Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #46

Summary

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Podcast Summary: "Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #46"

It Could Happen Here — December 19, 2025

Participants: Robert Evans, James Stout, Mia Wong, Garrison Davis, Sophie
Theme: This week’s Executive Disorder episode takes stock of escalating US government actions and their global, local, and legal consequences, focusing on mounting aggression toward Venezuela, a sweeping new travel ban, the chaos of mass shootings, and President Trump’s controversial AI executive order. The hosts break down the incoherence in governance, the humanitarian fallout, and the broader consequences for American institutions and daily life.

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Main Topics Overview

• Escalation Toward War With Venezuela
• Executive Actions: Travel Bans and AI Regulation
• Recent Mass Shootings and Misinformation
• Key Legal Battles and Immigration Policy
• Domestic Economic Strife and Political Narratives
• AI, Housing, and the Decline of “Big Ideas”
• Notable Quotes, Moments, and Critical Analysis

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1. Rising U.S.-Venezuela Tensions and Escalation Toward War

(03:35–24:29)

• ICE Violates Sanctuary City Laws in NYC:

  • James notes how ICE has repeatedly entered private shelter spaces unlawfully, exposing the fragility of sanctuary laws.
  • “People think of sanctuary city laws as inassailable. But in fact, sanctuary laws...are very often violated.” (James Stout, 04:51)

• Good News in an Immigration Case:

  • Faustino Pablo, previously deported to Guatemala against international protections, has been returned to the US, but with little media coverage on this positive outcome.

• Trump Labels Fentanyl a Weapon of Mass Destruction:

  • The group expresses concern over the echoes of misleading “WMD” narratives.

• Possible U.S. War With Venezuela:

  • Discussion of a Truth Social post with direct threats toward Venezuela:
    • “Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest armada ever assembled...all of the oil, land, and other assets that they previously stole from us...must be returned to the United States.” (Robert Evans quoting Trump, 08:03)
  • Trump designates the Maduro regime a “foreign terrorist organization” (FTO), an unprecedented move for a national government.
  • The legality and logic of such designations are scrutinized:
    • “It doesn’t make any sense to give it to a government...if you do business with a foreign terrorist organization, you are now immediately on the line for material support terrorism charges.” (Mia Wong, 12:57)
  • Blockades on Venezuelan oil, mechanisms for sanction-avoidance (ghost ships), and the potential for mass humanitarian consequences are detailed.
  • Congressional pushback is brewing, notably with bipartisan support for halting unauthorized hostilities.
  • Underlying this tension: American economic (especially oil) interests, with Venezuela's reliance on oil extracted under difficult technical and political conditions.
  • The discussion connects these aggressive maneuvers to broader US imperial patterns and electoral politics, including the influence of Florida’s anti-leftist, anti-Latin American “Marco Rubio lobby.”
  • Notable Quote:
    • “I want my war, but I want Congress to have a little shred of power.” (James Stout on some GOP members’ procedural objections to unauthorized warfare, 16:10)

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2. Update: Trump’s Venezuela Speech May Be Domestic Distraction

(27:23–29:58)

• Robert shares a new report suggesting the anticipated Oval Office address may actually be a PR move to “regain the narrative on affordability,” not a war declaration.
• Despite the possible pivot, the panel directs skepticism toward the administration’s priorities and laments the deteriorating economy:
  • “Almost no jobs have been added in the U.S. since April...things aren’t good.” (Robert Evans, 29:08)

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3. Expanded Travel Bans and U.S. Immigration Policy

(29:59–38:02)

• The travel ban previously affecting 19 countries is expanded to 20 more; bans now impact family reunification and international adoptions from these countries.

• Evidence cited ranges from poor government record-keeping, corruption, and inability/unwillingness to accept deportees, to issues with visa overstay rates.

• Notably, exemptions for family members are removed, and the process appears arbitrary and harmful.

• James spotlights the cruelty of international adoption disruptions, “particularly traumatic…to have it suddenly cut off like this.” (James Stout, 31:50)

• Case of Judge Hannah Dugan (Milwaukee):

  • Judge Dugan stands trial for allegedly allowing a migrant to leave court through an unconventional exit, possibly evading ICE.
  • The episode exposes inter-agency conflicts, the use of encrypted and auto-deleting messaging by DHS/FBI agents (“Frozen Water” chat), and the discord between judiciary and ICE enforcement norms.
  • Coverage to continue after the holidays.

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4. Mass Shootings: Brown University & Sydney

Garrison Davis’ segment from Tokyo (38:02–42:43)

• Providence, Rhode Island:
  • Brown University shooting with 2 killed, 9 injured. Initial reports of suspect in custody were false; shooter remains at large.
  • President Trump posts inaccurate information about the event, contributing to confusion.
• Sydney, Australia:
  • Coordinated attack at a Hanukkah event leaves 15 killed, including a child and a Holocaust survivor; bystander Ahmed Al Ahmed hailed as a hero for disarming one attacker.
  • Attackers had ISIS paraphernalia and apparent military-style training.
• Misinformation:
  • Online smear campaigns falsely identified a queer Palestinian student as a suspect, exacerbating harm and forcing the university to act to protect their community.
  • Brown University released a statement condemning these doxxing and conspiracy campaigns.
• Upcoming segment:
  • After the holidays, an indictment regarding the Turtle Island Liberation Front bombing plot in California will be covered.

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5. Executive Orders: AI Regulation and Tech Policy

(46:37–56:08)

• Trump’s Executive Order on AI:
  • Title: Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence (Dec 11, 2025).
  • Mandates U.S. “global AI dominance” via a minimally burdensome national policy and creates a federal AI Litigation Task Force to challenge state-level regulation.
  • If states enact laws “inconsistent” with federal policy (especially those limiting real estate price-fixing with AI), federal broadband/development funding can be cut off.
• Housing and Price Fixing:
  • Existing and proposed state bans on landlord collusion via “AI slop” systems, notably RealPage, would be directly targeted by the EO.
  • Robert: “What RealPage is doing is illegal collusion. This is price fixing. The AI is doing the actual price fixing.” (47:54)
• Congressional Pushback:
  • Proposal failed to get through Congress due to opposition from both sides—Republicans concerned about states’ rights and social ills facilitated by AI, Democrats focused on affordability, jobs, and abuse.
  • Even Steve Bannon weighs in:
    • “Tech bros doing utmost to turn POTUS MAGA base away from him while they line their pockets, which is essentially accurate.” (Robert quoting Bannon, 55:11)
• Larger Picture:
  • AI-driven “growth” is largely a mirage—real spending and economic health precariously prop up appearances.
  • The administration’s desperation and corporate capture shine through: “Trump making it very clear that he is bought and paid for by the tech sector.”
  • Host skepticism on enforceability, value, and justice of these executive actions.

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6. Meta-Analysis: The “Decline of Big Ideas” and the American Science Pipeline

(56:08–64:10)

• Vox article and “AI for Ideas”:
  • Robert and Mia critique a Vox piece suggesting America needs AI because humans are “running out of ideas.”
  • The original NBER research is misinterpreted; what’s actually declining is the ability to make immediate profits from new ideas, not human inventiveness itself.
  • “It’s not that there’s a lack of ideas; it’s that it costs more money to do stuff like that now.” (Robert Evans, 59:44)
  • Problems are framed as profit/growth, not public benefit; privatization and venture capital dominate priorities.
• Academic/Bureaucratic Decay:
  • Mia invokes David Graeber’s argument that mounting bureaucracy (especially in academia/government research) throttles innovation and practical progress just as much as exhausted “low hanging fruit.”
  • Current policies “annihilate” the development pipeline for new researchers, starving postdocs, grad students, and institutions of resources.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• “This is not a designation that has ever been given to a government before…it doesn’t make sense to give it to this government.”
  — Mia Wong on FTO designation for Venezuela (12:57)
• “Even just doing a blockade on these sanctioned vessels is an act of war. That’s very deliberately an act of war.”
  — Mia Wong (15:10)
• “They actually do think that you can knock off the government with airstrikes. No, you can’t. They thought this about the Houthis too—it’s wrong, it’s never been right, it’s hideous.”
  — Mia Wong (22:01)
• “If you want to have the big ideas and the Star Trek future…what you actually have to do is be willing to put a lot of money into research and development without any promise of a profit.”
  — Robert Evans (61:12)
• “They’re not talking about ideas, they’re talking about fracking the human mind.”
  — Robert Evans (62:25)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:52 – Episode intro and scope-setting
• 03:35–24:29 – Venezuela escalation, oil, and congressional response
• 27:23 – Update: Trump’s speech pivot
• 29:59–38:02 – Travel ban expansion, immigration legal battle
• 38:02–42:43 – Mass shootings and misinformation (Garrison Davis from Tokyo)
• 46:37–56:08 – Trump’s Executive Order on AI, housing, tech influence
• 56:08–64:10 – “Big Ideas,” research decline, and systemic barriers
• 64:27–end – Outro, holiday wishes, and humorous closeout

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Tone & Observations

The panel’s rapport is irreverent, exasperated, and deeply informed, blending gallows humor and detail-rich analysis. Throughout, the hosts emphasize the dangerous incoherence of current governance (“we’re being governed by posts”), the political and economic self-dealing in executive actions, and the real, immediate consequences for vulnerable populations.

They close with a call to mutual aid and care for marginalized communities, especially as economic and political crises deepen:
“Put a trans girl on your couch.” (Mia Wong & Sophie, 64:41)

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Takeaway for Listeners

This episode provides a dense, critical, and often darkly funny look at the ways U.S. federal governance is spinning further from norms and legality—pivoting erratically between international saber-rattling, nativist exclusion, techno-solutionist fantasy, and disregard for public well-being. If you missed the episode, this summary offers a clear map of the major events and debates, from Venezuela to AI, and insight into the fraught political landscape heading into 2026.

Transcript

[Robert Evans]

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[Robert Evans]

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[Robert Evans]

Today call Zone Media.

[James Stout]

All right, I'm do the intro.

[Robert Evans]

What up, Crackers and crackettes? Is that good?

[James Stout]

Perfect.

[Robert Evans]

Can we say that?

[James Stout]

I think so.

[Robert Evans]

Okay.

[James Stout]

Do you have a non binary cracks Krakems? I think.

[Mia Wong]

I think I'm definitionally not a cracker.

[Robert Evans]

Can I say this?

[Mia Wong]

The one non cracker on the show.

[Robert Evans]

I just wanted to use the word crackettes. Yeah, I understand. It's not appropriate.

[Mia Wong]

That's reasonable.

[Robert Evans]

Welcome to Ed. Yeah, thanks, Robert. We should just. We should cut off that. Sorry, James.

[James Stout]

No, let's just keep doing it.

[Robert Evans]

Do the intro.

[James Stout]

This is it could happen here. Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what is happening in the White House, the crumbling of our world and what this means to you. I am James Stout and I'm joined today by Robert Evans and Mia Wong and Sophie. Sophie is also here. And this episode we are covering the week of December 11 to December 17, the week before, the week that is Christmas.

[Robert Evans]

That's right, baby. So I hope you've done your shopping. I hope you got me a gift because I pay attention to which of our listeners do and do not buy me presents.

[James Stout]

Yep.

[Robert Evans]

So do I.

[James Stout]

You will never find me and you shouldn't try.

[Robert Evans]

That's right.

[Sophie]

And it's currently Hanukkah. Happy Hanukkah.

[James Stout]

Oh, Happy Hanukkah.

[Robert Evans]

That's right.

[James Stout]

Yes.

[Garrison Davis]

Happy Hanukkah.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, yeah. Happy Hanukkah.

[James Stout]

All the holidays.

[Robert Evans]

Have a. Yeah. Kwesi Kwanzaa. Have a solemn, dignified tet. All the holidays. Have a good one of them.

[Sophie]

Happy winter solstice.

[Robert Evans]

Which is happy solstice or unhappy solstice. It's kind of a bittersweet holiday.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Super saturnalia, you know, super saturnalia is a good one.

[James Stout]

So holidays are nice, but we are going to talk about some things that are less nice today.

[Robert Evans]

The government.

[James Stout]

Yes, the government. And specific parts of the government. Let's start with some headlines. Gothamist has obtained information about ICE being able to enter private parts of New York City shelters without a judicial warrant or being able to obtain private information about residents. Despite both of these, in theory, being prohibited by sanctuary city laws in New York. Right. It's happened at least five times. The way Gotham has found this is by making a public records request for incident reports, which is a clever use of public record law. Nice one. The city is already aware of both jail and police officers violating these laws. And I think this is a Good example of how people think of sanctuary city laws as, like, inassailable. But in fact, sanctuary laws, be they cities, state, whatever jurisdiction, are very often violated. And it's good to see that being reported on more. Last week, we talked about Faustino Pablo. Pablo, right. The guy who had been sent to Guatemala, despite the fact that he had protections under the Convention Against Torture for being returned there. The government has returned him to the US which is good. That is a rare, good immigration story. You love to see it. It did really bum me out to see that, like, there were dozens of articles on him being sent there.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

And I couldn't find anything, any reporting on him being returned, which is kind of like, we should be happy for these people. We should. Yeah. We don't get many wins and we should. We should take them. Yeah. We should be happy that this guy is not being likely to be tortured. At least it is still possible for them to remove him to a third country.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

That. That is not outside the realm of possibility. But right now, he's not in a place where a judge adjudicated. He was likely to be tortured. And that is good.

[Robert Evans]

Good.

[James Stout]

And Trump has designated fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction, which is great.

[Mia Wong]

What are we doing here? Like, just.

[James Stout]

I. I am trained as a historian, and I probably should remind you that we have been down this road before with the weapons of mass destruction. And I hope this is not leading where it did last time, but I am very worried that it might.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. It's one of those things. I'm both. We'll see. We'll know before this episode ends whether or not I'm wrong. Tucker Carlson stated recently that a source has told him the presidential announcement coming up is Trump declaring war. Right. That, like, we're doing a war with Venezuela full on, not just some, like, airstrikes and stuff, is not to minimize illegal airstrikes in the sea or on Venezuelan soil. I don't know if I think that that's the likeliest thing. It just seems like such a huge jump. But also, at this point, there's a whole armada blocking off Venezuela from the rest of the world. And Trump put out a statement saying that their oil is our oil and belongs rightly to American companies.

[James Stout]

Oh, wow.

[Robert Evans]

I. It's very, very possible. Very possible. If we're about to go to war with them, I'm certainly not. I don't know what's going to happen, y'. All. I'm white knuckling it like everybody else.

[James Stout]

Yeah, that fucking sucks. I didn't know the thing about their oil being ro.

[Mia Wong]

But yeah, it's amazing.

[Robert Evans]

I'll read the exact quote to you, James. This is from a Trump a Truth social post which has 12.4 thousand retruths and 47,000 likes. Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest armada ever assembled in the history of South America. It will only get bigger and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before. Such time as they return to the United States of America all of the oil land and other assets that they previously stole from us. The illegitimate Maduro regime is using oil from these stolen oil fields to finance themselves. Drug, terrorism, human trafficking, murder and kidnapping. For the theft of our assets and many other reasons, including terrorism, drug smuggling and human trafficking, the Venezuelan regime has been designated a foreign terrorist organization. Therefore, today I'm ordering a total and complete blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers going into and out of Venezuela. The illegal aliens and criminals that the Maduro regime has sent to the United States during the weakened, inept Biden administration are being returned to Venezuela at a rapid pace. Yada, yada, yada. Yeah. All of our oil land and other assets have to be returned to the United States, which, like, he's talking about oil that American companies have had at points, like contracts to exploit. Yeah, but he's phrasing it as like, their land and oil is our land and oil, which.

[James Stout]

Yeah, that's a very colonial way of phrasing, like a contract 100%.

[Robert Evans]

Again, a lot of times, you know, I would be like, okay, well, I don't know if war is the most reasonable thing to expect when the president's posting shit like that. It's very reasonable to be like, I think we might go to war. He might be about to invade Venezuela. I don't know what's going to happen. But it's. You're no longer being like a kooky conspiracy theorist to be like, well, maybe he's about to try to take over.

[James Stout]

Venezuela and maybe that is what's coming. Yeah, I don't understand how in that instance they would continue to get Venezuela to accept people. That's. The US Is removing. That's one of the question. The sticking points that I see. Maybe he's found a third country.

[Robert Evans]

Right. That they've.

[James Stout]

They've been very fond of finding third countries. I guess I should explain a little bit about oil leaving Venezuela just so like, people are aware of that. So, like Robert, read the. The truth. Sounds like something someone says in church, doesn't it?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Here we Are. So they're talking about like, blockading sanctioned oil tankers. Not necessarily. Every tanker that enters Venezuela is sanctioned. Like, I believe Chevron has some contracts. Chevron tankers should be cruising.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, there's a lot of Chevron.

[James Stout]

Yeah. That shouldn't be an issue. Right. They should be able to go back and forth. They're not sanctioned. It's the Venezuelan state oil company, which in English, I guess you would say pdvsa, PERD Vasa, PVASA is a. Joseph, you say anything?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, yep.

[James Stout]

What Venezuela has done previously, and this is not by any means unique to Venezuela, but this is generally how many of these regimes that are kind of in the ambit of Venezuela, I'm talking about Iran and Russia here, have avoided sanctions and sanctioned entities so far is by using what are called ghost ships. I will link to an explainer on this. What they will do is use the names and identifiers of vessels that have been scrapped. They will change the flags of vessels, often to these small island nations for whom allowing ships to use their flag is kind of a source of income. Right. And they will often use these to go out into international waters and then offload cargo, in this case, oil rate. So this happens pretty frequently with Venezuelan vessels. It was one such vessel called the Skipper, that the US Coast Guard boarded, I think last week as we're recording this.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, sure.

[James Stout]

That is how Venezuela has previously been evading these sanctions. And Iran does this too. Russia does this too. They also do things like spoof their location or turn off their. They have like a locator beacon that.

[Robert Evans]

Ships are supposed to use the transponder.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. So this is fairly common practice, but obviously the way to stop that is a physical blockade. Right. Like, that's not going to be possible if the US is effectively like, inspecting ships leaving Venezuela or sort of keeping a very close eye on them. So that will end. And with that will end a very important source of income for the Maduro regime if they keep doing this.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. Now, obviously one of the sort of issues we're trying to work out what is going to happen here, especially before whatever speech Trump is about to give, is that we're trying to figure out state policy from Trump posting.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And there's a lot of this that is enormously incoherent. So. Okay. The thing about designating the government of Venezuela as a foreign terrorist organization is one of the weirdest things I've ever seen. And this was also unhinged, the closest thing we've ever really gotten to that I guess was the irgc.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And maybe you could go back and say the Khmer Rouge, but like they weren't really a government by that point. So this is not a, this is not a designation that has ever been given to a government before.

[James Stout]

Right.

[Mia Wong]

It doesn't make any sense to give it to a government. It doesn't make sense to give it to this government. I mean, you know, even, even if you're working within the logic of counterterrorism, which is just, you know, unhinged murderous imperialism to begin with. But all of the reporting on this has been assuming that the blockade will be of, you know, like of these specifically sanctioned oil tankers. However, comma, the thing about the foreign terrorist organization designation is that it does things. And one of the things that that foreign terrorist organization designation does is that if you do business with a, with a foreign terrorist organization, you are now immediately on the line for material support.

[James Stout]

Terrorism charges like Chevron.

[Mia Wong]

So business, yes, there are lots of countries like Facebook does business.

[Robert Evans]

I'm fine with the US military carrying out airstrikes on Chevron executives in there and their property. Let's be clear about that. I would, I would salute the red, white and blue if we dropped some hellfires on that C suite.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. I don't know. This is all very weird. My understanding of the FTO designation process is that how it's supposed to work is that the President proposes it and then the Secretary of State and Secretary of the Treasurer, I think have to approve it and then there's a seven day period where Congress has an opportunity to say no and then it goes up. So right now we should be theoretically in the seven day window. But it's also really unclear what the administration has actually been doing because again, we're being governed by post.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Like it's. So it's not announced as an executive action on WhiteHouse.gov and I think normally it goes there and then the seven day comment congressional period commences. Then it's not in the Federal Register either. Right now all we have is a truth.

[Sponsor Voice]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And this is the problem is that this is sort of the Calvin Ball war in that they're using the names of actual legal categories and things that have material effects in the world, but they're just posts. And I want to be very clear about this. Even just doing a blockade on these sanctioned vessels is an act of war.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Like that's an act. That's very deliberately an act of war. It is an act of imperial aggression. It is morally wrong. It is also unbelievably illegal under the War Powers Act. And this.

[James Stout]

This is.

[Mia Wong]

This has actually gotten a response from Democrats in Congress. There's been a few measures. CBS is reporting this. There's been a. There's been a few measures to stop the President from starting a war here. I'm going to quote CBS. A second measure from Democratic Rep. Jim McGovern in Massachusetts would remove the armed forces, quote, from hostilities with or against Venezuela that have not been authorized by Congress. McGovern's resolution could face the best chance of potential adoption since it has three GOP co sponsors, Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Thomas Massie of Kentucky, and Don Bacon of Nebraska. Bacon says he would also vote in favor of Meeks's measure. Bacon's taking a very weird line here of he needs congressional approval. And also, I support him doing this.

[James Stout]

So purely a procedural objection.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, it's a. I want my war, but I want Congress to have a little shred of power.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

So I think it's also worth noting what exactly is going on here. I'm someone who's on the record as talking about how political economy in Latin America and American imperialism is usually slightly more complicated than they just want a resource, but they just want a resource here.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, this one. This one really is. Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

No, like, so, so like, like, like Bolivia, for example. Every. Everyone thinks that the whole coup in Bolivia was about lithium, and it wasn't. Yeah, I'm very mad about this. It was not. If you look at the people. If you look at Camacho, if you look at people who are actually running that coup, they were all Bolivian agro barons. Because a huge part of what was going on, there was a rebellion by the sort of agribusiness, like, agricultural elite who, like, joined with parts of, like, a reactionary middle class.

[Robert Evans]

Okay.

[Mia Wong]

But this is not that. Venezuela has the world's largest oil reserves, but there are significant problems extracting the oil. Right. Many of these problems stem from the 2002, 2003 opposition general strike. This is back after Hugo Chavez was elected. So in 2002, there was a coup against Chavez that failed and was sort of overturned, famously. But later that year, there was also a sort of opposition general strike that lasted from, like, late 2002 to start early 2003. And a huge part of that general strike was oil workers specifically. And it was very specifically. One of the things about the structure of oil production is that there were a bunch of very, very highly paid and highly skilled technical workers who are very, very loyal to the oil companies. Themselves and who are very loyal to, who are sort of tend to be very right wing. These people went on strike and sort of got fired en masse. Oil production requires both a huge amount of heavy capital and a bunch of highly skilled workers. And if you don't have both of those things then you can't do oil extraction. And this has sort of been been a recurring problem for the entire time both sort of Hugo Chavez and Maduro has been in office is that they haven't had the capacity to actually extract a bunch of the oil. And also they've refused to turn the oil over to more American companies that have already been contracted.

[Robert Evans]

And it's also worth noting there's a lot of talk about like Venezuela having the world's largest reserves. And a lot of that is like them jinking the numbers by including a lot of like tar sands. That would be that no one's going to try to get extract like fuel from because it's too expensive and too much of a pain in the ass. It's just not worth it anyway.

[James Stout]

And also their claims to reserves that are not actually part of Venezuela at this time.

[Robert Evans]

Right, right. Like we're not working with exact, with accurate information.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, it's messy. And it's also worth noting that like the oil numbers, I mean obviously all oil numbers are political, but the oil numbers here are extraordinarily political because these are numbers that are basically used as a pitch by sort of the opposition to try to get a US backed coup. And it's also sort of worth noting that the other thing that's happening here and the reason this is all going to probably cause really significant economic problems and probably humanitarian disaster both in Venezuela and probably also in Cuba, which extensively relies on Venezuelan oil to have their economy function, is that the Venezuelan economy has been really structured around oil in a way that they failed transition out of multiple times. The first big one. I've done a different episode about this in the neoliberalism series a bunch of years ago, but you know, there was a whole bunch of deliberate sabotage by American car companies over the attempt to build a car industry. There's a long sort of history of this, but it means that both of these countries economies are desperately reliant on oil. And the more of this is that is cut off, the more it's going to get for just everyone in Venezuela.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. And you can already see how much worse it's got from the time I went to Venezuela to now. Like they're very vulnerable to changes in crude oil.

[Robert Evans]

Prices.

[James Stout]

Right. And that has, along with corruption and a government which doesn't really give a. About the material welfare of its people has already made things unsustainably hard for people in Venezuela. And that will only get worse.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

So I want to conclude basically on a couple things. One, there's that, Two, this is going to cause more waves of migration and refugees fleeing the country, both from potential US Military strikes and from the economic damage. There's been some moves on the international stage with China and Mexico expressing support for the Venezuelan government. Scheinbaum in Mexico has offered to facilitate negotiations, immediate negotiations between the US And Venezuela. It's also kind of worth noting that right before this whole thing, there was a giant Vanity Fair interview with Susie Wiles, who's Trump's chief of staff, who. Oh, boy. This is for Reuters.

[Robert Evans]

Susie Dubs, as we call her here.

[Mia Wong]

God said Trump, quote, wants to keep blowing up boats until Maduro cries uncle, which is one of the most hideous things I've ever heard.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's gangsters terrorism.

[Mia Wong]

It's literally terrorism.

[Robert Evans]

It's. It's a highway. Yeah, yeah, it is. It is.

[Mia Wong]

Straight up, structurally, unless you reside. We are going to keep killing civilians like it's Hotchkiss taker shit.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. It's also a fundamental misunderstanding of how the regime operates if that is the case, though, because they don't care if their people kept dying. I have seen Venezuelan people die in the Darien Gap.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

Because. Because in part, their government is incapable of providing for their material needs. They don't care. Like killing some other people with boats is not going to fundamentally change the way that government works, because there's only one way it can work.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And I think. I think there's the one last thing I want to say about this before we head out, Slash, before whatever giant update comes after the speech.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I've got one after you finish here.

[Mia Wong]

One of the big problems here is that people in the administration really do believe this. They actually do think that you can knock off the government with airstrikes and. No, you can't. No, you can't. They thought this about the Houthis, too. It's wrong. It's never been right. It's hideous.

[Robert Evans]

We just finished doing like a five parter on Bastards about like the nuclear doomsday device that. That also dealt heavily with the work of that Italian Air Force General Duhay, who was the first guy in 1921 to be like, all you need are bombers. Nothing else is necessary in militaries. Now. It's nothing but bombers from here. And if you have enough bombers, no one will ever attack you. And this logic has always been wrong. And it's also every new generation of like military leaders, especially in the air power field are like, all we need is airstrikes. You don't need to send in ground. You can accomplish all of your goals, all of your power projection just by bombing people or shooting missiles at them. And they're always wrong. It doesn't work. It's just not effective.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Like I think the Trump administration is somewhat, I don't want to say high on its own supply. They had success in Syria with removing the territorial caliphate mostly using US air power. Right.

[Robert Evans]

There wasn't a big US that was the US part. There was still as you know, shitload of Kurdish fighters.

[James Stout]

That is the thing, right?

[Robert Evans]

Syrian.

[James Stout]

And yeah, yeah, 11, 12,000 Kurdish people died to remove the Islamic State and more have died since. Right?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And, and also a shitload of, of Iraqi soldiers, a mix of Kurds and largely guys from in and around Baghdad. But like, yeah, like a lot of.

[James Stout]

And a bunch of Arab Syrians and I don't mean to like ethnically gatekeep this at all. Assyrian people, Armenians.

[Robert Evans]

No, but like a huge amount of the effort was guys. I mean literally I was in bed with some of these guys. A lot of like the fighting tip was like literally dudes with fucking knives and hand grenades clearing buildings in hand to hand combat.

[James Stout]

Yeah, those were the people who faced danger.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

And that's what you need to. Unfortunately you can't do war with computers yet. But yeah, I think that that might be where this, this belief that. And like the Marco Rubio lobby. Right. The Florida Cubans who are invested in this kind of Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

And the idea that they can roll back leftist regimes in like south and Central America.

[Robert Evans]

Yep.

[James Stout]

I think that's where a lot of the pressure is coming from.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Speaking of pressure, we are being pressured to go to ads.

[Robert Evans]

That's right.

[James Stout]

Beautiful.

[Sponsor Voice]

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[Robert Evans]

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[Robert Evans]

And we're back. There's an update I just came across as we're doing this. We talked about how Tucker is an inside source saying that Trump's basically going to declare war. There's another article that just came out on Saturday, Stitch Snitches by Gloria Shaw, citing a pro Trump host on Real America's Voice who characterized the upcoming Oval Office address as a PR thing, meant basically as an acknowledgement that a lot of Trump's voters are frustrated that he keeps talking about like international issues like Venezuela, while everything is more expensive for them and they continue to lose their jobs and the economy is shit to quote from that article. And this is them quoting a segment from that Real America's Voice podcast. The remarks came during a segment on the Water Cooler with co host David Brody, who teased the 9pm Eastern address as an elevated effort to regain the narrative on affordability. The president is going to be in the oval office tonight, 9pm Eastern, Brody said. Big address to the nation. He's elevating this. Clearly, this is to regain the narrative and explain more about the affordability issue in America and what this administration is doing. I think they're trying to seize this right off the top and make sure it doesn't get away from them. And the claims here is basically like this is Trump trying to steal a night March on the 2026 election cycle and reset a lot of what people are talking about around affordability. Like this argument is that, no, he's basically acknowledging that it's been kind of a mistake to focus so much on his overseas policies. And he really needs to start promising that that golden age is actually going to come for his voters, which the numbers don't bear out. Right. Like, almost no jobs have been added in the US since April. There's about 700,000 more people unemployed now than there were in November of 2024. Like, things aren't good.

[James Stout]

Inflation is still wild.

[Robert Evans]

Inflation is real bad, like food.

[James Stout]

And like the material things that we need are going up in price faster than general inflation. Like it's not good.

[Robert Evans]

And people like on his own side. Jessica Tarlov, who's a Fox News host of the Five quote, tweeted a post about how like the hiring recession just with the golden age attached, which is like what Trump has been saying, you know, we're going to have a new golden age if you make me president. So like the fact that he hasn't done, he hasn't followed through on any of his promises to actually improve life for his voters or the economy is starting to hurt. And I guess I'm hopeful that that's what it is rather than the Marines are about to be in Caracas. Right. But I guess we'll see very soon.

[James Stout]

Yeah, great stuff.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Talking of international stuff Trump is doing, let's talk about the new travel ban. So this travel ban dropped yesterday. That was Tuesday. So previously had this 19 country travel ban.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

Some of that was a complete bar to entry for citizens of those country or to new visa entries. Some of it was a partial bar to immigrant visas, not to, not to non immigrant visas.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

They have now expanded this to 20 more countries. So totally banned now from getting new Visas to enter the USA are citizens of Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, South Sudan and Syria, as well as the Palestinian Authority. The Syrian one is particularly wild because Al Shara just visited the White House. There are individual case by case exceptions. Right. It's not that they wouldn't block Al Shara, I'm sure, but it's interesting to look at the justifications that they use here. What they are basically saying. I'll just read a couple of them here to give you an example.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

Quote, at least one country lacks mechanisms in hospitals to ensure births are reported. And widespread corruption combined with a general lack of vetting and poor record keeping result in any non citizen being able to obtain any civil document from that country, particularly if that person is willing to pay a fee or engage an individual that specialises in in assisting in such fraud. They go on to basically document failures in government bureaucracy. They talk about corruption, they talk about places where birth certificates are just written by hand. They talk about places where the government does not control all the territory, prevalence of crime, places which offer citizenship by investment without physical residence. They also talk about some of these countries not being willing to accept their nationals who the US deports and again, visa overstay rates.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

Which is what they spoke about last time. What is getting less reporting, or at least was this morning when I looked, was that they have removed exemptions which existed for the previous 19. These include family member visas.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

So that means that for instance, someone who could themselves become a permanent resident or even a citizen now cannot bring a family member, say a spouse, a sibling, et cetera, across, even though those people were previously vetted. And it appears there is certain categories of SIVs are exempt, but I believe not all SIV. So that's a Special Immigrant Visa. Right. The vast bulk of SIVs will be Afghan people who worked with the US military in Afghanistan. The 19 countries who are now partially restricted. I'm just going to read them off. Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Benin, Cote d', Ivoire, Dominica, Gabon, the Gambia, Malawi, Mauritania, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania, Tonga, Zambia and Zimbabwe. For some reason, the first five of these are underlined on the White House website. I don't know if someone copied and pasted them across with hyperlinks. I don't know. I'm unable to work out why they're not hyperlinked in the document, but there doesn't seem to be any explanation like this. There's no special set of sanctions for those and they're just in alphabetical order. They actually reduced restrictions on Turkmenistan because, quote, suspension of entry into the United States of nationals of Turkmenistan as non immigrants on B1 B2FM and J visas is lifted because some concerns remain. The entry into the United States of nationals of Turkmenistan as immigrants remain suspended. The last element of this that I want to cover is it would appear to stop international adoptions from the listed countries, like all of those 39 listed countries, which is wild and particularly unfortunate because I know people who adopt children from outside the United States. It's a process that takes years and I can imagine it being horrifically traumatic to have it suddenly cut off like this. But consciously or unconsciously, that is what this executive action appears to do. So that is not great. It seems that the United States is using this as a kind of cudgel, right? To encourage those countries to. It's kind of a quid pro quo. They get what they want, they got from Turkmenistan, apparently, then they will remove some of those restrictions. Otherwise, they will continue them. So, yeah, that's not great. So Judge Hannah Dugan's trial began this week. Dugan, if you're not familiar, she's not the judge in New Mexico who was accused of providing firearms to somebody, was not a permanent resident or citizen. She is a judge who is accused of allowing a migrant, a man named Mr. Flores Luis, to leave her courtroom from a door that is not the usual door. That door led to a private corridor. In that private corridor, there was one exit to a public area and also a door to a fire escape. Mr. Flores Ruiz took the exit to the public area. He then took a lift down, I think, to the ground floor with an ICE officer. He then attempted to run away when ICE officers attempted to detain him. When he left the lift, he was caught and detained. So we learned quite a lot in this, and it's just been interesting to follow. Right. First of all, we see that several of the people who were taking part in the apprehension were reassigned FBI agents. Agents. This is increasingly common, Right. Like all branches of the federal law enforcement have had some of their capacity redirected to doing this. Right? To doing like this guy, I believe, had misdemeanors. The agents were using signal to communicate. They had a group chat called Frozen Water, obviously.

[Robert Evans]

Jesus Christ.

[James Stout]

Yeah, really funny.

[Mia Wong]

God, I hate these people.

[James Stout]

The FBI agent conceded in cross examination that's not an app approved by the FBI. But according to one, the DHS apparently does approve it, according to a CBP agent who was cross examined there, which obviously creates an issue for the retention of records.

[Robert Evans]

Right?

[James Stout]

Because signal, if you're not familiar. Auto deletes things after a period of time that users can configure. It also appears that when one of these DHS agents entered the courthouse, court security officers told him that he needed an escort. But then he appears to have proceeded without one. In a text to colleagues, this DHS employee said, quote, this is gonna be a pain in the dick. There's that. Jesus Christ. Yeah. Do you what happens, it seems like is Judge Dugan sent them to the chief judge because it didn't have a judicial warrant, they said an administrative warrant.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

Another judge testified against Judge Dugan, A judge called Judge Severa. So Judge Severa was with Judge Dugan when they confronted the agents. Judge Dugan wore her judicial robes when confronting them, which apparently is not usual. It's not usual to wear them out of the courtroom. And Judge Cervera seemed to disapprove of that. And then she said, quote, Judge Dugan could, quote, have been more diplomatic. And then she said, quote, judges shouldn't be helping defendants evade arrest. At the same time, Judge Dugan's defence lawyer asked her if she had warned her sister of the ICE presence, which she had. And it appears that her sister had a hearing at the courthouse the next day, which Judge Severa said she was not aware of. So there's, like, a lot still to be unpacked here. Right. This is just the first day this could go on past Christmas, and it's the New Year, and it probably will, but there's been some pretty good reporting on this from a substack called All Rise Media. And I will keep checking in on this and we'll report on it again after the New Year.

[Garrison Davis]

Hello, this is Garrison Davis reporting from Tokyo. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend the regular executive disorder group recording due to being halfway around the globe. So I'm recording my section solo. This past week saw two devastating mass shootings back to back. On Saturday afternoon, a mass shooter entered an economics class at Brown University in Providence, Rhode island, and opened fire with a concealed handgun, killing two people, injuring nine others, all students. About 30 minutes after the shooting started, the university police announced a suspect was in custody. Twenty minutes later, they retracted that statement. Then university police reported shots fired in another section of campus, which they also later retracted. President Trump posted on Truth Social, quote, I've been briefed on the shooting that took place at Brown University in Rhode Island. The FBI is on the scene. The suspect is in custody. God bless the victims and the families of the victims. This, too, was untrue. As the university released A statement about an hour later clarifying that the shooter was not in custody and that over 400 officers were on the scene to assist in the investigation. The next morning, Providence Mayor Brett Smiley announced that a new person of interest was detained. The Providence police chief told NBC that they were confident that the suspect was the shooter. Major news outlets later named this individual, though later that evening this quote, unquote person of interest was released with the Rhode Island Attorney General saying that the evidence, quote, now points in a different direction, unquote. The shooter currently remains unidentified and at large. On Sunday night in Sydney, Australia, a father and son, Sajid and Navid Akram, coordinated a targeted attack against Jewish people attending a Hanukkah event on Bondi Beach. 15 people were killed in the shooting. Victims include a 10 year old girl and a Holocaust survivor. 24 victims remain hospitalized. A bystander named Ahmed Al Ahmed, a son of Syrian refugees, charged one of the gunmen and wrestled his gun away. Ahmed was later shot multiple times but survived and has been labeled a hero by the Australian Prime Minister. Police say that a vehicle used by the gunman contained homemade Islamic State flags and improvised explosive devices. The men were not part of an official terror cell, though the Prime Minister says that they were motivated by Islamic State extremist ideology. Counterterrorism officials believe the shooters received quote, unquote military style training in the Philippines a month before the attack. On Tuesday, self styled online investigators and right wing social media content mills falsely identified the Brown University shooter as an LGBTQ Palestinian studying at the center for Middle Eastern Studies. Citing gait analysis based on surveillance footage of the unidentified suspect released by police. The university removed this queer Palestinian student's online profile in an effort to prevent doxxing, though this itself was used by the online smear campaign as evidence of guilt. Brown University later published this statement, quote, in the aftermath of the shooting, we've seen a harmful doxxing activity directed towards at least one member of the Brown University community. It's important to make clear that targeting individuals could do irrevocable harm. Accusations, speculation and conspiracies we're seeing on social media and in some news reports are irresponsible, harmful, and in some cases dangerous for the safety of individuals in our community. It is not unusual as a safety measure to take steps to protect an individual's safety when this kind of activity happens, including in regard to their online presence. As law enforcement officials stated clearly on Tuesday afternoon, if this individual's name had any relevance to the current investigation, they would be actively looking for this individual and providing information publicly, unquote. On a final note after the holiday break, we will be reporting on the indictment against four alleged members of the Turtle Island Liberation Front in California regarding a New Year's Eve bombing plot.

[Sponsor Voice]

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This is where mindset comes in.

[Promo Announcer]

Someone will be eliminated.

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Pressure is coming down.

[Robert Evans]

Trainer Games on Prime Video January 8th watch the trailer on trainergames.com it's the.

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[Robert Evans]

We're back and we have some news that's going to be really sad for everybody here. And it could happen here. And just all of you listening, which is friend of the pod. Dan Bongino is stepping down from his work as Deputy Director of the FBI. I think it's been a nice vacation for him, but, you know, America needs him in his much more important role. Whatever podcast he was doing before he got brought in to be Deputy Director of the FBI, you know, look, if he was podcasting right now, they would have caught the mass shooter at Brown. I think we can all agree on that.

[James Stout]

Yeah, he'd have put gossip his way through it.

[Robert Evans]

Either that or just him not being at the FBI would have made the FBI do their jobs better.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Look, what we're learning from this is that you can never escape the podcasting minds. No matter where else you try to go, they will drag you back down.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, look, if you make me Director of the FBI, I promise to stop podcasting and start being the most corrupt director of the FBI we've ever had.

[Mia Wong]

That's a tough challenge, but I think.

[Robert Evans]

You have to be challenged. I think I'm up to the task.

[James Stout]

Prepared to work at it.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So, yeah, that's cool. I wanted to talk a little bit about an executive order that our beloved president put out very recently. Some of you may be aware of this, but on December 11, 20, I mean, this year, 2025, Trump released yet another executive order, this one titled Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence. And basically in this. And Trump stated that, like, the reason he's doing this is because it's absolutely critical to the U.S. s future that we be at the top of the game when it comes to AI that we be global leaders in this burgeoning new field, he states, in the eo, These efforts have already delivered tremendous benefits to the American people and led to trillions of dollars of investments across the country certainly haven't. But we remain in the earliest days of the technological revolution and in a race with adversaries for supremacy within it. Trump stated in an interview that he expects AI to be 50 to 60% of the US economy in the near future, which is nuts.

[James Stout]

Maybe that's just because everything else will Just go to complete shit.

[Robert Evans]

You know, the reality is that, like, AI is not even close to being that value in terms of, like, what the economy produces. But nearly all of our growth is related and, like, is tied right now to data center investment. So Trump absolutely, absolutely needs AI because without it, the country is very obviously in a recession.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Like, this is the only thing propping up the image of the economy as not being in the shitter. Now what does this EO actually do? Well, the, the goal of this, the statement is that it is the policy of the United States to sustain and enhance the United States global AI dominance through a minimally burdensome national policy framework for AI. This EO will establish an AI Litigation Task Force within 30 days of this order going out. The Attorney General is supposed to establish this task force task force whose responsibility is to challenge state AI laws that are inconsistent with the policies set forward above. Right. That we need to be globally dominant in AI. Right. So this task force is supposed to go out and find state laws that it believes are like an onerous burden on the development of this technology, going along with this. Within 90 days of the order, the Secretary of Commerce is supposed to do an evaluation of all state AI laws in order to, like, point out which ones this task force should go after. And then the stick that this EO establishes is that if this task force decides that like a state AI law is in violation of our need to be dominant in AI, we can restrict state funding to things like the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program. Right. Basically, they'll cut off federal funding for like, broadband access in order to punish state that try to restrict or in any way, shape or form govern what people can use, what companies can use AI for. And the primary thing this is all about, I know we all think about the stuff that, like most people have more direct experience with, which is like all the slop flooding the Internet, the disinformation that's continuing to cook the brains of a lot of our peers and elders, and just the fact that, like, it's making certain industries full of hardworking people a lot harder to exist because companies are just trying to replace quality work with absolute, like, slop trash. Yeah, but really what this is about, and the primary focus of most of these state level laws regulating AI is the housing market. Right. There's a good article in Politico about this written by Cassandra Dumay, but she notes that per a National Conference of State Legislatures analysis, in July, there were more than 40 pending bills across the United States related to just AI. In the housing sector. And most of these bills are attempting to stop landlords from using different AI programs to coordinate pricing. Basically, there are a couple of different programs, the most prominent of which is called RealPage. And what they do is landlords join these programs and they share information on, like, what their different properties cost. And then the AI knows what everybody is charging and, and can suggest that they charge higher prices. Right? Yeah. Now the way that this is supposed to work is that you as a landlord, look out at what's publicly available about the prices of your competitors and look at, like, what your customers are currently willing to bear and then try to set your prices and, you know, future price increases based on that. What RealPage is doing is a legal collusion. Right? This is price fixing. It's just the AI is doing the actual active price fixing. The landlords are just sharing their data and paying a fee to the service. And so a bunch of states have tried to stop this because this objectively makes the housing crisis worse. I know there's some annoying assholes who come out and be like, you shouldn't talk about anything, but in increasing the supply of housing and like, that's, that's, that's idiot shit. Yes, we need to increase the supply of housing. This objectively hurts people. These programs objectively increase the price of rent. They do damage. We should be mitigating or making it impossible for businesses like this to exist. Anyone who disagrees is just being a dummy. New York passed a law in October that banned the use of AI algorithms to allow landlords to do price fixing. There's a similar bill in the Massachusetts legislation that's making its way forward right now. And this is fundamentally what a lot of the opposition to, like, state level AI regulation is about, is that the landlords basically think that this is a great way to make a shitload of money. And tech companies like, and we can continue, we can make a shitload of money selling them the tools to do this. And states are trying to push back on this. And like, that's fundamentally what a lot of the impetus behind this executive order is, is an attempt to stop people from making this even more harmful. There is some, like, in this, that Politico article, they quote from Kevin Donnelly, who's the executive director of the Real Estate Technology and Transformation center. And he talks about like, well, actually we're currently using AI to identify buildable lots and promote sustainable construction so that we can actually, like, reduce some of the cost of housing. And all of these bills could, you know, undermine our ability to impress people's like, yeah, it's just fucking go like literally jump off a bridge, man.

[James Stout]

Fuck you.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, we know that's not how it works. We have data on this. No, this isn't theoretical. Yeah, yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Anytime a landlord, anytime a landlord says anything, or real estate developer that says anything that suggests the thing they want to do is lower rent, they are lying. You can tell because they don't fucking lower rents. Unless like a global pandemic happens. Yeah, like that's not how any of this works.

[Robert Evans]

And this has been controversial. Trump, before putting out the eo, tried to encourage the passage of a bill through Congress that would have done the same thing as the eo, Right. And would have actually had like more force of law behind it, basically making it illegal for states to have their own laws regulating AI. That didn't pass because even Republicans don't really like that idea. For one thing, states rights is still supposed to be a pretty big part of the party. But for another thing, there's like a lot of things that conservatives are really unhappy with in terms of AI. For example, it keeps exposing children to pornography and other things that kids shouldn't be exposed to. For another thing, there's a lot of American jobs that are going to be lost as a result of, or potentially could be lost as a result of AI slop automation of a bunch of industries. And so there's, there's even a significant amount of resistance among Republicans to this, which is why the bill didn't pass. Right. And Trump, when he announced this eo, basically sat down with like a chunk of the conservatives who were more critical of this, and I think basically bullied them into getting on board and saying, no, he promised us this won't restrict state levels to like improve safety for children. Right. There's absolutely like no guarantee of that. Like, you just have David Sachs, who is Trump's top AI advisor, saying, no, no, none of this is about trying to stop state laws to make kids safer. It's just trying to stop state laws that will make rent less expensive. Yeah, there's Marjorie Taylor Greene's come out against this. She's basically said that, you know, this is a violation of states rights. It's bullshit. Steve Bannon is in the same place. He had a good quote I found in an article by the Hill. After two humiliating face plants on a must pass legislation, now we attempt an entirely unenforceable EO Tech bros doing utmost to turn POTUS MAGA base away from him while they line their pockets, which is essentially accurate.

[James Stout]

Yeah, he's not right. He's not.

[Robert Evans]

Stevie ain't wrong about that. So all this is, like, pretty annoying and fucked up. We'll see what actually becomes of this. I tend to agree with Bannon that it's pretty much unenforceable. Like the lawsuit, the court battles that will come from this is just going to be expensive and time consuming. But I actually don't think this is going to work the way they want. This is Trump making it very clear that he is bought and paid for by the tax ed, and that he understands that he is hanging on by a thread in terms of popularity. And one of the only things stopping it from getting. Stopping the situation from getting worse is that AI spending on data centers and shit is propping up the image of the economy. Right. That's what this is all about.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And this is something where he can simultaneously shore up his tech base and shore up his landlord base.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Which are like, it's great.

[James Stout]

He's got left two kinds of guys do like Donald Trump.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. I guess there's an end here where I could. I wanted to make a note about something also related to AI, which is that there's an incredibly stupid article in Vox that came out this week. Literally, the title is Like America, you've made it very clear that you hate AI, but what if it's the only way to restart the idea machine? Right. And this dipshit columnist's argument is that, like, well, we're running out of ideas, and AI, like, human beings, can't come up with ideas enough to create growth at the level that the economy needs to be growing and in order to, like, take humanity into the future, really, AI is the only way to generate more new ideas. And I wanted to look at, like, what is this based off of? And I think I figured out what, like, the fundamental source of all of this shit is, which is. Back in 2017, there was a research paper put out by the National Bureau of Economic Research by Nicholas Bloom, Charles Jones, John Van Reenen, and Michael Webb. The kind of summary of that article reads as follows. In many growth models, economic growth arises from people creating ideas. And in the long run, growth rate is the product of two terms, the effective number of researchers and their research productivity. We present a wide range of evidence for various industries, products and firms showing that research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply. Right. So basically, we have more people doing research and we're spending more money on research, but that research is translating into economic gain gains at a lower level. Than ever before. Right. To the point where we're not going to be able to continue to make economic gains like we used to be unless something changes. And if you're kind of paying attention to this, you might notice that that study, which is the underpinning of that Vox article and all of these claims that we need AI for ideas, really is not actually making an argument that people aren't having more ideas. It's making an argument that it is harder to profit from ideas than it used to be. Right. Now that is fundamentally different from people not having ideas. For one thing, it's reducing an idea to something that delivers a return for venture capitalists. Right. That's all an idea is in this. It's something that makes money. And a lot of great ideas like the post office don't generate a direct profit. Now, obviously it's a net benefit to the economy that we have a post office, but the post office runs at a loss. Right. Which is why you have state funding for certain things, because they're just not going to be the kind of ideas that like a bunch of Silicon Valley investors want to throw money into right now. The other part of the issue here is just a very practical one, which is that a lot of the ideas, the great ideas last century that were like most correlated with massive gains in productivity, stuff like the introduction of vaccines on a wide scale, indoor plumbing and electricity on a wide scale, phones, there's not ideas like that that are like that big and that much of a game changer left.

[James Stout]

Right. The low hanging fruit.

[Robert Evans]

The low hanging fruit has been picked. There's not another the telephone waiting out there. We already did that. It was the smartphone. There's not another indoor plumbing. Right. There's not something that's going to be as much of a sea change for the economy and for the quality of human life as those ideas, because those were really big things.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. Like maybe you could put it something like actually cleaning the air that we breathe.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. But again, that's not profitable in a direct way.

[Mia Wong]

No.

[Robert Evans]

Right. Like you, that's an idea that would have a change that big, but there's not a profit incentive for it.

[James Stout]

Right. So we privatize the air.

[Robert Evans]

Robert. Right. Subscription model for breathing air. Yeah. And there's a lot, again, I find this whole discussion pattern, like it's an example of the fact that like people like this fucking Vox article, who I don't feel like deserves to be named to this, this, have been using ChatGPT so much that they're no longer thinking they're not really sentient in a meaningful way, right? Like when you, when you write something like that, it's because your brain has been completely fucking cooked. I did find a good article, ironically, from 2017 from Vox EU that is titled Ideas Aren't Running out, but they are getting more Expensive to find, which is making a lot of the claims that like I've made, which is that or that I've been bringing up so far in this, which is that that it's not that there's a lack of ideas, it's that it costs more money to do stuff like that now, like the costs, because everything's so much more complex. The big ideas we're looking at aren't as simple as indoor plumbing. They require a lot more computing power, they require a lot more people working on them, right? Like we've plucked the low hanging fruit and it ends with a paragraph I find kind of valuable here. Returning to the oil metaphor, we are digging deeper into a trickier part of the rock. Of course, we could be wrong, and humanity may have just been chipping away at a particularly hard point that will soon give way, creating decades of cheap ideas. This is the hope of those who emphasize the revolutionary power of artificial intelligence and the singularity and accumulation of technology that triggers runaway growth at some point in the future. Although we all enjoy science fiction, history books are usually a safer guide to the future. In this case, history suggests that large increases in research effort are needed to offset its declining productivity. And again, if you want to have the big ideas and the Star Trek future that all of these billionaires like Elon Musk pretend they want, what you actually have to do is be willing to put a lot of money into research and development without any promise of a profit. Your motivation can't be, well, now we have to get a 200% rate of return on our investments, right? It has to be, well, this would improve people's lives and make life more sustainable, right? Like finding solutions to a lot of problems with climate change, cleaning the air, like dealing with like lack of access to clean water, lack of access to basic, basic medical care. These are not things where doing them means that your company gets an immediate profit and evaluation in the tens of billions of dollars, right? That's just not the way providing life saving aid to people works. But the net value to the global economy would be massive if, for example, kids weren't going without food and access to clean water and had better access to education and thus were able to go into fields where they become researchers and generate Ideas that eventually turn into profit. Right. Like these AI fucks aren't talking about ideas, they're talking about fracking the human mind. Right? That's what they want to do.

[James Stout]

That's a good way to put it.

[Sophie]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

I think that there's another thing we're saying here, too. There's a David Graeber argument about this, where he makes an argument that I think is also very compelling, that part of the decline in the rate of technological change has been the extent to which everyone who was trying to do this stuff is just increasingly dealing with more and more layers of bureaucracy instead of actually doing the thing they're trying to do. And, you know, this is. This is a huge problem in academia where it's like, okay, so you have, you know, you're teaching in academia, but you're also spending like a quarter of your time trying to get another job. You're spending another quarter of your time dealing with all of the unhinged, whatever, like, accounting that your supervisors have like, or like, like university management has, like, put upon you. And this is, and this is something that's also true for government researchers where there's just like this. You know, there's been this incredible increase in sort of the amount of bureaucracy. They have to jump through it a lot. Like, largely because of the. Right. And because of all of the, like, weird they do where, like, they hate government funding. So, like, oh, everyone has to, like, justify their funding literally every 10 seconds. And I, I think, I think, like, that's like. That's like one of the other angles of this. And it's something that's only going to get worse because this administration is just annihilating the entire basis of American science. Yeah, they're just killing it. The damage that they've done to the pipeline of people that would produce these researchers. Right?

[Robert Evans]

With.

[Mia Wong]

With the ways that suddenly, like, American science postdocs just. There's no money for it. There's no money for grad students. They're killing all of the pathways that would do this. And then they're going, oh, the only solution is the fucking tech boondoggle we've created to the problems that we created by just annihilating the capacity to do science. It sucks. I hate them.

[James Stout]

If you want to email us, you can do so it is coolzonetipson me. If you want it to be encrypted, you should use a protonmail address as well. They're free.

[Robert Evans]

All right, guys, I think that's, that's the podcast listeners haters Lovers.

[Sophie]

It's our last Ed of the year, friends.

[Robert Evans]

It's our last Ed of the year. Well, I don't know. We'll see if those pills come in, but yeah, but I. Yeah.

[Sophie]

Hate you. Happy Holidays.

[Robert Evans]

Happy holidays, everybody.

[Mia Wong]

Put a trans girl on your couch.

[Sophie]

Put a trans girl on your couch, girl.

[Robert Evans]

Love it. Or a bed. I mean, yeah, if you got a bed.

[James Stout]

Inflatable mattress.

[Mia Wong]

We love those.

[Robert Evans]

One of those like chairs that leans back to where it's like basically flat.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Not a lazy boy in this instance.

[Robert Evans]

Sure. A lot of options.

[James Stout]

A neutral lazy chair.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. An inflatable mattress. Why not? Yeah, why not?

[James Stout]

Yeah. Water bed.

[Robert Evans]

A water bed. Water bed.

[James Stout]

Floors are strong enough because they are heavy.

[Robert Evans]

They're really heavy. And generally you're not allowed to have have them. But yes.

[Sophie]

Anyways, we reported the news.

[Robert Evans]

Arguably we reported the news.

[Sophie]

It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzone media.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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Support for the show comes from Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously. On public you can build a multi asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto and now generated assets which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI. It all starts with your prompt. From renewable energy companies with high free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20% year over year, you can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one of a kind index and lets you back test it against the S&P 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks. Generated assets are like EFTs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's. Go to public.com podcast and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com podcast paid for by Public Investing Brokerage Services by Open to the Public Investing Inc. Member FINRA SIPC Advisory Services by Public Advisors llc. SEC Registered Advisor Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not investment recommendation or advice. Complete Disclosures available at public.comDisclosures 10 athletes.

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[Robert Evans]

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[Robert Evans]

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.