12/17/25: Unemployment Spikes, GOP Flails On Healthcare, Trump Demands Venezuelan Oil and Land

26:48And I had built up this idea that music and being a musician was my whole identity. I had to sort of relearn who I was if you took this thing away. Who am I? Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In a moment, we're going to be joined by Brian Blaise, who's a conservative healthcare economist, to talk through Republican healthcare policy and strategy, which is currently, this week, seems to be collapsing a little bit. Yeah, and Brian is the guy to talk to. So there you go. On the right. So here's Donald Trump talking about where he is right now.

27:27What do you want to see Congress do this week if it relates to health care and the expiring ACA? That's a good question. I'd like to see the people get the money. I'd like to see all of the money that's going to the Democrat insurance companies. You know, the insurance companies are making a fortune. They're up 1 ,700 percent and more. Obamacare was set up, and I said it right from the beginning, for the benefit of the health insurance companies, of the insurance companies. They're making billions and billions of dollars. Their stock is through the roof. I don't want to give them anything. I want all money going to the people and let the people buy their own health care.

28:05It'll be unbelievable. They'll do a great job. They'll get much better health care at a much lower cost. So he sort of wants to end subsidies and just turn basically just we'll talk with Brian about what his idea is there. There are a bunch of different ideas that Republicans have been kicking around to try to stave off the increase. You can put up B2 here. We were expecting a vote tomorrow in the House of Representatives. It looks Mike Johnson saying no because we're not ready for that. You can put up B3. Jake Sherman prowling around Capitol Hill. He reports the deal between House GOP moderates and House Republican leadership is breaking down.

28:45Disagreement over the language in the amendment to extend Obamacare premium subsidies. So the four will go to rules Tuesday to offer their amendment. If they're rejected, that means they will be free agents. This is Fitzgibbon, Kiggins, Valedo, and Lawler, which matters because a lot of them are up for re-election and have tight races. What he's saying is if they become free agents, that could put Hakeem Jeffries' three-year ACA extension over the finish line if you get enough Republicans to join with Democrats. Now, Ro Khanna was recently on Fox News making the pitch for a bolder plan, Medicare for All, its role.

29:23Ro Khanna, and then we'll go to Brian. The high cost of the Democrats' health care plan did not work. That's just not true. Look, private health insurance is what's bankrupting America. It was happening before the Affordable Care Act. The Affordable Care Act helped slow the growth of private insurance. But of course, it's not the solution. The solution, as everyone knows, in my of you who studied this is Medicare for all. People should have national health insurance, health care as a human right. You should not be subject to these private insurance companies that have 18 percent administrative costs that are making billions of dollars of profits, whose executives are making millions of dollars.

30:02They're hurting our manufacturing. It's one of the reasons jobs are offshore. They're hurting workers' pay going up. They're sucking on money from our economy, and they're denying people care. Even people on the MAGA right have recognized that the system is not working. The system is broken. It's time to get Medicare for all in this country. Well, we're excited to be joined now, as we've teased long enough, Brian Blaze, who is founder of the Paragon Health Institute and really at the center of this policy conversation on the right and more broadly as Mike Johnson seeks to strike a deal. So thank you so much for joining us, Brian.

30:36It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. Now, maybe you could start just by telling us a little bit from your perspective of where things stand right now, because I'm sure you're hearing what's going to happen or what people want to happen. What's your prediction based on what you're hearing of how this all ends up before years end? Yeah. So thanks for having me on. And just let me explain exactly what the situation is before the Congress. So Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act took effect in 2014. It's mainly affected the individual market for health insurance, which is where people go that don't get a plan from their employer or through a government program.

31:14Its regulations significantly increased the price of insurance, and it contained large subsidies to help people afford the coverage that the government regulations had made more expensive. Those subsidies are permanent. They mean that the taxpayer pays a very large share of the premium. In 2021, as a pandemic measure, Democrats used reconciliation and they passed an expansion of subsidies. They put those subsidies in place for two years. And then in 2022, they extended them through 2025. So at issue is the expiration of these enhanced COVID-era subsidies. If they expire, the typical Obamacare enrollee would still have very large subsidies.

32:04In fact, the subsidy would cover more than 80 % of the premium for a typical enrollee. Now, there are some people who would face significantly higher premiums. That is because the law originally capped the subsidies for people making less than four times the poverty line. Now, that's a small number of Obamacare enrollees. It's only about 6 % of Obamacare enrollees. People making less? Only about 6 % of enrollees have income above 400 % of the poverty line. So most of the examples that you see from Democrats right now on people that face high premiums because these COVID era subsidies expire, they are for individuals right above four times the poverty line.

32:45But for the vast majority of people, the government is going to pay the vast majority of the premium next year. Now, I think these subsidies - Poverty line is what? For a family of four, 60? For a family of four, the federal poverty line is about$30 ,000. For a family of four? For a family of four. So we're talking$120 ,000. So if you make more than$120 ,000 for a family of four, then you're getting hit with that. Then you would face the higher premiums. But 95 percent, about 95 percent of enrollees would maintain subsidies, and the subsidies would cover, on average, about 80 percent of the premium.

33:26Now, one of the problems from the enhanced subsidies, they made coverage fully subsidized for a share of enrollees. And what we have seen is that far more people report that they have income to receive those fully subsidized enrollees. So we have done research that estimates that about a quarter of all of the Obamacare exchange enrollees are improper. They don't have, they don't meet the eligibility requirements. Many people - Do you have to have how much income? So this is between 100 and 150 of the federal poverty line. The COVID era subsidies made that coverage fully subsidized. And almost half of all Obamacare enrollees claim that their income is in that narrow band.

34:10What we did at Paragon was look at sign-ups in that income range with the actual people that have income in that range who would be eligible for the program. And we estimate 6.4 million people are enrolled in a fully subsidized plan who don't have that coverage. There's been pretty sophisticated schemes to enroll people because, again, these subsidies, to the president's point, they go directly to the health insurance companies. So if people don't have to pay any premium, that is a reason for people to sign up. And brokers have developed pretty sophisticated schemes to get people, get their information to get them enrolled.

34:51So there's millions of people that have been enrolled that aren't aware of their coverage. Now, if we've enrolled a lot of people that aren't aware of their coverage, one thing that you might expect is a lot of people don't use their health plan. In August, CMS released information on the number of enrollees in Obamacare that didn't use their health plan a single time in 2024. And it was 12 million people. So 35 % of all enrollees in the market didn't use their health plan a single time. So we think there's— Do you think they got paid? Like, does the broker say, here, if you get$1 ,000 up front to sign up?

35:28Like, how does it, like, why would you sign up for insurance and then not use it? So there were sophisticated social media campaigns. They advertised cash and gift cards if people would call a number. People called a number. They asked for the cash and gift card. They gave their information. They didn't get cash. They didn't get a gift card. They got signed up for an Obamacare plan. The epicenter of the fraud, South Florida is like the epicenter of the fraud. So it is. Put bars around all of South Florida. It's the worst in South Florida. And actually, DOJ, just a couple of weeks ago, closed the case.

36:05Two brokers committed massive fraud like this. The main beneficiaries are the health insurance companies because they're getting monthly payments on behalf of people that aren't enrolled in coverage and that aren't using it. The best kind of customer who doesn't take your product. That's right. So these two brokers, the amount of improper subsidies just from these two individuals was$230 million. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Rick Scott's like, that's real money. Well, OK. So on that point, this explains a bit about why Republicans are hesitant. There are some obviously real problems.

36:45And it explains a bit why Republicans are hesitant to just rubber stamp an extension of the deal. There are all kinds of political questions going into a midterm cycle that are different from the policy questions and that. But what then, Brian, do you think actually could be done? Because we're almost at year's end here. There's going to be an increase for some people, as you just explained. What could or should be done from your perspective when they have such – Republicans have such narrow margins. Democrats are pushing, as we heard from Congressman Khanna, Medicare for All. Well, like what are you thinking right now should happen in the next couple of weeks if there is anything to be done to stop people from getting higher costs right away?

37:23Yeah, so I think there's action that's needed in the next couple of weeks and then there's the development of sort of free market health plan. I think what the Senate passed, Finance Committee Chairman Crapo and Health Committee Chairman Cassidy introduced legislation that would redesign a portion of the Obamacare subsidies. It would open up the cheapest type of Obamacare plan to more enrollees. And it would take these enhanced subsidies and do what the president is advocating, direct them to individuals, has HSA contributions, rather than as payments directly to health insurance companies. I think that legislation, there's a lot to like about that.

38:08I think what the House is looking at doing today is to further expand options for small businesses, allow them to join together. to get some of the regulatory advantages that large employers get when they offer coverage. So I testified in front of the Senate Finance Committee about a month ago. I suggested nine ways Republicans could, you know, from expanding health savings accounts to addressing some structural flaws with the Obamacare subsidies and to opening up different coverage options that they could do in the near term. Fundamentally, I think the worst thing that Congress could do is throw good money after bad.

38:47The way to guarantee that we don't reform a very inefficient program and sector of the economy is just to continue to oversubsidize it because that reduces the pressure for real fixes. And we have a health care affordability crisis in the U.S. I don't think it's right to just shift all those costs to the American taxpayer.

39:36Martin 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.

40:34cult. 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? NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

41:15Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, host of the On Purpose podcast. On a recent episode, I sat down with Nick Jonas, singer, songwriter, actor, and global superstar. The thing I would say to my younger self is, congratulations you get to marry priyanka chopra jonas and also you know your daughter's incredible that's beautiful man yeah thank you that's so beautiful i can see that got you a little yeah for sure our daughter she came to the world under sort of very intense circumstances which i've not really talked about ever growing up on disney in front of million how did that shape your sense of self. I went blank.

41:57I hit a bad note, then I couldn't kind of recover. And I built up this idea that music and being a musician was my whole identity. I had to sort of relearn who I was if you took this thing away. Who am I? Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We can put B5 up on the screen just to make that point. This is a Gallup poll. The headline here There's cost leads Americans top of mind to health care concerns. So to the point Brian just made, people agree. Everyone basically agrees. This is one of the top, top stressors on the economy and individual families' budgets.

42:38And then we can put up the final one, too. So put up B6. When Obamacare was passed, you were sitting at about 30 percent, a little over 30 percent said that they would prefer a government-run system. And Obamacare, you know, rejected the public option, rejected Medicare for all, rejected even a Medicare buy in for people 55 and over. It was very close to being included. Joe Lieberman pulled it out at the last second. And so people have gotten this interaction with a bastardized version of a private system, which is the only thing we have actually around the world. Right. There's no pure kind of private health care system that I know of outside of, you know, in a kind of developed country.

43:26Maybe outside of Singapore. Okay. Outside of Singapore. I don't know much about Singapore health policy. You can teach us more about that. But as I was listening to you talk about the brokers and the scams and the fraud and how complicated this system is, and you're asked, and I assume the reason that you can fudge it is that they ask you ahead of time, And what's your income going to be for the next year? I don't know. Most people are like, I don't know. Like if some people are like, this is my salary. I hope I don't get fired. So I expect this to be my, but maybe I will get fired and I will fit into this nice little band where I get all the subsidies.

44:05Or you just kind of game it and like, I guess I'm going to make this. Or we could just do Medicare for all and then focus on the fraud. Like put a ton of money into, like if these chatbots and this AI, the LLMs are good for anything, they should be able to find this fraud. Like you guys, you have a couple interns and you compared the number of people that exist, right, in this economic band and the number of people claiming the subsidies in that band. And you're like, this doesn't match. You would think our LLMs could help us with that. And then say, okay, Medicare for all, we're going to make this simple.

44:46So people don't go around not knowing that they have insurance. You know because you're American. You've got it. Why don't we just do that and be done with all of this? Well, I think of how much government has already screwed up and the fact that you get the example out of Minnesota recently with that Medicaid fraud and dramatically increasing autism, paying parents to diagnose their children with autism. It's going to be a constant cat and mouse game. Americans are very clever. So are the newer Americans. I think fundamentally the problem with health care policy is that the individual consumer and patient is not in control.

45:22So only about 10 % of spending that people make on health care comes directly from them. Most of our expenditures come from third parties, whether it's government programs, whether it's insurance that takes the form of an employer-sponsored insurance plan. We have created a market that is not responsive to the individual consumer and patient. So it meets the needs of the insurance company. It meets the needs of the government program. It's not responsible to the individual. We have no idea what prices are, right? Prices in most sectors of the economy, that's what coordinates behavior. And we know how to value things relative to other things.

46:00But prices are basically just made up. Nobody has any idea. And people don't have any incentives to care about what the prices are. So I think fundamentally what we need to do is address these problems with government programs that have centralized control and power in the hands of the intermediaries and the middlemen and return as much control to the individual as possible so that they can choose the care and coverage that works for them. And so the health care providers, the doctors, the nurses are serving actual patients and meeting their needs. The reason I'm cynical about that is not just because of what most people say, which is that health care can't be a normal market because, you know, if you don't buy the thing, you could die.

46:46And so that, you know, creates an imbalanced amount of leverage in the transactional relationship between you and the person who holds your life in their hands. Pre-existing conditions. Yeah. But setting that aside, the United States government doesn't seem to care about markets anywhere else. Like in every other industry, we're OK with a monopoly or an oligopoly, whether it's airlines or youth sports or beef or poultry or like. Like, actually, it's harder to find an industry that we haven't allowed to consolidate into just one or two producers that set prices. And so then we're expected to believe that, oh, no, when it comes to health care, which makes up a third of the economy or something, we promise we're going to do strong antitrust enforcement.

47:38We're going to really crack down on the giant scammers. there were the medical the medical providers and we're not going to let private equity just roll this up and have giant companies you know let three companies control the entire health care industry and then set prices and so then you have a situation where it's not just like beef because like with beef okay you know you have four beef companies and control everything i guess i could eat less beef maybe go eat some chicken and more some more soybeans or whatever uh but when it comes to healthcare, it's like, you're going to have to pay the piper.

48:13And the U.S. government, I just don't trust to not make it so there's like three pipers. I don't trust the U.S. government either. I do think in some places it'd be great if we would have four competitors. We have produced a lot of local hospital monopolies. Exactly, right. Local hospital monopolies are a real problem. Right, so why are those hospitals going to - Well, what I would look is, where's the government policy that incentivizes consolidation? and reduces competition in the market. A really good example comes from the Medicare program. Medicare pays much more for the same service delivered in a hospital than if it's delivered in a physician's office.

48:50What does that lead to? That leads to incentives for hospitals and physicians to sell out so the hospital acquires the physician practice, and then you have an integrated health care system, and you've reduced competition in that area. There are examples where we've allowed market forces to work in health care. and consumerism to work of people making cost-conscious decisions and driving health care services to lower-cost providers. And the high-cost providers don't want to lose consumers, so they do lower their prices. So we do have examples. They are too few and far between, unfortunately. But I think where I want to go is what can we address in government policy that reduces consumer control and leads to these incentives for additional consolidation.

49:42And just zooming in on the politics of this quickly, I think one of the reasons that Republicans, and you'll know this better than I do, never landed on a consensus repeal and replace plan is that they never landed on consensus. There was never something that brought everybody together, you know, everyone from John McCain to, you know, Marco Rubio at the time in the Senate. So do you feel that as these conversations are happening now, and it seems to me, again, this is probably a frustration you've had for much longer, but that Republicans just keep putting health care on the back burner while voters say this is on our front burner.

50:17This is the thing that is like eating us up right now. This is forced the conversation. Do you think Republicans are getting anywhere close to a consensus, either tweak, as you say, before the end of the year and then big fix in the new year? Or is it still just kind of we're going to tinker around the edges, do what we can when the crunch is on and hope that, you know, it doesn't come up again before we have absolutely have to have some type of comprehensive solution? Yeah, so I do think Republicans have to do, conservatives have to do a better job on health care policy. I mean, it's one of the reasons that I founded Paragon was because there was a gap on the free market side on health care policy.

51:01And like you said, I mean, health care is 20 percent of the economy. We need it. And the health care sector is system is not working for most Americans. So we need policies. I think that there are like they recognize that Obamacare hasn't made health care more affordable. I think there's widespread agreement that just continuing to throw good money after bad and propping up an inefficient regulatory structure is unwise policy. I think there is agreement on how we should expand options and make some improvements on the margin on Obamacare. And I think what we have to do is just, I mean, one comprehensive plan I don't think is the right strategy.

51:43I think the right strategy is to look at what's not working, correctly diagnose the problem. Like I mentioned on Medicare, paying much more for hospital services than doctor services. That's a bipartisan problem. It's recognized by Democrats and Republicans. Now, who's the main obstacle to getting that policy through? It's hospitals. Hospitals are very powerful. If you look at the American Enterprise Institute has what they call a chart of the century. And it looks at the price increases by economic sector since 2000. The number one, the highest growing price inflation is hospitals. That to me is where we have our main health care affordability problem is we need to drive down hospital prices in the U.S.

52:32And these site neutral payments and Medicare should be a starting point. But it's going to require reformers to go and combat the health care industry. What do you think is going to happen? Do you think that these four Republicans or more will join with Democrats and pass a three-year extension in the House? And if it does, does it have a shot in the Senate? I do not. So I don't know if they'll join with Democrats and pass an extension. I do not think that that is a realistic policy. I mean. Right, but we've been doing unrealistic policy for decades. So well, I don't think it's there's not going to be a clean extension of the subsidies I mean, I think there's so many problems with the subsidies.

53:15The fraud is one major problem There's not going to be a clean extension of these covet era credits. I mean, I I there there might be some compromise Out there. I think there's certainly a way to deal with the problem for the people that I mentioned just above four times the poverty line Like that is a relatively cheap fix You would allow the enhanced subsidies to expire for people below four times the poverty line who still get very generous underlying Obamacare subsidies. You deal with the cliff that was created for people just above four times the poverty line. And you introduce some reforms to address the cost drivers in Obamacare.

53:58So interesting. And just like you said, Republicans had such a gap on this. So we appreciate you coming in, Brian, and helping walk us through. We'll have to have you back on to talk about Singapore's health care system. Yeah, I want to hear my word. My appetite has been beat. All right. Thank you, Brian Blaise, founder of Paragon. Appreciate being here. Thank you. 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. Writing and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale.

54:34In 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. 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.

55:19What 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. 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.

55:55It'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. Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, host of the On Purpose podcast. On a recent episode, I sat down with Nick Jonas, singer, songwriter, actor, and global superstar. The thing I would say to my younger self is congratulations.

56:35You get to marry Priyanka Chopra Jonas. And also, you know, your daughter's incredible. That's beautiful, man. Yeah. Thank you. That's so beautiful. I can see that got you a little... Yeah, for sure. Our daughter, she came to the world under sort of very intense circumstances, which I've not really talked about ever. Growing up on Disney in front of a million, how did that shape your sense of self? I went blank. I hit a bad note, then I couldn't kind of recover. And I built up this idea that music and being a musician was my whole identity. I had to sort of relearn who I was if you took this thing away.

57:14Who am I? Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So I think a friend of Donald Trump's must have told him that he was losing the capacity to shock people with his truth social posts. And so in the last few days, he shocked the entire world with his response to the brutal murder of Rob Reiner and his wife, Michelle. Now he's following it up with one of the most unhinged remarks he's made about Venezuela yet. We could put up this truth social post. We'll read this entire thing. He says, Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest armada ever assembled in the history of South America.

57:58I'll pause on that note. Are you really invoking the Spanish here? Like, what are you doing? He says, it will only get bigger and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before. Until such time as they return to the United States of America, all of the oil, land, what? And other assets that they previously stole from us. Yes, Venezuela stole our oil, land, and other assets. The illegitimate Maduro regime is using oil from these stolen oil fields to finance themselves. The horror. Drug terrorism, human trafficking, murder, and kidnapping for the theft of our assets and many other reasons, including terrorism, drug smuggling, and human trafficking.

58:42The Venezuelan regime has been designated a foreign terrorist organization. Therefore, today, I am ordering a total and complete blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers going into and out of Venezuela. The illegal aliens and criminals that the Maduro regime has sent into the United States during the weakened and inept Biden administration are being returned to Venezuela at a rapid pace. America will not allow criminals, terrorists or other countries to rob, threaten or harm our nation. and likewise will not allow a hostile regime to take our oil, land, or any other assets, all of which must be returned to the United States immediately.

59:17Thank you for your attention to this matter, Donald J. Trump, President of the United States. I don't understand how Venezuela could return land to us promptly. I understand the oil thing. There was a meme during the occupation of Iraq that said, how did our oil get under their sand? Beats me. But however it got under there, we're going over there and we're taking it back. Someone's got to find out. I understand the oil part. The land? How did Venezuela take our land? Jesse Waters, as we talked about last week, said South America is ours. It's in the name, America. America. Maybe that's what he means.

59:59It's not that hard. It's America. Ironically, Trump recently seized Venezuelan assets. They seized an oil tanker. We seized Citgo. Like we took their oil company.

1:00:14Now we're going to, now they took our land? I mean, also another part of that where he's saying, on the one hand, Maduro sent criminals into the United States during the Biden administration. On the other hand, Maduro is a vicious dictator. These two things are in conflict because what's actually happening is that Maduro is a dictator and people fled Maduro to come into the United States, which is why there's debate among the Republican Party over whether or not to grant asylum to people who, in the case of many Venezuelans, not all of them, actually is pretty sound for asylum fleeing the Maduro regime.

1:00:56there were real reasons for people to be fleeing the Maduro regime, just as though there were real reasons for people to be fleeing Cuba over the last several decades. And so on the one hand, Trump is acting as though this was intentionally set up by Maduro to infiltrate the United States. But on the other hand, Maduro is so bad. Well, if Maduro is so bad, then it stands to reason people are going to flee into the United States, which is exactly what happened. It wasn't it's similar to the trafficking narrative that they're trying to build. Of course, I think there's pretty significant evidence that there are state actors in the trafficking.

1:01:30And many people would argue there were state actors on our side in the trafficking as well. But that's the argument the United States government is making. But to say that this was intentional, that the migration from Venezuela into the United States was an intentional invasion infiltration, they're doing the same thing with drugs. And actually what's happened is that people are poor and desperate and are trying to make money or trying to get to a better country. And so that actually confirms the administration's argument about Maduro being a dictator. But of course, they're trying to have it both ways.

1:02:07And already a couple tankers apparently have turned around because they're nervous about getting caught up in this American Spanish armada. which is throwing the Venezuelan economy into complete and total turmoil. Like it was already deeply struggling under this like incredible tightening regime of sanctions that we have going on there, as well as the collapse of oil prices over the last decade, which was kind of propping up the Chavista socialism project. What that's going to do is create, like you said, an outflow of migration as well as create like starvation and suffering and misery. Which there's plenty of already.

1:02:55And create instability. Part of this, you know, there's a right wing movement going on now in South and Central America. You've had the right wing win elections in Ecuador, Honduras, Chile, Bolivia recently. And a significant, non-trivial amount of that is there were like 8 million Venezuelans. Yeah. Who poured out of, into lots of other countries, like a half million or so came to the U.S. Yep. That's another 7 and a half million went elsewhere around. And that generally throughout world history has created kind of a right wing pull. So when I first saw this news, I was like, Maduro, you want to call him a dictator or not, he's offering to step down.

1:03:41in exchange for like lifting of the sanctions and not drone striking him. Offering to let American oil companies come in. Like he's basically saying, what do you want? Well, he doesn't want what Trump is threatening to bring down right now. He doesn't want to be killed. Yeah. And so, like I don't understand why Trump won't just say yes. Like, okay, you get your regime change, you get the oil, you get everything. But you don't get, I guess, a war. Or the only thing I can think of is, and this is like, no, this can't be what he's doing. Like maybe he misses a border crisis. Like the border is very calm right now.

1:04:20And maybe to Trump, he needs a crisis at the border. And so he's like, oh, I need to create an enormous amount of instability and suffering in Venezuela so I can drive more people to the border. and then in 2026 point to the caravans of the people at the border and be like, Democrats, I don't know quite how you finish that equation, but Democrats, Gary Brown people, you have to vote for me. It hasn't worked in the past like when he had the big caravan in 2018 that didn't help him. What on earth is he doing? Well, correct me if I remember, but Maduro has said his counteroffer, part of it is allowing his like kind of him to handpick a successor who would reign in power for a couple of years right and while there's elections yeah and that successor would not run for re-election right my guess is that if there was any chance of donald trump himself cutting a deal with maduro that's probably a brick wall in the negotiations but i think that's a simpler just gonna put the nobel peace prize winning machado forcibly on the throne like no but but that's what she has no base but that's what i was gonna say the simpler explanation is that you have to think about this as President Marco Rubio as opposed to President Donald Trump.

1:05:31And President Marco Rubio doesn't want, like, knows that the United States, to paraphrase the Zelensky conversation, holds all the cards here, except for the American people largely not wanting this, but wants to make a point and wants absolutely no quarter, wants absolutely no remnant, which is impossible, but wants absolutely no remnant of the left, the socialist left, or whatever you want to call it in Venezuela. It's a country that has a left. Yes, and has convinced Trump. I mean, we saw just a couple of days ago, Trump declared fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction, that this could lay the groundwork for potential military action in Mexico.

1:06:17Because if you're declaring fentanyl WMD, there's all kinds of legal questions about what that actually means, what that actually does. But that's laying the groundwork for Mexico. That has nothing to do. I mean, this is we're talking about cocaine in Venezuela. And so that's that's. Yeah, I think that's the best guess is is because Trump does like making deals. But I think he is basically outsourced this to Marco Rubio. And about half of – so if we manage the transition, then we can approve who becomes interim president leading into the elections. And then we can get somebody who's friendlier to the United States.

1:06:56If we don't manage the process, if we just drive some kind of chaotic regime change, about half of Maduro's deputies are much friendlier to China than they are to us. Yeah, and that's why – And so you might get one of them instead. Which is why I think Rubio wants to do a total takeover. Again, though, with what? Like who's going to, like Machado and what army? Like you're really going to, like you're going to occupy Venezuela with the U.S. Army? Part of the Susie Wiles, we'll talk more about this in a second, but part of the Susie Wiles Vanity Fair story, I'm sure this jumped out to you as well.

1:07:34She's saying, we know who's on those boats. We have the CIA. I'm paraphrasing it, obviously. But she says that to Chris Whipple in the Vanity Fair article. And with what army is a great question, always has been a great question, could have learned that lesson during the Bay of Pigs. But it's I imagine intelligence coming from the CIA, which we know has been authorized to operate on the ground in Venezuela by the president, probably saying you can do this because that's what happens every damn time. You have the you have the people, you have the weak links in the military. You can do it. And that's my best guess as to why there's the full bravado for total, complete and total regime change is that they're once again convinced that it's doable and that anything short of that just gives a foothold for or leaves a foothold for China and Iran and the new axis of evil.

1:08:30And meanwhile, Trump is going to get somebody killed in the air and put up C2. So for the second time, civilian aircraft nearly collided, this time with a U.S. Air Force tanker, because all of these American Armada planes are flying around the Caribbean with their transponders off, not communicating with air traffic controllers. And as he said, it's the largest force maybe ever that's been in there. and so you have civilian aircraft constantly going through there and you know it's a big sky and hopefully that none of them go down but this is extremely reckless and dangerous and nobody is asking for it like he and he hasn't even bothered to try to lie much about it this whole like weapons of mass destruction fentanyl thing is is like offensively like lazy like this is what you like it is maybe they just maybe it's like we can do whatever we want well yeah and i think the best way to think about the venezuela policy is just again president marco rubio i think trump is not as interested as marco rubio is in this venezuela regime change he's been brought on board with it because he can use it from a kind of PR perspective to say this is the crackdown on drugs, even though that is going to be digested by most Americans to be related to fentanyl, and this is clearly not related to fentanyl.

1:10:07So anyway, all that is to say, the tripwires right now, when you have CIA operating on the ground in Venezuela, when you have the armada, as Trump put it, that is, we are in the middle of a recipe for escalation and that Americans could be dying in battle over Venezuela. And Americans could crash into the sea. Yes, yeah. And they took out another drug boat, alleged drug boat, just recently. And meanwhile, Hegseth is saying he will not show the video that he is so proud of where they executed these two survivors. And he says absolutely the right battle decisions keeps calling it a battle not a battle they're don't they're like basically unarmed and you're you're sitting in like florida um hitting them with the drone um they're not coming and shooting at americans they are by their own admission what this is they're trafficking cocaine allegedly trafficking cocaine and and without uh outboard motors to get to the united states like they're they're going somewhere surinam or wherever Mexico, somewhere.

1:11:20They're not making it to the United States with that. Yeah. Eventually, maybe they will. A lot of cocaine users are hoping they do. Right. Bro, this is what we do here in the United States. Why are you killing our splires? To compare it to kinetic battle. Right. And so he's so proud of it, and he would make the decision a thousand times again. But no, you can't actually see the footage of it. And oh, we've destroyed footage of similar strikes.

1:12:03Black history lives in our stories, our culture, and the conversations we still have in today. This Black History Month, the podcast I Didn't Know, Maybe You Didn't Either, digs into the moments, perspectives, and experiences that don't always make the textbook. Let me tell you about Garrett Morgan. Bruh had to pretend he didn't even exist just to sell his own invention. Listen to I Didn't Know. Maybe you didn't either. From the Black Effect Podcast Network, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or simply wherever you get your podcasts. I didn't know.

1:12:401969. Malcolm and Martin are gone. America is in crisis. And at Morehouse College, the students make their move. These students, including a young Samuel L. Jackson, locked up the members of the Board of Trustees, including Martin Luther King Sr. It's the true story of protest and rebellion in Black American history that you'll never forget. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lamumba. Listen to The A-Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, What kind of life would you have?

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