Jared Yates Sexton is on the road without the studio setup, but he and Nick Hauselman still sound sharper than the people allegedly running the country. Nick reads a wildly unhinged letter Trump reportedly sent to Norway, a Nobel Peace Prize grievance tour that somehow swerves into Denmark, Greenland, and demands for “complete and total control.”
From there, they dig into what it means when the U.S. starts treating allies like enemies, using tariffs like a cudgel, and drifting toward a real crisis over Greenland. They talk intelligence sharing, Five Eyes, why allies would start going dark, and how all of it connects back to the domestic crackdown, Minnesota, and the surveillance state getting upgraded right in front of everyone.
I probably sound like shit, but we're doing it regardless.
What a way to start a podcast, but you don't sound like shit.
You sound great.
I sound good.
You sound, you sound, you know what?
It's so important to hear the words that it doesn't really matter what you sound like.
Thank you, my friend.
And I'm just glad to be here.
And I'm glad to be anywhere, quite frankly.
We've got, you know, every day we take more and more steps into this alternate universe.
And luckily, we're on this journey together.
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But Nick, you know, I've been traveling and I've been keeping an eye on the news and it sounds like things are going great.
It sounds like our imperial ambitions have started to recede and things have started to get pretty normal again.
Oh my goodness, gracious.
I don't, you know, I think we're getting to the point now where other countries are going to call for the 25th Amendment.
Right?
Like, that's unprecedented.
I don't think we've ever had that before, but this would be an opportunity where we're talking about this letter that he wrote to the head of Norway.
You know, Nick, it's really weird.
Before we get into this, since I've been traveling, I use my time on the road to sort of research older things for context and for other works that I'm working on.
And I'm listening to stuff from January 6th of 2021.
And all of the talk around the 25th Amendment there, five years ago, when Trump was on his way out, it's incredible to hear people talking for the advocating for the 25th Amendment back then when he was on the way out and had not been re-elected.
And of course, shocker of shockers, things got worse.
Absolutely.
Can I read the letter?
I think it'd be worth the people hearing.
I would love for you to read this letter.
And for anybody who isn't aware, this is an actual letter the president of the United States of America sent the president of Norway.
Yeah, I mean, I'm going with that, that this is an actual letter on Letterhead from the White House.
It says, dear Jonas, Colin, considering your country decided, and the country, where country is discapitalized, considering your country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped eight wars and then all caps plus, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.
New paragraph.
Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China.
And why do they have a quote unquote right of ownership anyway?
Mind you, this is not to Denmark.
This is to a letter to Norway.
There are no written documents.
It's only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there also.
I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding.
And now NATO should do something for the United States.
The world is not secure unless we have complete and total control of Greenland.
Complete and total controls capitalized.
Thank you.
Exclamation point, President DJT.
You know, Nick, hearing it read out loud, it almost feels like this is improper and embarrassing and troubling.
Almost.
Even the use of commas is problematic with this, but it's really confounding that he's now, this is how demented he is in that he somehow is first of all, let me make this clear.
Norway, the government of Norway has nothing to do with the Nobel Peace Prize.
Okay, why he's complaining to the president of Norway about this, I have no idea, and why he's then trying to complain about Greenland not giving them Greenland because it's Denmark.
Uh, again, this is add old stuff that I cannot believe anybody in his orbit will allow him to send out, you know.
I was thinking about this actually, um, because let's be frank, you and I have been very open about this.
Joe Biden was not well by the end of his term, right?
Correct?
I'm going with that.
Okay, we both know that if he would have pulled some shit like this, like somebody would have said something, right?
Somebody would have kept the letter from being sent.
Yes, absolutely, right?
Right?
And wouldn't we, as people who would hope that the Democratic Party would do well, wouldn't we say, hey, this is kind of problematic and we need to do something about this?
I mean, you and I took black for calling out Joe Biden's acuity during his term anyway.
Yeah, I agree.
I mean, that was the whole point was they were actually hiding it to some degree because there are people in charge who, you know, were trying to guide the ship a little bit, right?
But here we are.
We're in a situation where not only he doesn't understand countries, but on top of that, his decline.
I mean, it's hard to talk about.
He was handed the Nobel Peace Prize by a woman who hoped that that gifting would allow her to take over Venezuela.
And maybe she will.
I don't know.
I don't know how that's going to work out.
We are in the demented dying king era of America in a way that I didn't even think was possible before.
And is it fair to say that we should just say that Machado never would have deserved the Nobel Prize if she was willing to give it to Trump anyway?
Like, doesn't that her?
That kind of means that she shouldn't have even gotten it.
Let's, you know what?
I'm going to be the person who says this.
Let's get rid of the Nobel Peace Prize.
It's the end of it.
Let's just be done.
Let's be done.
Okay.
I mean, okay.
I guess it won't, it won't affect my life anyway.
Well, I mean, I know that you've had your eye on it for a while.
And your works speak for themselves.
Yes, I had not ended eight wars, unfortunately, but yeah.
But eight plus wars.
And this thing, though, it's it really is troubling because Nick, he is able to exercise the power of the commander in chief, the president of the United States of America.
We're now, and I don't say this lightly, we're on war footing with our allies.
We are literally like inching up on a military crisis with our allies regarding Greenland right now.
That's where we are right now.
Right.
And meanwhile, anybody who wants to stand up for Greenland and stand up for Denmark is subject to tariffs all of a sudden out of the blue.
And I need to remind everybody out there that the president is not allowed to just willy-nilly slap tariffs on anybody like this.
And he continues to do so or proclaim that he's going to.
And then it'll go 10% and go to 25% if they don't heed his commands.
You know, that's the trade wars always can tend to end in regular wars.
Nick, when you were in school, let's say junior high in high school, right?
And you were being taught about the American Revolution.
Did you always get a little bleary-eyed whenever they talked about like the Stamp Act?
This sounds familiar.
I would imagine, yes, bleary-eyed would be a good way to describe how we would feel back then.
Right.
When we were learning about the reasons for the American Revolution, which was a taxing on the bourgeois class within the United States.
Yeah.
Right.
And it's the exact same thing was that the literal founding of the United States of America was based on the idea that one like strange old white man should not be able to make decisions to just levy any of this shit based on where he woke up that day or how he felt.
We have regressed so much, so quickly.
And I don't blame our former allies for freaking out about this and taking it seriously.
NATO has now sent fighter jets to Greenland.
They've sent troops to Greenland.
And I don't blame them for doing it.
And quite frankly, I would not be shocked if Trump goes ahead and steps over that tripwire, would you?
No.
Well, I mean, and I'll just say this again: I'm digging in on my point that I don't think Russia has any designs to take over Greenland.
I think that they're doing this to distract NATO from Ukraine.
Well, I think Trump and the tech oligarchs would.
Yeah, I mean, and that's true too.
I think all these things could be true.
But we have reports as well that to tap upon, to touch upon Ukraine, that France and Ukraine did a sting operation where they fed the United States intelligence community fake information to see whether that would bubble up on the battlefield.
And lo and behold, according to reporting in France right now on the news stations, they did.
This seems to be reporting that that actually happened, which again would not be a far-fetched notion that Trump would be feeding Putin information.
And what's fascinating about all this is that, you know, while Greenland seems far away from Ukraine and a separate incident at all, these are kind of folding in on each other in a weird way, aren't they?
They are.
And I want to point something out.
You and I, you know what's weird, Nick?
I've been on the road a little bit.
I went and listened to our old episodes, like our first few episodes, and we were talking about how Trump's presidency was going to put the strategic alliance of five eyes, these nations that share intelligence with each other.
And that that was eventually going to cause some problems down the way.
We've now reached the point where I can't imagine that any of our intelligence allies are sharing anything with us.
Would you be shocked to find out they still did?
No, and that's been reported as well.
There's been blackouts too, where they're not going to share, and Ukraine doesn't want to share it either.
We have to remember, and you go a little bit beyond those initial episodes where we've talked about how suddenly some of our agents just were getting killed in the field, you know, inexplicably.
All sorts of things.
I mean, listen, we already know that Trump was like storing top secret documents in the bathroom in Mar-a-Lago.
It's like he's already so horrible with, you know, classified information as it is.
It just, it cannot be considered far-fetched at all that he is sharing information with our enemies.
And if he is, and we know that he has, it also makes sense that our allies would not share actual intelligence with us, correct?
Yeah, but by the way, you kind of skipped over the whole thing about if he was, what is the penalty for that?
Well, I mean, that's treason and that's death.
So let's go ahead and let's pull out a little bit from the focus on Trump.
If we're not having intelligence shared with us right now, and I am not an intelligence apologist, I'm not a deep state sort of operative who's like, yeah, this is the price of doing business.
I actually think this entire thing should fall apart, but in a managed way, right?
Like a thoughtful, managed way.
But if that's the case, that makes all of us less safe.
Is that correct?
Absolutely, positively.
It makes us all less safe in a moment of huge dangers.
And so you have to take a look at this.
And even if you were the most dyed-in-the-wool MAGA right winger, you have to look at this and be like, oh, this is a little bit fucked up.
And if we're not going to have a relationship with these intelligence groups, then all of a sudden now we're looking at a situation.
We're pissing people off.
We're being more chauvinistically aggressive.
That opens us up to more and more threats, which tells me that it's not outside the possibility that we might be looking at some sort of an attack like in the near future.
Because why wouldn't you attack us at this point?
Exactly.
It invites that.
And we know over these years since 9-11, how often foreign intelligence has helped us thwart direct attacks.
Now, in the Bush administration, we had to kind of figure out whether or not those were real because they love to just do, remember the color-coded threat assessments.
But at the very least, I choose to believe that there have been several incidents, I'm sure, that have been thwarted as terrorist attacks on our soil because of the help from our friends and the other intelligence communities.
Right.
But now we've turned our backs on them.
Right.
And we're literally talking about taking over a frozen tundra, which, by the way, the fact that they want Greenland, it should tell everyone that climate change is real because they totally believe it's going to thaw out and all of its resources are going to be exploitable.
But for this frozen tundra and resources that are going to help the tech oligarchs, we're literally going to turn our backs on like our most treasured alliances.
Like we're literally talking about possibly going to war against Great Britain and France right now and other NATO allies in order to take over this thing, which only proves one thing, which is that neoliberal capitalism, it feasts on the nation state as the host and will eventually destroy it because it doesn't care about what happens to the nation state once it gets what it wants.
Absolutely.
And by the way, just to tap onto that global warming issue, one of the reasons why Greenland is becoming so desirable is because a certain shipping lane has been opened in the winters now because the ice is now thin enough where you can get through with a ship.
And that supposedly would cut out days and days and days of shipping time.
It would otherwise have to go somewhere another route.
So that's exactly the proof that you would need that these, you know, the waters are warming and the globe is warming.
Well, and on that point, you know, I'm a teacher.
I never want to miss the opportunity to use an example, right?
You know, we always talk about what is happening in terms of what the wealth and oligarchical classes are doing.
They're very serious.
They're very competent.
And what Trump is doing and how they use him as a pet, as a toy, right?
And Nick, everything we see, it comes down to that shipping lane you're talking about, which is they want the resources in Greenland.
They want to expand.
They want to have room to have their network states and their independent city states and their economic zones, whatever.
What do they tell him?
China and Russia are going to take over.
It is absolutely essential for our national security.
And you keep seeing this with Trump.
He is attacking this as if the actual fate of the United States of America rests on it.
But it's literally a power and resource grab, which is how these two entities and these two special interests interact with each other.
You know, the more I think about it, the more I think that Dr. Strange Love is a documentary.
It's just way ahead of its time.
Right?
This is what it feels like.
Because I'm trying to picture like, you know, and the weird thing now is that the other world leaders like in NATO are pretty much would represent the president of the United States in that movie.
And then the Russian president he's on the phone with a lot is basically Trump.
And it's like, it's just, it's mind-boggling how they've been able to do this.
Protest Psychology in Canada00:15:44
You know, and the subtitle of the book of the movie is Doctor Strange Love or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
And the people who have stopped worrying, I guess that would be MAGA, right?
They just let that all go and they don't care.
They're just nihilists ready for the end.
Well, and I was thinking about this a lot while I was traveling.
This movement from sort of isolationist into celebrating what happened with Venezuela.
I've been thinking about that a lot.
And I think that there is something in chauvinistic imperialistic aggression that is very, very pleasing to these people, right?
Like they enjoyed quote unquote winning.
The United States took Venezuela overnight and was going to exploit the resources.
What they didn't like was Iraq.
What they didn't like was Afghanistan that took a bunch of time and didn't give them like the pumped up feeling of winning.
And so as a result, they're very happy to simply get the catharsis of the semblance of strength as opposed to the fact that literally this crazy train is running off the tracks.
You know what's hilarious?
We're not hilarious.
It's really sad.
But like, you know, just to just to show you how my mind, my mind works, even though it's not the weekend, but Dennis Leary.
Remember Dennis Leary?
Yeah, sure.
Way before he became an actor, and you see him on all these TV shows, he was a stand-up, you know, a one-man performance guy.
Basically, he was a ranting, ranting stand-up comedian.
Yeah.
And it was really, you know, poignant and funny and all these things.
And there's a bit he does at one point when he's talking about how, yeah, like the conflicts across the globe.
And then at some point, he's like, you know, we should stop by Vietnam on the way back from Iraq, or whatever he was talking about, right?
And, you know, then he said the joke was the Vietnamese people would say, oh, you're here to make another movie.
And he goes, you know, no, not this time, pal.
And he was, he's speaking for that, right?
Like there's this, you know, Vietnam went so poorly with such a stain on everyone's, you know, psyche and their and their confidence in the United States.
It's like, yeah, people would probably have backed him up on that too and said, yeah, where else can we go to like right the wrong that we had to deal with?
Even though Vietnam is the place that's like basically democratic and extremely friendly in the United States now, you know, I mean, I almost feel like that could be next.
Well, and that's the entire point.
The psychology of what is happening here is you have a population that has been humiliated.
Right.
That's what MAGA is.
It's a group of people, even though they've enjoyed white privilege and male privilege, and they've probably had their own businesses and they've had their own successes.
Culturally, they feel like they've been humiliated.
So as a result, they like a bully.
They like a bully who says, you know, pull it up and let's go.
Let's go hurt people and let's go humiliate people.
And the problem here is that it is a bender.
They are so obsessed with the idea of ramping this thing up that there is no foresight.
We are now in a situation we're helping China.
We're helping Russia.
Basically, the entire BRICS axis is gaining every single day in every regard.
We haven't even talked about the fact that Canada moved towards China and the European Union moved towards South America.
Like strategically, everything has moved away from us and they don't have any sort of foresight or strategy.
They simply want the catharsis of the next hit.
It's like a person who is addicted to a drug.
They're not thinking about who they're going to hurt or how they're going to hurt themselves.
The only thing they're thinking about is how they get that next hit.
And that next hit is being able to brutalize or humiliate someone.
Okay, but Jared, capitalism is now creating allies that we wouldn't have thought between like Canada and China, for instance.
So look at how capitalism is making the world a better place.
China, Canada moved towards China, Nick.
You know, I don't know.
I mean, listen, that's what the forces are making that happen, right?
And so, you know, you get guys shaking hands that haven't shaken hands before.
That's something good, right?
Yeah, really.
That's going to be the legacy of this.
This is going to come out on January 20th.
We're recording it on the 19th.
That is one year since the inauguration of Donald Trump for a second presidency.
And before that year was up, he moved Canada to a trade deal with China.
Yeah.
Good.
That's all you need to know.
Great job.
Great job.
And yeah.
And by the way, we haven't even gotten into like, and I think what you were saying about the MAGA and their psyche kind of then plays into the domestic side of things here as well.
And it's, it's the layers, how often the layers kind of overlap each other is really kind of fascinating because we're talking about like Greenland can overlap with Ukraine and all that.
And then it kind of ties into what's going on like in Minneapolis, because like the Somali community that lives there is another one of those flashpoints, those one of those targets, right?
That is like, you know, sweet siren call to the MAGA people that would cheer this on.
And that's what's probably the more frustrating thing to me is, first of all, the kind of things I'm seeing, I'm seeing text of people saying it's much worse than what we're seeing, you know, being covered in the media.
But and I think it probably depends on, you know, certain areas that you live in, but there is this other pushback on the right to be like, yes, yes, keep going.
This is what we've been waiting for.
This is what we voted for, which maybe distracts them again from the Epstein, then not getting the Epstein thing that they wanted.
It's really soul killing to see that, to see that people who are just being tortured and ripped out of their cars.
And by the way, these are people who are here illegally.
You know, it's unbelievable that we're having these moments where enough people out there are full-throatedly supporting this movement.
And it's only serves to, I guess, encourage the government to ramp up even more.
Yeah.
And it is a feedback cycle, right?
Which is you go into a place and you hurt people.
And this entire thing started as an attack on Tim Waltz.
And I'm not going to excuse Waltz.
I think he has failed miserably.
I think he has betrayed the population of Minnesota.
But the political rivalry between Trump and Waltz and then this influencer, this YouTube right-wing influencer who then like called into question all these daycare centers, it has put like such a cycle.
It's almost like a storm that keeps feeding on itself through what's happening in Minnesota.
Things continue to get worse and worse.
And then there's a counter protest against it and a pushback.
And then they are going to increase the behavior and the violence.
And now we're seeing, first of all, that the Pentagon is pulling up thousands, if not tens of thousands of people.
They're preparing a surge in Minnesota, which is only going to make things worse, which means, by the way, that Donald Trump is considering declaring the Insurrection Act.
And then, of course, we're starting to see the full figure of the tech surveillance tools that you and I have been talking about for years now.
And so as a result, it is now becoming this center of catharsis for MAGA, but also the sort of birthing bed of what is to come, which is a more authoritarian state.
Jared, do you know who this guy, Jake Lang, is?
Yeah.
So he shows up as a, I guess, a counter protest or something.
And, you know, is there any way to describe it other than I guess he kind of got this shit kicked out of him and by the protesters?
What do you make of that?
What's your reaction?
Because he's a right-wing, you can fill it in, Demi, better than I can, but a right, right-wing, you know, influencer guy who works.
Provocateur.
Yeah, right.
And he went in there on purpose to like stir things up and they weren't having it.
What do you make of that?
I would imagine if I had to predict, I think you would probably be okay with what happened to him, right?
To be honest with you, I'm okay with anyone getting the shit kicked out of them at this point.
And part of the reason is not just basic human decency, but it's studying movements that have actually fought off fascists.
And I'm talking about in the 20s, 30s, and 40s.
And the old rule is if the fascists show up in your town, you beat the shit out of them until they leave.
And so I'm pretty okay with it.
Right.
And this, you know, he was screaming things like natural born citizens should be deported to preserve the white race, uh, is what he was saying.
Yeah, so just in case you're wondering, this is not just some guy who happened to show up in the wrong spot at the wrong time.
Um, I think he kind of wanted this, he probably wanted the content, probably wasn't expecting it to turn out the way it did.
Um, but uh, again, he represents something, he's not just an isolated person, which is really concerning.
It's the kind of people that probably would have uh you know uh told the authorities where Ann Frank was hiding, yeah.
And quite frankly, the longer this goes on, the more opportunity there is for people like this to show up and cause these problems and to try and be provocateurs.
And so, that is one of the reasons why I say that Tim Waltz and other people in the Democratic Party have failed.
They should have put an end to this, they should have handled the conflict and should have shouldered the conflict.
But the longer that this goes on, the more that it invites assholes like that, right?
Well, that's that civil war we've been talking about because what you're describing to put an end to it would mean local law enforcement squaring off against federal law enforcement, right?
Yes, right.
And I think that's that red line for some reason.
I mean, again, I can't quite picture some sort of civil war like it was back in 1880 when you had we'd be firing our muskets across the street at each other, right?
Like it's whatever.
I can't picture that.
But what I can picture, though, is something like that, where you have the local law enforcement police departments having to either arrest ICE or stop them from going somewhere and some sort of face-off with guns.
That to me speaks like that.
I could picture that happening.
Yeah, we're not going to have some sort of lineup with uniforms and a field type of civil war.
What we're dealing with right now is much more of an asymmetrical type of thing.
And quite frankly, it's being weaponized, urban versus rural, which is going to get really ugly, particularly as resources start to dwindle, both from Trump austerity, but also during climate change.
I think it's going to be much more confusing and probably look a lot more like what we've been dealing with over the past year.
Yeah.
And I think as the weather warms up too across the country, I would imagine then we're going to start seeing more of the protests, more of the unrest in the streets, because again, and that's the problem is they, I think the Trump administration wants all of this and they're trying to stir this up.
I have a feeling they probably have already had meetings thinking, why isn't it worse?
Where are the burning down the buildings?
Where is all that?
It's not happening.
Okay, send more troops in and then we'll get it, right?
Like, I feel like that's probably the thrust of their conversations.
But I think that speaks more to what is happening with the opposition.
And I won't call it the resistance.
It's a group of people that just want to be left the fuck alone.
They don't want their neighbors to be kidnapped.
They don't want children to be kidnapped.
They don't want children left abandoned in cars.
They want to be able to go about their lives without these attacks.
So I think they probably have looked for something that looks more like a 2020, summer 2020 BLM sort of style protest.
And I mean, quite frankly, if this continues, we might get there.
But at the same time, like, I think what we're seeing is just a group of people that are like having no decency.
Yeah.
And I think that's basically what this reflects.
And then to their credit in Minneapolis, like they're not taking the bait.
You know, they're not doing the things that we saw during the BLM protests that, you know, that got the silent majority all upset and whatever.
And that's that's good.
But I agree.
I think that at some point when people protest and they don't feel like they're being heard at all, it will spiral.
And that's sort of the natural evolution, I suppose, of protesting in your First Amendment right, where you have to make a statement that will, you know, listen, if you put a business in a situation where they have to rely on their insurance to cover costs, like I don't think people are that sympathetic to that.
I don't think so either, but I do think that there is such a frustration and such an anger in the country right now that you could have like even more disruptive protests.
Like in Los Angeles, your town, like there was a small period of time in which federal troops were there and people were like blocking highways and blocking exit ramps and it still didn't affect the approval.
I do think that there is room for more aggressive tactics right now.
And of course, I could be wrong.
That could be like a misjudgment in terms of my instincts, but I feel like people are at a point where they're so tired of this shit that they would accept more aggression.
Well, I am worried about whether it's anger or if it's just if it's going to morph into just sort of like apathy.
You know, it's really, really, that's one of those turns as well, where that's what they're probably relying on to some degree, where we're just stop resisting.
It's enough.
We can't do anything about it.
And that's when you have the leadership.
You have to have Democrats.
If we don't start seeing Democratic politicians marching and participating in these things, then I'm going to start, you know, I'm already upset, but I don't understand why they're not doing that more.
I mean, unless they're going to say that it's some sort of security risk that's beyond the pale, I don't see why, you know, they are not doing that.
They're not leading these things.
Yeah, they're not interested in it.
They don't want to be a part of any sort of actual movement.
That's the problem here.
And I get you.
Like, it would be great to have an actual opposition party, but these people don't have it.
So do you think AOC feels that way?
No, I think AOC is different.
I think AOC is one of the actual outliers within the party who actually wants to get involved in this stuff, but basically the rest of the party is completely chained to corporate interest.
And as a result, doesn't want to actually become in any way, shape, or form something that could be perceived as radical.
Truly remarkable, because even from a purely cynical political take, having a rousing speech where you have 10,000 people marching down the streets in LA or anywhere in your area would be a political win, as far as I could tell.
Well, I agree, but then it's you would have to do something.
Right.
You know what I mean?
Like at some point, you would have to actually stand up for what's right and actually like propose some changes.
I think the closest that we saw was the infamous moment where they donned, you know, Kenta cloths during the BLM protest.
I think that was as far as they were willing to go.
And then the moment they started talking about what reform would be, they were like, no, we're not going to go any further than this.
Right.
It's truly, truly, I cannot wrap my head around why that's so difficult for them.
And the other issue is, you know, they might feel like because they're not in power, they can't have any accountability.
But the issue we're also seeing on top of all this, because again, just let that sink in.
I'm not sure we really processed what that meant when I mentioned that, you know, there's a sting operation where they are like basically able to prove that, you know, Trump is laundering intelligence back to Russia.
But Palantir is also now involved.
And I think it's now clear, and we said this before, what Doge did was only to merge all the databases together.
And now Palantir has put the cherry on top by creating this app for all these ICE agents and they can now predict where everybody is.
Tech Bro Surveillance00:05:51
And there's a reporting now that you can, it's like Google Maps, but with people on it, and you can tap it, you'll see their picture, and it'll tell you within a zero to 100, the likelihood of where they'll be at that any given moment.
By the way, at some point, it will be where they are at any given moment.
It will be fine friends for the government.
That is truly frightening.
And that was the plan all along.
Like when they hatch this, I wonder, because this is now the amount of the tech bro control they can now have and the data they can now have over people is probably as valuable as any amount of raw materials they could find in Greenland, but like easier to get.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, it's there's no price you could pay on the information that the tech oligarchs have and that they've been developing over the past two decades.
And it's going to get to the point.
And, you know, it's funny that when we're talking about this, it's the idea that they can track where you are at any given moment.
It sort of works on the idea that you have to have your phone on you, right?
Like, that is how they would know where you were, correct?
Yeah, although if they can surveil you without it, then they'll just be able to predict where you're going based on your movements in the last six months.
But it would start on your phone.
Yes, yes.
Right.
Or your car or whatever.
Yeah.
And so basically that starts to beg the question, which is, do we need to move towards a society where when we're protesting or basically living in society, you don't have your phone on, right?
Which takes away part of sort of the surveillance apparatus.
And I do think, you know, I've been very interested lately, Nick, in how many people are moving away from social media.
They're just like, I don't want anything to do with this anymore.
And they're spending more and more time offline.
It feels like there might be a cultural and political reaction to parts of this.
It's like, I want to move away from this.
This system is obviously tied towards surveillance and oppression and authoritarianism.
And so people are going to move away from it naturally because the soul repels it.
Yeah.
And I also started wondering now my capitalist cap comes on.
And I'm starting to wonder if there could be a cell phone manufacturer and carrier that would offer a phone that does not have any tracking abilities.
I mean, I guess it's called the dumb thing.
Well, the dumb phone is out there.
Yeah.
And, you know, it is something that a lot of people are starting to move towards.
They're even like personally, I've even tried to make my smartphone a dumb phone for my own purposes.
And I do think that we're going to culturally see something that moves away from this.
And if people start to get a sense, and we've talked about this, they already have the ability to surveil us.
They already have the ability to track us.
The more overt it becomes, the more I think the reaction against it is going to become articulated.
Right.
And sort of embodied.
And we've seen Greg Bobino walking around in his tailor-made Nazi long coat.
It really is disgusting.
And there's a moment.
How have we not talked about that?
How have we not talked about how insane that man looks?
Yeah.
And like the haircut, the whole thing is ridiculous.
And the short stature.
You know, there was a guy that went to school with him.
I don't know if you've seen the post.
Maybe it might have been on Facebook that was, you know, let's just say it was intended to embarrass him.
And I would imagine it did.
But nonetheless, he's walking around.
He's barking at people.
Get on the sidewalk like as if he's got any kind of power or whatever.
He's got to say something.
But there is a moment in one of those videos where you see him where, you know, the people are filling him and backing up while he's walking forward.
And he takes out his large phone or looks large in his hand and starts to take pictures of them.
And the smile on his face or the expression indicates to me that he's like, yeah, this is probably a citizen, but we're going to put this citizen into our database too.
That literally is what it looks like.
He's doing it's taking the picture so he can put them with facial recognition into the palantir bullshit and have this have these people charted and know where they are.
Well, why wouldn't you?
If you were an authoritarian, this is what you would always want to do.
So now that we have the authoritarians, the anti-democratics, the fascists, they're on the same side as tech.
Why wouldn't they use their tools against us?
It's what this has all been leading to.
Okay, what would the percentage be?
Break it down, what you think in terms of how much of it is for the to be able to mine the data to make money off of it versus control the citizenry.
It's both.
It's both.
Yeah.
So what do you think?
Is it like 50-50?
Yeah.
I think it used to be like 95 and 5, and now it's moving more towards 50-50.
So 95 more just to build people their money, and now it's just going to be.
Yeah, originally.
Surveillance capitalism was always based on the idea of changing people's behaviors to buy your products, right?
So it was always a little bit of control, but the point now that they want total control over government and total control over the economy, they just looked around.
They're like, oh, these are the perfect machines to do this.
So it has now sort of shifted.
And now it is like focused on both, I think.
And I think the amount of money that Palantir and the other military tech industrialist companies are making is, I think it's outrageous.
Absolutely.
And that's fascinating because you're right.
Like that evolution was probably always moving in lockstep with each other anyway.
Like it might have felt like 95-5, but it turned out it was probably 50-50 the whole time.
That's right.
And that's the thing that I think we need to realize, which is going forward, if we're going to fix this thing, the people who are in charge of this technology and the people who are using it against us, they need to be held accountable.
Stephen Miller's Quote Tweet00:05:01
And I don't think there's any way around that.
And by the way, I just got to bring this up because they popped up in my thing.
I missed this, but Stephen Miller, resident white nationalist in the White House, quote tweeted somebody talking about what the local cops have been doing in Minneapolis.
And he wrote, did you see this, Jared?
He wrote, only federal officers are upholding the law, period.
Local and state police have been ordered to stand down and surrender.
That's pretty cheap.
Can I just put this out there?
I don't know what's going to happen going forward, but I don't know if Stephen Miller makes it out alive.
Like, this is a guy who's really feeling himself.
Is he not?
Yeah, but who's going to get him?
I mean, if eventually there's some sort of pushback against Trumpism and MAGA, I just feel like this is a guy who has grown into the power vacuum.
I mean, he is at the forefront of all of this shit.
It's incredible.
It's crazy how much power he has been actually like eating up.
You know what his official title is, by the way, right?
I actually don't know what they're calling him now.
It's deputy chief of staff.
He's Josh Lyman Wesley.
He's not even the chief of staff, right?
This is, you know, which is kind of crazy, right?
But yeah, he has to be the most influential of anybody right now and feeling his oats.
So, you know, if they ever were to dissect his brain, we'll find out some very interesting things.
I have no doubt about the fact that it's not functioning properly.
What a little fuck.
Yeah.
Like, what, what a little fuck who is just behind almost every like angry, painful thing that the government is doing.
Like, what an absolutely repulsive little fuck.
I mean, at least with Donald Trump, I'm sure if you were hanging out with him in 1985, he would have been liberal and talking nicely about whatever, LGBTQ, all sorts of stuff, right?
And then he made this thing.
Stephen Miller has been this way since birth.
You know, that's what's also so concerning about this.
I mean, by the way, JD Vance and you would have been hanging out in 2012, having beers talking about, you know, what we can do to help people's lives get better.
We don't need to talk about that.
All right.
We don't need to talk about my Bizarro version who's currently the VP and nobody knows what he's doing at all, except for just like trolling people.
Yeah, yeah.
And biding his time.
He's just waiting for Trump to fail, not fail, his health to fail and slide in there, which is the likelihood of that is high, isn't it?
It's pretty high at this point, I think.
Is that how you're feeling?
I do not feel like he's going to.
I'll just say I don't think he's going to make it through this term.
Well, now I'm starting to wonder if they're going to figure out an end around to get him out, too.
You know, like somehow he's supposed to be next in line, he's supposed to take over, but they're going to figure out a way to get him out of there as well.
Uh, if you know, almost like you know, kind of like you know how Biden, when he stepped down, he like sort of forced Kamala to be the successor.
And like, and maybe did we ever do we end up like saying that was a kind of a final F you to everybody?
I don't know exactly what happened there, okay, except for there were definitely uh groups within the Democratic Party that wanted to maintain power.
Uh, but yeah, I don't know what's going to happen within the Trump White House, but I'll just say, just to wrap this up and put a ribbon on it, am I wrong or is getting crazier?
All I know is that the second sentence out of everyone's mouth I meet and talk to today now in the last week has been, the world is on fire, and everyone nods, and there's not even a everyone's like, Yes, exactly, I know what you're talking about.
Like, that's the second sentence.
Hi, how are you doing?
Good to see you.
The world's on fire.
Seriously, that's what everyone said.
Everyone, the world is on fire.
Uh, but I will say, I'm always glad to be able to talk with you, my friend.
Yeah, no, I'm glad that you could pull over and uh give us your thoughts because, man, uh, there's a lot of them out there, and we need to figure out how to process this so we can move forward.
And without doing that, uh, I could see how it would get worse.
I listen for me, it's like what I'm doing right now is I'm doing work to try and fight against this.
That's why I'm on the road.
Um, that's what allows me to sleep, uh, what little sleep I get.
But, um, yeah, it's the world is on fire right now, and uh, I fucking hate it.
Yeah, I really hate it.
Yeah, the off-ramps are not uh, don't seem like they're gonna be they're viable, and then the only other worry is that every day that goes by, it just means it's gonna take longer and longer to to correct this course when it starts to be corrected.
And that's that's a that's a tough one, yeah, it's a tough one, but we gotta keep the faith.
Driving Through Winter Storms00:00:39
Yeah, and I'm in that place where it is painful and hard, but you're going through a halogen, keep going.
That's right, there's no other choice, you got to keep driving that car.
You gotta keep you gotta keep driving that car, much like I was driving through a winter storm today.
You can't pull over, you gotta keep going.
That's right.
All right, brother.
Well, we will be back.
Well, you will be back.
I won't be around for the weekender.
Um, but uh, you know, in the meantime, you can head over to Blue Sky.