2/4/26: Elon Freaks Over Paris Twitter Raid, Schumer Praises Israel, Blowback Pod Report From Cuba

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0:31rings and listen now. 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. I went blank. I hit a bad note, then I couldn't 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. 1969, Malcolm and Martin are gone. America is in crisis. And at Morehouse College, the students make their move.

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2:08Let's move on to Elon Musk, Ryan, because the X offices were raided in Paris yesterday. I'm going to go ahead and read from this AP report about what happened. And headline is X offices raided in France as prosecutors investigate child abuse images and deepfakes. You might remember us covering the X child abuse deepfake issue not very long ago. AP says French prosecutors raided the offices of social media platform X on Tuesday as part of a preliminary investigation into allegations that include spreading child sexual abuse images and deepfakes. They have also summoned billionaire owner Elon Musk for questioning X and Musk's artificial intelligence company XAI, which was just, by the way, obtained by SpaceX.

2:54So more financial engineering to dilute shareholders in favor of Elon Musk's wealth. Congratulations, guys. AP continues to say XAI also faced intensifying scrutiny from Britain's data privacy regulator, which opened formal investigations into how they handled personal data when they developed and deployed Musk's artificial intelligence chat bot Grok. Grok, which was built by XAI and is available through X, sparked global outrage last month after it pumped out a torrent of sexualized, non-consensual deepfake images in response to requests from X users. And so now X is in the crosshairs of European regulators.

3:32So it's not just in Paris. This is also in Spain and Greece and places where they're considering not even in targeting X specifically, but broadly teen social media bans. This is obviously targeting X specifically in Paris, but teen social media bans are on the table in a lot of different countries right now. And you can understand why if the average social media website had non-consensual deep fake porn being pumped out onto the Internet, pretty easily accessible to children at that point. Yeah. Yeah. And this is in some ways part and parcel of the kind of EU attack on American big tech. Yes.

4:16And it's much more restrictive and in some ways censorious in a negative way approach to it. Yeah. But also at times big some big tech companies. very much deserve to be checked by governments because and in particular i'm of a couple minds with musk's i like that he allows more speech yes and i like the more uh libertarian kind of approach to it at the same time for his own commercial purposes he does stuff that everybody just knows is wrong. Like he was falling behind on this, with, you know, Grok take up. Uh, and all of the AI world knows, and this is probably where it's headed and it sucks that the internet runs on porn.

5:11Yeah. Like that's actually, that's the actual basis of the internet. And if you, the more of a spigot. America runs on Duncan. The internet runs on porn. The more of the, the porn spigot you turn on for AI, the more you're going to get people to use it. And so he turned on that spigot and this flood of then disgusting child images and that in addition, what governments are trying to ban, which is doing deep fake nudes and porn of real people, it just starts flooding in. that you like as a public you've got to be able to check that at some point yeah um well but Elon Musk is yeah just let's feels like he's uncheckable well let's put Elon's response up on the screen this is um D2 and he said in a in response to an X statement on what happened in the Paris office this is a political attack I'll read a little bit more from X's statement about the Paris raid which calls it, quote, an abusive act of law enforcement theater designed to achieve illegitimate political objectives rather than advance legitimate law enforcement goals rooted in the fair and impartial administration of justice.

6:28And what I like about what you just said, Ryan, is that can be true, actually, that this is political theater and it's a political attack. that's both those things can be true at the same time as uh the sort of legitimate concerns about x are true and the deep fake non-consensual deep fake porn questions uh whether it's in regard to children being able to see them or the people who become the subjects of them these two things can be true at the same time it's politicized and it's a legitimate problem and it should be politicized in the sense that these are political questions, like what we want to tolerate in our society when it comes to child nudity and stuff, and deep fake porn of real people, these are political questions.

7:18Again, from a man who purports to be saving Western civilization and is seemingly aligned against globalist, atheist, whatever, and the right finds a lot of common cause with Elon Musk now, This is a man who is defending. I mean, he gladly defends pornography on the platform. It's not even that's not even a question at this point. Like, of course he does. So it's just a good reminder of the gulf, the real gulf between Elon Musk and the civilization saving forces on the right that align with him. And so he's also getting hit in Spain. So Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez there is what will play him in a second.

8:00And the context here is the center-left coalition in Spain is facing a wipeout from the right. And it's, I think, important to understand this in that context, that they clearly feel like this is something that could maybe stave off that wipeout potentially. We'll play Sanchez and then Elon Musk's just very predictable. predictable in general, but not in particular response. So let's roll Sanchez. Just last week, the owner of X, a migrant himself, used his personal account to amplify this information about the sovereign decision by my government, the regularization of 500 ,000 migrants that live, work, and contribute to the success of our country.

8:56The same platform that has allowed its AI, Grok, to generate illegal sexual content. Yeah, and some of this, to be clear, in my own opinion, goes way too far. For instance, in France, it's illegal to deny the Holocaust, and at one point, Grok was doing some dabbling in Holocaust denialism. You're going to have LLMs that screw up. Making that kind of speech criminal is, to me, pushing it a little too far. But Sanchez says, first, we will change the law in Spain to hold platform executives legally accountable for many infringements. Those laws have been wildly abused. We've seen that, yes. And second, we will turn algorithmic manipulation and amplification of illegal content into a new criminal offense.

9:46Third, we will implement a hate and polarization footprint system to track, quantify, and expose how digital platforms fuel division and amplify hate. If they turn that into a crime, that's awfully dicey. Fourth, Spain will ban access to social media for minors under the age of 16. Platforms will be required to implement effective age verification systems, not just checkboxes, but real barriers that work. Fifth, my government will work with our public prosecutor to investigate and pursue the infringement committed by Grok, TikTok and Instagram. It's one way I would think about it is like, let's say so upscrolled is doing tremendously, you know, a social platform that is exploding in popularity.

10:35And they're saying we want to be a free speech platform. What I would say is I've heard that before. What if Spain decides that some of the speech that you're allowing on this platform, they consider hateful? Are you going to put the upscrolled founders in prison over that? So I think this is not as clear cut as kind of a left-right thing as people think it is. Elon Musk swoops in with the least edifying possible response. You put up Musk here. he says dirty sanchez is a tyrant and traitor to the people of spain and then he has a little poop emoji in case anybody doesn't get the the reference there i saw that i was like where do i know that phrase from and i was like oh in college um i was i was telling uh mac and emily who don't remember a time before the internet well emily does mac i'm not so sure A year old, but Mac is young and spry.

11:35In college, there was a sheet of paper that was passed around. Like this is what viral stuff was back before the internet was a thing. It's a piece of paper that had been touched by hundreds of people. Hundreds of people had been passed around in dorm rooms and parties. And on it, it was actually multiple pages, I think. On it was, it was like an urban dictionary. It would say Dirty Sanchez. Yeah, urban dictionary. And Dirty Sanchez would then be defined. A lot of you are eating breakfast or drinking coffee, so I'm not going to define it. If you Google it, it says it surfaced in 2003 in some UK reality show.

12:13No, no, no. I can tell you it was circulating on paper in college campuses in the 1990s, which is apparently where Elon Musk is stuck. so a grown man with a deep cut there to come back at the Prime Minister of Spain here we are coping so poorly with this era of technology we're coping so poorly with it as evidenced by the engineer by the architect of our digital doom you can see it in his response his geopolitical negotiations you can see it 13-year-old, yeah. Right there. It seems like just yesterday that the Two Guys Five Rings podcast was in Paris for the Olympics. And now we're heading to Milan for the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympic Winter Games.

13:04I'm Bowen Yang. And I'm Matt Rogers. And we'll join athletes from 93 countries as Two Guys Five Rings hits the Italian Alps for the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympic Winter Games. Open your free iHeartRadio app. Did we mention it's free? search Two Guys Five Rings and listen now. 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. You get to marry Priyanka Chopra Jonas. And also, you know, your daughter's incredible. That's beautiful, man. Yeah, thank you.

13:45That'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 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. Who am I? Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the A-Building.

14:25I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. had 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.

15:09This 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. Ryan, let's move on to Chuck Schumer, this video. People absolutely have to see this video of Chuck Schumer talking about Israel. Yes. Let's do it. All right. Chuck Schumer, Ryan, where was this? This was at, this was happening, I think this was last week, right? I was, you can't ask me, I was in Mexico. That's right. You were at Mexico and you were very focused on Epstein. This was a fundraiser for, I forget what.

15:47It was a fundraiser last week. And I want to think, I think this popped over the weekend. But here's the clip of Chuck Schumer that you've all been waiting for. It won't surprise you, but unusually brazen given the circumstances. Let's roll it. Fight for aid to Israel, all the aid that Israel needs. I will continue to fight for it. And that we delivered more security assistance to Israel, our ally, undermine leadership than ever, ever before. We will keep doing that, everybody. It is so important to give Israel what it needs and to protect itself from the many in that difficult region who want to wipe Israel off the face of the map.

16:33We have to do everything to do that. We have to do everything to ensure that the delicacy's fire secured last year paved the way to last in peace. Okay, so according to the foreword, the breakfast quote previously held at the offices of the UJA, Federation of New York, was held this year for the first time in the Events Hall at Park East Synagogue, which was the site of a pro-Palestinian protest last year that featured, according to the foreword, anti-Semitic slogans and posters. That's how this is described. Ryan, I said it was unusually brazen. Not really unusually brazen, given the circumstances from Chuck Schumer, but tone deaf is probably a better phrase.

17:13I don't, well, I think it's another indication that Schumer's not running for re-election. Great point. I think that he is, I think he's just being honest here. I have many jobs as leader and one is to fight for aid to Israel, all the aid that Israel needs. I will continue to fight for it. So that's his authentic, genuine view. He believes that that is one of the things that he is proudest of in his role as Democratic leader and in his role as a member of the House and as a senator. And certainly at this fundraiser, he's going to celebrate that. But I do think it's another indication that, you know, he's looking back on his life and his achievements rather than thinking in a forward-looking way.

18:06Makes sense. I don't know if AOC is the only one that could beat him. If he does run for re-election, I suspect it's possible other people could even beat him. But I think that AOC would beat him fairly easily at this point. Yeah. Because he has. I'm sure he knows that. He has thoroughly and completely lost the normie suburban Democrats. Right. And this is what happened in Obama. And AOC has won them. Yeah. Like that would be the political environment was nothing that you could have expected five years ago. It's watching the view gush over Mamdani. Right. Yeah. Right. So, Ryan, take us, meanwhile, in Gaza, take us through some developments in Gaza and also some new breaking points.

18:49Some drop site reporting on Human Rights Watch. Yunus Tarawi, incredible Palestinian reporter, obtained another just horrifying video. It's not graphic or gruesome. It's just genocidally horrifying. So this is taking place in Rafa. He writes, Israeli troops blew up the Morag water station today, which, according to Gaza's water utility, supplied water to roughly one third of Rafa's residents prior to the war. And what Yunus consistently finds is the most foul captions that come along with these videos that the Israeli soldiers post themselves and have continued to do for two plus years now. Now, at the very beginning, I think a lot of sensible people thought, wow, this is really awful that the IDF keeps posting evidence of their own genocide and brutality.

19:50And it's humiliating to Israel's defenders. And the IDF is going to put a stop to it. Like that, I think there were, you may have even thought that at the beginning. Like, wow, this is some like recklessness on the part of these soldiers. but the commanders are going to get on top of this and you're going to stop seeing these. Like if these images are going to get out, it's going to, Hamas is going to have to like find them on the phones of soldiers or something. They're not going to continue to make themselves look like a spectacle of evil deliberately. And yet here we are more than two years later, they're still posting these types of videos and so the cap they put the caption they put along with the video is we specialize in paint jobs and small renovations details on m on dm i genuinely appreciate the honesty of that i guess right like it's it's so much more honest than continuing to say the most moral force that's ever existed yeah we don't hear that much anymore do we right the most moral.

20:55That's interesting. They did really sacrifice that. For maybe what was a year we heard that? Yeah. That's interesting. It's a good point. We don't ever hear the most moral army anymore. The situation with access to clean water in Gaza in general is brutal. And so we had Dropsite had reported that they blew up Gaza City's right as they were leaving. They burned down and blew up Gaza City's sewage treatment plant. And now they blew up this one. They also blew up, UNICEF reported for Dropsite that they blew up another one also in Rafa where Rachel Corey had been killed, actually, back in 2002 or 2003.

21:51We also had significant news out of Human Rights Watch. Actually, we can put up E3. We'll get to that in a second. So Reuters broke the news that the State Department and other officials had gotten access to northern Gaza early on in the war and had put together the most damning and extraordinary evidence you could possibly imagine laying out the utter dystopian carnage. And it was blocked by McLean McGurk and other State Department officials from getting to completion saying it lacked balance. Like, how do you, like, one of the details they put in there, like, you know, the dogs are overweight from eating so many corpses.

22:56Like, how do you balance, like, what do you want, what's the balance? What's the balance to that detail? like the the situation was not balanced so Jonathan Whittall uh former UN official uh pushed out of the UN by Israel by just by its destruction of UNRWA as has become a journalist um and he's been done a couple of incredible pieces for DropSite one of them um exposes a lot of the photos that were taken on that journey so now you don't have to take on that tour of northern Gaza So now you don't have to take the State Department bureaucrats word for the devastation that they witnessed. You can you can see the actual photos.

23:39And it was important for the State Department, the Biden State Department, to block that report, because if the report went through, then there would be legal implications. You'd have to stop weapons shipments. You'd have to notify Congress or all of these different things would kick in. So they had to just stop it right there. And then separately, a top Human Rights Watch official, Omar Shakir, resigned this week in protest of Human Rights Watch squashing some reporting on what Israel was doing in Gaza and whether or not like allowing people to return, not to return, or broke international law.

24:20You can read the details at Dropside and elsewhere. But it goes to this, there's this Israeli argument that all of these organizations are fundamentally biased against Israel. Human Rights Watch is right up there. You read what actually goes on inside places like Human Rights Watch. They're absolutely bending over backwards to do everything they can to minimize the criticism that they have to dole out. And so the criticism that we do get publicly, that is the least of it. And so this was Omar Shakir, somebody who was pretty heavily criticized over the years for kind of whitewashing Israeli crimes.

25:05And this is his way of, I think, saying, you know, I was fighting as hard as I could. Like you were criticizing me from the outside, but I was fighting as hard as I could for the truth on the inside. and I just feel like I cannot, I can't do it anymore. I can't just, because there's always that question, like, can I do more good on the inside or the outside? Yeah, totally. And he came to the conclusion that he could no longer justify even going along with what they're putting out. People can go read this piece on DropSite. It's a really fascinating glimpse. Great story, Ryan. Well, thank you. So up next, we've got the blowback boys, Noah and Brendan, who just returned from Cuba.

25:52Seems like just yesterday that the Two Guys Five Rings podcast was in Paris for the Olympics. And now we're heading to Milan for the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympic Winter Games. I'm Bowen Yang. And I'm Matt Rogers. And we'll join athletes from 93 countries as Two Guys Five Rings hits the Italian Alps for the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympic Winter Games. Open your free iHeartRadio app. Did we mention it's free? Search Two Guys Five Rings and listen now. 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, you get to marry Priyanka Chopra Jonas.

26:38And also, you know, your daughter's incredible. That's beautiful, man. Yeah. Thank you. 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 had 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 he 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.

27:22Welcome 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 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.

28:07This 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. The humanitarian situation in Cuba is spiraling downwards as Trump is trying to choke off energy from getting to the island. To talk about this, we're going to be joined by Noah Coolwin, who is a co-host of the Blowback Podcast, as well as joining us from New York, Brendan James, the other co-host of the Blowback Podcast. Welcome back to the program. We're having you guys on because you just returned from Cuba, and so we wanted to get an update on the conditions there.

28:55While you were there, I believe it was on Thursday, President Trump put out a new executive order downgrading Cuba further into the depths of evilness. Can you describe to us what Trump's new executive order is and what it would do and how it was received while you were there in Cuba? Sure. So the situation in Cuba, for those who don't know, is that Cuba exists under the gun of an American blockade and has for decades. This limits the businesses that can do business in Cuba, and it also limits the Cuban government's ability to access basics for its citizenry. We're talking about, in this case, the most important being access to energy.

29:42And so this executive order that was announced last Thursday was meant to prohibit anybody from doing business with Cuba involving the transaction involving oil transactions. The Cuban electrical grid runs on oil. Cuba is able to generate some of its oil, but it needs in order to keep the grid functional and to meet the needs of its nine million or so population needs to import oil. And what Trump did was he targeted specifically, I mean, he didn't do it by name, but this executive order was aimed at Mexico, which in recent years has become the primary foreign supplier of Cuba's oil. Overcame Venezuela even.

30:21Exactly. Well prior to the Maduro kidnapping earlier, or last month. And so the executive order said, we are going to, you know, we're going to do nuclear tariffs on anybody who nuclear figurative language here, not literal, nuclear tariffs on anybody who tries to sell oil to Cuba. And the purpose of this, which is very explicit, is to choke the Cuban population. It is to plunge them into darkness to make it so that they do not have electricity, that they do not have the basic means of carrying out everyday life. And the goal of that is that it will succeed, the Americans hope, where the last 60 years of American policy has not succeeded.