obvious thing in the world that if you're trying to block a street using a vehicle, which is a common practice, you know, I've seen this in New York or I've seen this in DC where they're moving

Even some of the like, you know, sanitation trucks to try to block off different areas like you have to actually block off that area or else it doesn't serve much of a purpose. Also the fact that he's able to just skirt right around it and there's not any, you know, immediate reaction. Now I have seen video of local law enforcement, you know, immediately running into danger when they realized what was happening. And obviously they were able to neutralize the threat before it was caused even more loss of life.

We should also mention in terms of the details here, and part of what created this confusion around whether or not he was acting alone. Confusion, which I don't think has been completely resolved, although at this point it appears that, the catch has showed up, that he was acting completely alone, but there was an IED in addition to the firearms that he had in the truck.

And then there was some indication that there might have been some other IED that was found around the city. So there are some questions that still remain, but that's part of what's been confusing is initially they came out and said, oh, we're investigating these other individuals that we saw planting these devices around the city and then had to come out and walk that, oh, no, no, no, actually turns out they weren't involved. So there was a lot of,

a lot of questions about the law enforcement response here. And we actually have a video of someone who was there, an eyewitness, who said that he was concerned from the jump about the seeming lack of security of this area that is obviously famous in terms of America. It's this cultural historical destination known for its revelry. Obviously, it's going to be a hotspot on New Year's Eve. And the fact that security was so lax in and of itself raises massive questions.

Yeah, let's go ahead and take a look at that video, which is cute up right here. This is on CNN. We can go ahead and roll the clip. Last Mardi Gras, this happened to an extent, maybe not terrorism, but still people getting hit and mass population would be able. Those barricades were not on period. They had the flimsy orange ones that you could just push over with your finger.

We actually thought it was kind of odd, because usually when you get to Bergen Street, you can turn your back to canal and not worry about anything. You can just walk the street, especially on New Year's, and there were still vehicles coming after 8 p.m. And then, I mean, the fact that they never raised them, that's how this guy was able to get down Bergen Street so quickly and cause so much damage.

because there's other barricades past the canal and bourbon intersection. There's more like every two, three blocks. So what was 10 or 15 dead and 30 wounded could have only been maybe five and 15. I mean, who can save? But it definitely would have been minimalized because this truck cannot go around those barricades. Everything in New Orleans in the French Quarter has all the balconies have pulled

There's no going around anything. If that barricades up, that's a wrap. That's your end. So just to be clear, you're saying that they were just flimsy, the flimsy orange barricades that weren't weren't that they weren't the same barricades there as elsewhere. No, they were the metal ones were absolutely not engaged.

Well, and that struck you with the time, right? Because there was that 2017 incident with Mardi Gras where a drunk driver drove through. And so from what my understanding is they increased security measures in that area because of what happened there. But what you're saying is that you didn't see the security that should have been there to protect the replors. Yeah, we we were walking right across it. Like as you walk down bourbon, you cross like five of them. And then even when you turn off the side streets of bourbon,

There's more. There's a precautions are there and everything's implicated. You just have to use it. Now, just for a flavor of how the FBI's response changed over the course of the day, the Associated Press confirmed investigators have reviewed video of three men and a woman, a woman placing explosives in connection with the deadly car attacked in New Orleans, French Quarter.

The FBI does not believe the driver acted alone. So now there are three other suspects. This is in the middle of the day yesterday. There are three other suspects that are potentially being investigated as part of a terrorism cell and are loose ostensibly in the country. And the FBI then walks that back later in the day. So let's take a look at this report from CNN.

Any new information? You're getting some clarification from law enforcement officials. What are you learning? Yeah, well, one of the things we have been focused on is the FBI certainly was looking at this surveillance video that at the time at least appeared to show that there were other people who may have been involved in placing devices in the French Quarter. Now, we know that law enforcement now has determined that those people had nothing

to do with this incident. At this point, it appears that those people, seen on surveillance video, did not have anything to do with replacing devices in the French Quarter, that this suspect was solely responsible, certainly for the attack, at least as we know it, at this point. Now, we should make clear that the FBI is still looking at possible associates. They're trying to see whether there's anybody who may have been involved in helping to create the devices, the IUDs,

whether those people, anybody who might have been involved in helping to plan the attack, but at this point, at least on the part of the surveillance video, they now believe that those people had absolutely nothing to do with this actual attack that happened this morning. All right, important information indeed.

So, Crystal, it also appeared that reporters like press actually got to the suspect's house in Houston before the FBI. That's so far. Yeah, New York Post saying they were there before the FBI was there before law enforcement was there. And just to go back briefly to the moment at the disastrous insane press conference in the middle of the day yesterday,

when John Kennedy made his weird little joke, what he also did was basically box the FBI director out to get to the podium and make remarks. And the reason I think that's important is I can imagine if you're in Louisiana and your constituents are still lying on the ground on Bourbon Street,

You are probably enormously frustrated with the FBI. You came out right away for some reason, said that we weren't investigating it as terrorism, then flipped immediately on it. Later in the day, we'd do the same thing. There's a level of incompetence that he may have been reacting there. Now, that's, we have no idea why he actually box out the FBI director, but it was a horrible day for the FBI.

There's absolutely no question about it. These things are incredibly difficult. Obviously, that's true. There's a few situation, thousands of people. There's lots of CCTV footage because it's Bourbon Street. There's lots of mobile phone video, obviously, because it was New Year's Eve. That said, how you get from

alerting the country to three possible terrorists being on the loose because you're seeing them plant IEDs and CCTV footage that you're confirming that to the press and then hours later saying, oh no, we don't think that they were planning IEDs. That was a stunning reversal after their other stunning reversal on the terrorism question.

Absolutely. And the first thing that you know, even just as a, you know, an analyst covering these things is that the initial stories often change, initial perception of what happened often changes. You would think that FBI would be the ones to, you know, be most well aware of that. So to be leaking to journalists like, Oh, I think it's this larger like ISIS terror style.

based on, you know, a video that then they immediately go out and find, oh, no, they were just, you know, partygoers, like doing whatever they were doing. It's truly, it's truly outrageous. And as I said before, I think there are still some questions remaining about whether or not he acted alone, but at least according to NBC News, they said the only indication that law enforcement had that he hadn't been the, you know, the lone wolf here was that video.

So if there is other evidence, they hadn't uncovered it as of yet that there were other people who were involved in this. The indications, at least at this point, are that he lost his mind for whatever reason, decided to do some, let me grab my ISIS flag and do some horrific attack on innocent people.

And perpetrated this come came up with this on his own is what the indication is at this point. The other thing in this will help us transition into the other violent event yesterday on New Year's Day. So there were a few things that surface level seem to sort of connect.

This attack with the Vegas attack, so you have someone who drove up in a Cybertruck, Tesla, of course, manufacturer owned by Elon Musk, manufacturer of the Cybertruck outside of the Trump Hotel, and then detonates a bunch of explosives there, killing himself and injuring, I think, something like seven people who were nearby. So both vehicles were electric, used in both attacks. Both attacks used vehicles.

Both rented from this same, it's like a peer-to-peer rental car agency where it's like, you know, you can personally say, hey, my car is available for you to rent. That's what this app effectively was. And then the other thing is they both are apparently former military.

Now, it doesn't appear thus far that there are actually any lengths. These seem to be coincidences, but in any case that that's being investigated at this point, the fact that there were weirdly some surface level similarities between these two disparate attacks.

Yeah, I mean it was as this was playing out yesterday was obviously you had the FBI saying there may have been multiple people involved and then we start learning more about the cyber truck explosion outside of Trump Tower in Las Vegas and it starts to look incredibly frightening immediately frightening because it seems that there's like a chain reaction happening around the country potentially and

To your point, Crystal, we're going to learn a lot more about what radicalized this prospect. And that's an interesting unanswered question right now is basically what the hell happened. This was somebody who was in the military, as you heard President Biden say, just a few moments ago, when we played the video from his Camp David Press conference, somebody who was in the Army Reserves until not that long ago. Seemingly normal person who was American.

Hold on here. Normal white collar job. I believe the suspect's parents were also born here, not connected, unless there are other suspects that we learn of, but not connected to any type of immigration. That was another thing that was playing out yesterday.

Carr itself had gone through Eagle Pass, Texas multiple times that he had rented on Turo, the app, to your point. So there's so much more to the story that we still don't know. But I do know one thing, a lot of people are not at this moment feeling probably very confident in what the FBI says as things transpired. Now some breaking news, the FBI is set to brief Congress on Thursday.

So there should be Congress is back in town. The new Congress is in session. We're actually going to talk about how difficult that will be for Republicans in just a bit because as they seek to turn the screws on the FBI and to get a new FBI director confirmed in the Senate at least over on the House side, Mike Johnson has like one vote margin. So a lot to come later this week and a lot of questions that remain unanswered.

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All right, so we've referred now a couple of times to this other violent incident that occurred yesterday, which thankfully resulted in much lower loss of life than that vehicle attacked down in New Orleans. But yesterday, a cyber truck pulled up outside of the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas, and then reportedly after sitting there for 15 or 20 seconds explodes.

Now we have some video I can show you so ultimately the driver himself who perpetrated what is being described as an intentional act. He's the only person who died in this attack. There were something like seven people who were standing nearby who were also injured but thankfully again lower loss of life here but in any case let's take a look at this stunning video of what occurred here.

So you can actually see these fireworks exploding. And sure enough, after the fact, when they got a look at the truck itself, you can see here them carrying this tarp and revealing the contents of this truck, you can see

these firework canisters, gasoline canisters, can't fuel canisters, and they say large firework mortars in the back of the cyber truck that exploded. So Elon Musk got involved immediately and helped out law enforcement trying to first unlock the car, which had automatically locked, and then investigating to see a

was this some weird like Tesla problem where the vehicle just exploded out of nowhere and no he says we have now confirmed that the explosion was caused by very large fireworks and or a bomb carried in the bed of the rented cyber truck and is unrelated to the vehicle itself. All vehicle telemetry was positive at the time of

the explosion. And as I just mentioned, Emily, you also had law enforcement confirming that this was being investigated as an intentional act. And, you know, obviously, you could see the symbolism here. You've got the cyber truck, which is Elon Musk, who's obviously closely affiliated with the Trump administration, you got the Trump hotel, et cetera. So let's take a listen to a little bit of the reporting here.

Let's talk about Las Vegas because this has been a sort of interesting development. You know, the images of the cyber truck parked outside the Las Vegas Trump property went viral. You know, sort of, I think people thought it was an accident and then it was heard. And so there was a sort of bizarre symbolism in that it was a cyber truck. It was not Trump. As it's developed, it seems that this is being taken far more seriously. What have we learned about what authorities know and how they're investigating this?

Right, Chris. So, according to the reporting of myself, my colleagues Andrew Blankstein and Kelly O'Donnell, right now, three senior U.S. law enforcement officials say that this explosion of a Tesla Cybertruck, kind of in the portico there, where you saw that smoke rising from in front of Trump's property in Las Vegas, is being investigated, at least initially, as a potential act of terrorism, and that it was, quote, intentional.

So there you go. Another potential act of terrorism appears very much to be intentional when you're driving around with, you know, a bunch of fireworks and gas canisters and other explosives would seem very much to indicate that this individual intended for this to happen. And just I'll just give you the last couple of pieces that we know here. As we mentioned before, you know, there are some surface level

I don't want to say connections, but similarities is the better word between this vehicle-based attack and the other vehicle-based attack in New Orleans. The most noteworthy of this was the fact that both vehicles were electric and both were rented through the rental car at Toro, where people can put up their own vehicles to rent out to the public. I don't know, perhaps that's just like

They thought both thought that this would be a way for the vehicles not to be tracked or the easiest way to get the particular type of vehicle that they were looking to get. I don't know how easy it is to rent a cyber truck from a traditional rental agency. But in addition to them, both using vehicles, both using this rental car app.

Um, they also both were former military. Um, so this is who authorities said perpetrated this attack and, um, you know, ended up killing himself in this attack. Matthew Livelsberger, 37, um, identified as the driver of the cyber truck that exploded in Vegas listed on LinkedIn as an operations director and intelligence manager who apparently is former green beret.

Um, so at this point, that's about all we know about this particular attack in Las Vegas, which killed the driver and injured a number of passersby. And both obviously used trucks as well. So those are, I think more, I mean, they're, they're superficial to your point, Crystal, because they're, you know, all on the surface level, but they're pretty, I think, interesting parallels. And it took a long time.

for people to talk about what was happening in the same breath yesterday. We didn't hear it from media and law enforcement, but it would seem to have been a fairly obvious question. Trump obviously was at Mar-a-Lago. He was not at Las Vegas, so there's no threat to Trump himself. But, I mean, we may learn that they have absolutely nothing to do with each other, but the questions, I think, on the minds of a lot of the American people who now see

two different things happening on two different coasts almost at the same time or within hours of each other. I mean, I shouldn't say almost at the same time, but really within the 24-hour span, really within I think a 12-hour span, roughly, that raises questions. And the answer so far has been, again, entirely unsatisfying.

So apparently law enforcement is investigating to see if there's any potential link between these two attacks. So far they have not indicated that there are any other than these, you know, sort of surface level similarities, but.

Yeah, to your point, when we were talking about the New Orleans attack, there was a very scary period of time yesterday when law enforcement comes out and says, oh, well, there were actually, this wasn't just this lone wolf in New Orleans. We have video of these other accomplices who are still at large.

And then that's at the same time that you're just starting to get these details that, oh, the Cybertruck didn't just randomly blow up. This was another intentional act potentially being investigated as terrorism. It certainly raised, you know, is there going to be a series of more attacks in the country? So far, there's, as I said, there's no indication the two were linked. It looks like

to separate lone wolf psychos who decided for whatever reason or whatever irrational reason their brains concocted to try to hurt and kill innocent people who were just going about living their lives. But that's still being investigated at this point to see if there's any potential connection here. But as best we can tell, I think we have certainly more details about the attacker in New Orleans.

you know, looks like someone who was going about his life doing okay and then hit a rough patch. He was also under financial distress, had this difficult divorce and appears to have just completely lost his mind and was thinking about killing his own family and then decides instead to kill a bunch of innocent random civilians on, you know, New Year's Day early in the early mornings of New Year's Day. So welcome to 2025, not going so well so far.

On that point, it was insane in 24 hours of New Year's, where you had symbolically a little lightning strike, hit the Capitol, hit the Washington Monument, and all of this happens, like, starts unfolding within, like, 12 hours of the New Year. Not a great start, Crystal, but just a whole lot. I believe in Omen. Not, you know.

Seriously, seriously. And just a last point on that. Former military, I think, is just cannot gloss over how important that is. And the time span is enough that it potentially allows for this man to have been the suspect in Las Vegas, to have been

animated in some way, you know, we're likely dealing with somebody who had some level of mental illness but could have potentially been animated in one way or another by what happened in New Orleans. There's enough time that whatever the motivation was, maybe it's like something is a reaction in one way or another to what had happened in New Orleans in the Las Vegas case as well. So a lot more to be, a lot more questions to be asked and hopefully we'll get those answers soon rather than later.

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together... On the Really No Really podcast... Our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like... Why they refuse to make the bathrooms door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer.

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So guys, earlier this week, we covered this whole embryo. Is that how you say that word? I never know between Elon Musk and Vivek versus Laura Loomer and a bunch of other Magatives fundamentally over immigration, but specifically over H1B visas and quote unquote high skilled immigration. So.

At the time when we spoke to you last, Trump had given some comments to the New York Post that were, I guess, still a little bit cryptic, but he was like, I like H1B. And in fact, I use many H1B visas on my own properties, which I don't even think is true. I think he means H2B visas. But in any case, seems very much like he was siding with Elon.

However, I did see some of his supporters who are on the more like MAGA, like anti-immigrant, right, who were kind of coping over this saying, until I hear from his mouth, I'm not going to believe anything blah, blah, blah. Well, he got asked about this, Trump did on New Year's Eve at his annual Mar-a-Lago party and made it pretty clear where he stands on the issue at this point. Let's take a listen.

I didn't change my mind. I've always felt we haven't had the most confident people in our country. We need to go out for the people. We need smart people coming into our country. We need a lot of people coming in. We're going to have jobs like we've never had before. But sorry, you said you changed your position. We need a lot of people coming in, Emily. Now, I'm old enough to remember when at the RNC, the crowd was holding mass deportation now signs. JD Vance at the RNC gave a speech about how

no longer would they let foreign workers come in and replace American workers. So since getting Elon Musk's $250 million into his campaign, his tone does seem to have shifted a bit on this issue. Yeah, I mean, the mass deportations can theoretically exist alongside H1B visas. Like there's an ideological

way that you can say we're deporting illegal immigrants and then we're going to bring in the best and the brightest. But that's not the position that Donald Trump has taken in the past and it's not the position of people like Stephen Miller and people who are

So hawkish and immigration that they believe in this is typically for cultural reasons and alongside labor reasons that they believe basically the country is full is the way that they'll say it. We have to integrate people who are already here culturally and assimilate people who are already here culturally and we cannot continue to import workers that are undermining American workers so no immigration full moratorium

Legal immigration has to be reduced dramatically, if not entirely curbed. You have to get rid of all of these visa programs. That is not something that can exist alongside H1B visas without significant reform. Elon Musk, you've probably seen this. Crystal has come out and said, you know, basically, we all believe that

there should be reforms to H1Bs, which is I think an easy thing to say. It's another question of what happens when people actually try to make those reforms and what they end up looking like and who weighs in to potentially stop them if they are a threat to the way Silicon Valley does business, which this is important to their bottom line because you can see just the reaction.

from people over the last couple of weeks, how important it is to their their bottom line. Oh, this is a major issue for Silicon Valley. And you knew this back when Trump went on the All In Podcast, and this is one of the things that he promised the tech bro crew, including, you know, David Saxon. And the rest of the gang there, this is like one of the things that he talked about and he promised. So for those of us who've been listening carefully,

It wasn't a surprise that he had made this dramatic pivot from the way he had positioned himself back in 2020 and 2016. You know, just to clarify, I got my position, I support more legal immigration, more pathways to citizenship, high skilled and low skilled.

But the problem with this program and effectively with all gas worker programs is it does created that create this indentured servant class that is completely beholden to, you know, whatever, whether they're corporate boss once in their their their immigration status depends.

on pleasing their corporate boss. They frequently are underpaid. They're also used as a tool to like, you know, bus unions, because if you've got this workforce there that is, you know, can only stay in the country so long as they keep the boss pleased, then they may not want to do something as adversarial as start a union, et cetera, join a union, et cetera.

And so those programs are fundamentally exploitative, both for the workers themselves, and also have a deleterious effect on the existing workforce. It's also worth really noting something that people have been pulling up and noting on Twitter. Tesla, among other tech companies, laid off thousands of American workers at the same time that they're claiming, because you have to, in order to get one of these H-1B visas that you can use for your company, you have to claim there's no American worker.

who can fill this role. And so at the same time, they're claiming, oh, we can't get anyone to fill these positions. You're laying off thousands of American workers. So for Elon Musk, it's very clear what's going on here, you know, and for the rest of the tech oligarchs, it's very clear what's going on. They like having

an exploitable, easily manipulated, lower paid workforce. And they consider that to be really important to them and their, you know, capitalist bottom line. Um, just to show you, so, uh, to, to give you a little visual representation of, uh, Elon's influence here can see him here, you know, uh, vibing with Lil X on his shoulders, who is absolutely adorable. Um, parting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago.

There's a New York Times report that he just he's just staying at the cottage at Mar-a-Lago I saw someone on Twitter It was like, you know, he's smart enough to realize Trump is very influenced by the last person he talked to so he's just gonna post up and Mar-a-Lago and always be the last person who talks to Donald Trump but even beyond that I think this deal was already made and

back when Elon basically rescued his campaign and who knows if he would have won or not if Elon wasn't involved in his money, etc. But certainly possible that that quarter of a billion dollars plus organizing efforts on the ground was determinative given how close a margin the race ends up ultimately being.

Yeah, well, and that means there's a sort of debt of gratitude, so to speak, that you would imagine Donald Trump owes Elon Musk. And in this case, Crystal, there was some reporting several years ago. It was a big controversy at the time that Disney had laid off American workers and actually had them

training their replacements. Again, it was a splashy at the time, but sort of faded from the headlines, as you can imagine. But what's important about that in combination with something you just said is that you have to say you can't hire Americans, like this is the most qualified person of all of a while to get your H1B. That's already a protective measure intended to be in the law. And so when you come in and say, I'm making reforms, this is going to be even more stringent.

Silicon Valley, if they stop protesting, usually means they found a way around whatever the reform is. Usually means they feel comfortable that they can still continue to hire people with these ways that are beneficial to their bottom lines and undercutting American workers, because if you look at what happened with Disney, for example,

It just raises this obvious point, which is if they can do it, why wouldn't they? If they are about maximizing shareholder value, why would they not do that if they can do it? If they can get away with it, obviously, they don't want the negative media attention. That was fairly disastrous for

this thing, but now nobody even knows it really happened. So if they can do it, why wouldn't they? And that means they're always- That's Trump's rationale too. I mean, he apparently has maybe a few, has applied for a few H1B visas, which are like the, you know, knowledge workers. H2B applies to hospitality and other seasonal work. So like hospitality, agriculture, things like that.

He has long used at his properties many H2B visas. And so it's important for people to remember, in spite of the way Trump has branded himself, he ultimately, you know, his class interests and ideological positioning are very much aligned with Elon Musk.

So for him to come out, totally change his position and don't let him fool you. This is a change in position. No one should be surprised because he avails himself and benefits from this very same, very exploitative system of visas which are tied to your employment. So if you piss off your employer, you get deported. That is a fundamentally exploitative relationship

that even lefties like me who think that immigrants are good for the country and want more pathways to citizenship, et cetera. This is a bad way to do immigration because it's bad for the person coming in and it's bad for the workers that you are undercutting with these lower wages and more exploitative labor practices.

Yeah, it's not as though there's no way to bring in the best talent in the world. I think that's entirely possible. But the way these laws are written, you can poke them full of holes, like Swiss cheese, if you have the resources and you're massive.

firm, multi-billion dollar company or anything like that, you can find a way around all of these different things that might hurt midsize or smaller businesses who are trying to use the same practices. And that's why there's no, yes, H1B visas, if you put Stephen Miller in charge of them, that's a threat to Silicon Valley. But there's always a confidence in the industry that they're able to write these laws in a way that still works for them, even if

You know, there are restrictions or reforms or whatever. So that's why, you know, I take seriously the idea that the program should be reformed if it's espoused by or endorsed by people like Elon Musk. I think that's great but incredibly, incredibly suspicious that it would really happen in a way, a meaningful way.

Let's take a look just for the record at a compilation of how Trump talked about this issue in 2016, how he talked about it in 2020, and then we've already played for you what he just said indicating, quote, we need a lot of people coming in. Let's take a listen to this.

Nobody knows the system better than me. I know the H1B. I know the H2B. Nobody knows it better than me. I know the H1B very well, and it's something that I frankly use, and I shouldn't be allowed to use. We shouldn't have it. Very, very bad for workers. As we speak, we're finalizing H1B regulation so that no American workers are replaced ever again. H1B should be used for top, highly paid talent to create American jobs, not

as inexpensive labor program to destroy American jobs. So there you go. And then they just play the 2024. And he's not the only one, Emily. And this was kind of funny, who has really changed his tune with regards to this very specific topic. So Vivek Ramaswami, who on Monday, you probably recall, we covered, he put out that tweet, like attacking American culture as being mediocre and pushing choreography.

because of our sitcoms that we watched in the 90s and hanging out at the mall or whatever, all in order to back up Iwan's position and now Trump's position on H1B visas. Back in October, not like years ago, I'm talking about literally this October 2024, he sounded very different on the topic. Let's take a listen.

A lot of the people who have come here through the H1B system would tell you, as I would, that it's just a broken system, no matter who you're seeking to serve. For example, you want to talk about special interests and lobbying? This is direct Silicon Valley lobbying that said that if you get your H1Bs and you're hired by one company, you're effectively like a slave. You can't switch to a different company. That's not a free labor market. So there's so much that's broken and bureaucratized.

Here's the next question about the H1B visa system is why the heck do we do it on the basis of a lottery when you could actually just select the very best people? So there's a lot that's broken about the administrative state, the bureaucracy. My general approach is when something's broken in government, you can't really fix it when it's lasted that long. You need to shut it down, start with a blank slate, and rebuild from scratch. And that's just a stylistic point that I've applied to this issue as to any other.

So that last bar is like, there's no reform. You just got to get rid of it. It's particularly important because people had surfaced some of his comments before that were critical of H1B's. And he's like, I didn't change my position. I've always been for reform. I'm still for reform. But this makes it pretty clear, like, no, you weren't just talking about reform. You were saying,

A broken system, you really can't fix it. You just got to get rid of it altogether. And so he really is kind of caught here also, I guess, deciding to kowtow to his fellow billionaire. He is also a billionaire, although I guess a lesser billionaire than Elon Musk. He's a single or double billionaire as opposed to whatever Elon Musk has, but ultimately, a line here with his own class interest.

Yes, that was a fairly detailed and substantive, well-thought-out argument against H.W.B.B.s, because it's no way around it. And what sucks for the American worker is it also used to be something that a lot of people, even like higher profile people, Bernie Sanders on the left, used to make a substantive and serious argument against as well.

It just, it's so, to your point about Silicon Valley, it's so valuable to them that we've seen those arguments just sort of melt away and this idea that it could be reformed without, as Vivek said, I actually basically agree with what he said in that conversation that we just played, because when you start quote-unquote reforming things, you end up with those whole likes was cheese being poked in by lobbyists and industry, which is the system that we have now. It's the system likely we would have,

under a seriously reformed version of H1B visas. So to see the change in rhetoric is just a small sample of what America workers have been dealing with for decades from the political class. Yeah, yeah, it is quite remarkable. I mean, I think when we talk to Roe, I think he's got some good ideas and working bipartisan in a way to reform the program. But as long as immigration status is tied to job status, that's going to end up in

that's going to end up in exploitation. So if you're someone who wants to have more immigration, whether it's high skilled, low skilled, whatever, I really don't think doing it through these guest worker programs, which is something that the left has long critiqued the guest worker approach to immigration because of these labor dynamics that it ultimately sets up. So the last thing that I'll say here is even though Trump has weighed in, the question is not necessarily completely closed.

Steve Bannon has been very much on the war path, specifically against Elon. I mean, that's the thing. It's like, Laura Loomer, all these people, like, they never really go directly at Trump. It's always like, whatever proxy on the issue, and Trump's just being misled. And of course, we love Trump, and he would never do anything wrong, but like, let me sort of like, do a roundabout critique of him. But in any case, Steve Bannon going very aggressively

still on this issue, really declaring war on it. Let's go ahead and listen to some of his latest comments here. I've said many times that Elon came and Elon's money helped organize the grassroots over in his engineering mind. He saw what the problem was as we saw it and he supported it. And for that, he gets a place at the table. There's no doubt you should.

It's a quarter of a billion dollars in June, not in a tire cycle in five months. But that dinner with Saks and that check from Elon came at Biden's, you know, when Biden in the debate, directed for the debate and Biden, you know, they kind of saw the numbers where this thing was heading. They're recent converts and we love converts. Hell, I'm a Catholic. We used to be in the convert business, not so much anymore. We can't keep what we got. But in the old days,

You know, half the saints are missionaries. We love and converts. But the converts sit in the back and study for years and years and years to make sure you understand the faith and you understand the nuances of the faith and understand how you can internalize the faith. Don't come up and go to the pulpit in your first week here and start lecturing people about the way things are gonna be. If you're gonna do that, we're gonna get and we're gonna rip your face off.

Because you can't beat us. We're not beatable.

This army, the awakened is not beatable because we're relentless and we will never surrender and we will never slow down. So there you go. We'll rip your face off. We're not beatable. Never surrender. Never back down. I don't know. What do you think is going to happen with this? Because I sort of feel like now that Trump has said his piece, they are going to just like get in line. And I also find it creepy to compare the support for a politician or a political movement to like, you know, religion.

Being a convert to religion, I find that a little disquieting myself. But anyway, go ahead. Well, I think it's interesting that it gives this question of how sincere their conversion to continue that to the Church of Magga actually was. You know, a band in there.

Bannon is not gullible. He's not a silly person. He obviously understands that their sincerity of their conversion is very much in question. What part of MAGA do they actually agree with? They agree with the doge part of MAGA, but the doge part of MAGA.

that don't touch entitlements part of MAGA, that everyone will have healthcare part of MAGA, which means different things, obviously, depending on where you catch Trump in the Republican Party in any given day. Donald Trump tried to come to the table with Nancy Pelosi on DACA in his first term, which is easily forgotten.

What MAGA means to Donald Trump and what MAGA means to Steve Bannon and Steve Bannon's many, many followers and listeners and the grassroots of the Republican Party, Tea Party activists who have been around the county Republican Party headquarters across the country for years,

It means something very different to Elon Musk and to Steve Bannon and to Donald Trump than it does to those people. Steve Bannon is more sort of has his finger more firmly on the pulse of what that looks like to the actual like party faithful and grassroots. So the question I think, Crystal, is where the stacks on priorities. So if Donald Trump and Elon Musk continue to say we're planning ahead with H1Bs, maybe they do lift the cap, which is

What kicked us all off was the AI appointment, putting out a tweet that said we should lift the cap. We should have unlimited, basically. If they did something like that, it's one thing to just go along with the existing system. It's another thing entirely to say, we're blowing up the system. There's no caps anymore. We're bringing over all of these people to compete with the American workforce. If they did that,

Bannon is going to continue to absolutely raise hell. And Bannon's followers will continue to absolutely raise hell. And I don't think it goes away. If they just sort of keep the system as it is, I mean, then I think everyone just kind of goes along for the ride. But the question is what level of priority it stacks up as. And that'll depend on, I think, what we see right away.

Well, because they are going to do some day one executive orders in the direction of quote unquote, a mass deportation, you know, how aggressively they move in that direction or not is a, you know, still open question. But yeah, you've still got Stephen Miller in there, effectively. And what's his face, Tom Homan, who's really, you know, very aggressively immigration hawkish restrictionists, who is the immigration czar.

So you still have some very hard line people who are going to put together a series of very hard line policies with regard to deportations. So yeah, I think that'll satisfy the Steve Bannon's of the world. And frankly, I think most Trump supporters have proven themselves to not be particularly ideological. It is more of a cult of personality than it is a consistent ideological movement.

Because if it wasn't, he's already betrayed the supposed tenants of Trumpism many times. You said trying to make a deal with Nancy Pelosi on DACA in the first administration, making his primary achievement in the first administration on giant Paul Ryan tax cut for the rich. And there was never any revolt among the MAGA base over any of these things outside of some minor complaints, minor bickering.

And I don't see that as being any different this time around. The last thing I'll say with regard to the billionaires is there's a reason why these billionaires flip back and forth between the parties. It's not because they're having some based awakening. It's because they're going wherever they think they can get the best deal for themselves.

where they think that they're very consistent ideology of enriching themselves and being able to have the type of captive, exploitable workforce that they want to have, they're going to go to whichever party they think is most primed to deliver those results for them, or however they think is most likely to win, whoever they think they can have the most influence with, et cetera.

And so that's what's going on here with Elon and David Sachs and all these people who have made a lot of the tech right that used to be in the Democratic Party, Mark Andreessen being another example of that.

It's not that they've had some sort of ideological conversion, although they may talk about being anti-woke or whatever. But mostly they just use that as a cloak like Mark Andreessen does for pushing through whatever their sort of bottom line capital interests are. And I'm referring specifically to when he goes on with Joe Rogan.

attacks the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has been decidedly a positive thing for American consumers and has delivered money back to them when they've been defrauded by companies. And he's had some portfolio companies that have come into their crosshairs before having scammy practices. He doesn't like the CFPB. But rather than directly talking about what it is he doesn't like about it, which is that this regulatory body was negative for him and his portfolio companies and his self-interest.

and steady cloak sit in this like all that it's it's woken they're canceling can serve as in their debanking service which is total incomplete nonsense so you know these guys are walls and sheeps clothing they don't align with by and large there may be some areas where they have overlap with your interests but they're looking out for themselves whether they're glomming onto the democratic party or the glomming onto the republican party the bottom line for them will always be the bottom line

And Bannon for a while said, this is one, maybe a crass way of putting it, but basically would look at all of these tech guys who were coming into the MAGA movement and said, you're our useful idiots, right? We're using your money to undermine your interests, because Bannon is a populist on the cultural and economic level. He's not just anti-woke, he's like genuinely anti-late stage Western capitalism. And he would look at them that way.

What he sees happening, I think accurately, is that MAGA is becoming the useful idiot of the money class. And that is a serious threat to Trump's second term, if you're a steep man and type of populist, or if you're just an average American who saw it in Donald Trump, somebody that would be able to extend a helping hand.

to your interests. So, yeah, if you're bringing these people into your movement and you think they're your useful idiots, you can very easily become their useful idiots. Oh, yeah. At a moment, on a whim, yeah.

Yeah, Elon did not give a quarter of a billion dollars to get nothing out of this deal. He is the wealthiest man on the planet. He is extremely powerful. Like he may be, he rivals Donald Trump in terms of his level of power. And I think to not see that from the jump is, is and was foolish, which is why when Elon was, and Vivek were given their like doge commissioner and was like, oh, they just gave them this make work project. And it's like pathetic and good job for just kind of like pushing them to the side. I was always very skeptical of that.

Because no, you are giving them this whole government mandate. The Trump administration has thought through specific legal mechanisms that they can use to try to effectuate some of the desires of Elon Musk. This person has the ear of the president and is in a very powerful position.

It doesn't have to give up any of his businesses in order to have that advisory capacity. Exactly right. Whereas if he was directly in government, he would have to abide by these specific conflict of interest rules that any federal government appointee or employee

has to deal with. So since he stays on the outside, he gets to keep all his stuff, but that does not mean that his power is ultimately diminished. And that's what really, like, outside the specific of H1Bs and H2Bs and all of the, like, you know, the policy wonkery here, that's the meat of why the story is so important, is because you have your first very clear ideological difference between the Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, you know, Laura Loomer and Culture, that wing of the party,

and the Elon Musk billionaire capitalist wing of the party, and Elon won and it wasn't close. Trump sided with him unequivocally. So if there was any question about how this was going to go, I think we got a pretty clear answer.

this time around and there's no sign of you know there were all this like oh maybe Elon's gonna overstep and Trump's not gonna like it and blah blah blah there's no sign of that they seem to be getting along famously fabulously i'm not sure Trump really cares that much about what happens in this administration he's staying out of jail he doesn't have to run for reelection again he can do what he wants to do

He doesn't have to care what MAGA thinks of him or Steve Bannon thinks of him ultimately because he doesn't have to get reelected. And he rightly calculates that at the end of the day, they're all just going to probably go along with what he does anyway. So I think that's, it's a preview very much of things to come. Yeah, absolutely. It would have been interesting actually to see if Donald Trump had disagreed with Musk on H-1Bs, how Musk would have reacted to that. So it is a lot online. True.

Alexander and I'm Peter Tilden and together on the really no-really podcast our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor we got the answer will space junk block your cell signal the astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer we talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth plus does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts his stuntman reveals the answer

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All right, let's go ahead and move on to this other Republican intro party fight. Congress is returning to Washington, DC with an incredibly razor thin margin for Republicans. As they enter, I'll go ahead and share this first element. This is a story from Axios about basically what Mike Johnson has as he returns, which is a one vote margin.

So just a little bit of context here, Axios writes, house GOP hardliners continued hesitance to coalesce around Johnson suggests that President-elect Trump's endorsement of the incumbent speaker has had little effect so far. Now, this is a quote from Ralph Norman to Axios. He says, a quote, growing number of members want at minimum assurances from Johnson on meaningful cuts to spending before they vote to re-elect him.

Now I'm going to share a second story. This is Donald Trump backing Mike Johnson for House Speaker

endorsement as speaker. He said that on Monday on truth, so socially referred to Mike Johnson enthusiastically actually as a quote, good, hard working religious man. He will do the right thing and we will continue to win. So said Donald Trump. Now this is interesting because there is, as Access reported, a movement among freedom caucus types or freedom caucus adjacent people like Thomas Massey, also Chip Roy to block Mike Johnson from becoming speaker again.

absolutely infuriated by how the omnibus negotiations transpired in late December, disgusted by it, said, we actually have the House of Representatives. You are the Speaker. You are a Republican. Donald Trump just won what they believe was a mandate. And you are still governing, like the political class has, like you, Mike Johnson, stood up against before you were Speaker.

And we're basically heading into Crystal. What I think is another Kevin McCarthy cycle here, where Mike Johnson is basically the only option that they have. So they're pushing right now. They were sort of testing the waters it looked like. For example, Chip Roy was testing the waters to see if Jim Jordan was a plausible candidate that they could quickly see if Jim Jordan had enough momentum to just be voted a speaker.

But what I think we're heading towards more likely is another series of concessions from Mike Johnson to people like Chip Roy. They got some significant concessions, significant enough that McCarthy was ousted last time around by his own concessions to Matt Gates. One of the things was something called the very parliamentary arcane thing called the motion to vacate.

which was always around until Nancy Pelosi hilariously got rid of this, or she added a threshold. And they got rid of that, which is how Matt Gates ultimately was able to oust Kevin McCarthy by bringing a vote on the speaker to the floor. So, you know, Mike Johnson might be in a position where he has to make some concessions that could ultimately be his undoing, but Republicans right now know in their conference that they don't really have anyone to rally around that is a consensus

point between the centrists and the Freedom Caucus people when you have such a thin, razor thin majority as they head back to Washington DC. So Mike Johnson has already technically lost the votes. Thomas Bassie says no. That's all he can afford to lose. It looks like Chip Roy is a no as of right now. But we'll see what happens. There's a lot going on behind the scenes with us.

Yeah, he's got to get to 18 unless people vote present. The math is a little bit confusing for this, but it's not enough to get a plurality. You have to get a majority of the members of Congress in the house, which is why he can only afford to lose one.

So Thomas Massey is a definite no. If you're saying Chip Roy is also likely a no, then that's it. He doesn't have the votes. Now, does that mean that Mike Johnson is not going to be the speaker? No. Mike Johnson is ultimately, unless something crazy happens, which you never know, Mike Johnson is ultimately going to be the speaker of the house, but not before going through what I'm sure will be a very painful and public

exercise of like, you know, having to go back and forth and figure out what sort of concessions he's willing to give and what Thomas Massey at L are willing to accept. And they have some bargaining chips to work with here. So first of all, Trump has to be certified as president. We all became intimately familiar with this electoral certification process. January 6.

four years ago. And so it's got to be approved by the House. And if you don't have a speaker, you can't do anything. So they need to get a speaker in place in order to certify the election results and make Donald Trump president of the United States.

which I'm sure is part of what motivated Trump to weigh in on this fight and to try to close the door to any potential challengers, etc, etc. So there's that. The other thing is you do have a debt ceiling constraint here. You're about to reach here in early January. So Janet Yellen came out and Emily's got this up on the screen here. As soon as January 14th,

the country could hit the debt ceiling limit. So in a previous deal, the debt ceiling had just been like suspended. By the way, debt ceiling is a stupid archaic thing. No other country has it, but we have it. It's like ridiculous. But anyway, it's true. I agree with Donald Trump when he says things like that. Anyway, it was extended. It was suspended. So they just like got rid of it temporarily until January 1st because they're getting some

refunds back and whatever, they're going to have enough money to not hit the debt ceiling until roughly January 14th. Even that is not a hard limit because then they can do what's called extraordinary measures, which means they move around the order of the payments, etc, etc.

to extend what period of time they have. However, it's kind of like once you hit January 14th through the 23rd, somewhere in that range, then the talk clock is really ticking and you really actually have to deal with this. People like Thomas Massey

They'll go out and chip Roy they'll say like oftentimes they're just like I'm not voting for a debt ceiling increase period end of story we need to cut spending that's their ideology that's what they believe and they're pretty consistent about it so um that's part of why they were so upset about the omnibus

Trump was upset about the omnibus because it didn't extend the debt ceiling, which creates immediate problems for him as his administration is coming in that he has to deal with. But in any case, that's one of the sort of like chips that they can play in terms of trying to extract whatever concessions they want ultimately out of Mike Johnson. Then you have to remember like it's not just the house that we're talking about here.

any sort of, you know, spending cuts, et cetera, like that also has to go through the Senate, where as of right now, you also have to get a filibuster, you know, proof 60 votes, which requires a collaboration of Democrats. So again, Mike Johnson's going to be speaker, but it's just illustrates there's a lot of tricky issues that Republicans are going to have to be dealing with here in the coming days. This first speaker vote happens literally tomorrow in the coming days and weeks as Trump takes office.

Yeah, and to your point, Crystal, this is all everything you just outlined. That's leverage. That was leverage that they understood they had with Kevin McCarthy and it's leverage that they know for sure they have now. So some of this is them saying, I actually can't take a vote for you. Like my constituents.

do not want me to vote for you. They don't want me to vote for this debt ceiling. I can't do it. So you need to give me something so that I can tell them, you need to give me reason to make this okay. And so that's the leverage they have behind closed doors and actually out in the open right now you're seeing some of this happen. What they can get from it is going to be fascinating because Mike Johnson is almost the only option.

But obviously, if you're shopping around Jim Jordan, you can say, I'm voting for Jim Jordan. There's nothing you can do about it. Democrats are definitely not going to help Mike Johnson this time around. I think I came, Jeffrey, says already said something to that extent. So good luck. Mike, I'm probably going to have to give up a whole lot.

I have to say as a lefty, I'm jealous of the way that the Freedom Caucus and the way Thomas Massey and others recognize this leverage that they have and recognize how to use it for their own ideological ends, even though those ideological ends are not my own, I respect the tactics.

And I'm jealous that there isn't anyone on the Democratic side willing to employ those tactics either. And I think that it's become very clear that the tactical posture of the squad and a Bernie to let me play nice with the Democrats and let me see if that's the way that I can effectuate the most political change. That really defanged them.

and made them just another rank and file Democratic establishment member. I'm still glad that they're there versus another more corporate Democrat. They're more likely to vote well on the issues that I care about. But it has completely defanged them and completely undermined the places where they could have wielded power. And there are a lot of places because in the Senate, but in particular in the House,

when the Democrats have the majority is also very slim majority. And so they could have employed some of these tactics to further left populist ideological interests and at every opportunity effectively. I don't want to say it every, but they never used any leverage whatsoever. That would be, you know, a misstatement.

But, you know, they never were willing to go to the mat the way that the Freedom Caucus is. They never were willing to really just aggressively be adversarial towards leadership the way that the Freedom Caucus is. And, you know, the most important case in point of this is AOC. She wanted to be ranking member on oversight. It would have been a good position for her because it requires someone who can, you know, communicate and be like, bombastic, whatever, like she would do well in that role.

And Nancy Pelosi actively, even after AOC did so much for the party and was a good, good girl and fell in line and did all the things they wanted her to do and advocated for Kamala and back by and all that stuff, even after all of that. And she reportedly promised I won't even primary, I won't even back primary challengers to incumbent Democrats. They still behind the scenes, Nancy Pelosi pushes for her chosen candidate, Jerry Connolly and blocks AOC from that position. So it, it, it was a failed tactical

decision, and I am envious of the Republicans' willingness to play hardball in these negotiations. Yeah, I mean, Ryan and I pushed Greg Cassar, the incoming chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, on exactly this. So if people want to see that sort of back and forth, go check out Counterpoints Friday from about a month ago, because I've always had the exact same question. And this gets to what I think might happen over the course of the next couple of weeks with the Republican Conference, because fundamentally,

The Post Tea Party, this is very much came out of the Tea Party. The Post Tea Party attitude of people like Chip Roy was bolstered by certain populist Republicans who came from the Tea Party wave themselves saying, oh, I know my constituents are behind me.

And not only are they behind me, they don't want me to go in here and make bad deals with you. They want me to make either no deals or good deals. And that's why we may see people like Chip Roy. It's actually possible that they don't go along to get along with Donald Trump. We saw Donald Trump actually attacking Chip Roy a couple of weeks ago when the omnibus was on the table and Chip Roy was threatening that they know fundamentally that their constituents are behind them when they block

deals with the political establishment. So it gives them confidence. And the squad should operate like that as well as sort of the post populist iteration of left populism in Congress. I shouldn't say post populist, but the populist wave iteration in Congress, they should know that that's where their constituents are too. And just finally, that means that, you know, if your constituents are fully behind Donald Trump, they're going to want to see you go along with Trump. And that's the question that the chip royals of the world have to ask themselves in the next couple of weeks.

Yep, it'll be interesting. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathrooms door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientists who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth plus

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Well, Crystal, the saga of it ends with us, starring Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, has officially crossed the threshold from a story of celebrity intrigue to one of greater import. I think it's really becoming a story about the media. And to be fair, we always could see a little bit of the internal Hollywood PR machinations creeping into public views over the course of the last several months, since the movie came out and they famously did not promote the movie together. But it has since, just in the last even 48 hours, become

a sort of post-me-to story about how the media is handling allegations of sexual misconduct, essentially. It's becoming a fascinating story, but I think a really important one. One of the reasons that I love following celebrity gossip so closely, Crystal, is because it's on low stakes.

public relations game. And you see how journalists, and in this case, we're talking about the New York Times. We're not talking about TMZ. We're not talking about pop sugar or whatever else. We're talking about the New York Times, how easily they can be manipulated by powerful people in the public relations game. So right now, it's sort of a question of who's a jerk, Justin Baldoni or Blake Lively. And maybe the answer to that question is both of them. But

Just yesterday, Variety published a story that I'm going to share on the screen right now because this is a hugely significant story in that it is quite a rebuttal to a New York Times story that really, really took Blake Lively's side. So this is the headline from Variety, Justin Belldoni files $250 million lawsuit against New York Times over Blake Lively's story, saying it relied on her, quote, self-serving narrative.

Again, Crystal, I don't think we needed Justin Belldoni to file this suit to realize that it was relying on Blake Lively's narrative. Let me share the New York Times story right now. You can see we can bury anyone inside a Hollywood smear machine. That had the byline, or you may recognize that byline viewers and listeners may recognize this byline, Megan Tohy, who was one of

The famous New York Times Me Too reporters very celebrated for Me Too reporting in the initial wave of the Me Too movement. And I don't know about you, Crystal, but as I was reading through the original New York Times story,

It seemed to me, just as a casual reader who hadn't looked at any of these documents, that there was a huge context gap, that a lot of the producers' texts that were being published, so the one that's in the headline, it says, quote, we can bury anyone. We were missing a lot of other parts of those conversations. So the New York Times is making it look as though Justin Baldoni had

realized that Blake Lively was not happy with him and was going to run her own kind of campaign against him. Obviously, millions and millions of dollars are on the line anytime you're promoting this. It's like a big product, essentially. And so it means a lot to bottom lines for these big companies. And they treat it really seriously. And that's where celebrity gossip becomes a product in and of itself as well.

Yeah, and you know, these allegations are that Baldoni was walking in on Blake Lively while she was breastfeeding allegations that he bit her lip during a kissing scene. Basically, they acted like a jerk. Nothing here. I think constitutes like assault, obviously, but he was also sort of walking around clothing himself as in the sort of like moral garb of male feminism.

So and then it's like he seems to be orchestrating or his people seem to be orchestrating a social media campaign to take clips of Blake Lively and disseminate them and make it look like an organic Uprising if people realizing that Blake Lively has always been sort of a

and then he comes in with this lawsuit against the New York Times and gives evidence to variety, suggesting the New York Times, believe it or not, Crystal, was overly gullible. And a lot of people will look at that more cynically and say taking some type of orders from Blake Lively for something in return. But I think what it looks like is they got drip, drip, drip bits from Blake Lively's team.

and did not confirm the context or were ideologically sort of wedded to the lively narrative and to her side of the story that they weren't interested in the other context because what Balthoni is doing, I don't think he may get a settlement, you're not gonna win, I think this suit against the New York Times and as a journalist, you know, I don't think he should win this suit against the New York Times because they're free to publish whatever nonsense they want to and we're free to say that it's nonsense.

But it looks like some of these things, at least from a journalistic standpoint, would have been served by context, better context. And so the question now becomes, whether the New York Times had that context. So, Crystal, what do you make of what we learned yesterday?

Yeah, so just to back up for people who are like me, and we're not really following the story outside of my 16-year-old being like, oh my god, mom, what do you think about this? I'm like, what do I think about it? I don't even know about it. There was a lot of TikTok. There was a lot of TikTok. That's where I had to start with is like, who is Blake Lively? And who is Justin Belldoni? That was where I had to start with all of this. But effectively, they're co-stars on this show movie. It ends with us. Yeah.

Okay, movie. And the movie, one of the central themes also is around domestic violence. So that's how Justin Belldoni comes to like cloak himself in this, like, I'm an ally and I'm against toxic masculinity. And he's doing a podcast with Liz Plank, who's noted feminist, etc. So he adopts this whole mantle.

And during the promotion for this film, neither one of them, they won't appear together. And also the entertainment media picks up on the fact that a bunch of cast members have unfollowed him. So there seems to be some rift between him and everyone else. So then, according to some of the texts that have been released, he starts to panic of like,

Obviously, she's not happy. They're not happy with us. They could really smear us in the press. What can we do to get ahead of that? And I think even without some of the ways that the Times characterized it, obviously, they screwed up. For example, about we could bury anyone, et cetera, et cetera, left out the emoji that would have indicated to readers that they were being sarcastic. And they also left out a text.

that indicated directly that this PR team was actually not responsible for this specific article that appeared. But nevertheless, even putting that aside, he enlisted PR professionals to basically try to get ahead of the story and flip the narrative. So at some point,

There seems to be this online organic like we don't like Blake Lively and she's kind of a bitch and she was a bitch in this interview and why she just out there promoting her like alcohol company when you know alcohol can be linked to domestic violence and she doesn't talk about domestic violence at all. There seem to be this organic anti- Blake Lively narrative that took hold in the public.

And so when she gets her side of the story out in this New York Times piece, she alleges with the aid of the New York Times that effectively, like number one, you were inappropriate on the set in any number of ways. You mentioned a few of them coming into my trailer when, you know, at different times when I was naked.

Um, there were some allegations of like body shaming. She just had a baby. Um, there were allegations that there were different boundary violations and they both, they had sex scenes in this movie. So, you know, it's very fraught and she's married and her husband apparently berated, uh, Belldonia at one point. So in case she alleges that that happened, then that there's this orchestrated campaign of retaliation against her. Okay. So now,

So I'm just going to put it up on the screen here. You can see from Variety as an example, one of the juiciest tidbits from the New York Times story was this allegation that Belldoni had basically stormed in on Blake Lively while she was breastfeeding on the set of the movie. And versus the variety story that I know you were just about to get to, which says, well, the context there, they have text messages of Blake Lively saying, I'm just pumping in my trailer. If you want to work out our lines and Belldoni saying copy, eating with crew, and we'll head that way. So effectively.

From these texts, it's like, oh, she was like, come on over. I'm just here, like, pumping, meaning breast milk. In my trailer, if you want to work out on lines, like, come on over. Or at the very least, that context should have been in the New York Times story.

Right, so maybe he's still barging or whatever, maybe there are more text messages saying, knock before you come in or whatever, but it sounds like that should have been in the New York Times story. Right, and then another instance where there was missing context was, they say in the New York Times story that she alleges, he showed her

naked, a naked video of his wife, which like, oh, like, what are you doing there? And it turns out, not that I still wouldn't be really cool with this, but it turns out the naked video was of her during a home birth.

So like the least sexual con like connotation or context for a nude video that you could possibly get that also left out of the New York Times piece. So, you know, he had his little PR campaign, which was successful in sort of turning the public against her. Then she fires back with this New York Times story.

that The New York Times was far too credulous about at best, at worst, like actively hid and manipulated some of the things that would be more favorable towards him. And now he's firing back with this lawsuit, which also you have to assume, right? It's his lawsuit.

this article is based on his side of the story is also likely cherry picking and leaving out some of the less flattering details for him as well. So some of the core themes here are number one, like, you know, he went out and draped himself in very intentionally, like that was part of the PR campaign, drapes himself very intentionally in this, I'm an ally of women,

I'm like, you know, I'm against toxic masculinity. I'm gonna speak out against it. You should never harm women blah, blah, blah. He's doing this as part of a PR campaign to undermine this very specific woman. So you've got that aspect. Then you have her basically engaging in some of the same behavior in the media, credulously picking it up. So you have that aspect.

And then, of course, you just have the whole specter of the way these two individuals who are human beings, yes, but also brands with a whole circle of people invested in their brands who are waging PR wars.

against each other and you know the public is being manipulated in any number of ways and I think that part is very real and also like you know to go and even layer deeper and we're about to talk about open AI and some of these AI stuff like one of the possibilities here is even that chatbots were potentially wielded in this war

between Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively. And it does just make you, like, this is kind of, you know, it's not that consequential of a story, ultimately, what happened on the set between these two individuals. But it does also make you question, like, how much of what we're being fed by the media, fed on social media, like these, you know, interactions that appear to be real and appear to be organic? How much of this is already just fake, already just, you know, astroturfed?

already just completely concocted by somebody for some reason to manipulate you and your perception of reality. And to me, that's like the most kind of like dystopian angle of this is that we really don't know how much of what we're already consuming on the web and in media is real and how much is just literally generated like falsely out of whole cloth.

That's why this is damning for the New York Times, because if there's something that should stand between smear campaigns, information operations, and the public, it's the free press. And for the New York Times, they're defending it and saying, you know, but they didn't defend any specific

to be clear, but they said, you know, we stand by our reporting. But this is a celebrated Me Too reporter at the New York Times who seems to have been at the very least taken for a ride by the extremely powerful public relations team of Blake Lively that I guarantee you weaponized the reporter's Me Too connections and feminist bona fides against

them and for the benefit of the Blake Lively smear campaign and we started this just by talking about how Entertainment media is often just like a lower stakes example of what happens in political media. Yeah, if you imagine Remember a lot of people probably do like you were talking about

your daughter, these clips of Blake Lively going viral around the premiere of It Ends With Us, their allegation is that Baldoni, sort of his team, whether or not he knew about it as a different question, but his team astroturfed this viral momentum against Blake Lively by sort of

creating accounts or feeding accounts these old videos. And we actually have one right here that will go ahead and roll for everyone just for a taste because you probably, a lot of people probably remember seeing this stuff go viral at the time, but here we go. This is an interaction that Blake Lively had.

Congrats on your little bump. Okay, so that was just like a short clip, but it was being used to say, like, oh, look at Blake Lively gets congratulated by a reporter on her baby bump and then turns it back around on the reporter, I guess. And it's basically like, you're fat.

Yeah, it seemed crystal like not a very kind thing to do. Yeah, well, and but then here's where things get even more, again, complicated. That particular, you know, I guess she's like an entertainment reporter, YouTuber, whatever, her last name, I think she's Norwegian her last name was like Flaw.

There's also a question about what her incentives were in resurfacing this interview because she resurfaced this and did this whole like the interview that made me want to quit my job, blah, blah, blah. Right. And she also, so she also had been very much pro Johnny Depp in the Johnny Depp Amber Heard trial and that whole drama. And lo and behold, Baldoni and Depp repped by the same PR.

agents. So now she denies that she says she did this organically blah, blah, blah. But you know, there's a question there too of whether or not she had some incentives. And maybe those incentives were just like, oh, I've built this particular audience. And here's a way that I can, you know, like get in on a similar storyline that may have a similar hook, et cetera. But this is also a potentially motivated actor

in this whole thing as well. So yeah, these things that can seem like they just sort of like organically popped out of the ether and there's some public reaction against it. It's like, well, did that really happen? Or did you really have like an army of boss and some highly motivated influencers and credulous journalists to push a particular view of the world that may or may not be accurate?

So, on that point, on that exact point, this is, we were going to talk about this story before the variety exclusive on Baldoni's lawsuit dropped, because the New York Times piece was so conspicuously fed by Lively's team. And that doesn't mean that Lively is wrong, and that Justin Baldoni is

a jerk or a saint, it doesn't mean any of that. What it means is that you could see in the sort of anatomy of the New York Times piece that it was coordinated by a public relations team on behalf of Blake Lively because it was so conspicuously missing context. And again,

That's fine if you are a feminist me-to-reporter who wants to stand with Blake Lively and that's just your opinion. You've reviewed the text messages, the team sent, you've asked the questions, you feel irrelevant, whatever. Fine, go ahead and do it. But don't do it and act like this is the objective or the most neutral version of the story if you're leaving out context or not asking questions that would help you ascertain that context that is being conspicuously hidden from you by Lively's team.

And again, to Crystal's point, these are multi-billion dollar businesses. These are important, like the celebrity stuff, it's lower stakes, obviously, than politics, but it's important to their bottom lines, the health of their companies, to their shareholders. And so they treat this stuff like it's widgets. They treat these human interactions like they're widgets, and the actors all know that the actors are investors, they're part of that. They're producers, executive producers, so they play the game. They understand what they are in all of this.

making a lot of money off of it. But now, put this to politics, and it's maddening to watch, to see stories like this about any given topic, like crystal from your perspective, the New York Times coverage of Gaza, or from my perspective, the New York Times coverage of any immigration story, or something dumb that Trump said. You can just see, you can see the fingerprints.

The cheap fake stories were a great example ahead of the debate about how the Republican Party was circulating these cheap fake videos. You could see in the New York Times coverage at the time, the fingerprints of the Biden White House and the DNC on those stories.

And you have that perspective when you're a media and you do this for your job, but this is the best example if you're a member of the public and you want to like see how the media can manipulate truth and information, read both of these stories, and it'll be really eye-opening. Yeah, and the thing is like, okay, so even if you took out or even if you included the context,

that the Baldoni people say was missing of like, well, she was being sarcastic here. And they actually said one text earlier that like, they weren't responsible for this story, but they kind of wish they were, you know, like, even if you added all that context, it still doesn't look good for him. It's still a story. It's still very much paints a picture of

he was worried that she was going to say some bad things about him. So he cloaks himself in this hole. I'm the women's ally and I'm against toxic, he cloaks himself in all of this, runs around talking about, you know, pretending like he really cares about domestic violence. And meanwhile, is launching this PR campaign of retaliation against her. Like, even if you add the context, that is all very clear. It's just they wanted it to be a less

nuanced and more clear cut indictment of him. They wanted the quote about we can bury anyone to stand on its own without having the supporting context, et cetera, et cetera. And by doing that, by reaching further than what was organically there and honest, as best we can tell at this point in this story,

They really you know they really end up undercutting her because now people would say well look you didn't include that so obviously this is just a hatchet job like it's just bullshit where i don't think it is all just bullshit like i think the general the basic contours of

She was unhappy with him. He wanted to get ahead of it. He launched this PR campaign of retaliation. Like, I think that is all true. I don't think that's really deniable at this point. But because they wanted to go that extra mile and really paint him in this sort of like one-dimensional villainous way, they end up overreaching and undercutting their entire story. So, but not that I think they'll learn any lessons from this. They won't, but anyway.

No, but big question to come is what the New York Times saw. And if the soup proceeds, we will learn a lot more. Oh, yeah. And does the discovery process could be interesting? Yes. And sadly, the winner from all this might be Harvey Weinstein, who

who is able to then say as egregious as what he clearly did was that this is the same thing to your point, Crystal. Some of these stories can be real and newsy, and then because the media does such a bad job with them, they end up undercutting actual victims. True. Yeah. So there's much more to come from this, to be sure, and it's more than celebrity gossip at this point.

So Sagar and I brought you recently the news that a whistleblower who had previously worked at OpenAI, who had raised concerns about the way that they may be potentially violating patent and trademark agreements, that that whistleblower had been found dead. Now authorities deemed it a suicide, but now we have the parents

of that whistleblower, whose name was Suchir Balaji, raising questions and saying that they are going to hire a private investigator in order to try to get to the bottom of what really happened here. Let's take a listen to a part of their press conference.

last person to talk to him. He was happy more. He is not a depress or anything. And it was his birthday week. He made plans of going to CES in January. That was the last phone conversation he had with him even. He went into his apartment, he never came out. There was no suicide note left.

There's nobody else in the scene that doesn't mean they can just come to conclusion. And we have seen the bloodshot in the bathroom, signs of fight in the bathroom. Vigil organizers say they're honoring Balaji's bravery and raising awareness to corporate accountability in artificial intelligence. So there you go. Obviously, I mean, AI is the highest stakes game that exists in the world right now. The amount of resources

government and corporate resources that are being poured into AI development is we genuinely don't even know how much money is going into this. There is an arms race going on right now to develop AI. Some of this is public like the war between Sam Altman and Elon Musk.

Some of it is not public. Peter Thiel has funded a number of stealth companies. You've got DARPA, which is a secretive agency within the US government that is funding research and development, Israel, China. The list goes on of actors and interested participants here. The amount of money at stake here is truly, truly mind-blowing. I mean, probably, sums that we've never seen in history is not an exaggeration. Just to give you a sense of some of what he was sounding the alarm,

over and in particular, you were talking about the New York Times, in particular was featured in a New York Times story raising concerns about what he had seen when he was at OpenAI. He elaborated on that interview in this post. He said, I recently participated in New York Times story about fair use and generative AI and why I'm skeptical that fair use

would be a plausible defense for a lot of generative AI products. I also wrote a blog post about the nitty gritty details of fair use and why I believe this. To give some context, I was at OpenAI for nearly four years, worked on chat GPT for the last one and half of them. I initially didn't know much about copyright fair use, et cetera, but became curious after seeing all the lawsuits filed against gen AI companies. When I tried to understand the issue better, I eventually came to the conclusion

that fair use seems like a pretty implausible defense of a lot of generative AI products for the basic reason that they can create substitutes that compete with the data they're trained on. I've written up the more detailed reasons for why I believe this in my post. Obviously, I'm not a lawyer, but I still feel like it's important for even non-lawyers to understand the law, both the letter of it and also why it's actually there in the first place. That being said, I don't want this to read as a critique of chat GPT or open AI per se.

Because fair use and generative AI is a much broader issue than anyone product or company, I highly encourage ML researchers to learn more about copyright. It is a really important topic and precedent that's off-siteed, like Google Books isn't actually as supportive as it might seem. Feel free to get in touch about this if you'd like to chat about fair use ML or copyright and

This is a central issue he's touching on here, Emily, because all of these large language learning models, all of them are trained on

whatever data they can gobble up. And this is one of the critical components in how they learn and are able to produce the products like chat GPT and other products that we're all now able to use. And so we're talking books, we're talking transcripts of YouTube videos, we're talking literally anything they can get their hands on. And without that data, they're unable to train these LLMs and push them out into the world.

So this is not a side issue. This is alongside having sufficient electricity and having the computational power. These are the key ingredients for the development of AI. And he was outspoken on it. And now his parents who, listen, these are grieving parents.

who I'm sure nobody wants to think that their son or daughter was so unhappy as to commit suicide and to end their own life. So we always have to keep that in mind. But it's worth taking seriously this investigation simply because this is one of a relatively small number of whistleblowers who we've seen who said, what is being done here is wrong and I'm not going to be associated with it.

It determines whether AI is built on a house of sand or like a really well-built foundation. AI can be a house of cards if their fair use argument is erupted and whether that's legally or in the court of public opinion

A.I. generative A.I. LLMs will be a house of sand if they can't defend their fair use practices. So obviously what he was doing was very high stakes and a notable point from his parents there, they say there was no note.

And also they believe what they saw was a sign of struggle. So the police obviously ruled this, as you mentioned, crystal suicide. But if the parents are saying the police ruled it a suicide despite there being signs of a struggle, that's, I think,

something just in the investigation stage. People will be looking at very closely and we will be looking at very closely if there are serious signs of struggle that still resulted in the investigation being concluded as a suicide. That's a hugely significant piece of information from the parents.

Yeah, and I'd be remiss if I didn't know that there were two Boeing Whistleblowers who were found dead and was also deemed suicide. And in one of those instances in particular, and you know, same thing, friends and family side.

He seemed fine. No indication of depression, no indication of, you know, anything that would lead directly to him taking his own life. Um, authorities deemed it a suicide. That's where things stand as of now, but this is one we'll, we'll definitely keep our eyes on.

And just one more point about Balaji's last post. He was actively soliciting information. So that's just something I keep in mind, that last poster is saying, get in touch with me. I want to hear your thoughts. That's a sort of active process of learning more, coming to different conclusions to undermine the sort of fundamental, the foundation really of LLMs. So you can see where that would be of interest to people who have a lot of interest in those LLMs.

Yeah, and just to tie this whole conversation, you know, zooming out from this whistleblower back to what we were talking about with Elon and Trump and David Sachs and all these people, like the H1B fight is a side Joe to the main event, which is AI development.

the resources that are being thrown into this truly arms race, both between nation states and between corporations, to be the furthest ahead in AI to achieve what's called AGI artificial general intelligence, to be the first to develop that. This is all going on. Some of it is you can read about in the press, but there is not nearly enough.

media coverage, democratic debate, transparency about what the plans are for this technology, how it will be deployed in our lives, what that will look like, how we'll upend the labor force. We're talking about, you know,

potentially greater than industrial revolution level change over a much shorter period of time. That's the real undercurrent of the political games that are being played right now and the political moves that are being made. Obviously, Elon Musk is a big player in that. Sam Altman of OpenAI, a big player in that, noteworthy to me that after Trump wins,

Sam comes in and is like, let me give a million dollars to your inauguration, right? They have so much at stake here. Zuckerberg as well. Absolutely. Zuckerberg as well. All of the big tech players massively invested and betting on this AI future.

And partly because I mean the you know chat GPT like it's fun and seems harmless and I use it and whatever like it's hard to wrap your head around the scale of potential um just like

incredible disruption that we could be facing and even darker scenarios that are truly dystopian, that if I lay them out right now, you're going to think I sound like a crazy person, but that AI researchers take very seriously as a possibility. This is all happening effectively behind closed doors with a few

comparatively small number of scientists and technologists who are making these decisions that could completely up end all of our lives. And so, you know, this incident with this whistleblower is just a tiny window in to the the stakes of this game.

And how much is happening and how consequential it could be. It truly is the biggest and most existential political question of our time. And it's not being treated or debated that way. So I mentioned before, I'm trying to learn as much as I possibly can because I do think that the stakes are potentially that high and that significant, like I said, this is just one little window into some of the concerns about AI and the way that it could transform our entire economy.

I mean, yeah, the story, even just the fate of Balaji himself is a lot more to be learned about that, given what we just saw from the parents, basically the commitment and the commitment to the idea that this is not what he would have done. Yeah.

much more to come. Absolutely. All right. Let's go ahead and transition to American doctors just back from Gaza who has a message to share with the world. Let's get to that.

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We are very grateful and fortunate to be joined this morning by Dr. Mohammed Khalil. He is American doctor based in Texas, a surgeon actually who has just returned from his second trip to Gaza and wanted to share with us and our audience what he experienced there and his concerns based on what his colleagues are continuing to tell him are happening there on the ground. Dr. Great to see you, great to meet you and thank you for joining us this morning.

Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, of course. So just tell us a little bit about the context of your visit and some of the things that you saw there operating on the ground.

Yeah, so I went with a humanitarian group in to Gaza. I'd actually been there the first time in April at European General Hospital and saw, you know, a lot of lower extremity injuries. A lot of, I think we signed this letter to the New York Times about all the sniper shots that we saw in children. A lot of targeted attacks is indiscriminate bombing.

This time I went up north in November to the Ali Hospital, which if you remember was the first hospital that was attacked and there was a lot of questions as to whether a hospital would be attacked by the Israeli military and this experience was completely different. Just a lot of death and destruction. We did quite a bit of

Operating orthopedic surgery just you know is a lot of stabilizing fractures and unfortunately you know in this setting there were a lot of amputations, just a ton of blast injuries up north though it's a very different type of

warfare. You can't shake the feeling that the north is almost a testing ground for technological warfare. We saw a number of drones that were dropping bombs and then off the back of those drones, they've got quadcopters that come down and shoot anything that's left moving. We had a number of children telling us that they would just have to lay there after an explosion so that they wouldn't move and get shot. I think there's a lot of a sense that this is, you know,

very much kind of utter destruction. What I would say is in April, we saw a genocide in November. It just seemed like a full-on Holocaust. Everything is destroyed up north. There's really barely any buildings left that are standing. And the ones that are partially destroyed and people are trying to live in those in a makeshift environment.

What can you tell us about how you saw the ratio of civilians? Obviously, this is very hard. Civilians to combatants, you're not interrogating people when you're treating them, but in terms of women and children that you saw, what do you make of the Israeli line that they are, this is a defensible ratio of civilians to combatants?

We did not see anyone that you could clearly identify was a combatant. I assume that they're probably seeking help in other environments because pretty much everyone that we treated was a non-combatant. A number of them were actually family members of the medical providers in the hospital. I know one of the nurses

that was working with us in the OR, his brother, his entire family. Most of them were dead, but a few people survived, and we saw them in the ER, and this was at the middle of the night, and then the next morning, that nurse was back in the OR with us, just getting back to work, and it really is

If somebody was a combatant, I assume they were seeking help in other locations because pretty much the majority of people that we treated were children, women, or known family members of people that we were working with.

Dr. We covered earlier in the week, the rate and destruction of Kamala Adwan Hospital, which was in the North, my understanding was it was really the last functioning significant hospital in Northern Gaza. What can you tell us about the state of the healthcare system in Northern Gaza when you were there, both in terms of facilities personnel and also supplies?

We were actually north of the Netsurim corridor, so we were in what was considered northern Gaza above the Netsurim border, so that's in Gaza City. Kamala Dwan was about another 10 minutes north of us, and Kamala Dwan and Indonesian are the only two hospitals up there, and they're completely non-functional now.

There was a discussion of having our group go up to Kamalidwan because one of the purposes that we serve as European and American teams is sometimes we can be protective for the people that are at the hospital. I think there's, you know, when we left, European hospital in Gaza in April, that was part of the discussion is once the team stops showing up, then we know we're about to be attacked.

So going up to Kamal Adwan was not an option, and we knew that hospital was under siege the whole time we were there. And there were a bunch of messages, because everyone knows Dr. Hissama, with Safiya, up in the area. And what's that messaging him and stuff, and kind of getting an update. But it was not very functional even back in November. And now it's completely non-functional after having been invaded and destroyed.

Well, again, let me ask about another line of argumentation. These are a lot from Israel and actually from the United States as well about hospitals in particular being used as Hamas strongholds or places of strategy organization for Hamas sort of using hospital patients as human shields. What did you see to that extent? If anything, and what do you make of that line? Dr.

I think at this stage that it's a hard thing to continue to push that narrative. I mean, so many hospitals have been destroyed and nothing has been found or at least shown to have actually been uncovered. The actual hospital functions are what are getting limited.