In the first episode of the new morning show, host Alex Blumberg is joined by his good friend Omar Chaudhuri to talk about a variety of current events, including the latest in the Trump administration, the latest on the Iran deal, and much more.
00:03:09.440But doesn't three to four years away feel like not exactly what we've been told?
00:03:14.760Because I thought when Elon Musk was talking about optimists, he was saying that it can, you know, dance and it can walk around and it can interact.
00:03:29.460But what he didn't say is you could give it instructions on something he had never done before and it could go do it, you know, like wash the dishes or something like that.
00:04:57.900Well, OMB director Russ Vogt says they intend to take the Doge agenda and the cuts and the momentum and the initiative and turn them into permanent savings.
00:05:33.920So I guess we have another $150 billion, coincidentally, to spend on the military and the border.
00:05:41.460I don't believe anything about, here's what I do believe.
00:05:46.000I do believe that Doge was directionally correct and found real savings and that they were all dedicated professionals who were really trying to, you know, do the real thing.
00:06:00.820I don't believe that our government can translate that into permanent savings.
00:06:10.680Now, that was my original prediction, that we wouldn't be able to translate it into the political part of the world.
00:06:21.060As soon as we reached the political part, somebody would say, you know, we could probably get away with spending the same thing we spent last year,
00:06:30.160even though it's moving us closer to doom, because, you know, people are just used to it.
00:06:37.520They're used to the fact that we're going to spend maybe a little bit more this year than last year.
00:06:43.740So I think that we're just going to take the Doge savings and say, free money, buy some more tanks.
00:06:50.260I think that's what's going to happen.
00:09:40.940I'm laughing because it's just so bad.
00:09:47.900So those people who had homes in Malibu, unless they're just outrageously rich, it's not economically possible to even build back.
00:09:59.220And how many years would it take for them to get approval for their septic systems?
00:10:06.440So the people who were saying it looks like there's going to be some kind of land grab or, you know, somebody's going to try to get everything cheap and build a hotel there or something.
00:10:17.480Well, I wasn't going to buy into the conspiracy theory, but I don't know what else you could do with this land.
00:10:30.000Because how many people are going to spend three to five million dollars getting their septic system just right before they even build the house?
00:10:39.140I mean, how rich would you have to be?
00:12:16.100It kind of suggests to me that she can't do these social events unless she's got a glass or two of wine.
00:12:25.680And then she probably gets cackly and stupid.
00:12:28.400So I think her advisors were trying to figure out, is it even possible for you to do a dinner without having a glass of wine and being a cackly idiot?
00:12:42.340But why in the world would you take the vice president of the United States and tell her that she has to practice just eating with people because she's too embarrassing?
00:18:29.260And then maybe they can tell us if the mammonist plutocrats are as dangerous as the oligarchs with their habeas corpus.
00:18:36.960Every time I see a Democrat on TV saying, we've got to maintain the habeas corpus, I think to myself, how many Democrats just turned that off because they don't know what you're talking about?
00:18:51.520I mean, how many of you would know what habeas corpus was if he didn't follow the news closely?
00:19:07.160Do you remember the story that also came from that same Jake Tapper book and Alex Thompson book that claimed that Biden didn't recognize George Clooney?
00:19:18.760And that was like the big news yesterday.
00:19:37.780He was right there when Biden and Clooney shook hands.
00:19:43.440And his version is that never happened.
00:19:45.500That there was never a time that Biden didn't recognize Clooney because the advisors were introducing the people to Biden, regardless of whether he'd met them before.
00:19:59.080So apparently the advisor, before anybody said anything to each other, said, and President Biden, here's George Clooney and somebody else.
00:20:11.580So he was actually introduced as George Clooney because they were just sort of, you know, standard procedure, just introducing everybody, which is the right thing to do, by the way.
00:21:55.000But I think he made a lot of news with his speech.
00:21:59.440So the essence of his speech was that the people who tried to, let's say, nation build in other countries didn't understand the culture of those other countries and just basically ruined the countries instead of helping them.
00:22:17.980But where the countries did their own work, such as Saudi Arabia, you know, nobody, nobody tried to turn it into something else.
00:22:27.560But the Saudi Arabia did great because they just used their own, they did it their way, basically.
00:22:34.100But it's so good, I want to just read you the central part of this speech because it didn't get a lot of play on TV.
00:22:44.080So this was Trump talking to the Saudis and the world, I guess, it's crucial for the wider world to know this great transformation has not come from Western interventionists or flying people in beautiful planes giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs.
00:23:04.640In the end, the so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built and the interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.
00:23:19.580No, the gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation builders, neocons, or liberal non-profits like those who spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop Baghdad and so many other cities.
00:23:38.700Instead, the birth of modern Middle East has been brought by the people of the region themselves.
00:23:44.060The people that are the people that have lived here, the people that have lived here all their lives, developing their own sovereign countries, pursuing their own unique visions, and charting your own destinies in your own way.
00:23:58.060They told you how to do it, but they had no idea how to do it themselves.
00:24:02.400Peace, prosperity, and progress ultimately came not from radical rejection of your heritage, but rather from embracing your national traditions
00:24:11.520and embracing that same heritage that you love so dearly, you achieved a modern miracle the Arabian way.
00:24:19.680So what he was doing is just giving Saudi Arabia and the other countries he visited a huge respect
00:24:29.160and saying that when the Americans, mostly, were interfering in the Middle East, they just ruined shit.
00:24:36.300And that's a pretty radical thing to say after all the years of Americans and Europeans going over there and ruining shit.
00:24:48.220He just says it never worked and never made sense, and the people who went over there didn't really understand the place
00:24:54.920and didn't really have a chance of fixing anything or making anything better.
00:24:59.920But when people were left alone, at least in many cases, they came up with a wonderful society.