1/21/26: Trump Demands Greenland At Davos, Canada Breaks With US, Market Tank, MN Cops Vs ICE

28:48And now the taxpayer owns all of all of these mortgage backed securities, which, you know, if the economy spins out of control, it means even deeper blot on on our balance sheet. At the same time, this Danish pension fund announced that it was selling off all of its treasuries and put up A12 here, which which contributed to the interest rates going up. This morning, Besant was asked about this at a press conference in Davos. Let me see if I can find his exact quote. It's incredible. Yes. So Besant said, quote, Denmark's investment. in U.S. Treasury bonds, like Denmark itself, is irrelevant. That's like, okay, well, maybe to you because you're like rich AF.

29:43Yeah, I was going to say you're a billionaire. You're not trying to buy a house or sell a house. You're not struggling. You don't care what happens to the American economy. He did just sell his soybean farm. So he sold off his, so he is, he does understand the flight. He found a buyer for the soybean farm. Good for him. He also said, by the way, I don't know if you caught this. He was talking about Gavin Newsom. This is a quote from Scott Bessent this morning. I guess it would be afternoon in Switzerland time. But he said, quote, I think it's very, very ironic that Newsom, who strikes me as Patrick Bateman meets Sparkle Beach Ken, may be the only Californian who knows less about economics than Kamala Harris.

30:21He's here this week with his billionaire sugar daddy, Alex Soros. The White House, as I mentioned, also proceeded on its rapid response Twitter account to say that Newsom, they posted a picture of him watching Trump's speech in the back of the room, was in the cuck corner chair. Amazing. My boy, Winter. So Besant, who is telling you that, you know, Denmark's purchase of treasuries is completely irrelevant. at A5, he also delivered another nice little Marie Antoinette moment. Let's roll this A5 side. We are going to give guidance at some point to see what is a mom and pop that someone, maybe your parents for their retirement, about five, 10, 12 homes.

31:10So we don't want to push the mom and pops out. We just want to push everyone else out. So even when Trump is doing something populist and cool, which is he's trying to push investors out of the home buying market, like BlackRock and these others that are coming in and trying to buy up all these homes. They're like, well, how are you going to define this? Besson says, well, you know, your parents might own five, 10, 12 homes. They might. They might. You don't want to push them out of the market. That's just a mom and pop buying 12 homes for your retirement. Yeah. Wait, now your parents are responsible for their kids' retirement?

31:45It's one thing like high school, college to some extent. Retirement? Well, I think my assumption on that is what they mean is the Gen X and millennials who are about to inherit property from boomers. That would be a retirement nest egg because they don't own property. And so if your retirement is tied up in a house, not necessarily great financial planning, but I assume that's what he was referring to. So if you do own 5, 10 or 12 houses. Yeah, mom and pop. Then you're going to be taken care of by Besant. Let's also roll A14. Another cabinet member, Brooke Rollins, was criticized for telling people they can totally survive just fine on a couple dollars a day.

32:28She went back to it, said she did a bunch of modeling and stands by it. Let's roll A14 here. We had run almost a thousand simulations. And between$3 and$4 is a fair number if you can have access to that food. So just about an hour ago, I saw new numbers that were run. A full day, meaning three full square meals and a snack is about$15.64. $15.64. That's all three meals and a snack. And a snack. And a snack. I mean, it's true. Like, if you go to Costco and you got the massive bag of rice. Totally. Now, I don't know who's going to pay the Costco membership because that's practically a dollar a day just for that.

33:11and you just ate rice for three meals a day. Yeah. And your snack would be the free samples in Costco. But yeah, it doesn't work because you have to pay the membership. Meanwhile, she just cut a bunch of food stamps. So making it even more difficult. So yeah, she wants to make sure that people, the government, the administration wants to make sure people who own 12 houses aren't unfairly penalized by their rulemaking. But as long as you have 15 bucks, then you can get three meals a day and a snack. What on earth kind of government is this? It's an interesting midterm strategy. Let's roll. See how this works for them.

34:00Yeah, exactly. So CNBC has the markets rebounding today. I mean, you can see that, But they say they connected to Trump telling everyone at Davos that, quote, he would not use force to acquire Greenland, easing a concern that has rattled markets and caused a flight from dollar based assets. Ray Dalio raised some eyebrows with these comments from Davos that we wanted to roll for everyone. Obviously, Dalio of Bridgewater. This is it's sort of similar to the Carney clip that it's an interesting you use the word seminal. I think that's a good word for what Carney said. Here's Ray Dalio kind of reacting to what's happened in the last week or so, maybe even just the last 48 hours.

34:46The headline is going to be that the and this is the one that CNBC used, quote, the monetary order is breaking down. Let's roll the clip. Let's step back from the sensational and be clear about what I mean. the monetary order is breaking down. Okay. What I mean by the monetary order is that fiat currencies and debt as a storehold of wealth is not being held by central banks in the same way. And that there was a change. The biggest market to move last year was the gold market, far better than the tech markets and so on. And the U.S. markets underperformed foreign markets because of the fact you could see it in the numbers of the central banks and so on.

35:36So let's just look at the fact that on the other side of trade deficits and trade wars, there are capital and capital wars. And so as we're looking at that, and you reported what the stock market and so on, but you didn't report that the gold market is also up three. We did say that earlier this morning. It's up to record levels again. And it's over. As you look at what is happening and why it's happening and who's buying it. So let's just take a moment on that capital war issue. Okay. We know that both the holders of U.S. dollar denominated debt, which is money, and those who need it, the United States, are worried about each other.

36:24Right. So if you have other countries who are holding it and they're worried about each other and we're producing a lot of it, that's a big issue. So you have to explain what is going on with fiat currencies, generally speaking. And now if you take the conflicts, you can't ignore the possibility that capital wars, in other words, maybe there's not the same inclination to buy U.S. debt and so on. We at least need to talk about those possibilities and find out who is buying and selling what that is behind these market movements. Ryan, that's basically what you were saying. Yeah. I mean, so we're entering.

37:09It's going to be, what's the Chinese proverb? May you live in interesting times. Yes. We're getting that. These are going to be interesting times. This, again, the U.S. chose the time of this fight. And I am quite skeptical that we are prepared for it. I just want to say these people all suck. I mean, they all suck. Everyone sucks. Every part of this sucks. And it's the reason they don't have the moral. I'm sorry, I just don't, I can't give moral high ground to Mark Carney and Gavin Newsom on this or to a lot of Trump's critics on this. I don't think anybody has the moral high ground because the reason we know this, but the reason Donald Trump is president of the United States, again, is that the system is not working.

37:57This is not working for average Americans. If you ask people in Canada, they'd probably tell you the same thing. Yes, people in the UK, that's how the system isn't working for average Brits. It's all broken. And they fucking broke it. These people broke it. And now they're the one. Welcome to the A-Building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. have both been assassinated. And Black America is at a breaking point. Rioting and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale. In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's alma mater, Morehouse College, The students had their own protest.

38:33It featured two prominent figures in black history, Martin Luther King Sr. and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson. To be in what we really thought was a revolution, I mean, people were dying. 1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone. The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should, and it will blow your mind. Listen to The A Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Seems like just yesterday that the Two Guys Five Rings podcast was in Paris for the Olympics.

39:18And now we're heading to Milan for the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympic Winter Games. I'm Bowen Yang. And I'm Matt Rogers, and we'll join athletes from 93 countries as Two Guys Five Rings hits the Italian Alps for the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympic Winter Games. Open your free iHeartRadio app. Did we mention it's free? Search Two Guys Five Rings and listen now. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings.

39:56Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, aka Neuro Linguistic Programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. It's about engineering consciousness. Mind Games is the story of NLP. It's crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a New Age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all?

40:36NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. ...to trust them to fix it, and we don't really have any other option. Yeah, I started in politics fighting against globalization in the late 1990s, early 2000s. I didn't know that Donald Trump would be the ally that would take us into the castle and deliver us this victory. Yes, it tastes so sweet, doesn't it? It sure does. Yeah. Disaster, disaster. When we, I mean, every Davos feels the same. It feels like the exact same thing. But this one will probably, if you're looking for turning point moments in the history of Davos, to the extent we'll remember this one as something on its own, it's probably as.

41:23I think Carney is right and Trump would probably agree with him that this is a moment of rupture and that this is a, we've entered a new era, which we probably arguably entered in 2016, but maybe not to your point that Trump didn't have the same power and will that he seems to have now. Yeah. And the opponents of globalization were arguing that the chief problems with it was it was driving down wages for people all over the world, like the race to the bottom when it came, when it came to breaking unions hurt the workers in third world countries. And then it also hurt the middle class back in the United States.

42:02It was undermining democracy and sovereignty that these globalized institutions were unaccountable to regular people. And also it was destroying the planet on which we rest. So I'm not so sure that Trump holds any of those values, whether it comes to dignity for workers, sovereignty for countries, or respect for the planet. So Trump may have defeated globalization, but what replaces it could be a much darker set of forces. We'll be covering all of it in the near future. Let's turn to Donald Trump marking his first year back in office and take a look at the polling. we mentioned this earlier but donald trump gave a ryan was referring to it as a longing because it's not it wasn't a briefing it was a longing at the white house yesterday i was there for this donald trump uh announced at the last minute the white house announced at the last minute that he would be joining the press briefing that day and let's just say it was all donald trump for what like two hours it went on forever uh he was reading off a list of 365 accomplishments that the White House handed out to reporters ahead of time, a stapled kind of packet of 365 accomplishments for 365 days.

43:20Obviously, Trump was there to mark his one-year anniversary back in office. It was January 20th, so it was exactly a year to the day since his second inauguration. And friend of the show, Philip Wegman, from Real Clear Politics got this question in. Let's take a listen. You promised during your second inaugural to always put America first. I'm curious, How would you, winning the Nobel Peace Prize, improve the lives of average, everyday Americans? Why is this prize so important? It wouldn't improve the lives of any—what improved the lives of people are people that are living. I saved probably tens of millions of lives in the wars.

43:59You know, if you add up the numbers, just if you look at any one of those wars, you're talking about millions of people. You multiply it times eight. But when you look at India and Pakistan, that could have been 10, 15, 20 million people. Could have been more than that. So I saved millions of people. So that, to me, is the big thing. So that question comes amidst polling. We can put the CNBC or this NBC News tear sheet up on the screen that shows Donald Trump actually struggling on marks from voters when it comes to the economy. So just reading a little bit from this report, quote, Trump closed out his first term in 2020 with majorities approving of how he handled the economy, even as he went on to lose that election to Biden.

44:40But they continue to say during the first few months of Trump's current term, his approval rating on the economy hovered in the mid 40s, though it has since dropped several points. This piece notes an AP at NORC survey conducted January 8th through 11th found 37 % of Americans approve of how Trump is handling the economy, while a Reuters Ipso survey conducted January 12 through 13, found his economic approval rating at 34%, while 30 % approved of his handling of inflation. The Wall Street Journal found those ratings slightly higher, 44 % approval on the economy and 41 % on inflation and rising prices.

45:14I wouldn't even call that slightly higher. That's a pretty big difference between the journal, which is saying 44 % approval on the economy and 34 % from Reuters, 37 % from AP. That's a pretty big gap. It seems like the journal poll might be the outlier on that, Ryan. It's where Republicans think he's most vulnerable, where they think they're most vulnerable going into the midterm cycle is that, again, he's out at Davos today. He's talking about Greenland. He's talking about Canada. And they are begging the White House to focus on, quote, affordability, which Trump, what does he call it now? A hoax?

45:48A hoax, yeah. They're begging. They're doing everything they can to try to get the White House's attention on the economy. And that's actually why Trump is going to Davos. He was supposed to be giving a big speech on the economy, but now it's going to be heavily dominated by Greenland, the big picture, abstract question of hegemony and war. And we're going to talk about this in the next segment, but the assault on Greenland is hurting the American economy. It is the thing that combined with trying to prosecute the Fed chair that is driving the stock market sell-off and driving mortgage rates up, driving interest rates up, driving uncertainty in the economy.

46:27We'll show some charts so we can get into that later. So it's not just that people are hurting and he's refusing to focus on the economic pain that they're feeling and trying to make it better. It's not just that. It's that the adventures that he's having around the world are making it even worse. So the whole thing feeds into itself. And then all day long, we're like, you know bracing for the next um human rights abuse to come out of minneapolis or now now they're in um portland and lewiston maine because that's what the whole country was demanding that we do it you know send ice into maine to start rounding people up and so we're just expecting to see like people getting dragged out of their cars a woman shot in minneapolis like instead of what he said he was going to do when he was elected which is get prices down That's what he said he was going to do.

47:24Well, actually, on that note, let's put these immigration poll numbers up on the screen before. This is to the point that Ryan was just making more from this NBC report. They say Trump's aggressive promises on immigration and border security were a centerpiece of his campaign, too. But Americans brought ratings on his handling of immigration in particular have declined since he took office. Polling last month from Fox and AP Nork still found Trump with a slim majority approval rating on border security. But he fares worse when respondents are asked about immigration as a separate issue. And Ryan, to those of us who follow this and probably a lot of our listeners and viewers, what is happening in Minneapolis and cities around the country in the Trump administration's immigration crackdown is not exactly surprising.

48:12I mean, I'm not surprised at all by what we're seeing. But if you heard Donald Trump out on the campaign trail talking about mass deportations and just returning to some border security and the other option is Kamala Harris and immigration is something you care about, it might not have been obvious that his approach, the immigration issue, was going to look like this. Exactly. That it was going to be. And so I think, you know, to the extent that he's struggling on this, here's NBC News writes, quote, Trump's approval on immigration across a handful of polls conducted by CBS, YouGov, Fox News, and Quinnipiac in the final month of 2025 came in around the mid-40s, so higher than the economy, while the Wall Street Journal poll came in at 48 percent, higher again.

49:03An early January polling from CNN and AP North conducted largely after an ICE officer fatally shot a woman in Minneapolis found Trump's approval ratings on immigration at 42 % and 38 % respectively. But he was hanging over that 50 % mark a lot of points during the year prior. And so it's a little bit of a slump right now for him. And I wonder if that's the explanation that there's a expectation versus reality gap of people being uncomfortable with what the enforcement level looks like from the Trump administration. Yeah. And I think this is one of those like shocking versus surprising things. And because I had the privilege of getting to be on this show, I was getting my news about what Trump was going to do from, you know, you and Sagar.

49:46And so not surprised. And, you know, I watch his rallies and he talks a lot about immigration. And so I'm not surprised that he's doing this crackdown. The way that they're carrying out is still shocking, even if you expect it to come. Like just to see these thugs roaming American streets, behaving the way they are, is just shocking to the American conscience. This papers please mentality being brought from Germany over to the United States and being foisted on lots of American citizens. It's just shocking. So it makes sense, though, when people say, well, I approve of his handling of the border because like the border is like secure.

50:31Sure, like we're not seeing like the waves of people come across like we did in the Biden administration, but immigration overall, this thing where you've got these masked ICE agents thoroughly disrespecting the Bill of Rights, the thing that, you know, the right even itself was warning about for decades. So we're going to have these armed federal agents that are going to go around asking you for your papers and disrespecting your civil liberties like that. That combined with the you can't you can't buy a home. Prices aren't coming down. You know, like that, I think, is contributing to his like extraordinary unpopularity.

51:11So speaking of ICE in particular, NBC notes that, quote, polling from Quinnipiac found 57 % of registered voters disapproved of how ICE is enforcing immigration laws broadly. So that's a higher number than when you're asking about Trump. And CNN found that 51 % of adults said ICE enforcement is making American cities less safe, while 31 % said the enforcement is making cities safer. So pretty hard to get a plus 20 on any contentious issue in the United States. Well, and I'll actually add in a country that is fairly supportive, both of legal immigration, but also enforcement, right, is supportive in the abstract, at least, of mass deportations.

51:52That actually I think is one of the things that media folks in D.C. were surprised over the last year or two, especially during the campaign season. You'll remember this to see showing up in polls a majority of Americans saying, yeah, mass deportations. We do support mass deportations. Not surprising if you look at the numbers of the largest surge in immigration since Ellis Island, as David Leonhardt wrote at The New York Times, that you're going to get a response like that from the public. But to see to when you ask about ICE in particular, this was a January poll, too. It wasn't a December poll.

52:26So January, as all of this is going on January 13th, that's a question that Republicans in purple districts and those are the ones that are on the bubble of some of them, even if they're going to run again. But those are the those are the Republicans that are going to get a whole lot of questions about this sort of thing. And to the point, I mean, I was watching Trump's interview with Katie Pavlich on News Nation last night. He said he wants to be remembered as a great president. That's if you have already 57 percent of voters saying they disapprove of how ICE is enforcing immigration laws, you're leaning into that.

53:00That's definitely legacy stuff. Yeah, and that's without, and I've talked about this before, that's without a serious external crisis hitting him. You could, you know, the California fires kind of started before he was president. I wouldn't even count those, right? We're about to get an ice storm all across the southeast, which could be like basically the first major external crisis hitting him. He hasn't really had, if you go through the history of the presidents, you get like, you know, George W. Bush, you got Katrina or 9-11. These external shocks that kind of you then either have, you respond to them and you are heralded for your response or you break in the face of them.

53:48or it exposes some of the problems that are inherent in your approach to the presidency. He hasn't had any of that. He's had stable prices. He's had an unemployment rate that was declining coming in. a fairly strong economy that by just giving body blow after body blow to it with his tariffs are on tariffs are off i'm prosecuting the fed i'm doing this like he has like single-handedly rattled a decent economy but otherwise there hasn't like the only external shock has been trump himself and you know we'll see how the ice storm unfolds, maybe that will end up being, you know, catastrophic enough to get his attention, but probably not.

54:43We have actually his foreign policy numbers as well. We can put B5 up on the screen. This is more from that NBC report, which just took a look at all of the recent polling. It's a very helpful thing to do as we hit the one year mark. Overall, quote, his approval rating on foreign policy has hovered around 40 percent in recent polling, a slight decline from the mid 40s at the start of his term. More broadly, a late October NBC News poll found that 53 % of registered voters said his administration has fallen short of their expectations on foreign policy. Well, 44 % said it's lived up to expectations.

55:14And a new CNN poll found that 57 % of adults think that Trump's foreign policy decisions have hurt America's standing in the world, while 31 % said they've helped. Now, Ryan, I remember a lot in the first Trump term, polling going one direction, media narratives going in one direction, Russia being a good example, immigration actually being another really good example. This feels very similar to what happened when the kids in cages narrative exploded. That was like the summer of 2017, 2018, somewhere around there. 18, yeah. And what ends up happening, or at least what ended up happening then, obviously his term ended with COVID.

55:53But his approval ratings before COVID hit, the economy was pretty strong. His approval ratings were okay. And it shouldn't be taken as licensed by Democrats to go back. And it's interesting because you're seeing the whole abolish ICE and you and I disagree on this, but you're seeing Zohan Mamdani, we have this later in the show, him talking about abolish ICE. And it's not just about immigration. It's about issues across the board. He benefits a lot from the reaction from Democrats. It's not, this polling isn't an approval rating. Like disapproving with Trump doesn't, disapproving of Trump doesn't equate to approving of a particular Dem policy or a particular reaction.

56:33We'll see. It might end up being different this time because in 2018, there was kids in cages and the kids were not being, kids were being treated terribly. And there was this child separation policy that was new. Obama had put families in cages. He hadn't had it, didn't have a child separation policy and we hit Obama for it. So don't get out of here with your hypocrisy. The media at large, I would say, did not. Right, exactly. Media at large, that's fine. Ryan Grimm. Yes, but me? You can always count on this guy. And, you know, Huffington Post, we worked with some Breitbart reporters at the time.

57:09Yes. Because Breitbart, at the time, not a fan of the way that migrants were being treated down on the border. They've kind of dropped some of that coverage since then. But so at the time, the abolish ICE movement was a kind of way to try to take Trump's entire immigration policy and symbolize it into the entity of ICE. Yeah. And then focus your ire on ICE. Right. Today, when they say abolish ICE, they mean it quite literally, that it is a rogue agency whose agents are doing terrible things on the streets, and it needs to be broken up, and it's enforcement mechanisms distributed to agencies that are not rogue.

57:56So it's gone from symbolic to literal. And now when you poll, should you abolish ICE to American people, it's very close, and it's within the margin of error. It's gone up. There's a plurality, at least, that say, yes, actually abolish ICE. And Democrats, it's increasing with Democrats as well. But this is sort of exactly, it's a majority of Democrats. But this is exactly kind of what I was remembering back from Trump 1, is that it's similar to mass deportations. So you say you want mass deportations, and then here's what mass deportations look like in practice from the Trump administration. And people start disapproving of this handling of immigration.

58:35And then if you're at Dems, you say, OK, we have support from our party. There's a plurality of Americans for abolish ICE. Here's what abolish ICE looks like in practice. Or here's what, from the first term, we have support for ending Trump's cruel and humane immigration policy. And here's what it looks like in practice. It looks like the Biden administration immigration policy. That's all I was saying is that the tug of war there is it's not – and I know Dems are kind of coping with that right now and Third Way is out there upset about the hashtag abolish ICE. But the politics and the policy are obviously sometimes separate.

59:15A key difference here, Trump and ICE have lost the cops in Minnesota. Like, sit down, buckle up, because this is an utterly striking press conference from police chiefs in Minnesota telling ICE, well, listen to them. Yeah, let's get to this. Recently, as the last two weeks, we as law enforcement community have been receiving endless complaints about civil rights violations in our streets from U.S. citizens. What we're hearing is they're being stopped in traffic stops or on the street with no cause and being forced to demand paperwork to determine if they are here legally. as this went on over the past two weeks we started hearing from our police officers the same complaints as they fell victim to this while off duty every one of these individuals is a person of color who has had this happen to them in brooklyn park one particular officer that shared her story with me was stopped as she passed ice going down the roadway When they boxed her in, they demanded her paperwork, of which she's a U.S.

1:00:36citizen and clearly would not have any paperwork. When she became concerned about the rhetoric and the way she was being treated, she pulled out her phone. In an attempt to record the incident, the phone was knocked out of her hands, preventing her from recording it. The officer had their guns drawn during this interaction. and after the officer became so concerned they were forced to identify themselves as a Brooklyn Park police officer in hopes of slowing the incident and de-escalating the incident down. The agents then immediately left after hearing this making no other comments, no other apologies, just got in their vehicles and left.

1:01:14I wish I could tell you that this was an isolated incident. In fact many of the chiefs standing behind me have similar incidents with their off-duty officers. If it is happening to our officers, it pains me to think how many of our community members are falling victim to this every day. And that last line, I think it's really important. That police chief found empathy with the citizens and the everyday people of the area. He said, imagine if it's happening to us, to cops, God only knows what they're doing to regular people. Well, we do know because people like Will Stancil and so many others are out there filming it and letting us know.

1:01:59Okay, you said people like Will Stancil. So to be clear, this is three law enforcement officers. You saw them on your screen. This is the chief of the Brooklyn Park Police Department, the St. Paul police chief, and then also the Hennepin County sheriff. Welcome to the A-Building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. have both been assassinated. And Black America is at a breaking point. Rioting and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale. In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's alma mater, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in black history, Martin Luther King Sr.

1:02:40and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson. To be in what we really thought was a revolution, I mean, people were dying. 1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone. The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should. and it will blow your mind. Listen to The A Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It seems like just yesterday that the Two Guys Five Rings podcast was in Paris for the Olympics. And now we're heading to Milan for the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympic Winter Games.

1:03:25I'm Bowen Yang. And I'm Matt Rogers. And we'll join athletes from 93 countries as Two Guys Five Rings hits the Italian Alps for the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympic Winter Games. Open your free iHeartRadio app. Did we mention it's free? Search Two Guys Five Rings and listen now. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused.

1:04:04Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, aka Neuro Linguistic Programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. It's about engineering consciousness. Mind Games is the story of NLP. its crazy cast of disciples, and the fake doctor who invented it at a New Age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all? NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:04:48That's who you saw on the screen just now, and that's who you were listening to. Those are big dogs in that area. Absolutely. This is, you know, you heard this quote, if it is happening to our officers, it pains me to think of how many of our community members are falling victim to this every day. It has to stop. And they go on at one point to say that they don't even necessarily want ICE gone out of the city. They just want to find, I think the quote is common ground. Yeah, exactly. They started that press conference. We didn't play this part. They started by saying, we're all for what ICE is doing.

1:05:21We have had respectful, collaborative working relationships with ICE in the past. Although that's tougher if you're the Hennepin County Sheriff. Yeah, so there are sanctuary policies that prevent them from turning over nonviolent, undocumented people to ICE. But they're allowed to work together with violent criminals who are undocumented. at it. And whatever you want to say, like these are, these are cops who are saying that like we, look, we have a lot of respect for ICE. We're not against the idea of immigration enforcement, but there's a way to go about it and there's a way not to go about it.

1:06:01And you're doing the, not the way to go about it. Watching ICE go around brutalizing people on an hourly basis has done more to, I think, lift the public opinion of local police forces than anything in decades. People are like, oh, wow, like, okay, I'm not going to be out of here marching for our police. But they're downright civilized. It creates a contrast. Yes, like, wow, it turns out it can be a lot worse. So let's look at Pramila Jayapal, who says, posted this Washington Post article, quote, two men in ICE detention say they saw guards kill a fellow detainee. Now the Trump administration is trying to deport the witnesses.

1:06:43This looks a lot like a cover up. We need an independent investigation now. That's from Representative Jayapal. The piece is from The Washington Post. Ryan, it's an interesting story from The Post. The allegations are that Geraldo Lunas Campos at this— This is the guy we covered last week. Yeah, and what's this detention facility? East Montana. In El Paso, in Fort Bliss. It's not actually in Montana. Right. But that he, quote, I'm reading this, was engaged in a struggle with guards before his death. Flores, so this is Santos Jesus Flores, who is one of the witnesses Jayapal is referring to in her post on Acts, quote, claim peace dog guards choking Lunas Campos to death.

1:07:26The story is interesting. That sounds impossible because according to DHS, he was trying to commit suicide. Right, that's what they, that's what they claim. And the DHS officers intervened to try to save his life. Unfortunately, they were unsuccessful and he committed suicide. So it couldn't be that there are witnesses that are telling a different story than DHS because DHS, whatever you want to say about them, they are at least honest narrators of their own actions, right? And one interesting point here is— That's sarcasm, by the way. One interesting point is the witnesses are saying he was claiming he needed medication, says he has asthma, but his family doesn't seem to know that he has asthma or doesn't seem to believe that he has asthma.

1:08:10But where this gets really tough for ICE is that a preliminary autopsy came back and said that he died by strangulation. So that's where it's going to get. For ICE, that's a pretty devastating. So this is on to the post. An employee of El Paso County's Office of the Medical Examiner had said in a recorded phone call that the office is likely to classify Lunas Campos death as a homicide subject to the results of a toxicology report. The employee said a doctor there is, quote, listing the preliminary cause of death as asphyxia due to neck and chest compression, which means Lunas Campos did not get enough oxygen because of pressure on his neck and chest.

1:08:50So if that holds, that's devastating for the ICE narrative. And yes, and fortunately for the country, we don't have to like sit around and figure out how to create a system to adjudicate situations like this. We have one. We charge people with crimes. We put them in front of a jury of peers. You have witnesses who testify to what they saw. You have toxicologists and you have other doctors testify as to what they've seen. The people charged can testify in their own defense if they wish or they have Fifth Amendment right not to. And because we care so much about this system, we even created a thing called a U-visa, which if you are a witness to a crime in an ongoing investigation, you are entitled to what's called a U-visa.

1:09:47And it's straightforward. Like if all you need is the certification from prosecutors that you're a witness to a crime and you get a temporary U-visa, which means you cannot be deported until the trial plays out. how is any of this complicated? Like, you cannot deport the witness who contradicts your claim that you did not kill this person. Like, that is the most basic level of our justice system and approach to these cases. So we can put the next element up on the screen. This is from Popular Information, Judd Legum. ICE has stopped paying for detainee medical treatment. Legum is... Yeah, Legum is reporting, quote, ICE halted payments in October, and the situation will persist for at least several more months.

1:10:37What do you make of this report, Ryan? They have, and we've talked about this in the past, more money in their budget than they will ever be able to spend. They cannot hire enough people and buy enough equipment to spend the amount of money that has been appropriated to them. ICE's budget is greater than all but like five militaries in the world or something like that. That's how much money they have. this is not about not having the money to pay your third-party medical providers. This is about immiserating and, in some cases, killing the people that are in your custody. There's no other way to see this.

1:11:25So this is from, like he said, ISIS failure to pay its bills for months has caused some medical providers to deny services to ICE detainees. So that's it's not just a matter of the payments haven't been made. It's that the payments are being made to Ryan's point. Quote, administration source who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press, told popular information this bit. And quote, in other cases, legum rights, detainees have allegedly been denied essential medical care by ICE. Yeah, I mean, that's a I haven't seen this report elsewhere. I will expect this to get picked up and not just on you know, sub-stacks, but like you would expect this to be on NBC and ABC, Raw posts.

1:12:10Yeah, it could get as well sourced there. They could maybe get this. And hey, if they've paid the bills, you know, post the invoice. That's not the risk of a sub-stack at all, by the way, either. That's just to say that I was trying to say that it's the momentum builds and it becomes a point where... No shade here. Actually, speaking of shade, in the shade, of media reports, you can kind of get away with funny business like that. No, for sure. So that's, I would expect that to become probably more of an issue for ICE. Although when you have alleged illegal immigrants detained, then it's not a particularly sympathetic group.

1:12:50It's just like the entire conversation about prisoners not being entirely sympathetic. It's politically not a huge winner for Democrats to make a big deal of ICE detainees. It's, you know, obviously a human rights issue, but it's not politically going to be a big winner. So maybe it doesn't end up ever getting that momentum. They say these payments can't be processed until April. That's what it says on the website until April 30th, 2026. Until then, like I'm right, medical providers are instructed to hold all claims submissions. Insane. One man that is standing up this and I feel no sympathy for ICE because ICE, Knew ahead of time, they have an entire intelligence arm that Will Stansel was in Minneapolis.

1:13:35If there's one thing everyone on the internet knows is that Will Stansel is in Minneapolis. And ICE decided to make their stand in Minneapolis anyway. Despite the presence of Will Stansel is what you're saying. And look what they're getting. Somebody posted footage the other day of ICE was grabbing somebody. They're like, wait a minute, is that Will Stansel right in the back? There he was, right next to the cop. He's been posting some footage, too, from his Honda Fit. He's on the case. What he's doing, and we can roll this. I don't know. Well, I think it's a side. Let's roll this, and then we can explain what he's doing.

1:14:15Here's the great Will Stansel. I've got six cars in Conway behind me, so who knows what's about to happen here. Keep going, buddy. It's my home. Get out.

1:14:31I won't do that. I'm following you have a constitutional right. I know you know where I live. I don't care. You go home. Where are you from?

1:14:43You arrest me for following. You may as well just do it because I'm going to keep doing it. I have a right to do this or I don't. If I don't, you should arrest me right now. And if I do, stop doing this weird crap. So if you don't kind of live in the bowels of the internet, Will Stansel is a liberal who first rose to kind of Twitter prominence fighting with leftists like yours truly. He attacked me constantly. He then started going after these white nationalists and driving them as completely insane as he drove the left insane earlier. then the right made an AI I forgot about that there's a series out there I watched one or two episodes they're fairly well done just as a piece of entertainment, shockingly it's like the first AI created series with Will Stansel as the mock superhero character couldn't have happened to a better guy he ran for State House I think I think Minnesota lost, regrettably.

1:15:58But whatever you can say about him, he's not, you can't say he doesn't put his money where his mouth is. He has been relentlessly tracking ICE around the city. And what he has said is that the reason it's so important to do this is not just to make a scene, but that when ICE grabs somebody, what he said, so he follows them all day long. So he has like a view of not just what they do when the crowd's around, but when the crowds are not around. What they do is they, he says, they look for people with darker skin who are by themselves. They pull over, grab them, and put them in the van, like in a matter of seconds.

1:16:38And then they figure out from there, at that point, is this person a citizen? Are they not? Did we arrest the wrong person? And so what Will said he and the other activists are doing is before they get the guy into the van, they'll shout, or the woman, what is your name? Who are you? And if you don't get their name, according to Will, then they're just gone. Like they are just into the system. And wherever they were going, the people are like, where's Steve? Like Steve said he'd be here by five. He's not here. Call the hospitals. Call the police. Nothing. There's no calling ICE and finding out.

1:17:22Like it's going to take you. If you. For a lot of these people. They are deported. Before you even figure out. You know where they went. And so from Will's perspective. It's so important to follow them around. Just to like. Because if you don't catch that name. The person just disappears. And so despite all our beef in the past, critical support to Will, he's, you know, he's really, he's laying, he's laying on the line. So good for him. There's nothing more American to me than like exercising your rights in the most obnoxious way possible. That is, that is truly American. The background that you gave is actually, I think, helpful to the context here, which is that Stansel rose to prominence on the online left or in the sphere of the online left because he was going after the left.

1:18:14And here you have Will Stansel himself in a car honking, doing the ice watch. That, I think, is in and of itself a statement on where the left is going towards. Right. And he would say there's he would say that there's nothing contradictory or inconsistent about that, that that he believes in a robust liberalism that is anti-fascist, that stands up for all of the rights of the Constitution. and that the left is sometimes not even supportive of some of those rights that are in the Constitution and also they're an electoral liability because nobody likes them and you can lump the Democratic Party in with the far left and it hurts them.

1:18:56That's his view on this. But he has hated the right and what it stands for passionately ever since I've known him. he just kind of thought the left was an obstacle to him fighting the right. But yeah, here he is. Man. A man of the people. A man of the people. In his Honda Fit, ripping around Minneapolis. Ripping around. He's not letting these guys get away. So we can put the next element up on the screen. This is a New York Times report from Miami, finding that a record number of Cubans have been deported, Cubans in Florida have been deported. Quote, to their shock, Cubans in Florida are being deported in record numbers.

1:19:42Now, to be fair, the repatriation under Donald Trump is like 1 ,600 Cubans. That's according to the Cuban government in 2025. But even that 1 ,600 number is, quote, double the number of Cubans who were repatriated in 2024. There was a big wave of Cubans going through, like flying to Venezuela, going up through the Darien Gap, up through Mexico. I talked to a couple of them who had done this after the July protests. And some would fly to just Nicaragua. Yep. Yeah. After the July, what was the July 11th protest, 2021? Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. So getting on flights, it costs a ton of money. If I'm remembering correctly, one of the people I talked to said it was like 11 grand for the whole thing.

1:20:26And not a luxurious trip at all. It was like 11 grand to make your way through the Darien Gap and sit at the border in shelters for months just hoping you could get in. But that's where for Republicans, traditionally, it's been you could just touch American soil. If you're Cuban, yeah. And Venezuelan for that matter. Yeah, and Venezuelan. But that's different now. Now, there was, again, a big, big, big wave of Cuban and Venezuela immigration, especially Cubans after 2021. So that's what this is in reaction to. But definitely a changed time right now for immigration policy. And none of this had to happen.

1:21:07Like Obama normalized relations with Cuba in 2015. Like we could have just left it at that. Obama was like, OK, we've been doing this 50-year embargo. Like enough. Like, what are we going to do? We're not threatened by Cuba. They're not going to invade us. The Cuban government could have also not beaten people in the streets in 2021. One of the people I talked to had, she showed me a scar. The American government could not beat people in the streets today. I mean, that doesn't have anything to do with, yes, both true, yes. But right, like, there's also a relationship between sanctions and embargo and liberalization.

1:21:42Yeah, I agree. The more pressure you put on a government, the less room they have to engage in political reforms. That doesn't justify the crackdown, but it's a factor in it. Yeah, I don't disagree. If you want, and the same is true with like liberalizing and opening up markets more in Cuba, you know, that would probably, that would create some problems with people who are getting supports in the first couple of weeks, maybe even months. And so you need some political cushion in order to pull off those reforms. But if you don't have any political cushion, you're just going to keep the same sclerotic system going forever.

1:22:23So as soon as Trump came in, he reinstituted sanctions, an embargo. Biden was awful on it. And Trump has been even worse since then. And you've had something like a third of the population leave in just like five years or so. like if you look at there was um uh there were some protests after maduro's ouster if you looked at footage of the crowds very few have been young people in the crowd anybody in their 20s 30s uh late teens has that can and that's you know and they're allowed you're allowed to leave so they just leave um and so they and only maybe 10 15 percent have come to the u.s like they're flooding South America, South America, Central America as well.

1:23:16Yeah. To the point where there's a similar discourse on immigration in places like Chile and other South American countries. Yeah. Yeah. And Columbia is stacked in Venezuela too. Right. Yes. And it didn't have to happen. Like, and we can talk about Iran too. Like we had the nuclear deal. Like, what are we doing? Why are we doing all this? What are we doing this for? Let's take a look here at C6. This is a 60 minutes report. Speaking of DHS and its accuracy. Yeah, let's go ahead and roll this. It's right in the after show, not the real show. So this is, yeah, so I'll just read the tweet before I roll the video.

1:23:5260 Minutes posted, Chris Parente, a lawyer for a Chicago woman who was shot by a Border Patrol agent in October, showed 60 Minutes new video evidence that he says contradicts the claim that the agents were, quote, boxed in by 10 cars. Quote, I don't see 10 people and I certainly don't see anybody in front of him, Parente said. Let's roll the clip. DHS released a statement saying that their agents were boxed in by 10 cars. They couldn't move. What does the video that you obtained from our surveillance camera show? There was nobody in front of this agent. If he simply wanted to move forward on the street in the direction he was going, he could have continued on.

1:24:27It shows there's nobody to the left of his vehicle. Why don't you play the video as you've got it set up and kind of walk me through what we see? OK. So this construction barrier that you see here, that is where eventually you're going to see the hood of the agent's car stop. You see the front of the car. That is the front of the agent's car. The quote, ramming has just happened. And right now, the agent is opening his driver's side door. He's jumping out. And within two seconds, according to a stopwatch, he's shooting his gun five times. So now you'll see Miramar's car sort of come out of bend.

1:24:57So she's in the far left lane. She goes towards the curb, away from the agent, and then comes back. There's nobody else. There's no evidence of 10 people, a caravan anywhere. I don't see 10 people, and I certainly don't see anybody in the lane in front of him. Why can he not go forward? Court proceedings also uncovered text messages from Agent Exum. In one exchange with fellow agents, he appeared to brag about the shooting, writing, quote, I fired five rounds and she had seven holes. Put that in your book, boys. Body camera footage discussed in court also revealed that an agent in Exum's car, while holding a weapon, said, do something, bitch.

1:25:33Seconds later, Agent Exum opened fire. So that is in reference to the case of Marmar Martinez. This is from October 4th. And the run up to it, I'm reading again from the 60 Minutes report, she said she noticed an unusual vehicle on the road when she was driving to church. It had no plates, a light under the windshield with a Lyft logo, and a driver that was wearing green camouflage. Flage Martinez, an American citizen, honked her horn and shouted La Migra, a Spanish word used among members of Latino community to identify immigration officers. She said she followed the car for about 20 minutes, alerting nearby residents by honking and shouting while live streaming on Facebook.

1:26:12And that's when things took a dramatic turn. And that's where the video picked up, Ryan. Yeah. And so then according to DHS, I think it was Trisha McLaughlin's special again, 10 cars boxed in this agent and rammed the vehicle.

1:26:32Completely fabricated. The guy just got out. So this is of the two high-profile cases of women being shot in their cars by ICE agents. Both have been called the B word. Renee Good was called that after she was killed. although she was still alive before they, you know, she had a pulse for another eight minutes, but they prevented her from getting medical treatment. This woman was called it right before he tried to kill her and then brags that he shot her five times and put, quote, seven holes in her. That's because she was probably instinctively covering, protecting herself with her bare hands.

1:27:15So congratulations, you tough guy. You shot an unarmed woman who tried to protect herself with her bare hands. And you managed to put a bullet through her arm that also then went into her body. And then she managed to live like an absolute miracle. She did actually have a gun in her purse, but she wasn't able to get to it. Yeah. No, that's what I said. Right. She did actually have a gun in her purse. She said she wasn't able to get to it in time, but she has it because she lives on the south side of Chicago is what she said. One of these cops, and I'm curious how y 'all are going to respond to this.

1:27:51one of these cops is going to get shot. Yeah, I think it's absolutely true. And it's because and it will be in self-defense. And then and then where's the back the blue versus the stand your ground types? How are you going to handle that? This is what's frustrating to me, because one of the things that we disagree on, and I would certainly disagree with Martinez on this, is following ICE agents with your car for 20 minutes and honking incessantly is interfering with their ability to do their job. That's the entire point of the protest, civil disobedience. I don't think that necessarily crosses into breaking the law, but it's not helping the situation.

1:28:30Obviously, the goal of it is to ensure that people don't get picked up, potentially American citizens. I get it, whatever else. I think a lot of this comes from people who just blankly want or categorically want pathway to citizenship for people who are here. They don't want nonviolent criminals to be deported. And I completely disagree with that. And most of the American people completely disagree with that. So if you want to get arrested as an act of civil disobedience, own it. Say I'm getting arrested as an act of civil disobedience. As you acknowledge, it's not a crime. No, not yet. No, no, not yet.

1:29:06But that's what I'm saying. It's building to something that we already saw what happened with Renee Good. It's building to something that I think is going to get even uglier. And I think everybody senses and everybody is kind of unsettled by that. And it's, I'm not at all just blaming the ice watchers and saying when you're looking at, as we just saw, those clips of cops, cops in Minneapolis saying they want to come back to a place of common ground with ice. It's, yeah, I think it's a, we're seeing the beginning of something that could get even worse. Well, I hope we're seeing the end of it. Think about what you learn in elementary school about what the United States is.

1:29:46the consent of the governed is required for the government to have legitimacy. Like that is the basis on which we overthrew the British. That is the basis on which we built the United States. The consent of the governed, of the people, by the people, for the people. You know, who doesn't get horns honked at them and constantly harassed walking up and down the street, even though they've complained about they don't get enough respect. local police forces. Cops who drive through a neighborhood or are walking a beat are not surrounded by groups of people honking at them and telling them to go home.

1:30:27I think they would be if they were deporting people, which is what... Well, they would be if they were doing things that the governed do not consent to. So ICE has lost the people. It is not the people's fault. The people were here first. ICE is a government agency that is coming into these neighborhoods. They need to win over the community. We're here first. And also, we are the we. Like, we are the ones that govern ourselves in a democracy. And if you want to, you know if you want to be a law enforcement agency in a democracy you need the support of the people you can't do this is not vietnam we're going to go in just mow down the villagers and burn the village in order to save it like you have to actually win hearts and minds not the fake way well yeah i mean then i think activists should also police themselves when people are throwing stuff at the ice officers and touching the ice officers standing in front of cars don't do crimes, don't assault them.

1:31:32Right. Well, I just, I say that because I do genuinely worry about things getting even worse and more dangerous. I think we all worry about that. My sense is that you see your point about, is this the, the end of a bad situation? I just think it's the opposite. I think it's, it feels to me like something can, is continuing to build because, um, yeah, I don't know. I just have a bad feeling about it. Might be, but you know, there's 20 ,000 of them. There's, more than 300 million of us. So they're going to have to, if they insist on doing this by force rather than through consent, then yes, they're going to have to bring a lot more force.

1:32:10But I hope that they would try to go the consent route.

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