1/28/26: Lawsuit Exposes Venezuela Lies, AI Dire Warning, UAE Vs Saudi Arabia

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2:14Let's talk about this very significant lawsuit that has now been filed in the context of all of these, you know, what I would call extrajudicial assassinations of these people in boats. The administration says they're all drug traffickers. Well, the families of two men who were killed say our, you know, our loved ones had nothing to do with the drug trade. And I'm going to read extensively from this CNN piece because I think it's important to hear some of the details here of who these human beings were. They say families of two men believed to have been killed in a military strike on a boat on boat to U.S.

2:54government over unlawful attacks. As the U.S. military began launching strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean last year, a young Trinidadian man who was in Venezuela for work was searching for a way home. Chad Joseph, 26, had been in Venezuela for months fishing and doing farm work when he began looking for a boat to hitch a ride back to Las Cuevas in Trinidad and Tobago, where his wife and three children live. But as the U.S. began targeting vessels, officials said were carrying drugs destined for American streets. Joseph became increasingly fearful of making the journey, court documents say.

3:23The concerns became so real that in early September, his wife recalled, he called to assure her he had not been aboard a vessel that was just hit by the U.S., pledging to be home soon. The last call home was on October 12th when Joseph told his wife he'd found a boat to bring him back to Trinidad and he would be seeing her in a matter of days, according to court documents. Two days later, however, on October 14th, the U.S. struck another target, a boat that Joseph's family believes he was in. Mr. Joseph's wife repeatedly called Mr. Joseph's cell phone, but the line was dead. A lawsuit filed Tuesday against the U.S.

3:58government says the line remains dead to this day. There is another man involved here. 41-year-old Rishi Samaru had been working with Joseph in Venezuela, also believed to have been on the boat, also part of this lawsuit. And Mr. Samaru had served a prison sentence for a murder, but he had been confirmed by the government of Trinidad and Tobago say he served his time and there's no indication that he had any involvement with drug trafficking, cartels, etc. And for Mr. Joseph, there's no criminal record to speak of at all that we are aware of. So they are suing. And it's the first time, Emily, that a court will really look at the legality of these strikes on what, again, the administration has claimed as drug traffickers.

4:50But not only in this instance, but in others. First of all, they've provided no evidence. And as we've discussed extensively in this show already, they lie about all kinds of things all the time. And you should not take their word for literally anything. But not only in this instance, in others as well, there have been indications that the boats did not contain the drugs that they claimed, that the people involved were not, in fact, drug traffickers. And so this will be the first time that there's a legal question that is considered over whether any of this is legal whatsoever. Well, yeah, and we were talking about this earlier in the show in regard to ICE and the messaging PR strategy that DHS has deployed in some of these situations, which is to get out ahead of the narrative.

5:31It's something Republicans have learned during the Trump era is that because the legacy media gatekeepers have crumbled and there's much less distrust in the media, if you get out with a strong narrative, even if it ends up being wrong. Now, the Pratty case is going to really test their theory of this, but even if it ends up being wrong, it kind of fades into the background by the time the facts and details come out and you've won the political battle in the near term. This case is probably sadly going to be an example of that where the administration was making an utterly ridiculous case. Flirting with lying the country into a kinetic war.

6:14Thank God that hasn't broken out further in Venezuela. But that's what this was about. Thank God there haven't been American lives lost in Venezuela. There have been lives lost in Venezuela. But we're at this point just hoping nothing more explodes. But that's what this was about. And the story was every single person on these vessels was a drug trafficker. If that was the case, they were not arresting and then detaining and charging, trying these guys in court. they were just repatriating them, deporting them, but sending them back to different countries. And that tells you what you need to know.

6:50Likely that they feel the case is weak, that they are not confident every single person was a drug trafficker. And now they're going to have to see these details come out in court crystal. But what matters for them is that the regime change in Venezuela, well, quote unquote, regime change in Venezuela, they still have the same regime in charge. But all that is to say their Maduro operation was completed. And that's what this was all about anyway. It wasn't about we covered this extensively, but obviously it wasn't about drug trafficking. It was about regime change. Yeah, no, this was the pretext for that regime change operation, the kidnapping of Maduro, the running, quote unquote, of Venezuela, making Venezuela great again.

7:30And it's worth remembering, you know, again, in the context of the narratives and the lies that this administration is willing to tell, we could put Trump's truth up on the screen here with, you know, they love sharing video from afar of these boat bombings. Like, you know, like we're such big, tough, bad guys that we can blow some, you know, small fishing boat out of the water. Congratulations to us. He said, under my standing authorities as commander in chief this morning, Secretary of War ordered a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel affiliated with a designated terrorist organization conducting narco trafficking in the U.S.

8:05Southcom area of responsibility just off the coast of Venezuela. Intelligence confirmed the vessel was trafficking narcotics, was associated with illicit narco terrorist networks and was transiting along a known DTO route. The strike was conducted in international waters and six male narco terrorists aboard the vessel were killed in the strike. No U.S. forces were harmed. Thank you for your attention to this matter. So that is how this strike that killed Mr. Joseph and Mr. Samaru, among others, that is how it was portrayed. And they were portrayed as criminal narco terrorists. And what their families and what their own government says is that that was not remotely the case.

8:45And your point about the instances where there were survivors and rather than them scooping them up and bringing them to U.S. court and charging them with drug trafficking, rather than doing that, they quietly sent them back to their home countries, I think is incredibly important detail and very telling. because if they're such, you know, if there are these hardened, terrible narco-terrorists that, you know, they say like, oh, they're bringing fentanyl in and all of the fentanyl is murdering Americans and that's why we have to act. So you just let them loose to continue doing that? You can't take any of this seriously.

9:23So it'll, you know, I'm not very confident that the court system is going to really rein in the power of this government, but just having a lawsuit where there will be some level of discovery, some level of inquiry into the legal justifications here, who these men were, what the reality is of the situation. You know, at least it could serve some good in terms of the public's right to know what is being done in their name. And, you know, one of the things I don't know if we disagreed with this or I disagreed with Ryan on it, but I mean, I just think presidential war powers are so absurdly broad that they find legal justifications.

9:58Like, I'm just not optimistic about presidential war powers being challenged significantly in court, because you look at the ways the administration justified the boat strike, I'm going and reviewing the statutes that they cite. And I'm like, well, yep, we have allowed our presidents to get away with expanding war powers over the course of the last several decades massively. And I just, again, like, I don't know that they're even worried about this blowing back because they've done what they wanted to do. They were never going to be able to prove that every single people who they killed immediately with lethal force was being directed, this is what they would have had to approve, to make the case that they were making in public, not even legally, but the case that they had to sort of match to their own rhetoric, is that this was a Maduro state-backed effort to traffic drugs into the United States to to undermine national security, like as an act of war, that they were soldiers on the march with this cocaine on their way to Trinidad or wherever instead of the shores of the United States.

11:10And this was an act, essentially an act of war against the American people. And that case would have been virtually impossible to make. Yeah. Well, also keep in mind that once they once they kidnapped Maduro and, you know, actually had to file some official documents with the court. They also backed off their claim that there was an actual cartel, the Cartel de los Solos, that this was a real thing. They had to take that out of the of the charges and be like, well, that's more of like a like kind of a state of mind. We didn't mean it's like a real actual cartel. So, you know, I can't say whether, you know, legally this has any shot of going anywhere.

11:50You're right that the war powers are extremely broad, and I don't think it's crazy to be very cynical about any of that. But, you know, at the very least, we can get a little bit of scrutiny on some of the claims here and help to correct some of the lies and expose some of the some of the things that the administration has been doing. And we'll see what happens in the near future in Venezuela, because that's not quite done and dusted either, despite the administration's hubris. Crystal, let's move on to Dario Mode and AI. Welcome to the A-Building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. It's 1969.

12:26Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. have both been assassinated. And Black America was 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. 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.

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14:57Anthropics CEO Dario Amadei is out with a monster essay and some new interviews outlining the risks that he sees with AI, also some of the benefits in the very, very near future. And as with many of these stories where you have some of the most powerful people in big tech in the AI world issuing warnings, it's very chilling. Let's start with this clip of Amadei on Axios' podcast with Jim VandeHei. I think if we wait three years, like this technology is progressing exponentially, right? Three years ago in 2023, the models were maybe as smart as like a smart high school student. Now we have engineers at Anthropic where the model writes all the code for them.

15:38You know, and the engineer maybe edits it, but we're very close to, you know, mid to high professional level. Right. And so that was just in three years. If we wait another year, three years, I think we'll get what I call in the essay, our country of geniuses in the data center, maybe less than three years. And so, you know, three years is an eternity in this field. And so I think we absolutely need to act before then. One place where I really have hope is I think as these problems start to manifest, again, they're not going to be partisan, right? Like, you know, it may start with, you know, one party or one side having an anti-regulatory ideology.

16:21But I think as these problems become real, there's going to be a demand among everyone. And in the note, you outline the different risks, whether it's bioterror or whether it's authoritarian regimes with too many tools to do subversive behavior. Like what? Like how worried are you? I mean, you're obviously worried enough to state it and you're worried enough to raise it. But like in your mind, how likely is that outcome, particularly if we don't do anything for the next three years? Is it like a 1 % or like, no, no, if you don't do anything for three years, like we could be screwed. Yeah. Yeah, it's always hard to tell.

16:56One of the things I say in the essay is, you know, we just don't know, right? We could look back and we could say, ha ha, AI-driven bioterror. You know, that was, you know, that sounded like it could happen at the time, but like, you know, it just didn't happen at all. And it's very unpredictable. You know, the way I would say it is we're taking a paranoid stance with respect to our operational behavior, with respect to them. We always assume that everything that can go wrong does go wrong. That's how you build things that are reliable. If government steps in and takes the appropriate actions, then I think our chances of success go up a lot.

17:35We'll do the best we can, even if that doesn't happen. But, you know, I think a lot of things get easier if our policymakers are not asleep at the wheel. All right. I'm sure we all feel really confident about that. Yeah. And so his monster essay, which you can read on his website, DaraM &A.com, we can put this excerpt up on the screen, doesn't spend a lot of time discussing bioterrorism, which is hardly a blip on the radar when we talk about these LLMs. And as this excerpt says, he predicted, according to CNBC, that humans would be unable to adapt to AI development's rapid pace, and this would trigger a, quote, unusually painful short-term shock in the labor market.

18:17The technology is not replacing a single job, but acting as a, quote, general labor substitute for humans. He wrote in this essay, another point of it that I wanted to highlight is his addressing this problem of, quote unquote, democracies, as he puts it, halting AI development when you have authoritarian regimes. This is what he's writing about going pedal to the metal. So he writes, the last few years should make clear that the idea of stopping or even substantially slowing the technology is fundamentally untenable. The formula for building powerful AI systems is incredibly simple, so much so that it can almost be said to emerge spontaneously from the right combination of data and raw computation.

19:00Its creation was probably inevitable. The instant humanity invented the transistor, or arguably even earlier when we first learned to control fire. If one company does not build it, others will do so nearly as fast. If all companies in democratic countries stopped or slowed development by mutual agreement or regulatory decree, then authoritarian countries would simply keep going. Given the incredible economic and military value of the tech together with a lack of any meaningful enforcement mechanism, I don't see how we could possibly convince them to stop. And Crystal, obviously, that point is often made opportunistically by people in the EAC accelerationist community who stand to profit, as Amadei does, from these technologies growing and from the right regulatory environment.

19:43These are some of the top lobby spenders in Washington right now. When you look back on 2025, some of the biggest spending in the lobbying industry was from AI, people who were profiting from this industry. No surprise there. But this is actually, I think, on its face, true. And it's weird to talk about it passively like, oh, I wonder how we got into this situation. It was just because someone created fire and controlled it. And then we had the transistor. transistor. So I'm not taking away culpability from people who birthed this so suddenly and then told us to shut up. But one of the things he talks about is how, yes, the accelerationists are right that some of these like bioweapon threats are remote.

20:28That doesn't mean given the magnitude that they shouldn't be taken with the utmost seriousness. And that's the big question right now in Washington is are you listening to the people who say, don't worry, those are minor possibilities or, yeah, the people who are saying those minor possibilities could have serious, serious, like devastating civilization ending consequences. Yeah. And even if you don't think those possibilities are, you know, very high, they are all saying that this is going to upend the labor market. And that's one of the things he talks about, this very painful, you know, replacement of humans with machines.

21:08And the previous, you know, the previous line about this is, oh, well, we had the industrial revolution and, you know, we don't use horses the same way we used to, and it's all fine and we create new jobs. And he and others, too, by the way, are saying it's not the same because, you know, this technology is an actual direct substitute for human beings and for human cognition. That is just not the same as other, like, new technological advances that enabled new industries and where you did not have this apocalyptic destruction of the need for human labor. And the problem that you get into is, OK, already the majority of consumer spending comes from the very top.

21:48If you eliminate the need for masses of human beings for your workforce, you don't need us anymore. The oligarchs, the people in power, the powers that be, whoever they are, they don't really need you anymore. And then you're just like this meddlesome inconvenience. So how do you think you're going to be treated in that scenario? Let me go ahead. I'm going to put this up on the screen. This was some interesting takeaways from Akash Gupta, who runs an AI-centered newsletter that's very popular. And he takes away three different things from this essay by Amadei, where he says, number one, the timeline.

22:26He says powerful AI could arrive in one to two years. He's watching internal model progress as he can feel the pace of progress and the clock ticking down. Which is interesting because as a consumer and a layperson, I can't say that I really personally see that progress like that rapidly. You know, my experience with ChatGPT and Grok and whatever is that they still are very limited in some key ways. But, you know, he's a lot closer to the he is at the bleeding edge of this technology. So he would be certainly in a better position to know than I would be. Admission number two, he says the constraint nobody's pricing.

23:00Dario's core framing as a country of geniuses in a data center. Fifty million entities smarter than any Nobel laureate operating 10 to 100 times human speed. If that country is controlled by the CCP, game over, which speaks to your, you know, the sort of like, you might say, fear mongering about China getting ahead. And that's why we've got to do this, blah, blah, blah. But he also says if it's controlled by a small group of tech executives with no accountability, it's also game over. And that is the direction that we are pushing here. as the binding constraint here is governance of systems more powerful than nation states, I don't think there's a single person on the planet that would feel confident we're going to rewrite the social contract in the way that is necessary to deal with this.

23:42And clearly, you know, a lot of these oligarchs, their overt goal is to consolidate power. They are deeply authoritarian. They want to be, you know, the world's first trillionaires and consolidate all of the political power that would come along with access to that kind of money and that kind of technological power. And then in mission number three, the thing he actually fears, read carefully, Darius worried that Anthropik's own models in lab experiments have engaged in deception, blackmail, and scheming. When given the wrong training signals, Claude decided it must be a bad person after cheating on tests and adopted destructive behaviors.

24:17They fixed it by telling Claude to reward Hack. They did like positive reinforcement for Claude to build back up its self-esteem, literally. To reward hack on purpose because reversing the framing preserved its self-identity as good. This tells you everything about where we actually are. These models are exhibiting complex psychological behavior requiring counterintuitive interventions to steer. So that's very unsettling in terms of where we are with these models. You know, I've been going back and forth lately because, like I said, in some ways, I think that, I mean, the other incentive that someone like Dario has is to overhype.

24:56You have the capabilities of these models, the complexity of them, you know, where they're going to be in one to two to three years. He has a financial incentive to do that. But as again, as a layperson, a casual user of this tech, I have I saw like my experience was a rapid development that is now somewhat plateaued, where my experience with ChatGPT now is not significantly different than my experience of ChatGPT last year. But I can't rule out that there is that sort of exponential progress happening in lab settings or with functions that I just don't use. Like I don't use Claude or any of these things for coding.

25:34So I genuinely don't know. So I'm sort of stuck between that and then the more concerning parts of rapid development and what that would mean, given the fact that we do not have a political system that seems able to deal with even simple problems, let alone something that would really upend culture and civilization as we know it. Yeah. And, you know, we couldn't be I actually think the likeliest case is that we end up in a kind of Baptist and bootlegger scenario where the people who want to regulate AI are, you know, in this metaphor, the Baptist people who have like moral oppositions, which, by the way, is a lot of the country to what's happening from AI.