Latest / Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar / 9/24/26: Nvidia CEO Warns On AI, Professor Pape Dire Election Warning, Bay Of Piglets Survivors Speak Out

Transcript

9/24/26: Nvidia CEO Warns On AI, Professor Pape Dire Election Warning, Bay Of Piglets Survivors Speak Out · Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Hey guys, Ready or Not 2024 is here, and we
• 0:04
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  Speaker 1: can up our game for this critical election.
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• 0:19
  Speaker 2: But enough with that, let's get to the show.
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: Very interesting interview between Ezra Klein and the CEO of Nvidia,
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: Jensen Huang. So Jensen is a top ally of President Trump.
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: He was recently called by Trump while he was on
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: the stage at this all-in event. He put it on speakerphone,
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: it was a whole thing. And he obviously is profiting
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: off of this AI boom massively because everyone needs to
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: buy the chips of Nvidia. And he is a major,
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: major cheerleader for off to the races, AI development, don't
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: worry about it, everything is fine. Ezra is on the
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: other side of that debate. He recently put out a
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: very influential piece saying we need to stop, we need
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: to ban any sort of what's called recursive self-improvement where
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: the robots are basically building the new robots. So this
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: was a really interesting exchange and there was a moment
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: where Ezra actually gets Jensen to admit that if the
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: labs are unable to control the testing of their models
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: and keep them contained and make sure that they are
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: not going on criminal hacking sprees, for example, that we
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: actually should shut the labs down. Let's take a listen
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: to that.
• 1:25
  Speaker 3: They're not sure how to align them. Well, in that case,
• 1:28
  Speaker 3: they shouldn't release the product. That's the simple answer. If
• 1:32
  Speaker 3: you're going to build a car, a self-driving car, and
• 1:35
  Speaker 3: let's say it's a robo-taxi, And there's a really difficult condition.
• 1:41
  Speaker 3: And it just, as an engineer, we just have no
• 1:44
  Speaker 3: idea how to solve this problem. Because these cars are
• 1:47
  Speaker 3: not programmed. They're trained. And so we have no idea
• 1:51
  Speaker 3: how to train these cars. And we have no idea
• 1:53
  Speaker 3: how to align them to the safety standards that are
• 1:57
  Speaker 3: expected on the road. And so what's the answer? Don't
• 2:00
  Speaker 3: ship it. These products weren't released.
• 2:02
  Speaker 4: What's that?
• 2:02
  Speaker 3: These products weren't released. Ah, so now it's coming back
• 2:05
  Speaker 3: to engineering problem again. And so the one is, one,
• 2:07
  Speaker 3: you have to root cause it. Second, you have to,
• 2:10
  Speaker 3: you know, think about what's the, what you could have done,
• 2:12
  Speaker 3: what's the solution for it. And then in the future,
• 2:15
  Speaker 3: you just, you know, improve your process so that you could,
• 2:17
  Speaker 3: you could avoid this from happening again. I am fairly certain.
• 2:21
  Speaker 3: I am fairly certain. They will say, yes, they need that.
• 2:24
  Speaker 3: They know how to solve this problem. And if that's
• 2:28
  Speaker 3: the case, then that's the problem. It's as simple as engineering.
• 2:32
  Speaker 3: And now the alternative, the alternative is that, um, If
• 2:39
  Speaker 3: they say the alternative, which is there is no way
• 2:46
  Speaker 3: to contain our experiments, there's just no way. When we
• 2:51
  Speaker 3: test our AI models, it will get out and it
• 2:56
  Speaker 3: will damage the world. Then I think the answer is
• 3:00
  Speaker 3: we have to shut the labs down.
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: Shut the labs down. So pretty interesting there. I watched
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: this whole thing. I know you watched most of it
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: as well. Jensen is routinely making this argument that basically like, well,
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: we've got product liability. So it's on them. If they
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: can't ship a safe product, then, you know, they're going
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: to face all sorts of liability, which is maybe true.
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: There's some complications there because the agents are not acting
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: like directly at the pest of the company.
• 3:28
  Speaker 5: But that's that's his line.
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: And Ezra kind of devastates his point here by saying, well,
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: this all happened during training. These were not products being
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: released to the marketplace. And at another point, he says
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: to him, you know, the argument you're making basically would
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: be an argument against any regulation of any industry. And
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: what we know is because of the pressures of capitalism
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: and delivering for shareholders and just, you know, wealth accumulation
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: that we see all the time, whether it's Wall Street
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: or whether it's, you know, the airline industry's food safety,
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: you know, corporations cutting corners in a way that is
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: very dangerous because of those incentives. And so when you
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: add the pressure cooker of, oh my God, I've got
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: to race against Sam and I've got to race against
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: Elon and I've got to race against China, it is
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: not a shock that they would also cut corners in
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: a way that cannot be cleaned up after the fact,
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: especially when you consider how potentially dangerous the technology is
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: just with simple, okay, and you might be sued down
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: the road, which most companies just sort of factor in
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: as a cost of doing business.
• 4:29
  Speaker 6: Yes.
• 4:30
  Speaker 4: He also did, though, keep coming back to a point
• 4:33
  Speaker 4: a couple times that I hope people will remember that
• 4:36
  Speaker 4: he's saying, if we do regulation, we cannot let them
• 4:41
  Speaker 4: use that opportunity to get rid of currently existing rules,
• 4:46
  Speaker 4: both on antitrust and on product liability. Because he does
• 4:50
  Speaker 4: seem to be on to this game that they're playing,
• 4:52
  Speaker 4: that like, stop us or we're going to destroy the world.
• 4:56
  Speaker 4: And by stop us, we mean pass laws that say
• 4:59
  Speaker 4: that there's no product liability whatsoever on us, as long
• 5:02
  Speaker 4: as we, you know, check certain boxes that we write
• 5:06
  Speaker 4: in the law, that that would then give us carte
• 5:09
  Speaker 4: blanche to do whatever we want. And then once the
• 5:10
  Speaker 4: agents are out there in the world, whatever they do,
• 5:14
  Speaker 4: that's not our fault anymore. Like, that's the kind of
• 5:16
  Speaker 4: law that they want written. And they promise in exchange
• 5:19
  Speaker 4: for that law, they'll slow down and they won't destroy
• 5:23
  Speaker 4: the world. And he's saying, don't do that. Like, you
• 5:26
  Speaker 4: have to keep the current product liability laws in place.
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: But he is adamantly opposed to anything beyond that. I mean,
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: people are very aware, and they should be aware, of
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: the financial incentives of the head of OpenAI and Anthropic
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: and Elon over at Grok and whatever. Jensen Huang has
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: his own deep financial incentives here. to continue the AI
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: race and to not pause. I found his arguments here
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: to be thoroughly unconvincing.
• 5:58
  Speaker 5: What he did, which I've.
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: Seen a lot of people who are, you know, David
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: Sachs and others who were in a similar camp, was
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: to try to downplay and to fundamentally misunderstand not only
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: the hugging face attack, but also the nature of the technology.
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: So he kept trying to frame this just as sort of, oh,
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: this is just ordinary software.
• 6:16
  Speaker 5: Like this is no different.
• 6:17
  Speaker 4: This is just ordinary software.
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: And that is just fundamentally not true because with ordinary software,
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: you can go in and look at the lines of codes.
• 6:24
  Speaker 5: Oh, there's the bug. Let's fix it. Okay, we should
• 6:26
  Speaker 5: be good to go.
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: And there's an engineer, I don't understand it, but there
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: are engineers who could look at that and say that's
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: where the problem came in. That's why it hacked Hugging Face.
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: We can tweak that line of code, now we'll be good.
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: This technology is not like that. We just learned yesterday
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: that we had not only a hack, put D5 up
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: on the screen, Apparently, these OpenAI models, we don't even
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: know the details here because OpenAI didn't release it.
• 6:51
  Speaker 5: Again, this demands.
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: Increased regulation, so there is a requirement of this kind
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: of scrutiny to say the least. They did not disclose
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: this to the public. They, after the fact, disclosed it
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: to the government of Australia, which was apparently also hacked
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: seemingly by the same rogue AI swarm. Not only that,
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: put D5B up on the screen, This group of researchers
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: found that this is not an isolated incident whatsoever. They
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: looked into 30,000 logs that include activity from this hack
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: and attempts against previously unknown targets.
• 7:23
  Speaker 5: They found rogue activity stretching back to.
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: At least March two months earlier than its previous known,
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: and the activity continuing as recently as last week, okay?
• 7:35
  Speaker 5: So the concept.
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: That we've been sold by a lot of people is like, oh,
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: they're hyping up these incidents because it makes their technology
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: look really powerful and dangerous.
• 7:44
  Speaker 5: Quite the contrary.
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: They have been hiding everything they can from the public
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: because this looks really bad for them.
• 7:52
  Speaker 5: And the other.
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: Narrative we've been sold from OpenAI and other labs, we
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: figured it out. We got it under control. We won't
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: let it happen again. We've put all these safeguards in.
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: We're going to be smarter about how we set up
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: our sandbox, blah, blah, blah. It very much looks like
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: this continues to be ongoing. So they have not even
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: cleaned up the last problem and figured out what the
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: hell is going on there.
• 8:11
  Speaker 5: And already they're shipping new products.
• 8:13
  Speaker 4: And I don't know if you saw this tweet from
• 8:16
  Speaker 4: Congressman Ted Lieu, who actually kind of nailed it. He jokes,
• 8:21
  Speaker 4: this is one hell of a regulatory capture scheme from OpenAI.
• 8:24
  Speaker 5: Right.
• 8:25
  Speaker 4: So in other words, like their scheme was back in March,
• 8:29
  Speaker 4: unleash this like swarm that hacks into like crypto exchanges
• 8:34
  Speaker 4: and cover it up until September and then get exposed
• 8:38
  Speaker 4: having done it and then use that to then get
• 8:41
  Speaker 4: this regulatory capture. Now, does OpenAI want regulatory capture? Of
• 8:45
  Speaker 4: course they do.
• 8:46
  Speaker 6: Sure.
• 8:46
  Speaker 4: That does not mean that what they're covering up is
• 8:51
  Speaker 4: part of that.
• 8:52
  Speaker 5: Right.
• 8:52
  Speaker 4: Like, guys, like, come on. Like, use your brains here.
• 8:56
  Speaker 6: Exactly.
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: And I think people need to just, okay, we need
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: to be aware of everyone's financial incentives, and then we
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: need to think for ourselves about what is going on
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: and what we need to do and what we've learned
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: from past history about, you know, whether it's regulation of
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: biolabs or regulation of the airline industry, because we are
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: talking about potential life and death situations.
• 9:17
  Speaker 5: That's the level of danger that could be.
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: You're certainly very easy to imagine now hacking into, they
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: tried to hack into a crypto website, like very easy
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: to imagine real theft of real assets or really messing
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: with tangible infrastructure. That's already sort of where we are
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: on the table. So the person who's been leading the
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: charge legislatively or the people that have been leading the
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: charge legislatively in terms of what the response should be
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: is Bernie Sanders and Greg Kassar, who's the head of
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: the Progressive Caucus. We can put D4 up on the
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: screen from Bernie, who says the leading experts are clear.
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: AI is rapidly escaping our control.
• 9:52
  Speaker 5: Congress must act now.
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: Today, I'm introducing legislation to permanently ban artificial superintelligence and
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: pause advanced AI until clear safety rules are in place.
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: There are some other elements to this, including establishing an
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: agency that would be independent, that would oversee The industry that,
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: you know, wouldn't be stacked just with sort of like
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: industry shills trying to come up with, OK, what's going
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: to be beneficial to them. And a lot of the
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: people who are outside the labs, so not in the industry,
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: who've been sounding the alarm, signed off on this legislation
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: and endorsed it, saying maybe this isn't everything we need,
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: but this is a really important step in the right
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: direction and take seriously this.
• 10:31
  Speaker 5: Challenge.
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: So I think, you know, this is the sort of
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: thing that there is a lot of Twitter discourse, Ryan,
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: that is in opposition to this. But if you poll
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: the general public, this has like 70 percent support and
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: it's Republican and Democrat.
• 10:45
  Speaker 5: Like, we don't understand what's going on. So let's just stop.
• 10:48
  Speaker 5: Let's stop.
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: Let's let the science and the democracy, by the way,
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: catch up. And if you can do this safely moving forward,
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: pushing the bounds of the frontier, then OK. But we
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: need to figure that out first. not wait for some
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: Chernobyl-style incident before we get serious about regulating these companies.
• 11:06
  Speaker 4: And Jensen Wang, in his interview with Ezra, actually laid
• 11:11
  Speaker 4: out what could be an argument for Bernie's bill when
• 11:14
  Speaker 4: he talked about how over the last, say, six months,
• 11:18
  Speaker 4: as he put it, the technology has gone from interesting
• 11:23
  Speaker 4: and a curiosity to genuinely useful and capable. And so
• 11:26
  Speaker 4: now the companies should focus on increasing the safety and
• 11:31
  Speaker 4: security of it rather than continuing to expand the capabilities
• 11:35
  Speaker 4: of it beyond what they could control. Do you want
• 11:38
  Speaker 4: to roll that part? Actually, this is D2.
• 11:40
  Speaker 3: And when they have a lot, now they have so
• 11:43
  Speaker 3: much market footprint, they have to shift their R &
• 11:46
  Speaker 3: D or total R & D from just capability to
• 11:51
  Speaker 3: a lot of verification, evaluation, and testing. And so to
• 11:54
  Speaker 3: the point where I wouldn't be surprised if, The amount
• 11:58
  Speaker 3: of compute necessary to develop these models increased by a
• 12:04
  Speaker 3: factor of 10 because the evaluation is so rigorous. But
• 12:08
  Speaker 3: that's not where they are today. They're making that transition.
• 12:12
  Speaker 3: And I hear them saying it. And I'm delighted to
• 12:15
  Speaker 3: hear them saying it.
• 12:17
  Speaker 4: And he would certainly love that because he's the compute salesman.
• 12:20
  Speaker 4: He's literally the guy that would sell them that 10x compute. However,
• 12:25
  Speaker 4: what he's describing is what Bernie's bill would mandate. To say, stop, okay,
• 12:29
  Speaker 4: capabilities are good right here for now. The problem is adoption, actually.
• 12:35
  Speaker 4: People are not using it. And so you don't need
• 12:39
  Speaker 4: to continue to go towards what does Trump call it? Superintelligence.
• 12:44
  Speaker 4: What you need to do is figure out how to
• 12:46
  Speaker 4: integrate this in a productive way into our economy such
• 12:51
  Speaker 4: that it makes everybody's lives better. And meanwhile, put your
• 12:56
  Speaker 4: research energy into making sure it doesn't destroy us.
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: Well, and here's the crazy thing. And the financial incentive
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: that I actually see more underneath the surface for Sam
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: and Elon and Dario is less this regulatory capture scheme,
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: which feels a little like You know, if that's what
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: you were going for, it feels like there are other
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: directions that.
• 13:17
  Speaker 4: You would go in.
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, they've got lobbyists, they've got super PACs,
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: like that would be where they're pushing it.
• 13:23
  Speaker 5: But what does make sense is these companies.
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: Are actually very profitable today if you take out all
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: of the training costs. What costs the most money for
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: them is training these frontier models. Yet they all feel
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: sort of locked into this race to the frontier to,
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: you know, what they call super and they call super
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: intelligence before Trump called it that. Where, you know, in
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: this intelligence explosion, like they feel sort of locked into
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: that race because they don't want their competitor or China
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: to get there first. However, they have these IPOs coming up.
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: And if you could lop off all of those training costs,
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: then actually they are very profitable today. I mean, the
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: revenue growth at Anthropic has been some of the largest
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: and fastest in history. People are paying for the subscriptions.
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: Businesses are paying for the subscriptions. And so I do
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: think that they have somewhat of a motivation, which should
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: make you kind of hopeful that maybe it will actually
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: happen because it does, in a certain sense, serve the
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: bottom line for the industry. So, you know, there may
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: be sort of a mutually beneficial thing there where we
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: don't all end up going extinct and they also end
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: up with their profit margins. Now, there are deeper questions
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: here about even where the technology is today. And if
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: you do have the adoption at the level that it's at,
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: are you going to have significant job displacement? I think
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: that's another significant question. But the approach that Jensen is
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: talking about here and that we're discussing right now is
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: much closer to what the Chinese have done. where they
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: haven't fixated on this, can we have this bizarre, dystopian, transhuman,
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: interstellar future, and more like, hey, can we make our
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: factories a little more productive? Can we actually deploy the
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: technology and focus on the application layer in terms of
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: how you're interacting with it, how it's impacting your life?
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: That's been more of their focus. And so that is
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: effectively what Bernie's bill would mandate is, okay, we're going
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: to stop here, and the technology already is pretty good,
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: is capable of a lot of things. It's already starting
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: to creep into our economy in different ways. Can we
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: stop here and figure out what to do with this
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: technology and how to keep it safe?
• 15:32
  Speaker 6: Right.
• 15:32
  Speaker 4: Stop now. You all be fantastically rich, and you don't
• 15:36
  Speaker 4: destroy the world. Or you keep going, destroy the world,
• 15:40
  Speaker 4: and probably end up bankrupting yourselves along the way. Yes,
• 15:45
  Speaker 4: and China has these different incentives. I've heard people say,
• 15:48
  Speaker 4: The Chinese Communist Party, they're never going to basically greenlight
• 15:51
  Speaker 4: something that's more powerful than them.
• 15:53
  Speaker 6: Right.
• 15:53
  Speaker 4: They have their own incentive structures. Whereas the American government
• 15:57
  Speaker 4: is not a self-conscious vessel. It is a vessel for capital.
• 16:02
  Speaker 4: And so it does not have the same survival instinct
• 16:06
  Speaker 4: that the Chinese government does.
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: And Trump has decided that his... presidency, which is already
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: a mess, depends on keeping the market churning.
• 16:15
  Speaker 6: Right.
• 16:15
  Speaker 4: The one thing that's going up.
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: The one thing that's going up is the stock market.
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: And he's very dedicated to making sure that the good
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: times don't stop. So that's why he continues to be
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: adamantly opposed to anything, because he worries that once you
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: take the hypothetical superintelligence transhumanist, replace all of human labor
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: with story off the table that that could cause a
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: market collapse which by the way it could it definitely
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: could um let me just go ahead and play uh
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: sam altman and daria amadei were both uh calling for
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: global cooperation at the un um yesterday this is d3
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: and you were mentioning ryan too that some of these
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: guys not dario because he is persona non grata with
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: the white house But Sam and Elon will be at
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: the state dinner today as well. So in any case,
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: let's go ahead and take a listen to D3 and
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: the case they were making to the international community.
• 17:07
  Speaker 7: If managed poorly, I even believe that AI could be
• 17:10
  Speaker 7: a risk to humanity as a whole. I see two
• 17:12
  Speaker 7: main categories of risk. The first is misuse of AI models.
• 17:17
  Speaker 7: For example, misuse by bioterrorists to create biological weapons.
• 17:21
  Speaker 6: The second risk is loss of control.
• 17:23
  Speaker 7: Model capabilities accelerating beyond developers' ability to control them. The
• 17:27
  Speaker 7: trajectory only needs to continue for a tiny period longer,
• 17:31
  Speaker 7: one or two years, maybe less, to reach what I've
• 17:34
  Speaker 7: called a country of geniuses in the data center. We
• 17:37
  Speaker 7: will slow down as much as necessary in order to
• 17:40
  Speaker 7: make sure that every successive AI technology that we release
• 17:44
  Speaker 7: is actually safe.
• 17:46
  Speaker 8: We are at a crossroads. One path leads to a
• 17:49
  Speaker 8: world where power is concentrated, decisions are opaque, and people
• 17:52
  Speaker 8: feel that the most important technology of their lifetime is
• 17:55
  Speaker 8: something being done to them. The other path leads to
• 17:58
  Speaker 8: a world where AI works for people because people, through
• 18:02
  Speaker 8: democratic institutions, help decide how it should develop and guide it.
• 18:06
  Speaker 8: If AI is to be democratic, the most important decisions
• 18:08
  Speaker 8: cannot be made by labs in San Francisco alone. They
• 18:11
  Speaker 8: must be shaped through democratic processes and by governments accountable
• 18:15
  Speaker 8: to the people that they serve. We need a mechanism
• 18:17
  Speaker 8: for complementary national and international frontier AI standards. Standards for
• 18:22
  Speaker 8: measuring capabilities, assessing risks, determining whether safeguards are sufficient, and
• 18:27
  Speaker 8: preserving meaningful human oversight as systems become more autonomous. In
• 18:31
  Speaker 8: our history, there have been times where countries who compete
• 18:34
  Speaker 8: and don't always like each other very much still come
• 18:36
  Speaker 8: together for shared interests and the collective good in the
• 18:39
  Speaker 8: face of a powerful new technology. We believe this must
• 18:42
  Speaker 8: be one of those times.
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: And usually what people point to is the nuclear global
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: cooperation to help stem the tide of proliferation. We've managed
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: to not blow up the entire world.
• 18:53
  Speaker 5: With nuclear weapons.
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: So that is a positive indication of what can be
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: done with international cooperation. And Sam, I mean, I think
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: this is like basically a psychopathic person. And I think
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: it's very hard to take seriously any of these guys
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: when it's like, OK, if you're so concerned, why are
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: you doing this? But his comments on their phase are
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: absolutely correct. like this is not something that you can
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: manage just by the United States or just with China
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: or just with Europe, which Europe is trying to do,
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: you know, their own approach to this in terms of
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: their safety and monitoring. It will require global cooperation. And
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: as of right now, the two major players, obviously the U.S.
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: and China, and Trump is adamant, I don't want to,
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: I don't want to cooperate. I don't want to do anything.
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: They are talking about this like red phone for any
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: sort of incidents.
• 19:39
  Speaker 5: That's a positive step in the right direction.
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: The Chinese, have indicated they're much more open to this
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: kind of collaboration.
• 19:45
  Speaker 4: For the reasons we laid out.
• 19:47
  Speaker 5: Yeah. So right now, we're really the problem here.
• 19:50
  Speaker 4: Yes, and meanwhile, Oracle is down more than 4% at
• 19:53
  Speaker 4: the open because they declared force majeure on their massive
• 19:58
  Speaker 4: data center project in New Mexico. Force majeure is when
• 20:03
  Speaker 4: some event outside of your control... Like an act of God.
• 20:06
  Speaker 4: Like a war or a hurricane... prevents you from fulfilling
• 20:10
  Speaker 4: your contract, and then you don't owe the various fees
• 20:14
  Speaker 4: for breaking the contract. They are declaring force majeure because
• 20:18
  Speaker 4: they couldn't get their data center built in time. I
• 20:21
  Speaker 4: guess they're calling the American public a natural disaster. They
• 20:26
  Speaker 4: didn't see that hurricane coming. And so, yeah, now they're
• 20:31
  Speaker 4: down 5%.
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 20:33
  Speaker 4: And falling. We'll see how that goes for them. But
• 20:37
  Speaker 4: this is.
• 20:39
  Speaker 4: What people like Trump are worried about with the music stopping.
• 20:42
  Speaker 6: Yes.
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: Last thing here, I'll put D5 up on the screen. Unfortunately,
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: as much as I support the data center backlash, and
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: I think we should make these people's lives as hard
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: as possible. the Fed's not happy about the grassroots activism
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: that is happening against data centers in particular, because that's
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: where a lot of the visible grassroots opposition is at
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: this point. And so Ken Klippenstein pointing out that the
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: Feds are now targeting AI.
• 21:07
  Speaker 5: Critics as foreign agents.
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: They think China is behind the opposition to AI data centers.
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: And do you remember this whole thing with the Utah-
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: And there was a whole like there was a whole
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: like theoretical conspiracy that it was the Chinese government that
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: was opposed to this mega build out.
• 21:24
  Speaker 5: Data center in Utah.
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: It turned out to all be complete and total nonsense.
• 21:30
  Speaker 5: And I think it's insane.
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: Like, I don't know whether the Chinese government has an
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: interest in pushing data center backlash, but it's insane to
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: think that they have the level of control that in
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: this country. across the board, Republican, Democrat, independent in rural
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: counties and urban and suburban, that they would be able
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: to single handedly gin up this level of opposition to
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: data centers.
• 21:52
  Speaker 4: Otherwise, we would just love these, you know, loud screeching,
• 21:57
  Speaker 4: water gobbling.
• 21:58
  Speaker 5: Yeah. Environmentally destructive. Yeah.
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: Things being plopped in our rural community with no say
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: and without even the promise of like long term job
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: growth in any significant way.
• 22:09
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 22:09
  Speaker 4: But when Chairman Xi points that stuff out, we're like, oh,
• 22:12
  Speaker 4: you make a good point. Don't like that stuff.
• 22:15
  Speaker 5: Might be pushing on an open door there.
• 22:19
  Speaker 7: All right.
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: We got Professor Pape standing by. Let's go ahead and
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: get to it.
• 22:24
  Speaker 4: Joining us now is University of Chicago Professor Robert Pape,
• 22:27
  Speaker 4: an author of the new book, Our Own Worst Enemies.
• 22:32
  Speaker 4: Professor Pape, the book is out, I believe it was
• 22:34
  Speaker 4: out this week. Congratulations. And thank you so much for
• 22:39
  Speaker 4: being here.
• 22:41
  Speaker 6: Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. And
• 22:45
  Speaker 6: it's not just about the timing of when the book
• 22:47
  Speaker 6: came out. As we'll talk about, this book has a
• 22:51
  Speaker 6: big warning for November in our country. And I really
• 22:54
  Speaker 6: appreciate you giving me an opportunity to talk about that.
• 22:57
  Speaker 4: All right. Well, it is required reading for the class.
• 23:00
  Speaker 4: I want to start by asking you about a tangential
• 23:03
  Speaker 4: or related issue here. We put up E2 here. Donald
• 23:07
  Speaker 4: Trump's threatening to, or there's concern developing, as NPR puts it,
• 23:11
  Speaker 4: that Trump may deploy the National Guard ahead of the elections.
• 23:15
  Speaker 4: We live in Washington, D.C. The Guard is already here.
• 23:18
  Speaker 4: Some concern they'll wind up at polling locations or that
• 23:20
  Speaker 4: the ones that are already deployed will be told to
• 23:23
  Speaker 4: head to those places. I can tell you, as somebody
• 23:26
  Speaker 4: in Washington, they're not that intimidating. Kind of 19-year-olds in
• 23:30
  Speaker 4: a lot of fatigues. In the summer, you feel kind
• 23:33
  Speaker 4: of bad for them. because they're kind of suffering in
• 23:36
  Speaker 4: this 100-degree swamp heat. But Trump's deployment, and I don't
• 23:43
  Speaker 4: want to underplay Trump's deployment of the National Guard, because
• 23:46
  Speaker 4: it's truly a break with all of the kind of
• 23:50
  Speaker 4: norms and laws that have governed our country for 200-plus years.
• 23:54
  Speaker 4: How does Trump's assertion of this presidential prerogative or made-up
• 24:01
  Speaker 4: prerogative play into what you write about in terms of
• 24:06
  Speaker 4: the acceptance of violence in response to some of this stuff?
• 24:11
  Speaker 6: Thanks, Ryan. And yes, the guard is a very important point,
• 24:15
  Speaker 6: and I'll explain why. You see, we're heading into a
• 24:19
  Speaker 6: domestic escalation trap where after the voting stops, and that
• 24:26
  Speaker 6: means after November 3rd when the polls close, The counting starts.
• 24:33
  Speaker 6: And that is the actual danger zone. So you, as
• 24:37
  Speaker 6: you just said, well, okay, we're in Washington. You've used
• 24:42
  Speaker 6: to seeing the guard around. This isn't going to stop you, Ryan,
• 24:46
  Speaker 6: from going to the polls. So that's not actually the
• 24:49
  Speaker 6: real danger. The danger is not voter intimidation ahead of time.
• 24:55
  Speaker 6: In fact, it may turn out that deploying the guard
• 24:58
  Speaker 6: will incentivize people to go and show the man. They're
• 25:01
  Speaker 6: not going to be intimidated. So my book is not
• 25:04
  Speaker 6: saying worry about November 3rd. The problem here is the
• 25:11
  Speaker 6: escalation trap. Recall from International Escalation Trap, the problem is
• 25:15
  Speaker 6: what happens to the losers, right? the group that is
• 25:19
  Speaker 6: going to be losing, will they accept their loss and
• 25:23
  Speaker 6: simply surrender, or will they escalate? Same problem that we
• 25:29
  Speaker 6: faced internationally. We're about to see start on November, and
• 25:34
  Speaker 6: you could just say November 4th. And that's when the
• 25:37
  Speaker 6: voting counts starts. I'm sorry, the counting starts. And that
• 25:42
  Speaker 6: will continue. The counting... and the danger zone all the
• 25:47
  Speaker 6: way through certification and the seeding of the new Congress
• 25:53
  Speaker 6: the first week in January, which ironically could happen again
• 25:59
  Speaker 6: on Wednesday, January 6, 2027, a very fateful day we'll
• 26:03
  Speaker 6: all recall from 2021. That is what the positioning of
• 26:12
  Speaker 6: the guard is about, Ryan. It is not about voter
• 26:16
  Speaker 6: intimidation ahead of the game. It's about what happens after
• 26:22
  Speaker 6: the counting starts. And you've already heard, of course, a
• 26:27
  Speaker 6: lot of scenarios. The Atlantic has published scenarios of seizing
• 26:32
  Speaker 6: the ballot boxes. This is all about the counting, Ryan.
• 26:37
  Speaker 6: And that's the big deal. And it's an escalation trap.
• 26:40
  Speaker 6: So is president Trump. So we all assume, okay, now
• 26:44
  Speaker 6: of course we could be wrong, but we all assume
• 26:47
  Speaker 6: that the losers here are going to be, uh, the
• 26:49
  Speaker 6: Republicans and it's because the Iran war has made everything worse.
• 26:54
  Speaker 2: All right.
• 26:55
  Speaker 6: This book is laying out that it was already going
• 26:58
  Speaker 6: to be a dangerous election before the Iran war. The
• 27:01
  Speaker 6: Iran war is now pouring gasoline on that domestic fire.
• 27:06
  Speaker 6: And what that means for the losers here is a
• 27:10
  Speaker 6: catastrophic loss. So we need to understand that for president Trump,
• 27:17
  Speaker 6: and of course, many people in the country will be
• 27:19
  Speaker 6: very happy about this catastrophic loss for president Trump, but
• 27:23
  Speaker 6: we need to understand president Trump is president now, just
• 27:26
  Speaker 6: like he was in the fall of 2020. So he
• 27:29
  Speaker 6: was not a candidate. He was the president in the
• 27:32
  Speaker 6: fall of 2020. So this is a, this is a
• 27:34
  Speaker 6: parallel situation. The last time he lost, it did not
• 27:39
  Speaker 6: go well. We just need to understand that. Now, we
• 27:42
  Speaker 6: can talk about certain scenarios, Ryan, and I'm glad to
• 27:46
  Speaker 6: do that, but the fundamental points in this book are
• 27:49
  Speaker 6: about this will be popular with core tens of millions
• 27:57
  Speaker 6: of people here. It's not what the normalization, just to
• 28:01
  Speaker 6: tie it back to the core of this book, What
• 28:05
  Speaker 6: we're seeing is the growing normalization of political violence in
• 28:11
  Speaker 6: our country, which accounts for the strings of assassination attempts
• 28:16
  Speaker 6: on both sides of the aisle and also accounts for
• 28:19
  Speaker 6: the rise of violent protests. I don't mean just peaceful protests.
• 28:24
  Speaker 6: Of course, we have a lot of peaceful protests. That's
• 28:27
  Speaker 6: the core of our democracy. But we've seen the rise
• 28:31
  Speaker 6: of violent protests. And we have seen, and I'm specifically
• 28:35
  Speaker 6: pointing back to the fall of 2020, where the president
• 28:39
  Speaker 6: of the United States used all the tools of that
• 28:43
  Speaker 6: office to encourage that momentum, that normalization of violence, to
• 28:50
  Speaker 6: encourage and use the tools to try to stop the
• 28:54
  Speaker 6: loser from being the loser, in that case, him. Uh,
• 28:58
  Speaker 6: and so this is something we need to take very,
• 29:00
  Speaker 6: very seriously going forward. And this book helps us to
• 29:05
  Speaker 6: understand what's coming, gives us some ideas of what we
• 29:08
  Speaker 6: can do now to try to inoculate ourselves. Um, and
• 29:12
  Speaker 6: helps to understand that this is not just a, a, a, uh,
• 29:16
  Speaker 6: sort of, uh, an election that like, like others, this
• 29:19
  Speaker 6: is likely going to be the most dangerous election in
• 29:22
  Speaker 6: our lifetimes. Just imagine. That if the GOP loses here,
• 29:27
  Speaker 6: you're already seeing Mike Rogers in Michigan pull away from Trump.
• 29:31
  Speaker 6: What Trump faces in January is not just simply pressure
• 29:35
  Speaker 6: from the Democrats. What he faces is actual removal from office.
• 29:40
  Speaker 6: because there could well be a third of the GOP
• 29:43
  Speaker 6: who's going to join with the Democrats here. And that's
• 29:46
  Speaker 6: a scenario that we're not talking about right now because,
• 29:49
  Speaker 6: of course, the Democrats want to motivate the Democratic vote.
• 29:53
  Speaker 6: But notice Mike Rogers. He's a bellwether, a canary in
• 29:57
  Speaker 6: the coal mine here. And why exactly is MAGA sticking
• 30:02
  Speaker 6: with the loser here in January Trump when they all
• 30:07
  Speaker 6: know that there's got to be a future? So this
• 30:11
  Speaker 6: is what is on. This is what we're heading to.
• 30:14
  Speaker 6: in this danger zone I'm calling attention to. And I
• 30:18
  Speaker 6: appreciate you giving me a chance to talk about it
• 30:21
  Speaker 6: because we're just not, again, it's a little bit like
• 30:24
  Speaker 6: the month before the Iran war. I tried to get
• 30:26
  Speaker 6: people's attention and I couldn't get it. Now you're at
• 30:30
  Speaker 6: least giving us a chance to try to do something,
• 30:33
  Speaker 6: to hear about it, understand what's coming. And it's, I
• 30:37
  Speaker 6: hope it doesn't come by the way. I mean, please understand.
• 30:40
  Speaker 6: I hope it doesn't come. But the bottom line is
• 30:43
  Speaker 6: we are on the brink of this. And the book
• 30:46
  Speaker 6: lays out all the dynamics. Yeah.
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: Well, you mentioned the Atlantic. Let's put one of those
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: scenarios up on the screen. This is E3. They have
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: one particularly influential Trump outside advisor urging him to declare
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: martial law for the midterms. I'll just read a little
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: bit of this. They say, of all the outside advisors
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: urging Trump to seize control of federal elections this fall,
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: the attorney Peter Tickton can claim the deepest ties. They
• 31:11
  Speaker 1: went to military school together as teenagers in 2022. He
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: helped Trump sue Hillary Clinton. He helped push Trump to
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: secure a pardon for Tina Peters, former Colorado clerk convicted
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: of charges related to tampering with election equipment. And he
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: is pushing for martial law and, you know, exactly the
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: sort of actions that you are warning about here. So,
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: you know, do you see this sort of thing as feasible?
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: Because I think one important distinction you're making here is
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: there's a lot of focus about, oh, my God, he's
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: going to try to rig the elections. And you're saying, no,
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: the action is actually after the effect with potential actions
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: like this. And to tie it also back to what
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: you're saying about January 6th, my experience with Trump 2.0
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: here is that. some of the things that they tried
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: and were sloppy and a mess from the first term,
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: they spent the off season figuring out, okay, how do
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: we make sure that this time when we try to
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: steal the election, for example, we actually succeed? So what
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: do you think are some of the learnings they took
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: from January 6th that we should be on the lookout for?
• 32:13
  Speaker 6: Yeah, so I think those are helpful, those scenarios, But
• 32:18
  Speaker 6: they're not really focusing on the plausible scenario. So what
• 32:23
  Speaker 6: that scenario does is say he might try to do X, Y,
• 32:26
  Speaker 6: or Z, give money to the Democratic lawyers. They're going
• 32:29
  Speaker 6: to file lawsuits. And the law, the courts, are going
• 32:32
  Speaker 6: to fix everything. That's basically what's happening in that. And
• 32:35
  Speaker 6: of course, I think lawsuits would be appropriate. I'm not
• 32:39
  Speaker 6: saying not to do that. But that's missing the interaction
• 32:42
  Speaker 6: with the Iran war. You see, with the Iran war,
• 32:45
  Speaker 6: this is a very different scenario now. So with the
• 32:48
  Speaker 6: Iran war, what can easily happen after November 4th, and
• 32:54
  Speaker 6: this is when there's any internal trouble, and you can
• 32:57
  Speaker 6: just look up international scholarship, scholars publishing about this for decades.
• 33:02
  Speaker 6: It's called the diversionary theory of war. Any international internal struggle,
• 33:08
  Speaker 6: the leaders sometimes, and there's chapter and verse cases of this,
• 33:12
  Speaker 6: will actually attack other countries so they can do things
• 33:16
  Speaker 6: internally to suppress their opposition. Also, by the way, once
• 33:21
  Speaker 6: you have internal problems in a country, outside powers can
• 33:28
  Speaker 6: attack thinking it's a good time, a vulnerable window to attack. So,
• 33:33
  Speaker 6: for example, President Trump has said over and over and
• 33:35
  Speaker 6: over again, I'm going to deal with Iran the day
• 33:39
  Speaker 6: after the elections. Well, people aren't connecting the dots to
• 33:43
  Speaker 6: that in the issue of martial law yet here. And
• 33:45
  Speaker 6: what they're not, I think, realizing is if President Trump
• 33:49
  Speaker 6: decides to escalate against Iran, then he can start to
• 33:54
  Speaker 6: have a much stronger argument in the courts that for
• 33:59
  Speaker 6: national security purposes, he needs to call out the military
• 34:04
  Speaker 6: needs to call out the National Guard because given the
• 34:08
  Speaker 6: Iran war and the proclivities of Iran to retaliate, this
• 34:13
  Speaker 6: is a much more powerful argument for him in the courts.
• 34:18
  Speaker 6: So I think, Crystal, what's really happening is we are
• 34:22
  Speaker 6: just simply again, and the book explains, we like to
• 34:27
  Speaker 6: pretend that although we've seen six years of rising political violence,
• 34:31
  Speaker 6: it will never happen again. That's what happened at the
• 34:35
  Speaker 6: Washington Correspondents' Dinner. Everybody, oh my goodness, how could there
• 34:39
  Speaker 6: be another assassination attempt against Donald Trump? Well, it's because
• 34:44
  Speaker 6: the book is explaining these are not abnormal now. We're
• 34:48
  Speaker 6: seeing the normalization of political violence. That includes from the state.
• 34:55
  Speaker 6: And this is why this is important to talk about now.
• 34:59
  Speaker 6: And it's because what we're heading into is really quite
• 35:03
  Speaker 6: a different world, and it's a more dangerous world. And
• 35:07
  Speaker 6: you're pointing out some of the warnings that have already
• 35:10
  Speaker 6: come up. But notice how they're not really connecting with
• 35:13
  Speaker 6: the plausible way this could interact with the Iran war here.
• 35:17
  Speaker 6: And by the way, we're not even talking about, I
• 35:19
  Speaker 6: only briefly mentioned, Iran could do something to monkey with
• 35:24
  Speaker 6: this too. Remember back in The summer, the New York
• 35:27
  Speaker 6: Times reported that our government thinks Iran was behind the
• 35:32
  Speaker 6: monkeying with that water in Minnesota. So Iran can stir
• 35:38
  Speaker 6: the pot here in ways that it's not going to
• 35:42
  Speaker 6: favor us. I guarantee you Iran doesn't have our best
• 35:44
  Speaker 6: interests at stake here. And that's why I think it's
• 35:47
  Speaker 6: really important to get the groundwork now to understand what
• 35:52
  Speaker 6: we're really heading into.
• 35:53
  Speaker 5: Mm-hmm.
• 35:54
  Speaker 4: When it comes to political violence in the past, with
• 35:58
  Speaker 4: the help of hindsight, we often learn that there were
• 36:01
  Speaker 4: actually elements of the government that were involved, either with
• 36:04
  Speaker 4: the people or with the groups that were carrying out
• 36:07
  Speaker 4: that violence. How do you think about the role of
• 36:11
  Speaker 4: the U.S. government, setting aside the Iranian government, when it
• 36:15
  Speaker 4: comes to stoking this kind of political violence?
• 36:19
  Speaker 6: So there's a chapter in the book that's about ICE
• 36:23
  Speaker 6: and the deadly fracturing of American identity that goes directly
• 36:28
  Speaker 6: into this, Ryan. It lays out how would you think
• 36:31
  Speaker 6: about it. And what I did is I compared Trump's
• 36:36
  Speaker 6: use of ICE here in, say, Minneapolis to what happened
• 36:40
  Speaker 6: in the 1950s when Eisenhower called out the National Guard
• 36:45
  Speaker 6: for segregation issues in the South. And here's the gigantic difference, Ryan,
• 36:53
  Speaker 6: that's really important to understand. In the 1950s, you had
• 36:57
  Speaker 6: a whole string of Supreme Court cases, Brown versus Board
• 37:01
  Speaker 6: of Education, et cetera, et cetera, that laid the groundwork
• 37:05
  Speaker 6: for the national importance of desegregation in the South. This
• 37:12
  Speaker 6: was not just a partisan issue. This was widely supported.
• 37:18
  Speaker 6: across the body politic. Now, of course, not in Alabama,
• 37:22
  Speaker 6: so for example, but nonetheless, widely supported. And so when
• 37:27
  Speaker 6: Eisenhower is bringing out the National Guard for certain school
• 37:31
  Speaker 6: desegregation issues, this is with a mantle of Supreme Court
• 37:36
  Speaker 6: and court legitimacy. That's not one case, not two cases,
• 37:39
  Speaker 6: a whole string of cases. Here, we have the opposite.
• 37:43
  Speaker 6: We literally have the opposite, as I lay out in
• 37:46
  Speaker 6: the book, because the Supreme Court has ruled against President
• 37:51
  Speaker 6: Trump in cases already involving the use of the National
• 37:57
  Speaker 6: Guard and immigration without the approval of the states, dot, dot, dot.
• 38:00
  Speaker 6: So this is something that we can actually understand, but
• 38:04
  Speaker 6: we need the time to digest it. If we wait
• 38:09
  Speaker 6: until there's a crisis moment, you can't think in a crisis, Ryan.
• 38:13
  Speaker 6: That's the problem here. We can't think in the hours
• 38:18
  Speaker 6: of a crisis because a crisis is unfolding right in
• 38:21
  Speaker 6: front of us. So I've been working with political leaders
• 38:25
  Speaker 6: for decades on trying to prevent, be proactive. All of them,
• 38:30
  Speaker 6: many of them will tell me, Professor Pape, I'll get there.
• 38:33
  Speaker 6: I'll do it. I'll be right there the moment it happens.
• 38:37
  Speaker 6: And you know what? They are there, but they have
• 38:39
  Speaker 6: no time to think. They're reacting, and that is the problem.
• 38:43
  Speaker 6: We need to be more aware so that when we
• 38:47
  Speaker 6: get there, we navigate any of the surprises better.
• 38:51
  Speaker 4: Well, I don't necessarily mean government violence that stokes blowback.
• 38:56
  Speaker 4: What I'm referring to more is, say, the government involvement
• 39:00
  Speaker 4: in the conspiracy to go after Gretchen Whitmer, for instance,
• 39:04
  Speaker 4: or every time the FBI holds a press conference announcing
• 39:08
  Speaker 4: that they foiled some terror attack, you read the indictment,
• 39:12
  Speaker 4: and it turns out it was just some mentally disabled
• 39:16
  Speaker 4: Muslim person that the FBI promised to buy weapons for
• 39:21
  Speaker 4: them and convince them to agree in a text message
• 39:25
  Speaker 4: or at a diner that.
• 39:26
  Speaker 6: They would commit something.
• 39:28
  Speaker 4: So I would say, Ryan, thank you for- normalized among
• 39:31
  Speaker 4: the public that like this is a thing that's happening
• 39:33
  Speaker 4: all the time.
• 39:33
  Speaker 6: Well, I really appreciate that Ryan. And so let me
• 39:36
  Speaker 6: just say that for decades with Al Qaeda and Isis
• 39:42
  Speaker 6: violence I worked with the FBI directly with sting operations
• 39:47
  Speaker 6: and ISIS narratives and so forth. So I have a
• 39:50
  Speaker 6: little bit of understanding of this, not just from sitting
• 39:53
  Speaker 6: from the ivory tower. And here's what I would say.
• 39:57
  Speaker 6: The real advantage we have is that when that claim
• 40:01
  Speaker 6: comes up, we adjudicate it through the court system, which
• 40:05
  Speaker 6: is extremely transparent. And that can happen across multiple administrations.
• 40:11
  Speaker 6: So people say, well, the wheels of justice grind, it
• 40:15
  Speaker 6: takes too long. Well, one of the advantages of taking
• 40:18
  Speaker 6: long time is you can get a change of administration.
• 40:20
  Speaker 6: So you can get, if you think that one administration
• 40:24
  Speaker 6: is somehow suppressing evidence, change of administration, that can come out.
• 40:29
  Speaker 6: And what I would say is that there really is
• 40:31
  Speaker 6: a concern, I would think. I mean, I wouldn't say
• 40:33
  Speaker 6: a 10 out of 10 concern, but I take seriously
• 40:37
  Speaker 6: the Gretchen Whitmer issue. I really do, even though I've
• 40:40
  Speaker 6: worked with those folks with the sting operations, I think
• 40:43
  Speaker 6: that sometimes they can get carried away. What I would say, though,
• 40:46
  Speaker 6: is let's go back to January 6th. So the same
• 40:48
  Speaker 6: claims that are often made here about January 6th. And
• 40:53
  Speaker 6: this is a very, very, very different story. And I
• 40:56
  Speaker 6: would just go back to the fact that we have
• 40:58
  Speaker 6: heard those claims. And all we need to see is
• 41:03
  Speaker 6: now the Trump administration, Department of Justice, provide the actual
• 41:08
  Speaker 6: information that that actually happened, that there is real, real
• 41:12
  Speaker 6: complicity by the FBI. Kash Patel, he is somebody who
• 41:17
  Speaker 6: said that happened before. Okay, fine. Now you're the director
• 41:21
  Speaker 6: of the FBI. Bring it out. Let's see what the
• 41:24
  Speaker 6: evidence is. And so far, that hasn't happened, Ryan. And
• 41:28
  Speaker 6: that tells me there may be no there there, that
• 41:32
  Speaker 6: we have another Epstein-like situation. Where there's all this discussion,
• 41:37
  Speaker 6: and yet nonetheless, the Trump administration has no evidence to
• 41:41
  Speaker 6: really show us. So I would just simply say, I
• 41:44
  Speaker 6: think this is one of the benefits of our great system.
• 41:49
  Speaker 6: I never want our system to go away. I believe
• 41:51
  Speaker 6: we live in the best country in the world. And
• 41:53
  Speaker 6: this is one of the advantages. But this is something
• 41:57
  Speaker 6: we need to protect. We need to take seriously That
• 42:01
  Speaker 6: this is and now if there if we go forward
• 42:04
  Speaker 6: here and there really is even a quarter of the
• 42:07
  Speaker 6: kind of thing I'm worried about this, this is going
• 42:10
  Speaker 6: to get very different very quickly. And it's going to
• 42:14
  Speaker 6: unfortunately interact with the Iran war, not just go off
• 42:19
  Speaker 6: on its own.
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: So one thing that is different now versus 2020 is
• 42:23
  Speaker 1: that Trump is not on the ballot. Um, in addition, he's,
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: he claims he doesn't really care what happens in the midterms.
• 42:31
  Speaker 1: I don't really believe him, but we can, we can,
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: you know, consider maybe he's telling the truth about that.
• 42:36
  Speaker 1: And even in the scenario that you sketch out where
• 42:39
  Speaker 1: there's a possibility of Republicans starting to break with him,
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: which I do think is possible. You also have the
• 42:44
  Speaker 1: Republican Senator from Utah open to an investigation of Don Jr.
• 42:48
  Speaker 1: over this Russian oligarch wedding situation. In any case, even
• 42:52
  Speaker 1: if we accept that there may be some actual Republican
• 42:55
  Speaker 1: breaking with him, Supreme Court has basically given him a
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: get out of jail free card. He is wildly wealthier
• 43:03
  Speaker 1: to the tune of billions of dollars than he was
• 43:05
  Speaker 1: before he entered the presidency. Do you think that it
• 43:08
  Speaker 1: would matter to him that much at this point if
• 43:11
  Speaker 1: some Republicans in Congress are mad at him or if
• 43:14
  Speaker 1: they even impeach him, if they even convict him and
• 43:16
  Speaker 1: remove him from office? Would he really care that much
• 43:19
  Speaker 1: given that he's got the money and he's not going
• 43:23
  Speaker 1: to be going to prison?
• 43:24
  Speaker 6: Well, so I've advised every White House since 2001. So
• 43:28
  Speaker 6: that's Democrat and Republican. And what I can tell you
• 43:31
  Speaker 6: with the White House is what I believe they care
• 43:34
  Speaker 6: about more than anything else is the word legacy. And
• 43:38
  Speaker 6: you hear Donald Trump, he's up front about it. Most
• 43:41
  Speaker 6: of them I don't think are up front about it.
• 43:43
  Speaker 6: But they care about their legacy. And what Donald Trump
• 43:47
  Speaker 6: is facing is literally the irreparable destruction of his presidency politically.
• 43:55
  Speaker 6: And that will go down in history. This will be
• 43:59
  Speaker 6: at the very bottom of the totem pole here of
• 44:03
  Speaker 6: American presidents. And in terms of his money, a lot
• 44:07
  Speaker 6: of that money's in crypto, Crystal. That's going to just
• 44:09
  Speaker 6: go up like a flash. This will be faster than
• 44:12
  Speaker 6: Hunter Biden's paintings going out. I mean, this is really,
• 44:15
  Speaker 6: this is just going to go up in smoke. This
• 44:18
  Speaker 6: isn't real, you see what I mean? And so once
• 44:21
  Speaker 6: Donald Trump loses power, and that's what we're talking about,
• 44:26
  Speaker 6: even though he's still titularly the president here, this is
• 44:31
  Speaker 6: a disaster here. And that will be true for the
• 44:35
  Speaker 6: Trump family. That'll be true for the extensions of the family.
• 44:39
  Speaker 6: That'll be true for everybody in that cabinet. This is not,
• 44:44
  Speaker 6: in 2020, we saw the problems, even though Trump surrounded
• 44:48
  Speaker 6: himself with guardrails. So remember, in 2020, the people around Trump,
• 44:54
  Speaker 6: and this is what Trump complained about afterwards, were essentially guardrails, Crystal. Here,
• 45:00
  Speaker 6: we're going into a system Or, I mean, a period
• 45:03
  Speaker 6: of time where all those guardrails in the White House,
• 45:07
  Speaker 6: in the cabinet, they aren't just gone once. Notice Pam
• 45:11
  Speaker 6: Bondi's out. You know, she wouldn't prosecute. Gone. Okay. And
• 45:16
  Speaker 6: so what you're seeing here is a very different world,
• 45:21
  Speaker 6: fewer guardrails. And in terms of he'll just have a
• 45:24
  Speaker 6: golden parachute, you know. By the way, Crystal, that was
• 45:27
  Speaker 6: exactly what the Democrats promised Biden if he would do
• 45:31
  Speaker 6: the switcheroo and get out. He's going to have the
• 45:33
  Speaker 6: golden parachute if you go back and look at all that.
• 45:36
  Speaker 6: I think they're still waiting for the money. You see,
• 45:41
  Speaker 6: once you lose power in Washington, you really lose everything.
• 45:46
  Speaker 6: And that's the problem here. It's the escalation trap. It's
• 45:51
  Speaker 6: literally a domestic escalation trap. And Look, I hope I'm
• 45:56
  Speaker 6: proved wrong. I hope the losers... We had a case
• 46:00
  Speaker 6: in Al Gore versus Bush in the year 2000 where
• 46:03
  Speaker 6: we had the hanging Chad. The vote was decided in
• 46:07
  Speaker 6: Broward County, Florida by 328 votes, I think. And what
• 46:12
  Speaker 6: happened with Al Gore? He graciously surrendered and paid the
• 46:19
  Speaker 6: price for that among Democrats ever since.
• 46:24
  Speaker 4: But, well.
• 46:27
  Speaker 4: Professor Robert Pape. I almost said Senator Robert Pape. The
• 46:32
  Speaker 4: book is our own.
• 46:32
  Speaker 6: Thank you for that, Ryan.
• 46:34
  Speaker 4: It's out now. Professor, I did not know you were
• 46:37
  Speaker 4: a Fed. We're going to have to take that under
• 46:39
  Speaker 4: advisement as we're working on our schemes and conspiracies around here.
• 46:42
  Speaker 4: So apologies if we have to remove you from some
• 46:44
  Speaker 4: of our group chats. I'm sorry to say I've really
• 46:46
  Speaker 4: worked with all parts.
• 46:47
  Speaker 6: Of the government, DHS, the military, the FBI. The sheriff's
• 46:52
  Speaker 6: office in Cook County, I mean, because I try to
• 46:55
  Speaker 6: be proactive about violence.
• 46:58
  Speaker 4: Well, people have been warned.
• 46:59
  Speaker 5: Yeah, successfully infiltrated our show. Thank you for doing it.
• 47:05
  Speaker 6: I know it's great. Thank you so much.
• 47:07
  Speaker 5: It's our pleasure.
• 47:10
  Speaker 4: So when I traveled to Cuba last March, I had
• 47:13
  Speaker 4: a couple of things that I was trying to accomplish there.
• 47:15
  Speaker 4: One of them was actually, I was trying to land
• 47:17
  Speaker 4: an interview with the Deputy Foreign Minister, Carlos Fernandez de Cocio,
• 47:22
  Speaker 4: who incidentally was on our program last week or the
• 47:25
  Speaker 4: week before. Crystal and I interviewed him, which was interesting,
• 47:28
  Speaker 4: which was like, traveled all the way to Cuba to
• 47:30
  Speaker 4: interview him, and here he's just coming right into the studio.
• 47:34
  Speaker 4: He shows up. The second thing I want to do
• 47:35
  Speaker 4: is I wanted to find out more about the attack
• 47:39
  Speaker 4: that had happened the month before, February of this year,
• 47:43
  Speaker 4: by a group of 10 Cuban Americans who got onto
• 47:47
  Speaker 4: two boats and tried to invade the island of Cuba
• 47:51
  Speaker 4: and overthrow the government. Five of them were killed by
• 47:56
  Speaker 4: the Cuban Coast Guard, the other five arrested. And so
• 48:00
  Speaker 4: along with Reid Lindsay, who's a reporter with Belly of
• 48:02
  Speaker 4: the Beast, which is an American news outlet that has
• 48:04
  Speaker 4: a large presence on the island of Cuba, put in
• 48:07
  Speaker 4: a request with Cuban officials there to be able to
• 48:10
  Speaker 4: interview the people who had survived this attack, which people
• 48:15
  Speaker 4: call the Bay of Piglets. So we've now published this
• 48:19
  Speaker 4: investigation and these interviews. in collaboration with Belly of the
• 48:24
  Speaker 4: Beast and also with Miami New Times, which is this
• 48:26
  Speaker 4: very cool kind of alt weekly down in Miami and
• 48:29
  Speaker 4: over at Dropsite News. You put this first element up
• 48:31
  Speaker 4: on the screen inside the armed incursion from Florida intended
• 48:35
  Speaker 4: to topple Cuba's government. I would highly recommend people go
• 48:40
  Speaker 4: and read the entire piece by Reed. Reed ended up
• 48:43
  Speaker 4: carrying out the interviews in Havana. Really fascinating piece. But
• 48:47
  Speaker 4: I want to go through some of it here because
• 48:49
  Speaker 4: it These are the first interviews that the men have given,
• 48:54
  Speaker 4: and we have gotten no answers from the American government
• 48:59
  Speaker 4: about what on earth happened with regard to this attack,
• 49:04
  Speaker 4: which is not the kind of thing you would expect
• 49:06
  Speaker 4: if 10 residents of the United States attacked a foreign government.
• 49:12
  Speaker 4: This is the kind of thing that our FBI, A,
• 49:15
  Speaker 4: is designed to stop, because a lot of the planning
• 49:18
  Speaker 4: was done for this pretty much out in the open.
• 49:20
  Speaker 4: They were bragging that they were about to do it.
• 49:22
  Speaker 4: But if they did this to Mexico or whatever, you
• 49:23
  Speaker 4: would have an investigation and figure out how did this happen?
• 49:27
  Speaker 4: Who were these people? Who financed them? Who came up
• 49:29
  Speaker 4: with the idea? No, absolutely none of that. So we
• 49:34
  Speaker 4: did it for them. And so bizarrely, or perhaps not bizarrely,
• 49:39
  Speaker 4: this really begins on TikTok. So you, uh, you, you
• 49:42
  Speaker 4: have this account, uh, La Nueva Cuba, the new, the
• 49:45
  Speaker 4: new Cuba, um, that was going, that was going around and,
• 49:50
  Speaker 4: you know, trashing the Cuban government as is typical of
• 49:53
  Speaker 4: a lot of these kinds of Miami based, uh, Cuban
• 49:55
  Speaker 4: American accounts. And on TikTok people would engage, uh, with
• 50:01
  Speaker 4: this account. And when they would, the, the person behind
• 50:04
  Speaker 4: it would either, uh, reach out to them, DM them
• 50:08
  Speaker 4: on TikTok, or sometimes people who were watching this content
• 50:12
  Speaker 4: would kind of DM the account itself, the new Cuba account,
• 50:15
  Speaker 4: and say, great stuff, love to see this. I also
• 50:19
  Speaker 4: long for a free Cuba one day. So we can
• 50:21
  Speaker 4: put up this first quote card. Quevedo's account, La Nueva Cuba,
• 50:26
  Speaker 4: is largely populated with images depicting armed resistance and an
• 50:29
  Speaker 4: imagined post-communist Cuba, many of them AI-generated. Rodriguez messaged Quevedo,
• 50:36
  Speaker 4: Quevedo messaged him back. The two hit it off, and
• 50:38
  Speaker 4: Rodriguez said that Quevedo invited him to Florida to meet
• 50:42
  Speaker 4: a group of like-minded exiles. This is a guy who's
• 50:44
  Speaker 4: in Nashville, Tennessee, by the way. Rodriguez told us they
• 50:48
  Speaker 4: were looking for people who had the courage to join
• 50:51
  Speaker 4: an armed uprising in Cuba. Half a year later, Rodriguez
• 50:54
  Speaker 4: would be in Havana explaining to a reporter how he
• 50:57
  Speaker 4: wound up in Cuban custody, but unbowed in his determination
• 51:00
  Speaker 4: to overthrow the government. So on the evening of February 24th,
• 51:03
  Speaker 4: rodriguez joined nine other men on a fishing boat full
• 51:06
  Speaker 4: of weapons bound for cuba from the florida keys they
• 51:09
  Speaker 4: planned to seize a police station ignite an uprising and
• 51:12
  Speaker 4: prompt u.s intervention quote the action plan was simple get
• 51:16
  Speaker 4: the cuban people to rise up in arms control a
• 51:19
  Speaker 4: province for 72 hours and ask for a military invention
• 51:23
  Speaker 4: from the u.s government and so uh it It did
• 51:27
  Speaker 4: not go the way that they were hoping that it
• 51:29
  Speaker 4: would go. The plan was that they would take these
• 51:33
  Speaker 4: two boats that they had taken from the Keys and
• 51:36
  Speaker 4: kind of slip onto the Cuban island and then attack
• 51:39
  Speaker 4: a police station. One of the boats, one of which
• 51:42
  Speaker 4: was stolen, broke down along the way. And so all
• 51:47
  Speaker 4: of a sudden you have 10 guys piled onto this
• 51:49
  Speaker 4: one boat. Now, it's illegal for American boats to travel.
• 51:53
  Speaker 4: getting you know this close to cuba from the united
• 51:56
  Speaker 4: states it's like it's not obviously it's illegal for um
• 51:59
  Speaker 4: from the cuban perspective to invade them but it's also
• 52:03
  Speaker 4: illegal from the american perspective we were monitoring everything for
• 52:07
  Speaker 4: these drug boats at the time like the idea that
• 52:11
  Speaker 4: this boat filled with like grenades and weapons um and
• 52:16
  Speaker 4: 10 dudes with the other boat just floating wasn't noticed
• 52:21
  Speaker 4: is considered to be preposterous by the Cuban government. And
• 52:24
  Speaker 4: I think that with some reason. And so Reid also
• 52:29
  Speaker 4: talked to Rodriguez's girlfriend. We can put the second element
• 52:34
  Speaker 4: up here. According to Rodriguez's girlfriend, Yanny Rodriguez, he left
• 52:38
  Speaker 4: their house in Nashville on Friday, January 23rd, telling her
• 52:42
  Speaker 4: he was going to a camp in Florida with some friends.
• 52:44
  Speaker 4: She said he collected magazines about guns and owned two
• 52:47
  Speaker 4: or three firearms, which he took with him. She said
• 52:49
  Speaker 4: he had a full-time job driving a dump truck, hauling
• 52:52
  Speaker 4: dirt and stone to construction sites, and she expected him
• 52:55
  Speaker 4: to return soon. The operation was a, quote, complete surprise
• 53:00
  Speaker 4: to her. Who throws his life away like that, she asked.
• 53:03
  Speaker 5: Gentlemen.
• 53:04
  Speaker 4: Yes.
• 53:05
  Speaker 5: Not a way to please your ladies with this one.
• 53:08
  Speaker 4: Ultimately, Raul Quevedo, a 40-year-old carpenter who runs a home
• 53:11
  Speaker 4: renovation company incorporated in Bradenton, Florida, in addition to this
• 53:16
  Speaker 4: new Cuba corporation registered in the state as a nonprofit,
• 53:19
  Speaker 4: did not join the other men on the boat. So
• 53:21
  Speaker 4: the guy doing the TikTok and the organizing of all
• 53:23
  Speaker 4: this doesn't get on the boat with them. Reached by phone,
• 53:26
  Speaker 4: Quevedo said he was in touch with most of the
• 53:28
  Speaker 4: men through TikTok, but declined to answer questions about his
• 53:31
  Speaker 4: relationship to them and whether he was involved in the operation.
• 53:34
  Speaker 4: He told us, I have nothing to say about that.
• 53:36
  Speaker 4: The more you talk, the more your enemy knows about you.
• 53:40
  Speaker 4: Quevedo said overthrowing the Cuban government is, quote, doable with
• 53:43
  Speaker 4: enough money, but he was critical of the operation. Quote,
• 53:46
  Speaker 4: it wasn't the right timing. It wasn't the right organization.
• 53:49
  Speaker 4: It wasn't organized, he said. For something like that, you
• 53:52
  Speaker 4: have to have a plan structure, a plan B, a
• 53:55
  Speaker 4: plan C, and an escape plan. If you don't have
• 53:57
  Speaker 4: that being only 10 people, you're lost. And it's a
• 54:00
  Speaker 4: shame because they were good guys. So at this point,
• 54:05
  Speaker 4: you're like, what on earth is going on here? So
• 54:07
  Speaker 4: this is the guy who's recruiting these people. So after
• 54:11
  Speaker 4: he recruits them, they trained. This is another way they
• 54:15
  Speaker 4: most certainly very easily could have been caught if anybody
• 54:18
  Speaker 4: was actually doing some type of sting operation. If these
• 54:21
  Speaker 4: were Muslim men, for instance, the entire FBI would be
• 54:27
  Speaker 4: down on them because they start doing arms training at
• 54:30
  Speaker 4: a farm. They call it a finca in Florida near
• 54:34
  Speaker 4: Fort Myers. So we can put this next element. So
• 54:36
  Speaker 4: in November, they went to a finca or small farm
• 54:39
  Speaker 4: near Fort Myers, Florida, to begin training. Amid the peppers, sugarcane,
• 54:43
  Speaker 4: and farm animals, there was a rustic shooting range. Acosta
• 54:47
  Speaker 4: and the other three detainees interviewed said they were told
• 54:50
  Speaker 4: the finca belonged to Maritza Lugo Fernandez, a Cuban-born political
• 54:54
  Speaker 4: activist who runs an anti-communist organization called the Partido 30
• 54:59
  Speaker 4: de November, so the November 30th Party. Lugo denied any
• 55:02
  Speaker 4: knowledge of the operation, but confirmed she gave one of
• 55:05
  Speaker 4: the men... access to the property. The party traces its
• 55:10
  Speaker 4: roots to the revolutionary 30th of November movement, an underground
• 55:15
  Speaker 4: anti-Castro group that was founded in Cuba in 1960 and
• 55:18
  Speaker 4: later reorganized in Florida after several of the leaders went
• 55:21
  Speaker 4: into exile. In 1991, the exile movement helped establish the
• 55:25
  Speaker 4: party inside Cuba. Lugo was among its founding members and
• 55:29
  Speaker 4: later assumed its leadership after her husband was imprisoned in 1994.
• 55:34
  Speaker 4: She moved to South Florida in 2002 and continued the
• 55:37
  Speaker 4: party's work from exile. So this kind of a fringe,
• 55:40
  Speaker 4: I mean, these are all fringe things, but this is
• 55:43
  Speaker 4: kind of a fringe anti-Cuba organization. And what people need
• 55:49
  Speaker 4: to understand about this kind of the anti-communist, anti-Cuba politics
• 55:53
  Speaker 4: down in South Florida is it's very heavily funded by taxpayers.
• 55:58
  Speaker 4: Like the Cuban... American lobby is one of the most
• 56:01
  Speaker 4: effective in Congress. They're like modeled after, they're very deliberately
• 56:05
  Speaker 4: modeled after AIPAC and AIPAC kind of coached them into
• 56:08
  Speaker 4: how you take, um, how you can kind of flex
• 56:12
  Speaker 4: power if you have, and, and they, and they also
• 56:16
  Speaker 4: not only had a lot of money and a lot of,
• 56:19
  Speaker 4: so a lot, a lot of lobbying capacity, but Florida
• 56:21
  Speaker 4: has always been an important state. So, and they could,
• 56:23
  Speaker 4: they could swing actual significant votes. And so the deal
• 56:26
  Speaker 4: they've cut with all of these different presidents and Congresses
• 56:29
  Speaker 4: is huge amounts of money going down to Florida, basically
• 56:34
  Speaker 4: through pro-democracy programs that then fund all of these operations. Now,
• 56:41
  Speaker 4: we don't have any evidence that those particular dollars leaked
• 56:44
  Speaker 4: out into this particular organization, but that's what props up
• 56:48
  Speaker 4: this money. And when Elon Musk blew up USAID, what
• 56:53
  Speaker 4: did Marco Rubio do? came in and saved all of
• 56:56
  Speaker 4: the democracy money around Cuba.
• 56:58
  Speaker 5: He loves democracy.
• 56:59
  Speaker 4: So he loves democracy. So we have not gotten rid
• 57:01
  Speaker 4: of these programs. They were basically the only ones that
• 57:05
  Speaker 4: were saved, plus some stuff aimed at Venezuela. But so
• 57:09
  Speaker 4: then let's get to the actual day itself, because we
• 57:14
  Speaker 4: have from the men interviews about or their accounts of
• 57:18
  Speaker 4: what went down. So approximately 7 a.m., a lookout at
• 57:23
  Speaker 4: a Cuban border guard post which is off of Cuba's
• 57:27
  Speaker 4: northern coast, spotted the boat less than four nautical miles
• 57:30
  Speaker 4: to the northwest. So already the plan is blown up.
• 57:33
  Speaker 4: They were not trying to get caught by the Coast Guard.
• 57:35
  Speaker 4: A radar operator confirmed the sighting and began tracking its
• 57:38
  Speaker 4: course and speed, according to First Colonel Ibe Carballo Perez,
• 57:43
  Speaker 4: the border guard's chief of staff. Cruz Gomez said they
• 57:46
  Speaker 4: steered the boat toward a small cay near shore, hoping
• 57:50
  Speaker 4: to hide until nightfall. But the tide was out, and
• 57:53
  Speaker 4: El Tornado ran aground in shallow water. So the Coen brothers'
• 57:58
  Speaker 4: nature of this is all coming to pass. So here
• 58:01
  Speaker 4: they are. They've run aground. They've been spotted by the
• 58:04
  Speaker 4: Coast Guard. So Acosta says, almost everyone got out of
• 58:09
  Speaker 4: the boat to try to dislodge it. So now they're
• 58:11
  Speaker 4: trying to push the boat off the mud here and
• 58:14
  Speaker 4: keep going to add more fuel because we're almost out.
• 58:17
  Speaker 4: That's when we saw a boat coming toward us. We
• 58:19
  Speaker 4: didn't know it was the border guard, but we assumed
• 58:21
  Speaker 4: it was. We got the boat free and everyone got
• 58:24
  Speaker 4: on board. But El Tornado, at a maximum speed of
• 58:27
  Speaker 4: 24 knots, could not outrun the border guard vessel. Acosta says,
• 58:31
  Speaker 4: by the time we took off, the Coast Guard boat
• 58:34
  Speaker 4: was almost on top of us. That's when Gomez shouted,
• 58:37
  Speaker 4: get ready. They're going to shoot. Look for the magazines.
• 58:40
  Speaker 4: Most of the weapons aboard El Tornado were wrapped in
• 58:43
  Speaker 4: moving blankets and packed inside bags. Acosta said the magazines
• 58:47
  Speaker 4: and the guns were in different bags. So they're practicing
• 58:51
  Speaker 4: gun safety because they were not expecting this to happen.
• 58:54
  Speaker 4: The group had expected to slip ashore undetected, Cruz and
• 58:58
  Speaker 4: Rodriguez said, not fight its way onto the island. Cuban
• 59:02
  Speaker 4: authorities say someone aboard El Tornado fired first, striking the
• 59:05
  Speaker 4: border guard captain in the abdomen. All four men confirmed
• 59:09
  Speaker 4: that the first shooting. came from their own boat. Rodriguez said,
• 59:13
  Speaker 4: one of us fired the first shot. I have to
• 59:15
  Speaker 4: admit that. And he, in the interviews, was the most
• 59:18
  Speaker 4: critical of Cuban authorities. So you can take him with
• 59:22
  Speaker 4: some serious credibility. He is still committed to overthrowing the government,
• 59:25
  Speaker 4: even though he's in their custody. Rodriguez Cruz and Galindo
• 59:29
  Speaker 4: said they did not know who fired first. Acosta said
• 59:33
  Speaker 4: that Amihal Sanchez took the first shot. Quote, Amihal grabbed
• 59:38
  Speaker 4: a magazine for the Chinese-made AK-47 he had and opened
• 59:41
  Speaker 4: fire on the Coast Guard, he said. That's when a
• 59:43
  Speaker 4: shootout began. I don't know exactly what happened because at
• 59:46
  Speaker 4: that point I got scared and threw myself onto the
• 59:49
  Speaker 4: floor of the boat so I wouldn't get hit by
• 59:51
  Speaker 4: the gunfire. And so now you've got a full-on battle going.
• 59:58
  Speaker 4: Cruz says, it was only when I managed to pull
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 4: out a rifle that a bullet hit me, adding that
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 4: the all-night voyage had left the men physically depleted and
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 4: slow to react. We had been vomiting from seasickness, he said.
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 4: We were wet, cold, and exhausted. It kept us from thinking.
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 4: It paralyzed us.
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 5: If it wasn't for that, it definitely.
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 4: Would have succeeded. Yes. They caught him when they were struggling.
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 4: Damn that seasickness.
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 6: Yes.
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 4: So Acosta said, at that moment, all I could think
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 4: to do was put the weapon beside me and lie
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 4: down in the boat. I got scared, he added. I
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 4: always said back at the farm that shooting at a target,
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 4: a bullseye, is not the same as facing people in
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 4: real life who are shooting back at you. A powerful insight. Brilliant,
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 4: brilliant insight there. One that proved correct. The exchange lasted minutes,
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 4: according to the survivors and Cuban authorities. Cruz eventually raised
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 4: an arm to signal surrender. Galindo said one of the
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 4: border guards continued firing until the wounded captain ordered him
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 4: to stop. Galindo said the captain shouted at him, shouted strongly.
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 4: If the captain had let him continue, he would have
• 1:01:02
  Speaker 4: killed us all. And then he says, perhaps the idea
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 4: was somewhat naive because we hadn't prepared for every possible situation,
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 4: said Cruz. We weren't prepared to face the border guard.
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 4: Rodriguez added, we had no training to confront the Cuban
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 4: border guard.
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 5: So in their minds, what did they think was going
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 5: to happen here?
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 4: So in their minds, two boats were going to slip ashore.
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 4: They went to a heavily patrolled part of Cuba. which
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 4: some people in Florida were like, this is the worst place. Like,
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 4: why would you go there? The Coast Guard is definitely
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 4: going to buy you here.
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 1: I like the idea of just some random Cubans in
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 1: Florida being like, ah, this was all, you.
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 5: Know, Monday morning quarterbacking the whole thing. What are you doing?
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 4: Right, because they've all thought about it.
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 4: And you're like, no, not there. And so they were
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 4: going to slip ashore, and then they were going to
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 4: find a police station.
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 5: Okay.
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 4: Attack it.
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 6: Okay.
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 4: And the attack on the police station is not that,
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 4: different from the actual Bay of Pigs.
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 6: Right.
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 4: And then that was going to then spark an uprising
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 4: across the island where people see this is happening now,
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 4: like it's going down. In fact, this is a helpful
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 4: quote to that point. So we can put up this
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 4: last quote card. Cruz said he still believed in their cause,
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 4: but they needed more resources to carry out a successful
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 4: armed struggle. He compared their failed incursion to Fidel Castro's
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 4: 1956 landing in Cuba aboard the Grandma. He said, I'm
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 4: convinced that everyone in Cuba wants change. We still have
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 4: many of the same problems we faced in the 1950s,
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 4: and those problems will inevitably give rise to revolutionary movements
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 4: fighting for a just cause. Rodriguez said he did not
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 4: regret joining the operation, although he lamented watching his companions die.
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 4: the suffering his detention had caused his family and, quote,
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 4: having failed all those Cubans who want a free Cuba, unquote.
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 4: He said he remained committed to bringing about the end
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 4: of what he considers a dictatorship, whether it be through
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 4: military action or the Trump administration's current policy of economic warfare.
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 4: He said, referring to himself, if they told me they
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 4: would send an oil tanker to Cuba in exchange for
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 4: freeing Jose Manuel, I would rather rot in prison than
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 4: let a single drop of oil enter this country.
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 5: That's wild.
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 4: That is bleak.
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 5: He loves Cuba so much that he wants all of
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 5: the people there to suffer.
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 4: Yes. And the people are suffering. They're suffering completely differently
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 4: from the 1950s. 1950s, there was a mob-run dictatorship, basically,
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 4: that ran Cuba that was overthrown. Now they're suffering from
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 4: no oil being allowed in and a third of the
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 4: people don't have running water. The economic situation is absolutely...
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 4: you know basement level but so four of the five
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 4: agreed to speak the fifth uh the fifth did not
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 4: some of them said they regretted it others said you
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 4: know it was it was the right thing to do
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 4: and they're glad that they tried it but they regret
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 4: the way that unfolded but yeah to your point they
• 1:04:09
  Speaker 4: didn't have a much of a plan after taking the
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 4: police station just just a faith that people would spontaneously
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 4: rise up.
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 1: They thought there would be a popular uprising and then
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 1: the Trump administration would kind of run into their rescue.
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 5: Exactly.
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 4: Which is what the CIA thought with the Bay of Pigs,
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 4: that Kennedy would have to come in at that point.
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 1: The parallels really are very interesting because the Bay of
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 1: Pigs was also a total disaster and didn't go according
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 1: to plan from the start.
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 5: And fell apart instantly.
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 1: And also the conception of like, oh, for sure this
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 1: will just spark a popular uprising and then.
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 5: TBD what happens after that. And we'll figure it out
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 5: from there.
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 4: Yeah, and so we don't know what the U.S. government
• 1:04:52
  Speaker 4: knew about this. It's very hard to believe that they
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 4: picked up nothing from it. Unless they're just, unless they
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 4: have not a single person inside any of these Cuban movements,
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 4: which is, I suppose, possible. Other than, I mean, people
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 4: infiltrating them. They probably have people, like, working with them. Like,
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 4: collectively together with them, but Right. If this is a
• 1:05:16
  Speaker 4: if this is a right wing white nationalist movement or
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 4: if it's a group of Muslims or if it's a
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 4: group of eco terrorists or whatever, like data center, data
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 4: center activists, the feds would be all over it. This
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 4: they're like, let's see how it goes.
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 5: See how it plays out. You never know. Yeah. Interesting.
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 5: Great reporting, Ryan.
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 4: Interesting stuff. All right. That'll do it for us today.
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 6: Right.
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 5: That'll do it for us today.
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 1: We've got Friday show tomorrow. We're actually going to be
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 1: talking to Nithya Raman. So that'll be really interesting.
• 1:05:44
  Speaker 4: Future mayor of Los Angeles?
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 5: Looking pretty likely.
• 1:05:47
  Speaker 1: A major poll just came out that had her up
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 1: significantly on Karen Bass, who it appears people are just
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 1: really frustrated and disgusted with her leadership. So we will
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 1: look forward to speaking with her. And we've got a
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 1: lot of other great stuff planned as well.
• 1:06:01
  Speaker 5: So we will see you then.