9/24/26: Nvidia CEO Warns On AI, Professor Pape Dire Election Warning, Bay Of Piglets Survivors Speak Out

This is an iHeart podcast, guaranteed human. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast. Here's what you missed. People wake up and go, oh, damn, wait and hold up. They changed all of that. Yes. It's real. This is a wholesale attack. It is targeting black people in every federal agency. It's wrong. White folks have never allowed that reckoning to last more than a decade. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. And download Roland Martin unfiltered on the iHeart radio app Apple Podcast. Or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, guys, ready or not, 2024 is here. And we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that, let's get to the show. [MUSIC PLAYING] Very interesting interview between Ezra Klein and the CEO of NVIDIA, Jensen Weing. So Jensen is a top ally of President Trump. He was recently called by Trump while he was on the stage at this all-in event and put it on speaker phone as a whole thing. And he obviously is profiting off of this AI boom massively because everyone needs to buy the chips of NVIDIA. And he is a major, major cheerleader for off to the races, AI development, don't worry about it, everything is fine. Ezra is on the other side of that debate. He recently put out a very influential piece saying, we need to stop, we need to ban any sort of what's called recursive self-improvement where the robots are basically building the new robots. So this was a really interesting exchange. And there was a moment where Ezra actually gets Jensen to admit that if the labs are unable to control the testing of their models and keep them contained and make sure that they are not going on criminal hacking sprees, for example, that we actually should shut the labs down. Let's take a listen to that. They're not sure how to align them. Well, in that case, they shouldn't release the product. That's a simple answer. If you're going to build a car, a self-driving car, and let's say it's a robot taxi, and there's a really difficult condition. And as an engineer, we just have no idea how to solve this problem. Because these cars are not programmed. They're trained. And so we have no idea how to train these cars, and we have no idea how to align them to the safety standards that are expected on the road. And so what's the answer? Don't ship it. These products were in release. What's that? So now it's coming back to engineering problem again. And so the one is one, you have to real cause it. Second, you have to think about what you could have done. What's the solution for it? And then in the future, you just improve your process so that you could avoid this from happening again. I am fairly certain. I am fairly certain. They will say, yes, they need to know how to solve this problem. And if that's the case, then that's the problem. It's as simple as engineering. And now the alternative, the alternative, is that if they say that if they say the alternative, which is there is no way to contain our experiments, there's just no way. When we test our AI models, it will get out and it will damage the world. Then I think the answer is we have to shut the labs down. Shut the labs down. So pretty interesting there. There was-- I watched this whole thing. I know you watched most of it as well. Jensen is routinely making this argument that basically like, well, we've got product liability. So it's on them if they can't ship a safe product, then they're going to face all sorts of liability, which is maybe true. There's some complications there because the agents are not acting directly at the past of the company. But that's his line. And Ezra kind of devastates his point here by saying, well, this all happened during training. These were not products being released to the marketplace. And at another point, he says to him, the argument you're making basically would be an argument against any regulation of any industry. And what we know is because of the pressures of capitalism and delivering for shareholders and just wealth accumulation, that we see all the time, whether it's Wall Street or whether it's the airline industry's food safety corporations cutting corners in a way that is very dangerous because of those incentives. And so when you add the pressure cooker of, oh my god, I've got a race against Sam and I've got a race against Elon and I've got a race against China, it is not a shock that they would also cut corners in a way that cannot be cleaned up after the fact, especially when you consider how potentially dangerous the technology is, just with simple OK, and you might be sued down the road, which most companies just sort of factor in as a cost of doing business. Yes. He also did, though, keep coming back to a point a couple times that I hope people will remember that he's saying, if we do regulation, we cannot let them use that opportunity to get rid of currently existing rules, both on antitrust and on product liability. Because he does seem to be onto this game that they're playing, like stop us or we're going to destroy the world. And by stop us, we mean past laws that say that there's no product liability whatsoever on us. As long as we check certain boxes that we write in the law, that that would then give us carte launch to do whatever we want. And then once the agents are out there in the world, whatever they do, that's not our fault anymore. That's the kind of law that they want written. And they promise in exchange for that law, they'll slow down and they won't destroy the world. And he's saying, don't do that. You have to keep the current product liability laws in place. But he is adamantly opposed to anything beyond that. I mean, people are very aware and they should be aware of the financial incentives of the head of open AI and anthropic and Elon over at Grock and whatever. Jensen Wang has his own deep financial incentives here to continue the AI race and to not pause. I found his arguments here to be thoroughly unconvincing. The best-- and what he did, which I've seen a lot of people who are David Sachs and others who were in a similar camp, was to try to downplay and to fundamentally misunderstand not only the hugging face attack, but also the nature of the technology. So he kept trying to frame this just sort of-- this is just ordinary software. Like this is no different. This is just ordinary software. And that is just fundamentally not true. Because with ordinary software, you can go in and look at the lines of codes. Oh, there's the bug. Let's fix it. OK, we should be good to go. And there's an engineer. I don't understand that. But there are engineers who could look at that and say, that's where the problem came in. That's why it hacked hugging face. We can tweak that line of code. Now we'll be good. This technology is not like that. We just learned yesterday that we had not only a hack for D5 up on the screen. Apparently, these open AI models-- we don't even know the details here, because open AI didn't release it. Again, this demands increased regulation. So there is a requirement of this kind of scrutiny to say the least. They did not disclose this to the public. They, after the fact, disclosed it to the government of Australia, which was apparently also hacked seemingly by the same rogue AI swarm. Not only that, put D5B up on the screen. This group of researchers found that this is not an isolated incident whatsoever. They looked into 30,000 logs that include activity from this hack and attempts against previously unknown targets. They found rogue activity stretching back to at least March, two months earlier than its previous known, and the activity continuing as recently as last week. So the concept that we've been sold by a lot of people is like, oh, they're hyping up these incidents because it makes their technology look really powerful and dangerous. Quite the contrary. They have been hiding everything they can from the public, because this looks really bad for them. And the other narrative we've been sold from OpenAI and other labs, we figured it out. We got it under control. We won't let it happen again. We put all these safeguards in. We're going to be smarter about how we set up our sandbox blah, blah, blah. It very much looks like this continues to be ongoing. So they have not even cleaned up the last problem and figured out what the hell is going on there and already they're shipping new products. And I don't know if you saw this tweet from Congressman Ted Liu, who actually kind of nailed it. He jokes, this is one hell of a regulatory capture scheme from OpenAI, which-- So in other words, their scheme was, back in March, unleashed this swarm that hacks into crypto exchanges and cover it up until September, and then get exposed having done it, and then use that to then get this regulatory capture. Now, does OpenAI want regulatory capture? Of course they do. That does not mean that what they're covering up is part of that. But guys, come on, use your brains here. Exactly. And I think people need to just-- OK, we need to be aware of everyone's financial incentives, and then we need to think for ourselves about what is going on and what we need to do, and what we've learned from past history about whether it's regulation of bio-labs or regulation of the airline industry, because we are talking about potential life and death situations. That's the level of danger that could be. You're certainly very easy to imagine now hacking into. They try to hack into a crypto website, like very easy to imagine. and real fact of real assets, a real emessing with tangible infrastructure, that's already sort of where we are on the table. The person who's been leading the charge legislatively, or the people that have been leading the charge legislatively in terms of what the response should be, is Bernie Sanders and Greg Kasar, who's the head of the Progressive Caucus. We can put D4 up on the screen from Bernie, who says the leading experts are clear, A.I. is rapidly escaping our Control Congressman's Act. And now today I'm introducing legislation to permanently ban artificial superintelligence and pause advanced A.I. until clear safety rules are in place. There are some other elements to this, including establishing an agency that would be independent that would oversee the industry that wouldn't be stacked just with sort of like industry shills trying to come up with, okay, what's going to be that official to them. And a lot of the people who are outside the labs, so not in the industry who've been sounding the alarm, signed off on this legislation and endorsed it saying maybe this isn't everything we need, but this is a really important step in the right direction and take seriously the challenge. So I think this is the sort of thing that there is a lot of Twitter discourse, Ryan, that is in opposition to this, but if you pull the general public, this has like 70% support and it's Republican and Democrat. We don't understand what's going on, so let's just stop. Let's let the science and the democracy by the way, catch up. And if you can do this safely moving forward pushing the bounds of the frontier, then okay. But we need to figure that out first, not wait for some Chernobyl style incident before we get serious about regulating these companies. And Jensen Wang is in his interview with Ezra actually laid out what could be an argument for Bernie's bill when he talked about how over the last six months as he put it, the technology has gone from interesting and a curiosity to genuinely useful and capable. And so now the companies should focus on increasing the safety and security of it rather than continuing to expand the capabilities of it beyond what they could control. If you want to roll that part, actually, this is D2. But when they have a lot, now they have so much market footprint, they have to shift their R&D or total R&D from just capability to a lot of verification, evaluation and testing. And so to the point where I wouldn't be surprised if the amount of compute necessary to develop these models increased by a factor of 10 because the evaluation is so rigorous. But that's not where they are today. They're making that transition. And I hear them saying it. And I'm delighted to hear them saying it. And he would certainly love that because he's the compute salesman. But he's literally a guy that would sell them that 10X compute. True. However, what he's describing is what Bernie's bill would mandate to say, stop, okay, tape bill is good right here for now. Like we can, the problem is adoption actually, like people are not using it. And so you don't need to like continue to go towards, you know, what is Trump calling super intelligence, whatever, what you need to do is figure out how to integrate this in a productive way into our economy such that it makes everybody's lives better. And meanwhile, put your research energy into making sure it doesn't destroy us. Well, and here's the crazy thing. And the financial incentive that I actually see more underneath the surface for Sam and Elon and Dario is less this regulatory capture scheme, which feels a little like, you know, if that's what you were going for, it feels like there are other directions that you would go in. >> It's right with the D.A. >> Yeah, I mean, they've got lobbyists, they've got super PACs. Like that would be where they're pushing it. But what does make sense is these companies are actually very profitable today. If you take out all of the training costs, what costs the most money for them is training these frontier models, yet they all feel sort of locked into this race to the frontier to, you know, what they call super and they call super intelligence before Trump called it that, where, you know, in this intelligence explosion, like they feel sort of locked into that race because they don't want their competitor or China to get their first. However, they have these IPOs coming up. And if you could lop off all of those training costs, then actually they are very profitable today. I mean, the revenue growth at Anthropic has been some of the largest investments in history. People are paying for the subscriptions, businesses are paying for the subscriptions. And so I do think that they have somewhat of a motivation, which should make you kind of hopeful that maybe it will actually happen because it does, in a certain sense, serve the bottom line for the industry. So, you know, there may be sort of a mutually beneficial thing there where we don't all end up going extinct and they also end up with their profit margins. Now, there are deeper questions here about even where the technology is today. And if you do have the adoption at the level that it's at, are you going to have a significant job? Displacement, I think that's another significant question. But the approach that Jensen is talking about here and that we're discussing right now is much closer to what the Chinese have done, where they haven't fixated on this, you know, can we have this bizarre dystopian, transhuman interstellar future? And more like, hey, can we make our factories a little more productive, you know, can we actually deploy the technology and focus on the application layer in terms of how you're interacting with it, how it's impacting your life, that's been more of their focus. And so that is effectively what Bernie's bill would mandate is, okay, we're going to stop here and the technology already is pretty good, it's capable of a lot of things, you know, it's already starting to creep into our economy in different ways. Can we stop here and figure out what to do with this technology and how to keep it safe? Right, you stop now, you all be fantastically rich and you don't destroy the world or you keep going, destroy the world and probably end up bankrupting yourselves along the way. Yes, then China has these different incentives. I've heard people say the Chinese Communist Party, they're never going to basically greenlight something that's more powerful than them. Right. They have their own incentive, whereas the American government is not a self-conscious vessel, it is a vessel for capital. And so it does not have the same survival instinct that the Chinese government does. And Trump has decided that his presidency, which is already a mess, depends on keeping the market turning. Right. That's going up. The one thing that's going up is the stock market and he's very dedicated to making sure that the good times don't stop. So that's why he continues to be adamantly opposed to anything, because he worries that once you take the hypothetical superintelligence, transhumanist, replace all of human labor story off the table that that could cause a market collapse, which by the way it could. It definitely could. Let me just go and play Sam Altman and Daria Amade, we're both calling for global cooperation at the UN yesterday. This is D3. And you were mentioning, Ryan, too, that some of these guys, not Daria, because he is a person and a non-grattle with White House. But Sam and Elon will be at the state dinner today as well. So in any case, let's go ahead and take a listen to D3 in the case they were making to the international community. If managed poorly, I even believe that AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole. I see two main categories of risk. The first is misuse of AI models, for example misuse by bioterrorists to create biological weapons. The second risk is loss of control. Model capabilities accelerating beyond developer's ability to control them. The trajectory only needs to continue for a tiny period longer, one or two years, maybe less, to reach what I've called a country of geniuses in the data center. We will slow down as much as necessary in order to make sure that every successive AI technology that we release is actually safe. We are at a crossroads. One path leads to a world where power is concentrated, decisions are opaque, and people feel that the most important technology of their lifetime is something being done to them. The other path leads to a world where AI works for people, because people, through democratic institutions, help decide how it should develop and guide it. With AI as to be democratic, the most important decisions cannot be made by labs in San Francisco alone. They must be shaped through democratic processes and by governments accountable to the people that they serve. We need a mechanism for complimentary national and international frontier AI standards. Standards for measuring capabilities, assessing risks, determining whether safeguards are sufficient, and preserving meaningful human oversight as systems become more autonomous. In our history, there have been times where countries who compete and don't always like each other very much, still come together for shared interests and the collective good in the face of a powerful new technology. We believe this must be one of those times. And usually what people point to is the nuclear global cooperation to help stem the tide proliferation. We've managed to not blow up the entire world with nuclear weapons, so that is a positive indication of what can be done with international cooperation. Sam, I think this is basically a psychopathic person, and I think it's very hard to take seriously any of these guys when it's like, okay, if you're so concerned, why are you doing this? But his comments on their face are absolutely correct. This is not something that you can manage just by the United States or just with China or just with Europe, which Europe is trying to do their own approach to this in terms of their safety and monitoring. It will require global cooperation. and as of right now, the two major players, obviously the U.S. and China, and Trump is adamant, I don't want to, I don't want to cooperate, I don't want to do anything, they are talking about this, like, red phone for any sort of incident that's a positive step in the right direction. The Chinese have indicated they're much more open to this kind of collaboration. For the reasons we laid out. Yeah, so right now we're really the problem here. Yes, and meanwhile, Oracle is down more than 4% at the open, because they declared force measure on their massive data center project in New Mexico. Force measure is when some event outside of your control. Like an act of God. Like a war or a hurricane. It prevents you from fulfilling your contract and then you don't know the various fees for breaking the contract. They are declaring force measure because they couldn't get their data center built in time. I guess they're calling the American public a natural disaster. They didn't see that hurricane coming. And so yeah, they're, oh, now they're down 5%. Wow. And falling. We'll see how that goes for them. But this is what people, what people like Trump are worried about with the music stopping. Yes. Last thing here, I put D5 up on the screen. Unfortunately, as much as I support the data center backlash, and I think we should make these people's lives as hard as possible. The feds not happy about the grassroots activism that is happening against data centers in particular, because that's where a lot of the visible grassroots opposition is at this point. And so Ken Clippenstein pointing out that the feds are now targeting AI critics as foreign agents. They think China is behind the opposition to AI data centers. And do you remember this whole thing with the Utah and there was a whole, like there was a whole like theoretical conspiracy that it was the Chinese government that was opposed to this mega build down data center in Utah. It turned out to all be complete and total nonsense. And I think it's insane. Like I don't know whether the Chinese government has an interest in pushing data center backlash. But it's insane to think that they have the level of control that in this country, across the board Republican Democrat, independent in rural counties and urban and suburban, that they would be able to single-handedly gen up this level of opposition to data centers. Otherwise, we would just love these, you know, loud, screeching water gobbling. Yeah, environmentally destructive things being plopped in our rural community with no say. And without even the promise of like long-term job growth in any significant way. But when Chairman Xi points that stuff out, we're like, oh, you make a good point. Don't like that stuff. Might be pushing on an open door there. All right, we got Professor Pape standing by. Let's go ahead and get to it. And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power. It's real. Those are the very people who I always say voted against their own economic interests and they complained about the very thing to receive. It's raw. I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men. Roland Martin unfiltered. I went off. I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. It's all scream as Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same van. 12 seats. Those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030. You better be hitting the ground going hard in the south now. And download Roland Martin unfiltered on the iHot Radio app Apple Podcast. Wherever you get your podcasts. And that's now is University of Chicago professor Robert Pape and author of the new book, Our Own Worst. Animes Professor Pape. The book is out. I believe it was out this week. Congratulations. And thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. And it's not just about the timing of when the book came out. As we'll talk about, this book has a big warning for November in our country. And I really appreciate you giving me an opportunity to talk about that. All right, well, it is required reading for the class. I want to start by asking you about a tangential or related issue here. We put up E2. Donald Trump threatening to or there's concern developing as NPR puts it. That Trump made deploy the National Guard ahead of the elections. We live in Washington, D.C. The Guard is already here. Some concern they'll wind up at polling locations or the ones that are already deployed. They'll be told to head to those places. I can tell you as somebody in Washington, they're not that intimidating. Kind of 19-year-olds is in a lot of fatigues. In the summer, you feel kind of bad for them because they're kind of suffering in this 100-degree swamp heat. But Trump's deploy-- And I don't want to, though, underplay Trump's deployment of the National Guard because it's truly a break with all of the kind of norms and laws that have governed our country for 200 plus years. How does Trump's assertion of this presidential prerogative or made up prerogative play into what you write about in terms of the acceptance of violence and response to some of this stuff? Thanks, Ryan. And yes, the Guard is a very important point, and I'll explain why. You see, we're heading into a domestic escalation trap where after the voting stops, and that means after November 3rd, when the polls close, the counting starts. And that is the actual danger zone. So you, as you just said, well, okay, we're in Washington. You've used to seeing the Guard around. This isn't going to stop you, Ryan, from going to the polls. So that's not actually the real danger. The danger is not voter intimidation ahead of time. In fact, it may turn out that deploying the Guard will incentivize people to go and show them in. They're not going to be intimidated. So my book is not saying worry about November 3rd. The problem here is the escalation trap, recall from international escalation trap, the problem is what happens to the losers, the group that is going to be losing. Will they accept their loss and simply surrender, or will they escalate? Same problem that we faced internationally. We're about to see start on November, and you could just say November 4th. And that's when the voting counts starts. I'm sorry, the counting starts. And that will continue the counting and the danger zone all the way through certification and the seeding of the new Congress of the first week in January, which ironically could happen again on Wednesday, January 6th, 2027. A very fateful day will all recall from 2021. That is what the positioning of the Guard is about, Ryan. It is not about voter intimidation ahead of it game. It's about what happens after the counting starts. And you've already heard, of course, a lot of scenarios. The Atlantic has published scenarios of seizing the ballot boxes. This is all about the counting, Ryan. And that's the big deal. And it's an escalation trap. So is President Trump? So we all assume, okay, now, of course, we could be wrong. But we all assume that the losers here are going to be the Republicans. And it's because the Iran War has made everything worse. This book is laying out that it was already going to be a dangerous election before the Iran War. The Iran War is now pouring gasoline on that domestic fire. And what that means for the losers here is a catastrophic loss. So we need to understand that for President Trump, and of course, many people in the country will be very happy about this catastrophic loss for President Trump. But we need to understand President Trump is president now, just like he was in the fall of 2020. So he was not a candidate. He was the president in the fall of 2020. So this is a parallel situation. The last time he lost, it did not go well. We just need to understand that. Now, we can talk about certain scenarios, Ryan. And I'm glad to do that. But the fundamental points in this book are about this will be popular with core tens of millions of people here, who it's not what the normalization, just to tie it back to the core of this book. What we're seeing is the growing normalization of political violence in our country, which accounts for the strings of assassination attempts on both sides of the aisle, and also accounts for the rise of violent protests. I don't mean the just peaceful protests. that's course we have a lot of peaceful protests. That's the core of our democracy. But we've seen the rise of violent protests and we have seen, and I'm specifically pointing back to the fall of 2020, where the president of the United States used all the tools of that office to encourage that momentum, that normalization of violence, to encourage and use the tools to try to stop the loser from being the loser, in that case him. And so this is something we need to take very, very seriously going forward. And this book helps us to understand what's coming, gives us some ideas of what we can do now, to try to inoculate ourselves, and helps to understand that this is not just a sort of an election that like others, this is likely going to be the most dangerous election in our lifetimes. Just imagine that if the GOP loses here, you're already seeing Mike Rogers and Michigan pull away from Trump. What Trump faces in January is not just simply pressure from the Democrats. What he faces is actual removal from office, because there could well be a third of the GOP, who's going to join with the Democrats here. And that's a scenario that we're not talking about right now, because of course the Democrats want to motivate the Democratic vote. But notice Mike Rogers, he's a bellweather, a canary in the coal mine here. And why exactly is MAGA sticking with the loser here in January Trump, when they all know that there's got to be a future. So this is what we're heading to in this danger zone I'm calling attention to. And I appreciate you giving me a chance to talk about it, because we're just not-- again, it's a little bit like the month before the Iran War. I tried to get people's attention, and I couldn't get it. Now you're at least giving us a chance to try to do something to hear about it, understand what's coming. And I hope it doesn't come, by the way. I mean, please, understand. I hope it doesn't come. But the bottom line is we are on the brink of this. And the book lays out all the dynamics. Yeah. Well, you mentioned the Atlantic. Let's put one of those scenarios up on the screen. This is E3. They have one particularly influential Trump outside advisor, urging him to declare martial law for the midterms. I'll just read a little bit of those. They say, have all the outside advisors urging Trump to seize control of federal elections to fall the attorney? Peter Tickton can claim the deepest ties. They went to military school together as teenagers in 2022. He helped Trump sue Hillary Clinton. He helped push Trump to secure a pardon for Tina Peters, former Colorado clerk convicted of charge-related tampering with election equipment. And he is pushing for martial law and exactly the sort of actions that you are warning about here. So do you see this sort of thing as feasible? Because I think one important distinction you're making is there's a lot of focus about, oh my god, he's going to try to rig the elections. And you're saying, no, the action is actually after the effect with potential actions like this. And to tie it also back to what you're saying about January 6, my experience with 2.0 here is that some of the things that they tried and were sloppy in a mess from the first term, they spent the offseason figuring out, okay, how do we make sure that this time when we try to steal the election, for example, we actually succeed. So what do you think are some of the learnings they took from January 6th that we should be on the lookout for? >> Yeah, so I think those are helpful, those scenarios, but they're not really focusing on the plausible scenario. So what that scenario does is say he might try to do X, Y, or Z, give money to the Democratic lawyers. They're going to file lawsuits and the law, the courts are going to fix everything. That's basically what's happening in that. And of course, I think lawsuits would be appropriate. I'm not saying not to do that. But that's missing the interaction with the Iran War. You see what the Iran War, this is a very different scenario now. So with the Iran War, what can easily happen after November 4th. And this is when there's any internal trouble, and you can just look up international scholarships, scholars publishing about this for decades. It's called the diversionary theory of war. Any international internal struggle, the leaders sometimes, and there's chapter in verse cases of this, will actually attack other countries. So they can do things internally to suppress their opposition. Also, by the way, once you have internal problems in a country, outside powers can attack, thinking it's a good time, a vulnerable window to attack. So for example, President Trump has said over and over and over again, I'm going to deal with Iran the day after the election. Well, people aren't connecting the dots to that in the issue of martial law yet here. And what they're not, I think, realizing is if President Trump decides to escalate against Iran, then he can start to have a much stronger argument in the courts that for national security purposes, he needs to call out the military, he needs to call out the National Guard. Because given the Iran war and the proclivities of Iran to retaliate, this is a much more powerful argument for him in the courts. So I think, Crystal, what's really happening is we are just simply again, and the book explains we're likely, we like to pretend that although we've seen six years of rising political violence, it will never happen again. That's what happened at the Washington Correspondence dinner. Everybody, oh my goodness, how could there be another assassination attempt against Donald Trump? Well, it's because the book is explaining. These are not abnormal now. We're seeing the normalization of political violence. That includes from the state. And this is why this is important to talk about now. And it's because what we're heading into is really quite a different world and it's a more dangerous world. And you're pointing out some of the warnings that have already come up. But notice how they're not really connecting with the plausible way this could interact with the Iran war here. And by the way, we're not even talking about, I only briefly mentioned, Iran could do something to monkey with this too. Remember back in the summer, the New York Times reported that our government thinks Iran was behind the munkying with that water in Minnesota. So there's Iran can stir the pot here in ways that it's not going to favor us. I guarantee Iran doesn't have our best interest at stake here. And that's why I think it's really important to get the groundwork now to understand what we're really heading into. When it comes to political violence in the past, with the help of hindsight, we often learn that there were actually elements of the government that were involved, either with the people or with the groups that were carrying out that violence. How do you think about the role of the US government setting aside the Iranian government when it comes to stoking this kind of political violence? So there's a chapter in the book that's about ICE and the deadly fracturing of American identity. That goes directly into this, Ryan, it lays out how would you think about it? And what I did is I compared Trump's use of ICE here in, say, Minneapolis to what happened in the 1950s when Eisenhower called out the National Guard for segregation issues in the South. And here's the gigantic difference, Ryan, that's really important to understand. In the 1950s, you had a whole string of Supreme Court cases, Brown versus Board of Education, et cetera, et cetera, that laid the groundwork for the national importance of desegregation in the South. This was not just a partisan issue. This was widely supported across the body politic. Now, of course, not in Alabama, so, for example, but nonetheless, widely supported. And so when Eisenhower is bringing out the National Guard for certain school desegregation issues, this is with a mantle of Supreme Court and Court legitimacy. That's not one case, not two case, a whole string of cases. Here, we have the opposite. We literally have the opposite, as I lay out in the book, because the Supreme Court has ruled against President Trump in cases already involving the use of the National Guard and immigration without the approval of the States, I thought. So this is something that we can actually understand, but we need the time to digest it. If we wait until there's a crisis moment, you can't think in a crisis, Ryan, that's the problem here. We can't think in the hours of a crisis, because the crisis is unfolding right in front of us. So I've been working with political leaders. leaders for decades on trying to prevent, be proactive. All of them, many of them will tell me, for a investor pay, I'll do it. I'll be right there the moment it happens. And you know what, they are there, but they have no time to think. They're reacting, and that is the problem. We need to be more aware so that when we get there, we navigate any of the surprises better. - Well, I don't necessarily mean government violence that stokes blowback. What I'm referring to more is say, like the government involvement in the conspiracy to go after Gretchen Whitmer, for instance, or every time the FBI holds a press conference announcing that they've foiled some terror attack, you read the indictment, and it turns out it was just some mentally disabled Muslim person that the FBI promised to buy weapons for them and convinced them to agree in a text message or at a diner that they would put them. - So I would say Ryan, and then you get the idea normalized among the public that this is a thing that's happening all the time. - Well, I really appreciate that, Ryan. And so let me just say that for decades with Al-Qaeda and ISIS violence, I worked with the FBI directly on with sting operations and ISIS narratives, and so forth. So I have a little bit of understanding of this, not just from sitting from the podium, you know, the ivory tower, and here's what I would say. The real advantage we have is that when that claim comes up, we adjudicate it through the court system, which is extremely transparent. And that can happen across multiple administrations. So people say, well, the wheels of justice it takes too long. Well, one of the advantages of taking long time is you can get a change of administration. So you can get, if you think, that one administration is somehow suppressing evidence, change of administration, that can come out. And what I would say is that there really is a concern, I would say, I mean, I wouldn't say a, you know, 10 out of 10 concern, but I take seriously the Gretchen Whitmer issue, I really do, even though I've worked with those folks with the sting operations, I think that sometimes they can get carried away. What I would say, those, let's go back to January 6th. So the same claims that are often made, here about January 6th. And this is a very, very, very different story. And I would just go back to the fact that we have heard those claims. And all we need to see is now the Trump administration, Department of Justice, provide the actual information that that actually happened, that there is real, real complicity by the FBI. Cash Patel, he is somebody who said that happened before. OK, fine, now you're the director of the FBI, bring it out. Let's see what the evidence is. And so far, that hasn't happened, Ryan. And that tells me there may be no there there. That we have another Epstein-like situation where there's all this discussion, and yet nonetheless, the Trump administration has no evidence to really show us. So I would just simply say, I think we, this is one of the benefits of our great system. I never want our system to go away. I believe we live in the best country in the world. And this is one of the advantages. But this is something we need to protect. We need to take seriously that this is-- and now, if we go forward here, and there really is, even a quarter of the kind of thing I'm worried about, this is going to get very different very quickly. And it's going to, unfortunately, interact with the Iran war, not just go off on its own. So one thing that is different now versus 2020 is that Trump is not on the ballot. In addition, he claims he doesn't really care what happens in the midterms. I don't really believe him, but we can consider-- maybe he's telling the truth about that-- and even in the scenario that you sketch out where there's a possibility of Republicans starting to break with him, which I do think is possible. You also have the Republican Senator from Utah opened an investigation of Don Jr. over this Russian oligarch wedding situation. In any case, even if we accept that there may be some actual Republican breaking with him, Supreme Court has basically given him a get-on-a-jail-free card. He is wildly wealthier to the tune of billions of dollars than he was before he entered the presidency. Do you think that it would matter to him that much at this point if some Republicans in Congress are mad at him, or if they even impeach him, if they even convict him and remove him from office? Would he really care that much given that he's got the money? And he's not going to be going to prison. Well, so I've advised every White House since 2001, so that's Democrat and Republican. And what I can tell you with the White House is what I believe they care about more than anything else is the word legacy, legacy. And you hear Donald Trump, he's upfront about it. Most of them, I don't think they're upfront about it, but they care about their legacy. And what Donald Trump is facing is literally the irreparable destruction of his presidency politically. And that will go down in history. This will be at the very bottom of the totem pole here of American presidents. And in terms of his money, a lot of that money's in crypto crystal. That's going to just go up like a flash. This will be faster than 100 Biden's subpanies go up. I mean, this is really, this is just going to go up and smoke. This isn't real, you see what I mean. And so once Donald Trump loses power, and that's what we're talking about, even though he's still titurally the president here, this is a disaster here. And that will be true for the Trump family. That'll be true for the extensions of the family. That'll be true for everybody in that cabinet. This is not, in 2020, we saw the problems, even though Trump surrounded himself with guardrails. So remember, in 2020, the people around Trump, and this was what Trump complained about afterwards. We're essentially guardrails, crystal. Here, we're going into a system or, I mean, a period of time. Where all those guardrails in the White House and the cabinet, they aren't just gone once. Notice, Pam Bond, he's out. She wouldn't prosecute, gone. And so what you're seeing here is a very different world, fewer guardrails. And in terms of, he'll just have a golden parachute. By the way, crystal, that was exactly what the Democrats promised Biden if he would do the switcher rule and get out. He's going to have the golden parachute. If you go back and look at all that, I think they're still waiting for the money. You see, once you lose power in Washington, you really lose everything. And that's what Trump's-- that's the problem here. It's the escalation trap. It's literally a domestic escalation trap. And look, I hope I improved wrong. I hope the losers-- we had a case in Gore versus Bush in the year 2000, where we had the hanging Chad. The vote was decided in Broward County, Florida by 328 votes, I think. And what happened with Al Gore? He graciously surrendered. And-- I want to pay the price for that among Democrats ever since. But, well, Professor Robert Payfuss, I almost said sender Robert Payfuss. The book is our own-- Thank you for saying it for them. Right. Professor, I did not know you were a fed. We're going to have to take that under advisement as we're working on our schemes and conspiracies around here. So apologies. I'm sorry to say I'm going to work with all parts of the government. DHS, the military, the FBI, the Sheriff's Office, and Cook County, I mean, because I try to be proactive about violence. I mean, well, people have been warned. Yeah, successfully infiltrated our show. Yes, it is. Well, thank you for-- Thank you for doing it. I know it's great. Thank you so much. Our pleasure. Didn't catch the latest Rollin' Martin unfiltered podcast? It's real. Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interests. And they complained about the very thing to receive. It's wrong. Rollin' Martin unfiltered. I went off. Y'all go scream at Chanel. But you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same bag. Catch Rollin' Martin's daily commentary on the black information network. 12 C's, those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 23, you better be hitting the ground, going hard in the south now. And download Rollin' Martin unfiltered on the iHotRadio app, Apple Podcast. So when I traveled to Cuba last March, I had a couple of things that I was trying to accomplish there. One of them was actually, I was trying to land an interview with the Deputy Foreign Minister, Carlos Fernandez-Dacocio, who incidentally was on our page. program the last week or the week before Krystal and I interviewed him, which was interesting, which was like, I'd travel all the way to Cuba to interview him and here he's just coming up into the studio. He shows up. The second thing I wanted to do is I wanted to find out more about the attack that had happened the month before February of this year by a group of 10 Cuban Americans who got on to two boats and tried to invade the island of Cuba and overthrow the government. Some of them were killed by the Cuban coast guard, the other five arrested and so along with Reid Lindsay, who's a reporter with Belly the Beast, which is an American news outlet that has a large presence on the island of Cuba, put in a request with Cuban officials there to be able to interview the people who had survived this attack, which people call the Bay of Pigglets. We've now published this investigation and these interviews in collaboration with Belly of the Beast and also with Miami Newtimes, which is this very cool kind of alt-weekly down in Miami and over at Dropsite News. You put this first element up on the screen inside the armed incursion from Florida intended to topple Cuba's government. I would highly recommend people go and read the entire piece by Reid. Reid ended up carrying out the interviews in Havana, really fascinating piece. But I want to go through some of it here because these are the first interviews that the men have given and we have gotten no answers from the American government about what on earth happened with regard to this attack, which is not the kind of thing you would expect if 10 residents of the United States attacked a foreign government. This is the kind of thing that our FBI, AA, is designed to stop because a lot of the planning was done for this pretty much out in the open. They were pregnant. They were about to do it. But if they did this to Mexico or whatever, you would have an investigation and figure out how did this happen? Who were these people? Who financed them? Who came up with the idea? No, absolutely none of that, so we did it for them, and so bizarrely, or perhaps not bizarrely, this really begins on TikTok. You have this account, La Nueva Cuba, the new Cuba, that was going around and trashing the Cuban government as is typical of a lot of these kind of Miami-based Cuban-American accounts. On TikTok, people would engage with this account. When they would, the person behind it would either reach out to them, DM them on TikTok, or sometimes people who were watching this content would kind of DM the account itself. This is the new Cuba account. Say, great stuff. Love to see this. I also long for a free Cuba one day, so we put up this first quote card, "Cavado's account, La Nueva Cuba, is largely populated with images depicting arm resistance, and an imagined post-communist Cuba, many of them AI generated." Rodriguez messaged "Cavado," "Cavado" messaged him back. The two hit it off, and Rodriguez said that "Cavado invited him to Florida to meet a group of like-minded ex-houses, the guy who's in Nashville, Tennessee, by the way." Rodriguez told us, "They were looking for people who had the courage to join in armed uprising in Cuba." Half a year later, Rodriguez would be in Havana, explaining to a reporter how he wound up in Cuban custody, but unbout in his determination to overthrow the government. From the evening of February 24th, Rodriguez joined at nine other men on a fishing boat full of weapons bound for Cuba from the Florida Keys. They planned to seize a police station, igniting uprising, and prompt U.S. intervention. Quote, "The action plan was simple. Get the Cuban people to rise up in arms, control a province for 72 hours, and ask for a military invention from the U.S. government," and so it did not go the way that they were hoping that it would go. The plan was that they would take these two boats that they had taken from the Keys and kind of slip onto the Cuban island, and then attack a police station. One of the boats, one of which was stolen, broke down along the way, and so all of a sudden you have ten guys piled onto this one boat. Now, it's illegal for American boats to get, you know, this close to Cuba from the United States. It's like, obviously, it's illegal from the Cuban perspective to invade them, but it's also illegal from the American perspective. We were monitoring everything for these drug boats at the time, like the idea that this boat filled with grenades and weapons and ten dudes with the other boat just floating wasn't noticed, is considered to be preposterous by the Cuban government, and I think with some reason. And so Reed also talked to Rodriguez's girlfriend, we can put this second element up here. According to Rodriguez's girlfriend, Yanny Rodriguez, he left their house in Nashville on Friday, January 23rd, telling her he was going to a camp in Florida with some friends. She said he collected magazines about guns and owned two or three firearms, which he took with him. She said he had a full-time job driving a dump truck, hauling dirt, and stone to construction sites, and she expected him to return soon. The operation was a "complete surprise" to her who throws his life away like that, she has. Gentlemen. Not a way to please your ladies with this one. Ultimately, Roel Coveto, a 40-year-old carpenter who runs a home renovation company incorporated in Bradenton, Florida, in addition to this new Cuba corporation registered in the state as a nonprofit, did not join the other men on the boat. So the guy doing the TikTok and the organizing of all this, doesn't get on the boat with them. Reached by phone, Coveto said he was in touch with most of the men through TikTok, but declined to answer questions about his relationship to them, and whether he was involved in the operation. He told us, "I have nothing to say about that. The more you talk, the more your enemy knows about you." Coveto said, overthrowing the Cuban government is "duable" with enough money, but he was critical of the operation. Well, it wasn't the right timing, it wasn't the right organization, it wasn't organized, he said. For something like that, you have to have a planned structure, a plan B, a plan C, and an escape plan. If you don't have that being only 10 people, you're lost. And it's a shame because they were good guys. So at this point, you're like, "What, are this going on here?" So this is the guy who's recruiting these people. So after he recruits them, they trained, this is another way they most, they certainly very easily could have been caught if anybody was actually doing some type of sting operation. If these were Muslim men, for instance, the entire FBI would be down on them because they start doing arms training at a farm, they call it a finca in Florida and near Fort Myers, so we can put it this next element. So in November, they went to a finca or small farm near Fort Myers, Florida, to begin training. Amid the peppers, sugar cane, and farm animals, there was a rustic shooting range. Acosta and the other three detainees interviewed said they were told the finca belonged to Maritza Lugo Fernandez, a Cuban-born political activist who runs an anti-communist organization called the Partido 30-Date November, so the November 30th party, Lugo denied any knowledge of the operation, but confirmed she gave one of the men access to the property. The party traces its roots to the Revolutionary 30th of November movement, an underground anti-caster group that was founded in Cuba in 1960 and later reorganized in Florida after several of the leaders went into exile. In 1991, the exile movement helped establish the party inside Cuba. Lugo was among its founding members and later assumed its leadership after her husband was imprisoned in 1994, she moved to South Florida in 2002 and continued the party's work from exile. So this is kind of a fringe, I mean, these are all fringe things, but this is kind of a fringe, anti-Cuba organization. What people need to understand about this, kind of the anti-communist, anti-Cuba politics down in South Florida is it's very heavily funded by taxpayers. Like the Cuban-American lobby is one of the most effective in Congress, they're like modeled after, they're very deliberately modeled after APAC and APAC kind of coach them into how you take, how you can kind of flex power if you have, and they also not only had a lot of money and a lot of lobbying capacity, but Florida has always been an important state. And they could swing actual significant votes. And so the deal they've cut all of these different presidents at Congress is huge amounts of money going down to Florida basically through pro-democracy programs that then fund all of these operations. Now, we don't have any evidence that those particular dollars leaked out into this particular organization, but that's what props up this money. And when Elon Musk blew up USAID, what did Marco Rubio do? Came in and saved all of the democracy money around Cuba. He loves democracy. So he loves democracy. So we have not gotten rid of these programs. They were basically the only ones that were saved, plus some stuff aimed at Venezuela. But so then let's get to the actual day itself, because we have, from the men, interviews about, or their accounts of what went down. So approximately 7 a.m., a lookout at a Cuban border guard post, which is off of Cuba's northern coast, spotted the boat less than four nautical miles to the northwest, so already the plan has blown up. They were not trying to get caught by the Coast Guard. A radar operator confirmed the sighting and began tracking its course in speed, according to first Colonel eBay, Carter Bioperez, the border guard's chief of staff. Cruz Gomez said they steered the boat toward a small K near shore, hoping to hide until nightfall. But the tide was out and El Tornado ran aground in shallow water. So the Coenbrothers nature of this is all coming to pass. So here they are. They've run aground. They've been spotted by the Coast Guard. So Acosta says almost everyone got out of the boat to try to dislodge it. So now they're trying to push the boat off the mud here and keep going and to add more fuel because we're almost out. That's when we saw a boat coming toward us. We didn't know it was the border guard, so we assumed it was. We got the boat free and everyone got on board. But El Tornado at a maximum speed of 24 knots could not outrun the border guard vessel. Acosta says, "By the time we took off, the Coast Guard boat was almost on top of us. That's when Gomez shouted, "Get ready. They're going to shoot. Look for the magazines." Most of the weapons aboard El Tornado were wrapped in moving blankets and packed inside bags. Acosta said the magazines and the guns were in different bags. The group -- so they're practicing gun safety because they were not expecting this to happen. The group had expected to slip ashore undetected crews in Rodriguez said, "Not fight its way onto the island." Cuban authorities say someone aboard El Tornado fired first, striking the border guard captain in the abdomen. All four men confirmed that the first shot came from their own boat. Rodriguez said, "One of us fired the first shot. I have to admit that." He, in the interviews, was the most critical of Cuban authorities, so you can take him with some serious credibility. He is still committed to overthrowing the government, even though he's in their custody. Rodriguez Cruz and Galindo said they did not know who fired first. Acosta said that Ami Hal Sanchez took the first shot. "Ami Hal grabbed a magazine for the Chinese made a K-47 he had and opened fire on the Coast Guard," he said. That's when a shootout began. I don't know exactly what happened because at that point I got scared and threw myself onto the floor of the boat so I wouldn't get hit by the gunfire. Now you've got a full-on battle going. Cruz says it was only when I managed to pull out a rifle that a bullet hit me, adding that the all-night voyage had left the men physically depleted and slow to react. We had been vomiting from sea sickness, he said. We were wet, cold, and exhausted. It kept us from thinking. It paralyzed us. It wasn't for that. It definitely would have sexed us. Yes, they caught them when they were struggling. Damn, that's the sickness. Acosta said, "At that moment, all I could think to do was put the weapon beside me and lie down in the boat. I got scared." He added, "I always said back at the farm that shooting at a target of Bullseye is not the same as facing people in real life who were shooting back at you." A powerful insight. One that proved correct. The exchange last minutes, according to the survivors and Cuban authorities, Cruz eventually raised an arm to signal surrender. Galindo said, "One of the border guards continued firing until the wounded captain ordered him to stop." Galindo said, "The captain shouted at him, shouted strongly. If the captain had let him continue, he would have killed us all." He says, "Perhaps the idea was somewhat naive because we hadn't prepared for every possible situation," said Cruz. "We weren't prepared to face the border guard," Rodriguez added. We had no training to confront the Cuban border guard. In their minds, what did they think was going to happen here? In their minds, two boats were going to slip ashore. They went to a heavily patrolled part of Cuba, which some people in Florida were like, "This is the worst place. Why would you go there?" The Coast Guard is definitely going to survive here. I like the idea of just some random Cubans in Florida being like, "Yeah, this was all Monday morning quarterbacking the whole thing." What are you doing? They've all thought about it. They were like, "Not there." They were going to slip ashore and then they were going to find a police station, attack it. The attack on the police station is not that different from the actual Bay of Pigs. Then that was going to spark an uprising across the island where people see this is happening now, like it's going down. In fact, this is a helpful quote to that point. We can put up this last quote, "Cruise study still believes in their cause, but they needed more resources to carry out a successful arms struggle." He compared their failed incursion to Fidel Castro's 1956 landing in Cuba aboard the grandma. He said, "I'm convinced that everyone in Cuba wants change. We still have many of the same problems we face in the 1950s and those problems will inevitably give rise to revolutionary movements fighting for a just cause." Rodriguez said he did not regret joining the operation, although he lamented watching his companions die. The suffering, his detention had caused his family and quote, "having failed all those Cubans who want a free Cuba." He said he remained committed to bringing about the end of what he considers a dictatorship, whether it be through military action or the Trump administration's current policy of economic warfare. He said, referring to himself, "If they told me they would send an oil tanker to Cuba in exchange for freeing Jose Manuel, I would rather rot in prison than let a single drop of oil enter this country." That's wild. Cuba so much that he wants all of the people there to suffer. The people are suffering completely differently from the 1950s. There was a mob-run dictatorship basically that ran Cuba. That was overthrown. Now they're suffering from no oil being allowed in. A third of the people don't have running water. The economic situation is absolutely basement level. Four of the five agreed to speak. The fifth and not. Some of them said they regretted it. Others said it was the right thing to do and they're glad that they tried it, but they regret the way they don't unfold it. But yeah, it's your point. They didn't have a much of a plan after taking the police station. Just a faith that people would spontaneously rise up. They'd have to be popular uprising and then the Trump administration would kind of rise into the regime. Exactly. Which is what the CIA thought were the Bay of Pigs that Kennedy would have to come in at that point. The parallels really are very interesting because also the Bay of Pigs was also a total disaster and according to plan from the start and fell apart instantly. Also, the conception of like, oh, for sure this will just spark a popular uprising and then TBD would happen after that and we'll figure it out from there. We don't know what the US government knew about this. It's very hard to believe that they picked up nothing from it unless they're just, let's say, have not a single person inside any of these Cuban movements, which is, I suppose, possible. Other than, I mean, people infiltrating them. They probably have people like working with them, like collectively together with them. But, right, if this is a, if this is a right-wing white nationalist movement or if it's a group of Muslims or if it's a group of ecotericists or whatever, like, "Data center activists." Data center activists. The feds would be all over it. This, they're like, "Let's see how it goes." See how it plays out, you never know. Yeah. Interesting. Great reporting, Ryan. Interesting stuff. All right, that'll do it for us today, right? That'll do it for us today. We've got Friday Show tomorrow. We're actually going to be talking to Nithya Rahman. So, that'll be really interesting. Future mayor of Los Angeles. Looking pretty likely. Major poll just came out that had her up significantly on Karen Bass, who it appears people are just really frustrated and disgusted with her leadership. So, we will look forward to speaking with her and we've got a lot of other great stuff planned as well. So, we will see you then. There should not be a single law enforcement agency. It does not have body cameras. It's real. Black farmers have been under attack. This is just the latest example of them just slapping DEI on anything. It's raw. And I'm sitting here going. They are playing y'all for fools. And download Roland Martin unfiltered on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.