12/9/25: Pro-Israel Billionaire CNN Takeover, Trump Bans State AI Regulation, Glenn Beck Interviews Washington

23:23And they don't have any ethical or moral qualms about any of it. No one should fool themselves otherwise. They feel pressure from their populations to put in provision, oh, you have to make some noise about a Palestinian state, et cetera, for us to sign on to these deals. But this, no, it makes perfect sense. Yes, exactly. All right, let's continue on and put some more stuff on the screen. So let's put A5, for example, what that will show you is just the amount of properties here that would be controlled by anybody who gets this. But also, finally, in terms of giving the game away, is David Ellison, the CEO of Paramount, who is openly talking about his relationship with the president on this.

24:04Let's take a listen. That's A6, guys, from CNBC yesterday. Do you sense that he is in your corner here? What I would say is I'm incredibly grateful for the relations that I have with the president, and I also believe he believes in competition. And when you fundamentally look at the marketplace, allowing the number one streaming service to combine with the number three streaming service is anti-competitive. Incredibly grateful for relations with the president. And the thing is, is that what David Ellison has been doing over at CBS, like, again, let's just look at this purely from business. Is CBS doing that much better?

24:39Have they done anything remarkable under Ms. Weiss, Barry Weiss? What did she do? That great round table with Secretary, I've never heard from Condoleezza Rice. Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice. You know what I've been hurting for is more Condoleezza Rice and fucking Hillary Clinton content over there. Thank you, Barry, for these groundbreaking discussions. Or she's like, I want to promote, who was that guy who got into it with Ta-Nehisi Coates? Oh, yeah. Tony, I can never say his last name. Is that his name? Yeah, big pro-Israel guy, right? And they're like, oh, let's make him the new face of CBS News.

25:12Yeah, like that's all they care about, okay? And that's the funny thing is even that, what Trump does is he gives the game away because 60 Minutes recently just did an interview with Marjorie Taylor Greene. Let's put that one up here on the screen. This is a long tirade from Trump against Marjorie Taylor Greene. And what you see in here is he goes on this tirade, but he says, my real problem with the show, however, wasn't the low IQ trader. It was the new ownership of 60 Minutes. Paramount would allow a show like this to air. They are no better than the old ownership who just paid me millions of dollars.

25:44Since they bought it, 60 Minutes has actually gotten worse. Oh, well, far things happened. I demand a complete and a total apology. I mean, what he's basically showing is that the mandate for all of these people is you don't just have to be like, you know, you don't just have to suck up to him in private. You have to suck up to him on the air. You can't air anything that is remotely critical or you're going to get scrutiny. I mean, this kind of reminds me of the whole Jimmy Kimmel thing. We can do this the easy way or the hard way. Like it's overt government pressure in terms of content, not in terms of, you know, what's good for the consumer, what's good for America.

26:20Like what's, you know, does this thing make any sense? You could make a monopolistic argument for Netflix, right? Hey, you know, everybody pays way too much money for streaming. It's better for one company that owns it. I don't agree with that necessarily. I do think we pay too much for streaming, but I don't think that's a good thing, you know, probably for culture. But you can make that argument. That's a legitimate economic argument. But they're not even making that argument, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no. And OK, so think this is this is why the corporate ownership of the press and the consolidation is such a problem, because Trump just comes out and says it and is very direct about it.

26:52Right. And if you're David Ellison and you want your deal to win out, what are you going to do? What are you going to tell Barry Weiss in terms of her content choices over at CBS? No more Trump criticism. Like, no, you can't have Marjorie Taylor Greene on. No, you can't have Thomas Massey on. No, you can't have, you know, whoever he's pissed. Letitia James, whoever he's pissed off at, no, no more Trump criticism, at least until we get this deal done. And so, you know, with him, it's extremely overt. We, of course, have been warning about the way that corporate pressure can influence things for a long time.

27:25You guys recall the whole flap with Bernie Sanders and the Washington Post talking about Bezos's ownership and how that was a problem. And this was a big scandal. How dare you even suggest that their independence would be compromised, blah, blah, blah. That was, you know, an appearance of compromise. And that comes with like an understanding from the higher ups at the Washington Post about what Bezos would want from them and what areas he wouldn't want them to touch. With Trump, it is just completely direct. It is completely brazen and is completely overt. You know, remember how, look, we covered this at the time too, like with the Twitter files, it was a genuine scandal that the federal government was not even telling Twitter, oh, you need to censor this or Facebook, you need to censor this.

28:06Just saying, hey, we found this content and we think that this is wrong and we have a problem with it. The very understanding that the federal government had taken an interest in that is enough to exert pressure on these social media companies who want their, you know, favorable treatment from the government, don't want to run into any problems, etc. Even without the threat being made overt, they all know what the game is. Here you have Trump just completely making it plain, whether it's with Jimmy Kimmel, whether it's this tantrum about Marjorie Taylor Greene interview on 60 Minutes and complaining about all the new ownership is just as bad as the old ownership, whether it's demanding from the Ellisons that if they win out and their deal goes, his deal goes through, that then you are going to change CNN.

28:49You're going to change, you know, the leadership at CNN. You're going to basically bury Weissify CNN as well. This is a genuine scandal and it is a genuine shift in terms of, you know, the manner in which the federal government and the president himself feels the ability to directly coerce media. And of course, we know about all the lawsuits and all of that. And none of these media executives have any sort of character. They care about their money, their profit margins, you know, what their shareholders want from them. That's what they care about. And so they're all going to play the game. And that at its core is the problem with corporate ownership.

29:26And with Trump, it is just completely on steroids. You know, in terms of, I just want to give a shout out, of course, to Matt Stoller, who covers the antitrust aspect of this extraordinarily effectively. He doesn't have a piece up yet about the Paramount hostile takeover bid. However, he does have a piece about the problems with the Netflix bid. And we can put this up on the screen. This is A8 from Stoller. He says Netflix is trying to buy Warner Brothers Discovery. That would be a disaster for America. Part of what he says here is Netflix is the number one streamer and would be buying the number three streamer, would also be buying a large and important content library, which would presumably then be unavailable for potential rival streaming services.

30:07A Netflix Warner merger is a recipe for monopolization would be a pretty straightforward challenge for an antitrust lawyer under the Clayton Act. Judges are always a crapshoot, but the story here is clear and recent analogies work against this deal. Most industries are no longer about making a good product. Really, what they're about is trying to figure out how they can have a monopoly so that they can basically rig the rules and cheat. He thinks that it's very possible that the Netflix deal would ultimately be blocked in the court system. I think all of that is very political, ultimately. But the antitrust issues for whether it's Netflix or whether it is Paramount are incredibly clear, especially in a landscape where we already have so much corporate consolidation.

30:50Yeah. And that's why I don't want to miss the culture element. And I've been hammering it home. I mean, we're talking about sports. We're talking about movies. We're talking about everything together. Again, look at the trajectory of Netflix, where you have had a reduction in good content, an increase in price, ad tiers. Is your Netflix experience better today than it was 10 years ago, whenever it was cheaper, right? No, it's just not. And that's one where there's this new term called unshittification, which I really like. And it applies to everything. It's applying to streaming as well, where we pay more and we get less.

31:26And it's one of those where why? And then I guess, again, look, maybe I'm being too romantic, but there are only a few places left in the world where you can actually create good stuff over and over. And HBO and Warner Brothers is one of them. And it's like please, please don't bring your, you know, the people who run that show, is it cake? I can't have them with their grubby paws over HBO. I can't do it. I can't have is it cake, you know, rule America. But that's apparently, that's where everything goes. I think honestly, is it cake is like a best case scenario? Cause at least there's actual human beings involved.

32:10What we're actually looking at is like the AI slop takeover where it's so cheap to churn it out. It's better. There's already on YouTube, there's these channels that'll just put up like thousands of AI generated music. Like that's where the Charlie Kirk music came from. I'm sure you've seen those floating around. I can't sing right now. Yeah. Anyway, we are Charlie Kirk. Anyway, there's already channels that do this, that is just like so cheap and easy to churn out this content, that they do it and most of it doesn't hit. And then, you know, every once in a while, you get a We Are Charlie Kirk that goes mega viral and that pays for all of it.

32:46Like that, that is the logic that they're going to use as well, because they don't give a shit about art. They don't give a shit about creativity. They don't give a shit about like culture or American culture or any of that. It's just about the bottom line. And if they can rig the market and corner the market so that we have to accept whatever price increases and whatever slop they give us, that's exactly the direction that they're going to go in. 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.

33:22Rioting 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. 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.

34:10What 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.

34:47It'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. This is Ryder Strong, and I have a new podcast called The Red Weather. It was many and many a year ago in a kingdom by the sea. In 1995, my neighbor, Anna Trainor, disappeared from a commune. It was hard to wrap your head around.

35:28It was nature and trees and praying and drugs. No, I am not your guru. And back then, I lied to my parents, I lied to police, I lied to everybody. There were years right where I could not say your name. I've decided to go back to my hometown in Northern California, interview my friends, family, talk to police, journalists, whomever I can to try to find out what actually happened. Isn't it a little bit weird that they obsess over hippies in the woods and not the obvious boyfriend? They have had this case for 30 years. I'll teach you sons of a** to come around here and my wife. Boom, boom. This is The Red Weather.

36:07Listen to The Red Weather on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Turning now to AI. Huge development here in Washington. Let's go ahead and put this up here on the screen. President Trump says he will now issue an executive order to preempt any state in the United States from passing individual AI regulation. There must be only one rule book if we are going to continue to lead in AI. We are beating all countries at this point in the race, but that won't last long if we're able to have 50 states, many of them bad actors involved in rules and the approval process.

36:40There can be no doubt about this. AI will be destroyed in its infancy. I will be doing a one rule executive order this week. You can't expect a company to get 50 approvals every time they want to do something. That will never work. And this is part of a huge campaign in Washington over the last couple of days. Let me just zoom out and explain a little bit. So first of all, he had multiple attempts in the Congress to try and put this AI preemption in the bill, multiple in the NDAA, which we're going to get to here in a little bit. That actually failed at every level. Individual congressmen and even Republicans who initially had tried to put that in were like, oh, we're getting a lot of constituent pushback on this.

37:20And there are actually a lot of red state governors called their delegation. They're like, hey, I don't want this in the bill. So they push that away. The fact that they weren't able to get it in the NDAA, an executive order is actually the worst thing for them because it means it, of course, can be rolled back and it can be a challenge in the court system. So this is kind of a last ditch effort by the AI companies going to the White House and making their case. You've had multiple visits. Christmas party season is always fun for watchers here in D.C. The number of the big tech guys who have been at the White House over the last few days is crazy.

37:53Sergey was here just a couple of days ago. You had Greg Brockman at OpenAI. You had Jensen. You had Sundar Pichai. You had every player in Sam Altman, every major player has been at the White House in the last 10 days. This is their number one priority. And David Sachs, who's the White House AI czar, has kind of been the spearhead of this. Let's go to put this up here on the screen. This is his explanation, and he's, I guess, the father of the policy. He says, one rule book for AI, I want to share a few thoughts on AI presumption and address some of the concerns. First of all, this is not AI amnesty or AI moratorium.

38:29It's an attempt to settle a question of jurisdiction. When an AI model is developed in state A, trained in state B, inference in state C, delivered through the internet, that is clearly interstate commerce, exactly the type of economic activity the framers intended to reserve the federal government to regulate. In the absence of preemption, 50 different states will assert their jurisdiction, creating a patchwork of 50 different regulatory regimes. He says, for example, states like Colorado, California, and Illinois have made AI developers liable if their models contribute to algorithmic discrimination, which is defined as disparate impact.

38:59Colorado's list of protected groups includes English language proficiency, so presumably it's against the law for AI models to criticize illegal aliens. This is the type of ideological meddling of how we ended up with, quote, black George Washington. So he's making a cultural argument here. He says, only a federal framework can achieve this goal. The attempts of red states to protect conservatives from bias and discrimination will have limited effectiveness when blue states like California have the most market power and a nexus to AI development. We can't afford any of this. So he says, we will have preemption, but there will still be an application for child safety, for community, for creators, and for censorship.

39:37Now, the thing is, though, again, and this is actually kind of the problem, is that they're trying to do this through EO is the worst possible way. Because everything he said is not technically wrong to me. I don't think he's wrong about the interstate commerce. I think that what he's talking about, communities, creators, censorship, and executive order is the worst way to accomplish that. It's not actually the law. And it doesn't mean that we had a full-on debate, a democratic debate in the United States Congress and more to settle some rules around this because they're not technically incorrect.

40:12Like we should have federal standards in the same way that we do the internet or any of these things like the Child Safety Act, right? What we should have is a very specific major debate in this country about these models, their effects, their liability, what guardrails that we're going to have in place? What can we all agree on? The suicide one is it keeps me up at night because how many people are using this as a mental health proxy? We have a loneliness crisis. You have 800 million people or whatever using chat GPT. If just 1 % of them are crazy, that's millions of people and they're using this to assist them.

40:49I'm not saying it's chat GPT's fault, although it gets kind of sketchy whenever you live in countries where there's assisted suicide is legal, but they have no qualms. It's in the hands of Sam Ulm. And that's why, ultimately, I actually would fall back on state regulation because right now it's Wild West. And that's actually, again, in the era of exponential growth. And that's everything they tell us is exponential. It's getting better. It's getting better. And in this time, we do not have time to dilly-dally. The next time that a Congress could potentially solve this issue, or at least some issue is what, 2029?

41:27Like that's an eternity in AI math. Yeah. Well, and in fact, we did have a democratic debate and that's why legislators realized, oh, people do not want this. They don't want the federal government to preempt all of the states. They actually want the states to be able to have some control here. And I mean, this is the like the good part of the laboratory of democracy. You have 50 different states. They can take different approaches. They can try to figure this thing out. Who among us has confidence that this government, which is 100 % bought and compromised and shot through with these tech oligarchs, is going to do a good job regulating this extraordinarily existentially dangerous technology?

42:13Zero people should have confidence in that. The only people who like this direction are people, frankly, like David Sachs, who have a vested financial interest in pushing in this direction and having no regulation whatsoever. That has been the thrust of this administration from the jump. From the jump, any sort of regulation that was in place from the Biden administration, which was limited but did exist, that gets rolled back. These guys have gotten everything they wanted. That is why I say the main project, not to say there isn't a lot else going on that has consequences and is bad and all the rest, But the main project of this administration is pushing unregulated, off to the races, Wild West AI, and hoping and praying that it isn't a complete fucking disaster.

43:00And guess what? The public is not on board. That's why you couldn't get this through the Congress. That's why you have to do it through an executive order. That's why there's backlash, not just from Democrats who hate you anyway, but from Republicans who are saying, wait a second, we're not comfortable with this either. We're not comfortable with it in the short term. We're not comfortable with it in the long term. No Sam Altman, no David Sachs, no Mark Andreessen, no Peter Thiel. No, we don't trust you to do this in an ethical and responsible way that is ultimately going to provide more benefit than harm for the American people.

43:36So that is why they have ended up doing this executive order, because even people in the Congress, and many of, if not most of them, are getting money from Silicon Valley and are basically bought off by these guys. But even with that landscape, they said, no, we cannot put this in. The backlash and the consequences are too severe. That was actually democracy. And that's why it's so much of a problem, the way that this president has tried to consolidate so much executive power. And of course, he's not the first, but like with everything, He takes it to the next level. And why it's such a problem that in many instances, the court has allowed him to do that, whether through directly ruling on his executive power grabs or at the Supreme Court through the shadow docket where they said, well, we're not going to rule now.

44:23But you can go ahead and keep doing what you're doing. And, you know, in this instance, blocking the regulation at the state level and go about your merry way while we take our good old time figuring out how we're going to ultimately handle this thing. Yeah, and this is also like a real ideological war. So like for David, I mean, in terms of his, like I like David. He's, you know, I've been friends with him pretty open about this. Him and I have a very different view on AI question in terms of like his own financial interest. I actually think he's a libertarian and kind of always has been. And that's really the fundamental ethos of a lot of the people who are in the White House.

44:55Like for example, David, I mean, he's always been kind of a foreign policy dove, but he is majorly behind working with Jensen Wong and NVIDIA right now to loosen a lot of these current restrictions. So for example, can we put CB7 up here on the screen? This is by far one of the most consequential things on the AI front. And if you put this together with the AI moratorium or the EO, it totally makes sense. Trump says, I have performed in foreign president Xi of China and the US will allow NVIDIA to ship its H200 products to approve customers in China. H200, one of the more advanced chips in the NVIDIA arsenal, major reasons not to do it, which is basically handing China the one last piece that the US has in terms of our AI competitiveness.

45:42Now, the NVIDIA David Sachs argument is that by having them use the chips, they are reliant. They won't create their own. It's not a bad argument, but let's explain a little bit about what that means. In the interim, though, it means NVIDIA gets to keep printing a shit pot of money, and that's good for their stock. Now, again, like in David's kind of more libertarian ideology and all this, one of the things that David has consistently said is we're the backbone of the U.S. economy. And they're not wrong. Now, I think that that's a bad thing. You know, that's kind of my criticism of the Trump administration is that they're this jet, this rocket fuel to the AI industry is good for the short term, not good for the long term.

46:25because of a potential bubble bust going all in with huge amounts of GDP, stock market gains, vastly concentrated inside of this. It makes it so that these people are becoming fantastically wealthy, but we all may get fantastically poor if this shit doesn't work out and if it does work out. That's part of the problem. Yes, exactly. Yes. Let me - Damned if you do and damned if you don't. Let me also just show the red state opposition here, which we previously have mentioned. Can we put B4 up here on the screen? This is Ron DeSantis. Now, he says, I oppose stripping Florida of our ability to legislate in the best interest of the people, a 10-year AI moratorium, banned state regulation of AI, which prevent Florida from enacting important protections for individuals, children, and families.

47:11Now, the reason why I think that's important is to show you very specifically, it's not just like a blue-red issue. This is really about this question of guardrails. And And again, coming back to this, the belief of the Sachs-Andreessen crew is, yes, by the way, especially with Andreessen and some of the other people who are directly invested in this, a lot of this is money, but they're long-time libertarians. A lot of their genuine belief is that the government will come in, it will stifle the industry, and their claim is that this will benefit the open AIs and all of that of the world. The problem to me with a lot of that argument here is that because the tail risk socially and societally of this is so high, it would be genuinely irresponsible to say that we shouldn't have an immediate and a compelling interest in doing something about, and I understand, yes, that's going to hurt your venture profits and all that, but that's your problem, not mine, right?

48:10And that's not our democratic issue. That's part of the reason why ultimately Congress did not passed this. I'm really glad that you said that. The reason why, even with all the pressure from the White House, they're like, I don't know about this, is because they were getting huge pushback from their constituents. And what constituents can feel, I think correctly, is that the benefits to them are not yet as promised, and the costs remain high. So for example, let's go and put B5 up here. I found this in a Financial Times investigation about data power. And if you're watching this, I really want you to sit home and look.

48:46I mean, it shows you where in parts of the US, the gap between new data center demand and spare grid capacity is growing. You can see the gap. Look at PJM, right, up there in the top left. Look at the orders of magnitude where the new demand is from the projected capacity in 2030. In almost every grid in the US, projected demand is way higher or is higher than what the projected capacity is. And their argument, basically, is that this is a good thing for the market because the cure for high prices is high prices. This is a long-term libertarian talking point. What they mean by that is that high prices, the grid will take that.

49:30They will build out more investment infrastructure. But one of the reasons why I thought that the Financial Times piece was so important is if you keep reading, the pathway to building these new natural gas power plants and price, it doesn't keep up with that. And that's natural gas. Same. I mean, look, I'm a huge proponent of nuclear reactors. I'm also going to be honest with you. It takes about seven years to get this shit online, right? That's not even close to where that is. So in the interim, that gap, right, the price gap is going to be very painful for all of us. And again, we have to come to terms with what are we getting from this?

50:03Their claim, they look at big productivity numbers and all of that. Like, I fundamentally am just rejecting the fact that AI is not the same as the Industrial Revolution or the railroad. The broad aggregate benefits to the everyday citizen is not even close. And the power laws of wealth broadly flow, you know, into the pockets, not just of Silicon Valley, but very specifically, Sam Altman, Microsoft, Google, Meta, like the biggest of the biggest. In a lot of ways, these guys are tertiary actors compared to the big five companies that are all the way at the top. They're getting much wealthier and there's not enough productivity gain across the entire U.S.

50:41I mean, they have a lot of goals with this, but one of the goals is they find it annoying that they have to exist in a society and ever have to deal with government regulation or any sort of democracy like trimming their sails. So these guys are always looking for a way to exit. And this is their exit. They're like, if my company wins the AI race, then basically I get to say what is what. I get to run the society. I get to have all the wealth. I don't think we are capable of wrapping our head around the amount of power that would consolidate in the hands of a very small number of people, like you could count them on one or two hands, if one of these companies actually achieves super intelligence that they are all racing towards.

51:26So again, this seems like something we should have a massive democratic, like small d democratic debate about and take very, very seriously. They know that there is increasing, but that's part of why David Sachs is feeling the need to put out some frigging essay length thing. And I find it disgusting the way he's trying to use this culture war framing of like, oh, that's why you got black George Washington. Like, I'm sorry, I don't give a shit about black George Washington. You guys are trying to take away everyone's jobs and rip up the entire social contract and do it without us being able to even have a say.

52:01You want to make it so there's no regulation in the federal government. You've already accomplished that by and large. And ban states from being able to do it on their own. That is the game here. They want an exit from society. I mean, Peter Thiel and these people, they invest in this like Prospera and Honduras and they want these like crypto, yeah, seasteading. They're always looking for a way to not to be basically like god kings. And they think AI is the answer to that. Now, again, they have other goals as well, but that is a big one to keep in mind. So that's what we're talking about here.

52:35The power grid thing, I'm sorry, the argument, the libertarian argument that like, oh, high price will lead them to build out, blah, blah. These are monopolies. No, it won't. No, it won't. What's gonna happen is high prices are gonna lead to high prices. That's what's happening right now. You know, the grid that is the most strained there and the most, you know, where the demand exceeds the grid capacity the most rapidly and by the most extraordinary amount, it's right here. Why? Because Virginia is the epicenter of all of this data center buildup. Now, these things are being built all across the country, but in terms of the hotspot, it is in Virginia.

53:12For capital, we have the highest. Yeah, I've told 40 percent of Virginia's energy capacity already goes to these frickin' things. No one voted for that. No one voted for them to be, for us, regular consumers, to be shouldering the cost of that. Not all Republicans are apparently opposed to this direction. Glenn Beck, the very innovative youth of AI technology, invented for himself a mini-me George Washington to spout back to him. In a t-shirt. In a t-shirt, which is very deeply offensive to Sauger. I think it's fair. I think he's very undignified. This whole thing is very undignified. He's a great man.

53:50He doesn't wear a fucking T-shirt, okay? In any case, Glenn Beck created his own AI George Washington to feed back to him his own worldview, reflect back to him his own worldview and talking points. This is so, I don't even know what to say about this. This is a B4B. Let's play it. George, we have programmed a lot of information and given you a lot of information on what's going on in today's America. Based on your writings, the writings of the rest of the founders, What is it that you feel is the biggest problem or where we should start to fix things? If I may. Welcome to the A-Building. I'm Hans Charles.

54:29I'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. 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.

55:12This 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. 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. Can you get someone to join your cult?

55:49NLP 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. This is Ryder Strong, and I have a new podcast called The Red Weather.

56:34It was many and many a year ago. in a kingdom by the sea. In 1995, my neighbor, Anna Traynor, disappeared from a commune. It was hard to wrap your head around. It was nature and trees and praying and drugs. So no, I am not your guru. And back then, I lied to my parents. I lied to police. I lied to everybody. There were years right where I could not say your name. I've decided to go back to my hometown in Northern California, interview my friends, family, talk to police, journalists, whomever I can to try to find out what actually happened. Isn't it a little bit weird that they obsess over hippies in the woods and not the obvious boyfriend?

57:13They have had this case for 30 years. I'll teach you sons of bitches to come around here and my wife. Boom, boom. This is The Red Weather. Listen to The Red Weather on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speak plainly. My countryman, the danger, the greatest danger to our republic Lies not in foreign arms or political faction But in the decay May I just interrupt you for a second Could you just dumb it down just a little bit? Okay I do have 29 points and they're all referenced to exactly what we said in the past For this, just speak in today's language Okay, okay, I get it

58:00Let me speak to Americans If I'm honest, America's biggest problem isn't political or economic. It's all moral. You've drifted from the virtues that make liberty possible in the first place. Freedom. To be free, you have to have discipline. You have to have faith. You have to have character. And if you don't have any of those things, laws. Laws can't stop anything. They mean little. Government turns either weak or oppressive. You have grown skeptical of truth. You're reckless with debt. You're comfortable blaming instead of building anything. And in my time, we understood that self-governance begins with self-control.

58:47Maybe Netflix can pick up AI George Washington for their streaming slot moving forward. This is the world that we have now, Sager. Yeah, that's rough. It's a rough one. It's so bad. I don't know. I mean, the T-shirt. Yeah. Yeah. You know, one of the things I actually, this is going to be an ultra-sogger tangent, but it's just one of those things where putting the words that you want into people who are dead for like over 280 years is so offensive always to me. Because here's the thing about historical figures. They are very complicated. They are nuanced. They were human beings. George Washington, I think he was a great man.

59:25Had a lot of flaws. Okay. People like to focus just on slavery, But, you know, there was a lot of issues, actually, throughout the entire period in which he was a major figure in American history. I find that actually pretty interesting, you know, getting ultimately to the point and stepping ultimately down. Who is it? Ron Chernow, in my opinion, the best biography of George Washington. You should go read it, you know, for yourself. You actually, I think you get a lot more out of it than some boomer slop, which basically, you know, there's always this idea. Like, they would have agreed with me, right?

59:54That's not how historical figures are. You know, for all the greats, there were a lot of, you know, poor. They also had, many of them, deeply idiosyncratic, insane ideas. But, you know, they were coming from the time that they were in. I was telling you recently about, you know, John Adams, probably my favorite founding father. He wanted, you know, the president, George Washington, to be referred to as like his majesty the king. Which, ultimately, undemocratic. Now, why, right? His argument was, well, we live in a world in which there's all these other kings that will never respect our guy if we don't call him a king.

1:00:30It's kind of logical. It doesn't make any sense to me. And it also doesn't mean. It's an interesting debate. Right. And it also doesn't mean, like, that's a perfect example. If you take him out of that time period and you plop him in today, it's unlikely he's still going to be making the argument. Of course. That, oh, we need to call him a king. Right? I mean, that's why, yeah, I mean, I find the same thing so obnoxious when people try to retrofit, whether it's Founding Fathers. Yesterday I said Founding Farmers on the show. Shit restaurant. Almost overrated. Sorry, but don't sue me. Most overrated restaurant I've watched in the movie.

1:01:01Emily said positive things about it. Did she really? Oh, my God. Anyway, that's a side tangent, but now I'm very in my head about not saying Founding Farmers again. Anyway, whether it's a Founding Father or whether it's like a civil rights icon or whatever. Oh, yeah. But, you know, it's already annoying when people will like cherry pick their quotes and quotes and be like, that's why my ideological project is in line with blah, blah, blah. It is another level of horror to literally take an AI embodiment of that person and put your words into their mouth. That is, I think, I mean, it is it is disturbing.

1:01:34It's gross. It's disturbing. It's mockable. It's ridiculous. It's humiliating. It's all of those. It's sort of pathetic. Honestly, it's pathetic. It is pathetic. And again, people do this like you're talking about with civil rights. People will post the most like, you know, it's like those debates about Abraham Lincoln. People will post his emancipation quotes. Same guy who thought about repatriating blacks to Africa, right? Those two things apparently can exist in the same body. Also within, I mean, I want to go back and check, a five-year time span. You could choose to look at that. I'd choose to study the time period between that and then eventually emancipation.

1:02:09That's a lot more interesting, okay? And that was a product of its time, of its circumstance, and transposing that to today, ridiculous, man. I mean, it's genuinely offensive from a person who really likes to look and to understand history. So Glenn, I mean, I don't even, look, I'm sure the boomers loved it. I'm sure they loved it. Did they? No, I actually, I'm telling you, I think so. They probably thought it was real. Yeah, they either thought it was real or they're like, oh yeah, he would've agreed with me. Same thing, you know, they do the same thing with Thomas Jefferson. It's like, oh, apparently Thomas Jefferson only ever, or Thomas Jefferson had some dumb fuck ideas, all right?

1:02:41Nobody is ever exactly who you think they are. And, you know, yeah, using their, using their like literal likeness and then pretending that that's what they would have said today, man, that's just grim. One more reason to hate this whole development and recognize that thus far the AI promise for all of us, for these tech titans, it's making them wildly wealthy and it's giving them the possibility of like achieving their wildest God King dreams and fantasies. But for the rest of us, not really living up to the hype so far.

1:03:301969, 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 Lumumba. Listen to The A-Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Black 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.

1:04:16Let 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. No. This is Ryder Strong, and I have a new podcast called The Red Weather. In 1995, my neighbor, Anna Traynor, disappeared from a commune. It was nature and trees and praying and drugs. No, I am not your guru. Back then, I lied to everybody. They have had this case for 30 years. I'm going back to my hometown to uncover the truth.

1:05:00Listen to The Red Weather on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.