Unnamed Expert

You're talking about hundreds of millions, billions, and sometimes into the trillions when you're looking at the impact of each of these regulations.

EPA will be reconsidering many suffocating rules that restrict nearly every sector of our economy and cost Americans trillions of dollars. Our actions include the Biden administration's deeply flawed Clean Power Plan 2.0, medium and heavy car and truck rules, and the so-called social cost of carbon.

Out of nowhere, they would create these NGOs, and they were getting billions of dollars. I mean, it's not like they were creating an entity and then getting $100,000 or getting $5 million. They were getting $2 billion, $5 billion, $7 billion. And they were doing it in a way where they were deliberately restricting oversight from the federal government.

so that I, as EPA administrator, sit before you today unable to answer a whole lot of very simple questions that should be required whenever the federal government is spending even a dollar.

The Kansas City Royals offered him their stadium, and he said he didn't want to be the Kansas City Royals of crypto.

Finally, this thing with the heat breaks. And he does want to be the Miami Heat of crypto. And the twist to the heat deal that was so appealing to him and the small circle of people trying to figure out how you get inside of the minds of ordinary people was that it required government approval. The Miami-Dade County had to approve the deal. It wasn't just, oh, you go right to the Miami Heat.

And the fact that a government was going to sign off on it and rubber stamp them and say the government approves of FTX, they thought that was really valuable because it would just create trust. That's what they're doing. They're trying to create trust.

It was perfect because what is an umpire? An umpire is someone who's there judging everything and making sure it's fair. And you're watching the television and you see the batter and you see the catcher and you see the pitcher and you see this logo on the umpire. I couldn't, I mean, it took my breath away how quickly, how easily, how cheaply they were able to get that real estate.

Almost every shot, you know, basically constantly on TV, on this human being, is this thing that says FTX. So what they figured out, I mean, I figured this out in my own way, right?

That I've written sports books to get at things other than sports, because this whole society is so sports obsessed that you can take them to, if you start with sports, you can get them to places they wouldn't think they would want to go. They're not going to want to read a book about data and analytics. They might want to read a book about, wow, data analytics in baseball. And business people,

are constantly looking for sports metaphors for what they're doing. If you give them a sports metaphor combined with a lesson, the lesson is more likely to be absorbed. This is a version of what Sam Bankman-Fried was doing.

You're picking up on all this stuff that nobody has picked up on. But yes, yes. They were worried, of course, crypto, you know, crypto has got kind of sketchy reputation in most people's minds. Lots of bad things that happen in crypto. Getting people to take your money, they thought was going to be a big problem. And it was a problem, obviously, in football.

with the institutions, with the stadiums. The basketball, the deal with the Heat, they had to jump through hoops. They did go give presentations to the Miami-Dade Board of Supervisors or whatever that government body is. Baseball just took the money. Baseball, they couldn't believe how easy it was. And this probably tells you something about the hand that baseball feels it's playing.

It's like the lesser venture capitalist. It's worried about being left out. So it will allow others to just do their vetting for them. And if it's okay for basketball, it's got to be okay for us. Just please give us some too.

again it's the martian view sort of like this is he notices this sort of indiscriminate use of quarterbacks especially but but athletes uh to pitch stuff and he says you know i've seen dak prescott in this mattress commercial 7 000 times and i don't believe a single person has bought a mattress because dak prescott was with in the mattress commercial that that i think his mind that had zero effect

He said, on the other hand, Tom Brady has changed our life. That Brady matters more than everything combined. The best ever, right? But he's not thinking about being the best.

I'm in. I mean, I do think everybody FTX hired to endorse it was being paid more money per minute than they'd ever been paid. I mean, it wasn't just Brady, but that, if you ask Sam, Brady was cheap at that price. This is gonna sound strange. You hear that number and you think, oh, Brady just let himself be bought. I don't actually think that's what happened. I think Brady actually was interested.

And this was, FTX was the most interesting crypto place. Brady had is a genuine curiosity, fascination with crypto and a genuine curiosity, fascination with Sam. The money in a way clouds the reality of the situation. It wasn't just the money. As much money as it was.

For Sam's point of view, it might have been just the effect Brady had. Although I think it probably tickled him that he was, you know, on the sidelines when Brady was playing football.

Most people who met Sam felt oddly admiring and protective of him. He was nothing but this roly-poly, super bright nerd. He wasn't pretending to be a former athlete. A lot of times you see people who are cozying up to athletes, and athletes smell it, right? They're kind of jock sniffers. Sam, you know, he didn't pretend to know which way the football was supposed to go when you had it.

He was just his own person and so different that he interested people like Brady. It was like a weird friendship struck up on the playground by the kid who was all alone in the corner who nobody wanted to play with and the most popular kid in the school. That's what it felt like. Sam could not believe the effect of the role that Brady played in the culture.

And the drop off from Brady to Baker Mayfield or Dak Prescott is just huge. But he was also saying this like, There's a relationship between the product that's being pitched and the person who's doing the pitching. So, for example, Steph Curry's operation at first said no, he didn't want to endorse FTX. But then after Brady in the stadium, he came on board.

The platform that does it all. There's no due diligence. And in this case, there was no due diligence done even by the venture capitalists who invested in the company. So it was a little hard to blame the athletes for not doing it too. It's sort of like, oh, everybody's all in on this. What could be wrong with it? But what it says is what you're getting when you buy an athlete

is you're a kind of blind faith the deal the athletes thought they were doing was well i'm famous and and they're buying a little bit of my fame and there's no cost to me and nobody's really going to do anything because i said you know i said do it with sam beck and free showed is yes people will actually do things because you said to do it and so there's some responsibility there

Sam would go, said, when I go to Capitol Hill, and I go meet the senators, the first thing they want to talk about is Tom Brady. So the senators were feeling that warm glow towards Sam because of this perceived relationship with Brady.

It was actually brilliant. It actually worked. It was exactly the way to go about it. And whatever dollars he forked over, he got much more in return in terms of just social credibility. If he had actually run this place the way it should have been run, He might have become the world's first trillion dollar company. It was growing unbelievably fast.

The name recognition went from zero to like everybody's heard of this place in about two seconds. And it felt okay because all these people who you admire and these institutions you admire said, it's okay.

My connection to Sam, I think in the beginning, why he was even interested in sitting down with me, was he'd read Moneyball when he was 13 years old. I was going to ask. And it completely confirms his approach to life, which is, you know, he's this kid who's unendowed with a normal range of human feeling.

And he substitutes emotion and feeling for emotion and feeling, sort of mathematical calculation to make every decision in his life. Every decision. I mean, when he gets older, like whether to get married and have kids, it's an expected value calculation.

he's sort of taking the idea the hard money ball uh that i mean that experience doesn't matter that a nerd with a computer can actually make better decisions about baseball players than some guy who played for 20 years um he's sort of taking that to an extreme and taking it out into the wall into the world and applying it to everything And it becomes preposterous.

I mean, he takes it to, he dislikes his money ball on steroids gone wrong. That phenomenon, the money ball phenomenon, was in a way, I think, a bridge for him to see, a bridge for him, his mind into the world, into real world problems that you might otherwise think he has nothing, no ability to solve or even think about.

You put it well. The nerds evict the scouts. The scouts are still around, but their status is lower than it was. And the nerds all of a sudden have a place at the head of the table. And Sam was very oddly doing the same thing in other sectors of the economy. He didn't let anybody over the age of 35 into his company.

So the nerd was evicting the old experienced people in finance, basically, or political analysis. It was meddling in American politics. It was him and three 28-year-olds thinking about how you manipulate a Republican primary. using analytics as sort of their touchstone. So the moneyballing of everything, I mean, it's a phenomenon in the last 20 years, right? No doubt.

And Sam is just like taking it to an extreme. I think, what do I think about this? It bothers me a little. This is the truth. And it may bother me for unintelligent reasons. What bothered me at the time when I wrote Moneyball was that there were a club of people who were insensible to new ideas and new approaches.

And so they just shut out this other way of thinking about the problem and were smug in their ability to make their own judgments. I thought that was bad, this kind of clubby approach to thinking about the world or thinking about problems or dealing with uncertainty. We've replaced one smug club with another smug club. It's just the smug club are these nerds. Yes.

They are undeniably better at putting debt together a baseball team than the old smug club. It is a better way of thinking about the problem. And, but it is not a perfect way of thinking about the problem. And I think when you, whenever you create the smug club, what you do is you shut out other ways of thinking about the problem, things that are threatening or alien to you.

Intellectual monoculture. Yes. Intellectual groupthink. We know... that there isn't a different way to think about this problem. I think the smartest of the people who are, you know, at the vanguard of Moneyball are aware of this. I agree. I agree.

But there is, there is the, we were talking about the pendulum swinging and I just have felt it's, I've sensed it swinging too far in the other direction. And Sam Beckman Freed is oddly an example of that. Yeah.

where you allow your mind to come to rest. Someone once said, an explanation is where the mind comes to rest. And the mind used to come to rest with, oh, Bill Parcells knows what he's doing on defense. We're doing this because Parcells knows defense. or we know the player is good because this scout says he's good, without examining the mechanisms by which this judgment is rendered.

And my point, and the point of Moneyball, is don't allow your mind to come to rest.

I was very aware of this. I was very aware of this.

That's an interesting way of putting it. Yes. If you can connect it up to sports, people are blind to everything else. This is absolutely true. It legitimizes. Sports is used to legitimize great fortunes in this country. You buy a sports team and your money becomes a different kind of money. Yes. It's one of the reasons people buy sports teams, whether they're conscious of it or not.

However they made this pile of money, they might have made it by raping middle-class investors in the stock market. But now they're the owner of some franchise and people see them differently and like them more.

That's right. And- What I loved about Sam Battenfried as a character was that he was figuring all this out as if no one had ever thought any of these thoughts before. He was figuring out all by himself the role of sports in the American imagination.

And when you approach life this way, when you approach life, your working assumption is nobody knows what they're talking about, especially older people have no idea. You only trust your friends with their computers and their analytics. You end up First, making some wild errors. But second, sort of stumbling upon cliches that everybody who's been in this world and paid attention to it understand.

But third, sometimes you get these blazing insights. Like you actually do get this fresh look at a thing. Totally. And the way he parsed sports generated, I've never heard anybody say, oh, the stadium matters. The player doesn't matter. I never heard anybody say Tom Brady is not just a different by degree than Dak Prescott. It's like a different species. They figured this stuff out.

It was interesting. Interesting to hear it. Absolutely.

This is just one big trust fall.

Sam was, you got to remember, he's a Martian. He's trying to figure out people the way an AI would figure out people. Had no kind of social interaction as a kid. Never thought of himself as the sort of person who could run a business with customers. So he's sort of groping, figuring out how do you get attention for this crypto exchange?

And he starts to just kind of, from first principles, look at what people care about. And he saw that, like, in Europe, when you put the names of companies on the jerseys of players, everybody noticed the name of the company. And no one cared about the names that were on the stadiums.

But in the United States, all the announcers, every time they talk about a stadium, they mention the Mercedes-Benz Superdome.

He just picked it up. It was like what people cared about. He would never try to make an argument about why people were this way because he had no idea. It was just, I'm looking at these strange creatures called human beings, and this is what they do here in America.

Once Sam has decided that what they need to do is stick FTX's name on a stadium, they go looking for a stadium to stick its name on. And he got rejected by the New Orleans Saints and the Kansas City Chiefs. And I think it was because crypto just generally made some people uncomfortable, rightly.

Chevron says its systems were at one point infected with Stuxnet. Nobody admits to it, but it's widely assumed the United States or Israel's defense forces created that virus. Now there's flame.

Another virus apparently targeted at Iran, it dwarfs Stuxnet.

Flame is 20 times the size of Stuxnet.

It spread all over the world. Most of the infections that we saw were in Iran, but ultimately it escaped Iran and began to spread anywhere and everywhere. If you had a Windows machine connected to the internet, you could get infected by Stuxnet. And it's still out there today, spreading.

The attack, using a virus called Shamoon, did not disrupt oil production, calling it, quote, probably the most destructive cyber assault the private sector has ever seen. Another volley in an increasingly high-stakes war going on in cyberspace.

Countries and companies swipe our corporate secrets. Now our enemies are also seeking the ability to sabotage our power grid, our financial institutions, our air traffic control systems. We cannot look back years from now and wonder why we did nothing in the face of real threats to our security and our economy.

Did you think that this was an actual FBI agent, or did you think this was a spam call?

The administration revealed that China had been involved in hacking of U.S. pipelines from 2011 to 2013. Chinese-backed hackers targeted and in many cases breached nearly two dozen companies that own such pipelines. The FBI and DHS unveiled...

And now, with a program called Vault Typhoon, is putting cyber time bombs on our critical infrastructure, like our water, our grid, and our ports.

It's been pouring into the networks of aviation, rail, mass transit, highway, maritime, The program injected malware into U.S. sectors like energy communications and water treatment.

And the bulletin reads, Volt Typhoon has compromised the IT environments of multiple critical infrastructure organizations, primarily in communications, energy, transportation systems, critical infrastructure. Things like the cellular phone carriers are the target.

Water pipes are bursting in the frigid conditions leaving behind a path of destruction. Outages have now hit water treatment plants triggering dozens of boil water advisories and with some grocery stores running out of essentials people are lining up for help.

As Texans struggle Republican Senator Ted Cruz was photographed heading to Mexico for a vacation even though days before he pleaded with Texans to hunker down.

China this month celebrates the 10th anniversary of the Belt and Road Initiative, which ranks as the world's biggest development program ever undertaken by a single country. Over the last 10 years, the BRI, as it's generally called, has seen Chinese financial institutions lending close to US$1 trillion to finance infrastructure projects all over the developing world.

The China-Europe Railway Express officially launched its unified brand, with eight cities including Chongqing, Chengdu, Zhengzhou, Xi'an and Wuhan as the starting stations.

Ports. The China Ocean Shipping Company, or Costco, has expanded this once sleepy wharf into a container city. China started investing $2.5 billion in the Piraeus container terminal seven years ago. This has since become a key part of the One Belt, One Road initiative.

Montenegro decided to build a motorway to open up the country. A Chinese bank provided a $1 billion loan in 2015.

Major oil and gas pipelines. Prior to his visit to China, the Saudi crown prince was in Pakistan, where a $10 billion oil refinery investment deal was made. The refinery is in Pakistan's Gwadar port. The deepwater port is one of the projects that China and Pakistan have worked on

Cambodia is now one of the fastest growing economies in the world. A major factor in such remarkable growth is this hydropower plant, which meets around 20% of the country's electricity needs.

The dam is part of the Belt and Road Initiative, China's trillion-dollar investment in infrastructure across Asia, Africa and Europe. The Guinean government is promising to help farmers adapt and find new sources of income.

China is building over 200 coal-fired power plants through Belt and Road, so we need to look at providing renewable energy to these countries.

Argentina is set to boost its energy production after announcing a major contract with China to build a new nuclear power plant in the Buenos Aires province.

As Jim Lewis puts it, You know, the old joke is that the Americans show up with lectures, the Chinese show up with money.

And in terms of the number of people reliant on Huawei telecom infrastructure, probably it's more of the world's population than on anyone else.

Well, first of all, I mean, they are our biggest competitor on a global basis.

Huawei didn't become the biggest telecom equipment manufacturer in its segment by itself. It did it because it stole Cisco technology and the technology of other companies. And Beijing really pushed it around the world. So this is really a challenge.

Robert O'Brien, President Trump's National Security Advisor, is warning the Canadian government not to allow Huawei to participate in our 5G network, saying it was frightening and terrifying, a Trojan horse that would allow the Chinese government to gather information and micro-target Canadians.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said Huawei was the poster child for China's nefarious strategy, quote, to infiltrate and dominate crucial Western infrastructure.

The Trump administration is still urging U.S. allies to shun Huawei, claiming the Chinese telecom giant gives confidential information to China's government. The Justice Department indicted Huawei last month on 23 criminal charges, including wire fraud, money laundering and stealing trade secrets.

The American envoy warned Brazil against ignoring U.S. advice on Huawei.

Huawei founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei spoke with Bianna Golodryk at the company's headquarters in Shenzhen, China.

Have you ever given any information to the Chinese government in any way, shape or form?

For the past 30 years, we have never done that. And the next 30 years to come, we will never do that.

Could Huawei possibly have a backdoor without your knowledge?

It is not possible, because across our entire organization, we've stressed once and again that we will never do that.

As a matter of Chinese law, the Chinese government can rightfully demand access to data flowing through Huawei and ZTE systems. Why would anyone grant such power to a regime that has already grossly violated cyberspace?

Today, we're talking about Huawei. This company has also been accused, ready for this, of working with the Chinese government to spy on its users. That has led the United States to ban American firms from doing business with Huawei.

There's no reason for them to be in our water. There's no reason for them to be in our power. This is a decision by an actor to actually focus on civilian targets. That's not what we do.

Google has warned that if Washington moves ahead with its sweeping ban on Huawei technologies, it risks compromising national security.

The future of the internet is being built by Huawei. The tech giant spending billions to gain the edge in 5G, the next generation wireless network. An edge the US government is trying hard to stop.

A nervous system with connected neurons makes a human body an integrated being full of wisdom. At Huawei, we are now using our 30 years of experience to create nervous systems for cities. We call them Smart City ICT Networks. They analyze transportation data. They are helping to improve urban medical services. They help to improve tourism management and services.

Huawei is now building the central nervous system for urban brains.

Huawei, for example, is taking smart cities, what they call safe city solutions into around the world. And that plays a crime prevention and emergency response role. But they're also playing public security roles.

Closed circuit cameras feed into a database with advanced artificial intelligence. And facial recognition can identify everyone, cross-reference license plates, and analyze unlimited information.

In the last couple of years, Huawei has managed to install and maintain a handful of networks in U.S. rural markets, including a vast quadrant of southwestern Kansas.

The FBI knew that these small rural telecommunications companies out in the Midwest were using Chinese-made Huawei equipment on top of their cell towers in places like Colorado and Nebraska that were close to sensitive military installations, including U.S. nuclear missile silos.

These small rural telecom companies have been mandated by the FCC to rip and replace the equipment, but the amount of money Congress has appropriated to reimburse them is about $3 billion short of what it's going to cost all these companies to get the job done.

All of a sudden, we see Chinese threat groups since about late 2020, at least from my observables, hack in and we don't know why because they're not the tank through the cornfield. They're hacking in and just, that's it. There's no other activity. And then you're like, why are they there?

My usual line is you don't hack infrastructure for fun, right? It's reconnaissance. It's target reconnaissance for the event of a conflict between the United States and China.

Did you do one of these where you're just kind of like, what are you saying?

What do you mean the Chinese government is inside our utility?

Russia is much like a hurricane. They're aggressive and come at us hard and fast. But China is climate change.

When you called up these other utilities and said, hey, this is what we've lived through.

Telvent, a Madrid-based company, they make IT systems that monitor everything from electric utilities to traffic flow.

Telvent makes information technology systems, so-called smart grids.

The story of what we know about the Stuxnet virus begins in June of 2010. Stuxnet was launched several years ago against an Iranian nuclear facility, almost certainly with some U.S. involvement.

It was discovered just a couple weeks ago, but has been worming its way undetected through hundreds of computers in Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East for at least two years.

Did you say Lyme disease is a highly likely militarily engineered bioweapon?

Millions and millions of Americans who want clean air, clean water and a healthy nation have concerns about toxins in our environment and pesticides in our food.

The NAACP took millions of dollars from Coca-Cola to say that we should maintain Coca-Cola on food stamps, which is just an absolutely insane public policy because that's literally poisoning lower-income kids with a supplemental nutrition assistance program.

In hindsight, what I saw is that the healthcare system is working to propagate a system where more Americans are sick and to perform interventions on those Americans, not to cure any disease, but manage it. And that's 95% of our medical spending. 95% of our medical spending is management of chronic disease.

So examples of that are in this invisible hand at work where I don't even think people realize what they're doing is working for Coca-Cola, funding millions of dollars to the American Diabetes Association. I saw that. So why is Coca-Cola funding the American Diabetes Association?

And why would the American Diabetes Association be accepting money from Coca-Cola when we have a diabetes crisis among children when it's liquid diabetes, it's high sugar drinks? Right. So there's actually this interplay between our food system, our ultra-processed food system that's getting people addicted, that's getting people sick, and then a healthcare system that stands silent.

So that's on the food side. On the pharmaceutical side, it's the rigging of institutions. The pharmaceutical industry is the lifeblood of institutions. of academic research and the NIH and the federal bureaucracies just by definition are a revolving door, an orgy of corruption between industry and government.

I mean, 11 of the 12 past FDA directors literally left the FDA and the next day walked into a pharmaceutical office. I had a list of Stanford and Harvard professors that we were going to funnel money to. These aren't apparent corruption. It's rank corruption. And I saw that.

Well, they resort to ad hominem attacks. If you really stay on these unimpeachable messages, I think they're pretty hard to disagree with. It's a demonstrable fact that our scientific and healthcare agencies are co-opted. 75% of the FDA department that oversees drug approvals is funded by the pharmaceutical industry itself.

NIH bureaucrats are able to take royalties from drugs, which they did during COVID. It's also impossible to argue with the fact that we're the sickest country in the developed world and there's a true chronic disease crisis among children. That's pretty hard to argue with. So what happens is the healthcare industry is the largest and fastest growing industry in the country.

It's the most powerful industry in the country. The pharmaceutical industry Industry is the biggest funder of politicians themselves, scientific research, regulatory agencies, the media itself. So they control a lot of our institutions just by definition.

What sounds nutty that I said?

I didn't say that. I didn't say that. I completely dispute the premise of your question. I said that the pharmaceutical industry makes money when people are sick and loses money when they're healthy. That's not a conspiracy. That's a demonstrable statement of economic fact. And hospitals make money from fee-for-service.

Many friends from Harvard Business School of mine work at hospitals, and their job is dependent on filling the beds. That's not a conspiracy.

I didn't say that. I said their economic incentives.

No, I didn't talk about their motivations.

This is the largest industry in the country is healthcare. A pharmaceutical executive gets fired if there's not growth. Growth of pharmaceutical, the pharmaceutical industry presupposes and necessitates more sick people.

Somebody gets fired unless the company grows. The company requires more sick patients to grow. That's an indisputable fact.

Well, that's inaccurate. My company facilitates third-party medical interventions to recommend whether exercise, supplementation, food in some cases is a medically appropriate intervention.

No, no. Hold on.

Excuse me. No, I don't think we should expect nobody to make money. I think everyone's financial conflicts should be highly exposed. My company makes money when a third-party provider recommends efficacious treatments of root cause non-pharmaceutical interventions. My company will make money when more people are exercising and more people are eating broccoli.

And I am absolutely fine that being exposed and that being scrutinized of whether I'm in the pocket of big exercise and big broccoli.

Well, he didn't have to appoint Bobby Kennedy. He didn't have to say at every single rally that he was going to have Bobby Kennedy go wild on health. So President Trump said this. He doesn't think a lot about health policy. But what he does think a lot about is corruption and taking on the swamp and taking on corporate cronyism. And I think he's really seen in Bobby Kennedy how corrupt.

The forces that profit from sick children are a great example of what the foundation of President Trump's candidacy is about, which is corruption holding us down. So, yes, I don't think there's any cabinet secretary that there's more demonstrated history with and bonding with during the campaign than Bobby Kennedy.

What Bobby Kennedy has consistently said about vaccines during the campaign is that they should be studied like any other pharmaceutical product. Blanket trust of pharmaceutical companies is not a good idea either. And continued scientific research on interventions we're providing to the American people, whether that be pharmaceuticals or the

other billion prescriptions we're writing in America a year. I don't think anyone disagrees with that. And even what you mentioned about the Children's Health Defense, you didn't say that they're attacking all vaccines in general. You said they're questioning the pharmaceutical schedule. They're questioning specific ingredients. I mean, I don't know.

We should be scrutinizing each formulation and whether that's safe and which the safest vaccine is. I mean, that's a good thing to do. We have demonstrably different schedules than other countries. Like, you know, continued research and refining of that seems like a reasonable thing to do.

So I think there's a lot of, frankly, pharma money and bad money making that the key issue, even though he's talking about much wider things.

I think you just painted an extremely pessimistic and nihilistic view of the American people. What an unfounded statement to say that they're prone to conspiracy thinking. That's kind of a dismissive statement, honestly.

Well, maybe that's being rational. Maybe that's being prone to questioning things. Listen, this is what President Trump and Bobby talked about during the campaign, and I strongly believe the American people are rational. The American people don't want their kids to be sick. I really commend and respect, you know, the media hearkening back and their concern for polio, right, and polio coming back.

But I would push you if you or anyone else is concerned about childhood health, which is the real issue here. We should be concerned about what's happening right now. We have a chronic disease crisis. We have a truly societally destabilizing event happening. Yes, I agree. We should keep polio at bay. But like that's that's not even on the top 10 list.

What the promise of Maha is, is Bobby, a reform-minded person, I would say a magnetic, incredible leader, is putting a stake in the ground that we need to move to a more preventative model and a more chronic disease reversal-focused model of health. That's his stake. And I had a really profound conversation with the dean of a med school recently, and he was honest.

And he said, listen, everyone in the faculty lounge thinks Bobby's a whack job. And if you steer NIH funding to more preventative outcomes, and that's kind of where the NIH is going, they're going to kick and scream and complain and say that's stupid. But they're going to write grants for what the NIH is saying they want.

And if you can win and keep this kind of vibe and this movement towards that more preventative pull, in four years and six years, Bobby, you'll be gone. But if that preventative direction that the health incentives go towards... stays that way, in six years, it'll be the norm. In six years, it won't be about body being crazy. It'll just be like, this is how things are done.

And that's the stakes right now, is we're trying to, we've lost our way a bit. Our health incentives are too focused on waiting for people to get sick. and then managing those conditions. I would argue profiting from those conditions.

What we're trying to do is get conflicts of interest out of the system and steer the sizable incentives that the government creates towards a more preventative future that asks, how can we actually prevent and reverse these diseases? That's the fight right now. And we just have to continue to win that argument. At the highest level, these are unimpeachable ideas that most Americans agree with.

It's not going to be total shock and awe. We're not going to be able to change everything at once. But we really have changed the country if we can accomplish that momentum shift to that world.

Thank you.

In every company, there's a whole system of decision makers, challenges, and strategies shaping the future of business at every level. That's why we're running a special three-part Decoder Thursday series, looking at how some of the biggest companies in the world are adapting, innovating, and rethinking their playbooks.

They have plans on how to do it that are, I would just say, light years beyond anything I've ever heard of before. You just have the smartest entrepreneur of our entire generation who's like the conceptual genius of our time across multiple domains.

And they have plans where I think when people see them, I think people are going to be like, oh, I didn't realize that that's the way that you could go about this.

I've been at my job for nine months. I really love my job. I'm a little worried I'm going to lose it.

I am very confused and don't know what to do. I have a disability. I had... Is there going to be any pushback along the way, Andrew?

Are there going to be challenges in court? Or is this all within Trump and OPM and Doge's purview?

We're asking enterprise leaders about some of the toughest questions they're facing today, revealing the tensions, risks, and breakthroughs happening behind closed doors. Check out Decoder, wherever you get your podcasts.

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And one of the things we are doing is signing a deal very shortly with respect to rare earths with Ukraine, which they have tremendous value in rare earth. And we appreciate that.

Democratic Republic of Congo. Many, many people come from the Congo. I don't know what that is, but they came from the Congo. Saudi Arabia.

We are rocking. The United States is the hottest country, with the exception of your country, I have to say, right? I'm not going to take that on. No, Mohammed, I'm not going to take that on.

I said, well, we want something for our efforts beyond oil. what you would think would be acceptable. And we said rare earths, they're very good.

We want to extract these minerals but also process them, as this would create a lot of jobs. And we want a partnership that will provide lasting peace and stability for our countries, which we need.

The Congolese government has refuted M23's claims of an ongoing genocide against Tutsis in the DRC. They say it's a pretext for M23's backers, Rwanda. to invade Congo by proxy and take control of its vast mineral resources.

This battle, which has been raging for close to 30 years, is always about the control of Congo's mineral wealth. Our Congolese are paying the price.

Hello, friends. Ready for a new adventure? Today, we're going to learn everything about minerals.

We really have a lot to give. And all we ask is really for an opportunity to live in peace.

We've made a lot of progress with Rwanda and Congo fighting a very violent war, by the way.

Greenland is a wonderful place. We need it for international security.

The people of Greenland would love to become a state of the United States of America.

Now major countries, including France, Germany and Chile, are calling for a pause on all deep sea mining operations in these common areas, where mining exploration has already prompted protests. However, nations including Norway, China and South Korea are in favor of pushing ahead.

We said rare earth. They're very good rare earth. As you know, we're looking for rare earth all the time.

We believe it's possible to extract enormous amounts of critical minerals and rare earths, which you know we need for technology and high technology in the process.

In President Trump's second term, we've seen a lot of news about tariffs. Chinese imports into the U.S. now face a 30% tariff down. About Congress.

These minerals power phones and computers, household appliances, electric vehicles and batteries, solar panels, wind turbines and so much more. Without these minerals, we simply cannot function. They can't function.

Rare earth minerals are a sort of ace up China's sleeve in the escalating trade battle. They represent a relatively small proportion of the country's exports, but they are crucial for the supply chains of other nations.

The Catholic population in Africa has grown significantly, from around 185 million in 2013 to an estimated 230 million by the end of 2025.

The Catholic Church in South Korea has shown exponential growth in the last 50 years. There were about half a million Catholics in the country in the 1960s. But today, there are nearly 6 million.

It's been around actually a long time. The medical version of keto has actually been around for a hundred years.

Now, some experts say that this helps consumers take in fewer calories, lowers your blood pressure, improves glucose levels and even slows down the aging process.

Things in Gaza have been bad for, like, forever. But they're getting so bad that the coalition of people talking about it has got to be the most far-reaching it's ever been.

You know, now reportedly he's very upset by the images coming out of Gaza, the sort of pictures of malnourished children he's seeing. And, you know, he's made several statements to the effect that he wants to see this war wrapped up quickly.

On Gaza. We want to see if we can stop that. And Israel, we've been talking to them and we want to see if we can stop that whole situation as quickly as possible.

We're almost oddly back kind of where we were under the Biden administration, where we have all these stories coming out every few days where either Trump or senior officials speaking on background are quoted saying how frustrated they are with the Netanyahu government, how they're losing patience.

We got to get that taken care of. A lot of people are starving. A lot of people, there's a lot of bad things going on.

But the war doesn't seem to be ending. It's continuing. And it's not really clear just how much pressure the Trump administration is willing to bring to bear to get a ceasefire in place.

I guess it wasn't surprising to most people that he couldn't figure this out instantly, considering, I don't know, the history here. But maybe more surprising is that his relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has cooled down so much. What exactly happened there?

Yeah, I mean, you could basically define the Trump administration's Mideast policy in his first term as give Netanyahu what he wants.

Some of the dramatic moves included moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the disputed Golan Heights.

And, you know, what may have been the kind of crowning achievement of the Trump administration's first term foreign policy, the Abraham Accords, which are this series of deals under which several Arab countries established formal diplomatic relations with Israel for the first time. I took a risk in doing them, and they've been an absolute bonanza for the countries that have joined.

So I think the Israelis, when Trump came in, had every reason to assume that they had their guy in the White House again after some of the frustrations they had with the Biden administration. But putting Gaza to the side for a second, what's been really striking to me is the degree to which

The Trump administration is just kind of pursuing its priorities in the Middle East without seemingly any concern over appearing to be aligned with Israel. It's hard to imagine any of the last few administrations doing things like having direct negotiations with Hamas to secure the release of an Israeli-American hostage.

Now, we understand that this was the result of direct four-way talks, which led to the release, again, with countries like the U.S., Qatar, Egypt, and Hamas.

We know that the president, during his trip throughout the Middle East, will not meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Some say it is viewed as somewhat as a slight.

They've also restarted nuclear talks with Iran, perhaps willing to countenance a deal that would leave Iran with some kind of nuclear enrichment, which is a deal basically comparable to the one negotiated by Barack Obama that Trump tore up a decade ago, and which the Israelis famously hated that deal, wanted it torn up. And then a third example is Yes, the U.S.

launched this bombing campaign against the Houthis, the rebels in Yemen who've been attacking shipping in the Red Sea. But when they agreed to stop that bombing a week ago, the deal that they reached with the Houthis basically stipulated that this group wouldn't attack American ships anymore. It said nothing about continuing attacks on Israel.

And actually, the Houthis have continued lobbing missiles at Israel. And so, you know, the implicit message of that is that... They basically left Israel on its own to deal with the Houthis. So this is stuff that's just kind of remarkable to see from an administration, from a president who's basically touted himself as the most pro-Israel U.S. president in history.

What about the rest of the world? How are they responding to the situation in Gaza right now?

Well, I mean, we're seeing European allies who were long reluctant to criticize Israel making their positions a lot more clear. I mean, there was a joint statement from the leaders of France, Canada, and the UK.

Tia Goldenberg is a correspondent for the Associated Press in Jerusalem. We asked her what's going on with aid in Gaza.

We will not stand by while the Netanyahu government pursues these egregious actions. If Israel does not cease the renewed military offensive and lift its restrictions on humanitarian aid, we will take further concrete actions in response. We oppose any attempt to expand settlements in the West Bank.

Even Germany, the government that has perhaps been, other than the US, been the staunchest supporter of Israel within the West, within NATO, has said that it no longer finds Israel's actions acceptable.

What the Israeli army is now doing in the Gaza Strip I no longer understand, frankly, what its objective is. To cause such suffering to the civilian population, as has increasingly been the case in recent days, can no longer be justified as a fight against Hamas terrorism.

Is it making any difference? This may also have been one factor among many that led to the resumption of humanitarian aid. It's a lot easier for him to brush off the pressure from these European governments who are sort of viewed as sort of implicitly anti-Israel anyway than it would be for him to brush it off coming from Trump, who's supposedly Netanyahu's guy.

This is supposed to be the most pro-Israel government ever. So if they're losing Trump's backing, I think that's in a lot of ways more meaningful.

Okay, so you're saying that if Trump did the thing that Biden did actually do briefly and suspended military aid to Israel in some fashion, it could actually turn the tide here. Trump wants to figure out a deal here, he says, at least. He's turned his back on Netanyahu a little, at least. Why not go the extra step?

I think cutting off support for Israel would be, you know, a much more dramatic step that I have a hard time seeing this president take. I mean, you know, it's important to remember, too, that there's almost this split screen going on with how Trump approaches this issue. When it comes to domestic policy, I think he's sort of like followed through on this most pro-Israel president ever title.

You know, the president has made... effectively tried to criminalize criticism of Israel in many respects. He's deported U.S. residents who've been involved in anti-Israel protests. He's punished universities. It's funny. In some ways, Israel's almost been a domestic issue for this administration rather than a foreign policy one.

But I think maintaining that split screen is going to be harder if you get to actually taking steps to punish or restrict aid to Israel on the international stage.

That puts the president in a very tricky situation here. If he is genuinely concerned about these images of starving children, where does that path lead him?

I could see it leading to effective... sort of public disengagement. I mean, we're seeing a sort of similar dynamic play out in the Russia-Ukraine situation where they're just kind of getting frustrated progress is not being made and they might just sort of wash their hands of the negotiating process, you know, and continue sending weapons to Israel and say it's not really our problem anymore.

Josh.KeatingVox.com. Avishai Artsy and Denise Guerra produced the program today. Jolie Myers edited. Laura Bullard is our senior researcher on facts. And Andrea Christen's daughter was our sole audio engineer for this episode of Today Explained.

Hamas steals the supplies and prevents the people of Gaza from getting them. It uses these supplies to finance its terror machine, which is aimed directly at Israel and our civilians. And this we cannot accept.

To the children's entertainer, Miss Rachel.

The shadowy organization faces accusations of helping Israel fulfill its military objectives of excluding Palestinians and of failing to adhere to humanitarian principles.

The American company running this new scheme says that 8,000 boxes of food have been handed out so far. But remember, the population of Gaza is 2.2 million.

There's video circulating online now and it shows the moment that thousands of Palestinians flooded this distribution center in Rafah.

There was no order. The people rushed to take something. We didn't get anything. There was shooting and we fled.

To the new pope, Pope Bob. To a former Israeli prime minister.

The project has been controversial, seen by critics as politicising and militarising aid and using food distribution to cattle Palestinians into diminishingly smaller areas, with selective distribution used to starve out Israel's adversaries.

We need all types of aid, not aid that is cherry-picked by the Israeli side that we are allowed to get in.

I saw people running there. I decided to go too. People said it was scary. I didn't care. It was dangerous or not. I was going to go. I want to feed my children.

A couple of million people living in Gaza, and they say they should all starve. To even President Trump. We're going to ask if it'll make a difference on Today Explained.

You're calling it a limited amount of aid. So it's by design not enough aid?

How are these policies around aid going over with Israelis in Israel?

Hmm.

I want to say to the people of Gaza, we are with you. We know that you are innocent, and we are fighting to end this destruction of your city and of your lives.

We are refusing genocide, also Jewish people in Israel. We are standing beside Palestinians. They are going through the worst period in their history, including the Nakba in 1948, and we absolutely cannot stay silent.

In the meantime, is any of this getting Israel closer to getting back these 58 hostages, one-third of whom are believed to still be alive?

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Our forces are capturing more and more territory, eliminating and clearing out Hamas terrorists. All of the Gaza Strip will be under the security control of Israel.

Ultimately, we intend to have large safe zones in the south of Gaza, and the Palestinian population will move there for their own safety while we conduct combat in other zones.

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So why ramp up military pressure instead of negotiating? Is that desperation?

This war can end tomorrow. It can end if Hamas lays down its arms and returns our hostages.

Problem solved.

No matter where you stand, it's all here. Prime Video. Click or tip on the banner to learn more.

Tia Goldenberg, Associated Press, APNews.com. Trump ices out Netanyahu when we're back on Today Explained.

Support for this show comes from Story Worth. Story Worth for Father's Day. All your loved ones need to do is respond to that email with a story. They can either write a story or record it over the phone for StoryWorth to transcribe.

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Today Explained is back. I'm Sean Ramos from here with Josh Keating, who covers national security and foreign policy here at Vox. Josh. Gaza was one of the things that Donald Trump wanted to solve as soon as he entered office. How is he talking about Gaza now?

Well, you know, in some ways, to give him credit, he didn't solve it, but there was a ceasefire in place when he took office.

So incoming Trump's team's cooperation with the outgoing Biden's team helped secure a ceasefire in January, which lasts until March.

And they have steadily tried to rebrand themselves as certainly a conservative Islamic organization, but not as a Takfiri or what we would call jihadist organization, such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS. And if you allow me, I'll just try to clarify what is the difference between these two types of organization.

An organization such as HTS has a very Islamist radical ideology which it wants to impose on the population it rules, it governs. But it has no ambition to convert non-Muslims or to export its model to other countries. ISIS or Al-Qaeda are transnational organizations.

They don't only want to impose the sharia, the Islamic rule, the Islamic law, on their population, but they want to export their model around the world. They want to convert non-Muslims to Islam, and they are ready to fight for that and to kill for that. That's a big difference. So ISIS and Al-Qaeda are considered, are transnational organizations, considered terrorist organizations.

Now, that's just also to be more precise. HTS technically is considered by the U.S. as a terrorist organization because it was originally affiliated with al-Qaeda.

The organization that launched this offensive over the weekend is a terrorist organization designated as such by the United States. We certainly do not support that organization in any way, shape or form.

What it wants to do now is get delisted. What they have been trying to do is rebrand themselves, but also their whole ideology. I mean, when you read the, listen to the official statements, they are all tending towards that, towards an organization, as I said, that wants only to rule the place it is in and that does not want to fight any other country.

So they remain listed as a terrorist organization, but it is true that in practice, they say they don't want to fight anyone outside their national borders.

Yeah, so the nom de guerre, as we say, of the leader of HTS is Abu Muhammad al-Julani. He's a Muslim Sunni. He originates from southern Syria. He entered the ranks of al-Qaeda. established HDS, and then decided to shift, if you want, his focus into a more nationalist agenda. Joulani is a quite impressive figure.

The area he's ruling, he has been ruling, that northwestern part of Syria, he has been ruling for many years, is probably the best managed part of Syria. So Jolani is quite impressive in terms of what he has succeeded in doing. I do think that at the end of the day, he wants to rule the whole of Syria.

And I think that this is why also he knows that if he wants to rule the whole of Syria, which has Christians, Shias, Druze, Kurds who are not Arabs, well, you have to compromise. And I think that's why also, that's what explains the fact that he's trying to open up and to rebrand himself into a more, if you want, mainstream Islamist organization.

whether he compromises or not is going to depend a lot on the balance of power. At this stage, He's obliged to compromise, and at a later stage, he will be obliged, in my opinion, to compromise for the simple reason is that not only Syria is home to a large number of communities that are not Arab Sunnis, as he is, but also because Syria has a very strategic geographic location.

I argue actually that currently a lot of regional players, not only the traditional supporters of the regime, but even countries in the Gulf, Jordan, and to some extent the Israelis, they may prefer Bashar al-Assad to stay, at least for a temporary period, than to allow Jolani to take over.

Jolani, if he reads well the geopolitics of the region, he will understand that also from a geopolitical angle, he has to make compromises because otherwise he will have opposition either from the Israelis or from the Turks or from the Gulfies or from the Iraqis who are in majority Shia. So the geographic location, the internal composition of society should eventually force Joulani to compromise.

He could think that he can take over power by sheer force, but it would be, in my opinion, very difficult for him to maintain his rule over the country and stabilize it without compromising.

I'm not sure, Noor. I'm not sure that today the United States' goal is to get Bashar al-Assad out. The United States' stated goal is to get Bashar al-Assad out.

Nothing has changed with respect to our policy. Assad is a brutal dictator with blood on his hands. Ultimately, what we want to see is a political process forward where the Syrian people get to determine who their leaders are.

But the US goal is to weaken Iran, to protect the borders of Israel, to prevent refugee flows, although it's not a direct threat to the US, but it can be to its allies. if you want a stable country. So indeed, if you want to get Iran out and Bashar cannot distance himself from the Iranians, you would want Bashar out.

But you don't want Bashar out in any case, in any situation, unless you have an alternative. What the US wants is a guy in Damascus whom they can call and who is capable of giving orders to an army, to an armed group, so that when the U.S. says, I want this or I don't want that, they have a guy who can answer and can implement decisions if you want.

One of the weaknesses of the Syrian opposition at the very beginning of the uprising 13 years ago is that it didn't have such a leadership. The US certainly, what it wants is stability, safe border for Israel, weaker Iran. If this is done through Bashar, so Bashar will stay. If Bashar cannot help, so Bashar. I'm not saying the American have the capacity or the willingness to invest into...

The conflict in Syria began in 2011, initially as a popular uprising against the regime.

kicking him or keeping him, but I'm just trying to answer the question of, do they want him still in power or not? The official stated policy, given the massive crimes widely documented that Bashar al-Assad committed, it's very difficult for you, if you are a Western liberal country, to openly support him. But in practice, What they want is, you know, the least bad option if you want.

So I'm not 100% sure that it is really the aim of the U.S. to get Bashar out of power.

Yes, of course there's something positive. There is something positive in the sense, as I said, that we have seen people freed from prisons. There is something positive because I think that some IDPs and refugees will be able to return home.

positive in the sense that Bashar is weaker and Bashar is an absolutely terrible individual that needs to be himself and his whole regime need to be weakened. Maybe one more positive thing is that there is renewed focus a bit on Syria. But this, of course, has a bad aspect and a positive one. It all depends on how it turns. So, no, I think there are positives.

But of course, war and conflict is something you look forward to, obviously.

the initial demands of the population were for, to sum it up pretty in short, was really to demand political liberalization, more political freedoms. That was met actually with very heavy violence from the regime.

Since the very start, President Assad has had one objective, staying in power. And he's been prepared to do pretty much anything to achieve it.

The opposition took up arms and it has been evolving as a civil conflict for many, many years now.

So basically what is happening now, what we are seeing in the past few weeks, is that one segment of the opposition, which controlled so far a very small part of Syria, and which happens also to have an ideology which is quite radical, very conservative from an Islamic conservative ideology, the organization controlling that part of Syria went on the attack

and took over large parts of northern Syria, including the country's second largest city, and managed within a few days to double the size of the area under their control.

Yes, so what we have seen actually is that group of rebel fighters, so that's not a formal army, comprised of several thousands, probably maybe in the low dozens of thousands, crossing front lines very rapidly with relatively light equipment, military equipment, and taking over areas controlled formally by the Syrian government. So they have managed to move forward quite quickly.

Everybody's assumption is that the initial attack aimed at gaining a few kilometers, at enlarging a bit the area which is under their control. But what happened is actually the defense of the regime, of the government, completely collapsed. So within a day, less than two days at least, they reached the borders of Aleppo, Syria's second largest city.

And it was really unexpected that they would get there that quickly. But what was even more unexpected was that they would be able to take over the city with almost no defense, no fighting, within a couple of days.

You are absolutely right. In 2016, actually, the government took over Aleppo from the opposition with the support of the Russian Air Force. That was almost exactly eight years ago in December 2016. So the regime has been controlling the whole of the city for the past eight years. What you have seen here now is no real battle at all, actually.

As I said, within 48 hours, they had the control of the whole city. What seems to have happened is that the government... realizing that it was too weak, decided to withdraw its forces to fall back on the city, Hama, so that they can, you know, prepare a real defense.

The decision was made to withdraw, to retreat very quickly, so that they could regroup and mount some form of more decent defense, which is currently happening now.

This is not only humiliating for him, but this is changing radically the map of the country and of what will happen in the future. The conviction was only a week ago that Bashar al-Assad had won the Syria war. that although he did not control the whole of the country, there was no chance of moving him out, and that we need to find some form of normalization with the regime.

This whole discourse in the space of 24 hours, 48 hours collapsed entirely. So it's a major, major defeat for Bashar. Bashar is clearly the very big loser here.

The reason we have this now is a large part a consequence of the Israeli war on Gaza and on Lebanon. This has weakened tremendously the Iranians and the militias affiliated to them, Hezbollah in Lebanon and other militias, and that has created a void, if you want. Another dimension to take into account is that the Syrian government and regime has been impoverished

crumbling very gradually, very sadly over the past few years. Soldiers are paid very low salaries. There are no job opportunities. There is no investment by the government. There's a lot of corruption. And one of the reasons the soldiers did not fight is because they don't really have really any motivation to fight for the regime.

Supporters of Bashar al-Assad, which are today very few, are unhappy, of course, about what happened. Supporters of the opposition, which are more numerous, have a mixed reaction. Why? Because on the one hand, you are seeing these people, these soldiers, these armed rebels fighting.

when they entered Aleppo, opening up political prisons, freeing political prisoners, some of whom have been in prison without judgment for 10, 15, or 20 years, you can only be very happy about that. Also, because these attacks by rebels are going to help

A lot of displaced people and refugees in Turkey returned home because a lot of them originally lived in the areas which were taken back in the past few days. They were expelled by Bashar al-Assad's forces and were not allowed to return back. So a lot of people are very happy about that. At the same time, the main rebel organization, HTS, that took over Aleppo, its ideology is very conservative.

So it forces women to wear Vs, it bans alcohol, and so on and so forth. Now, what has happened in Aleppo so far in the past few days is relatively reassuring in the sense that they have not tried to impose yet their very strict rules, but there is anxiety among Syrians about what could potentially happen.

And beyond whose sides you are on today, what is making people anxious is that we are seeing the return of large scale battles in urban areas with large number of casualties. You have had a low intensity conflict for quite a few years now. And what a lot of people fear is a return of this intense part of the conflict. In Aleppo, as I said, there were no battles. There was no battle, really.

It was easy to take over. But in Hama, for example, you are seeing very heavy battles. And that's really very worrying.

Yes, exactly. That's a real risk.

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So the organization is called HTS, which stands for Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or the Organization for the Liberation of the Levant. The Levant meaning Syria and Lebanon.

Known by their initials HTS, they are made up of some 30 armed groups and at least 60,000 well-trained fighters. It has long been dominant in Idlib, part of the northwest that stayed under rebel control for the past few years.

So HTS is actually the result of the merger of several organizations that fought against the Syrian regime. One of these organizations was actually an affiliate of al-Qaeda. So it originates in al-Qaeda. Now, gradually HDS has sought to distance itself from Al-Qaeda to the extent that actually they have also fought Al-Qaeda and expelled Al-Qaeda from their area.

So it's not totally clear where and when this kernel got planted in RFK's head.

I think certainly we have to acknowledge that by the early 2000s, this idea that autism was maybe caused by vaccines, and this has been pretty thoroughly debunked over and over again, but this idea had sort of entered the mainstream in large part due to this since-retracted study published by Andrew Wakefield that seemed to draw that link.

He is a former physician who was at one point studying vaccines and autism.

This was a hugely problematic study. It turns out the data was cherry-picked and manipulated. And, you know, Wakefield himself had conflicts of interest that certainly made it in his best interest to seemingly find such a link.

This is around the time when at least a few concerned mothers went to RFK in his capacity as an environmental lawyer saying, I'm really worried about some of the stuff that's in the vaccines that are being given to my kids.

I don't know if this is why they've been behaving differently or they seem to be different from other kids.

By this point, RFK started calling around different vaccine experts and started, like, interrogating this question in earnest. And that seems to be where this idea really picked up for him.

RFK has been really pushing this idea that HHS is going to lead a bunch of new studies into determining the cause of autism.

at the time he first started saying this was you know like four and a half months away like very ambitious timeline and also incredibly ambitious to talk about finding a potentially singular cause of autism which it's certainly not to imply that nothing at hhs was looking into autism or that people weren't paying attention to this but

The idea here is that it was being really heavily prioritized and that this was coming directly from the White House, that it was certainly a priority for President Trump and, you know, his top allies to figure out the cause of autism and then to get rid of it. How does he plan to do that?

You know, it's a fantastic question. And I actually don't have a great answer for you because I'm not sure anyone has a great answer for you. And I am including the folks at HHS. Huh. The messaging around this has been incredibly muddled. With such an ambitious timeline, I mean, they would need to be working, I would say, nonstop, and they would still not even scratch the surface by September.

But it seems that there is not a clear-cut plan. To sort of illustrate this a little more, you know, there's been a lot of talk from Kennedy saying...

Then later at a press conference, he was talking about looking through electronic health records.

kind of mining existing literature to see if there's a link that's been missed or hasn't been definitively pinpointed. And then there was additional talk out of NIH about how part of this effort may involve looking into private health data from pharmacies, hospitals, even smartwatches. But some of that was later walked back after a bunch of privacy concerns emerged. So

It seems like there is a lot of chatter about there being this incredibly ambitious, expensive, accelerated effort with a goal very clearly in mind. But I'm not sure a plan has really come into formation yet. And frankly, it may take until September for a good plan to come together, if that is indeed their intentions.

I would suspect that is influencing their thinking quite a bit. I mean, it's already been reported that he has tasked HHS with looking into that link, you know, under the supervision of RFK. This guy named David Geyer, who himself has a history of really hawking this idea that vaccines cause autism. Again, repeatedly disproved, but there are certain people who will not let that bone go.

And then, you know, with this new HHS-wide effort that's come into the news this month... Kennedy has not leveraged vaccines as often. You know, his discourse has primarily been around, you know, a quote unquote environmental toxin. He's talked a lot about this idea that someone in industry has been putting this out into the environment.

It's, you know, poisoning our kids and someone's making a profit over this. I do not know of any evidence that really strongly supports that. I don't know to what he's referring, but it seems very clear that no matter what toxin or toxins or exposures he has in mind, he does have a select few in mind, and he's already crafted the story that he is setting out to prove.

And I think the huge issue with that is that's just not how you do science. You don't go out to prove a narrative that you've already decided is true. You go out and try and look for the evidence and see if a story emerges that is supported by the evidence that you find.

You know, in recent decades, the definitions of autism have changed, the way that physicians have approached treating autism have changed. And, you know, awareness of autism has certainly grown. But I think really the only consensus that has emerged over decades of research is that this is a really complicated, multifactorial condition.

It may even be unfair to call it a single condition because of how diverse it is. And there's a really strong genetic component. So to really just hook onto this idea that it's something in the environment that is causing this quote unquote epidemic, it's a potentially very problematic way to view things, especially if that's going to influence policy around handling autism in this country.

Some people, they just lose it. Stop! Research shows that taking methamphetamine, even just a few times, can impair your brain and movement for life.

Are you surprised by this? I mean, there's Occam's razor. Sometimes the simplest answer is the most likely.

With methamphetamine, you can see 20-year-olds having strokes. You can have 20-year-olds having heart attacks.

The answer to that is certainly yes. Only a minority of people who are exposed to the drug... will actually become dependent or develop use disorder. So it's not, it's like inevitable. It's not like it wipes out your entire brain and you're kind of a slave to the drug the moment you take it. It's just not like that.

The use disorder is more than just, you know, the kick of dopamine. Yes, that explains some element of it, no question. But it's not the only thing.

Here's the kicker. The rapidity with which you develop methamphetamine uses is unbelievable.

We are in the midst of a crisis when it comes to methamphetamine. It's more destructive than any other drug. Law enforcers are starting to see the emergence of super-powered versions of meth.

For those who do, it can be very terrible. You know, you're down the cliff. I mean, that's the point.

Experts say it's more lethal, and it causes extreme psychosis.

So for example, how to surf an urge to use methamphetamine, how to urge surf, how to be able to sit with that discomfort and wait until it passes.

They actually visualize the wave and the fact that the wave, you can actually watch the wave as it crests and it gets bigger and it feels like it's going to be overwhelming, but eventually it does actually crash and then recede.

No, I don't think that that's true. I think what's happened is that meth has earned itself a reputation whereby it's highly stigmatized. So I don't think it's that it's the scariest drug out there. I think that it's a highly misunderstood drug.

Breaking Bad is my favorite show. Really? I love the show. We actually have a paper that has the subtitle, I'm the Danger.

It essentially makes a drop of dopamine seem like it's an ocean of dopamine.

And so the dopamine system turns up the knob a little bit and you say, oh, wow, you know, this is really, this is really something. Time passes, and then... The dopamine is sucked back up into the nerve cell, and it's basically gone, right? And so then you get the little blip, and it's gone.

That's right. That's right, yeah. And so literally you get this flood of dopamine that comes out of nowhere and everything seems like great. People who, even the first time they do that, they say it's like 100 times an orgasm.

So you get the dopamine, but there's nobody listening on the other side or fewer receptors listening. So you don't get the same effect after a while. Right? It's no longer like this woof, this incredible hit. But now it's like a little poof.

The point being is there's enormous regenerative capacity in the brain. I mean, there are limitations, but there's a tremendous amount of regeneration that can happen.

The dirty little secret is that business actually likes what we do. They're the ones encouraging us to bring cases because they want access to markets. They want supply chains that are affordable. They want greater supply of key inputs, right? This is something that's quite popular in business.

I am part of a whole family of Bombas wearers. My daughter, who's three, also wears Bombas. She has several pairs in toddler, kid sizes, and they're great. The kids' ones have little grips on them, which is great because she runs around a lot, so the grips help her to make sure she's not slipping on wood floors. So she's a fan, too.

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Just like clear-cutting an old-growth forest and leaving nothing behind, deep sea mining is like clear-cutting the ocean.

The companies involved in deep-sea mining aren't necessarily interested in revealing the damage that's taking place down there.

These minerals are in our own waters. We can extract them with much less cost and much less time and much less environmental impact.

This is Today Explained.

Yeah, we have some asteroids that we've identified that have up to 10,000 times the percent of platinum group metals on them than the ore deposits on Earth.

If we can figure out how to mine asteroids at scale and economically, resource scarcity could be a thing of the past.

We're looking at asteroids that will provide water and other consumables that can be used for propellant and for other needs in space.

So we might have a base on the moon where we actually manufactured materials and spacecraft or whatever we needed and tools to actually go and explore further into space.

We could be opening up outer space in the same way that the gold rush of 1849 opened up California for exploration. Trillions of dollars could be at stake.

Estimates suggesting multi-trillion dollar industry could emerge that this looks like it's going to be the new gold rush.

We believe it's possible to extract enormous amounts of critical minerals and rare earths, which you know we need for technology and high technology in the process.

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And we're back, folks. It looks like Jim from sales just got in from his client lunch, and he's gotten receipts. His next meeting is in two minutes. The team is asking, can he get through his expenses in that time? He's going for it. Is that his phone? He's snapping a pic. He's texting Ram. Jim is fast, but this is unheard of. That's it. He's done it. It's unbelievable.

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Here is truly a miracle in the desert. A whole new outlet for the crowded millions in big cities. A Palm Springs with water. Here is where you can find the good life in the sun.

You can enjoy your life more fully, both mentally and physically, at the Salton Riviera.

In one of California's most neglected and forgotten corners, a new kind of gold rush appears to be brewing.

The Imperial Valley, a region that once had boarded up businesses and many people struggling to find work, may soon see a booming economy thanks to lithium.

Rod.

Yeah, my name's Rod Colwell. I'm the chief executive of CTR. Been out at the Salton Sea here for 13 years, going on 14 years.

that land that runs across to see that island or that little volcano across there. And you'll see there's about three and a half thousand acres where those wells are. So it's just a blank canvas. We'll run a central road in and build out facilities as we develop.

The benefit, aside from renewable energy, is that we generate jobs.

bringing over 1,300 jobs to their construction industry here in Imperial County.

Many residents argued solar was depriving agricultural workers of their jobs and taking more work away than it was creating.

Promises were made, yes, but they were not true. They didn't come to fruition.

We're a small private company, so raising capital has been a challenge. That challenge got exoperated by a ridiculous, frivolous lawsuit that got filed and, you know, we got thrown out. But that put us back 12 months. For what? You know, for what reason?

That's how we mitigate price volatility and things like that. We have good relationships with General Motors and Stellantis on long-term take-or-pay contracts. So they're relying on us to step up and deliver.

Ongoing debate over lithium mining in Nevada has taken a personal turn for six individuals sued by Lithium Americas for the peaceful protest of Thacker Pass.

Blowing up a mountain for coal mining is wrong. I think blowing up a mountain for lithium mining is just as wrong.

Whoever controls the production and processing of these critical minerals will control the 21st century economy the way that control of petroleum defined the 20th century economy.

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I mean, based on our understanding, the most reasonable explanation would be some sort of a drone or a UAV. And then you sort of go to the connotation that's attached with calling them what they actually are, which is an unidentified flying object, a UFO. They are technically that, but that doesn't mean that they're extraterrestrial.

Like that's the connotation that comes with using that phrase, even though that is the proper phrase for what we saw and what we classify. Can you tell me a little bit why this doesn't fit with a conventional drone? We were always trying to listen and we couldn't really hear anything.

which is also different from what we've experienced with drones that are in close as these appeared to be, you would hear something a lot of times.

Correct. For like more of a conventional drone, a national drone would still have like a low hum of an aircraft flying, which you would hear.

Just in general, we were a good amount off of land, and I'm not sure if I can disclose exactly how far away we were, but it was not a range that a conventional drone should ever be able to traverse, especially for the amount of time that we were seeing these. Nothing we know of can stay out here for that long. The amount of time that we were seeing them was well beyond...

I mean, if they flew out there, they would probably need to fly back. So I know that it wasn't a civilian. It absolutely wasn't civilians. because there's nothing available or even that you could modify to do what we saw.

This was the closest that we ever came to on our ship, figuring a possible origin outside of coming from land somehow. Like you said, traversing those 30 to 50 miles that we were from the nearest islands. So at one point, we did see what looked like multiple air contacts around a merchant ship that was operating in our vicinity of our strike group. And it was a foreign flag merchant ship.

And we reached out to them. They denied they weren't a vessel of interest that we had been worried about or anything. But I think it was like five to 10 of the aircraft circling around it. And we never saw it actually land on this vessel.

Yeah, I can verify the latter for sure. And that was also why I sort of skirted around saying many details about that merchant vessel because I wasn't, I'm not sure where the investigation went afterwards. I sort of helped compose the message that we sent off because I'd seen it. And like I said, we didn't see them land on it. And that was what we really wanted to see.

Like we really wanted to see either a launch or a landing. We didn't know if possibly this vessel had a foreign nations intelligence detachment on board or something like that doing this. They did deny they were the source and they also never landed or launched them. So. Right. Really wanted to see that because we just wanted an answer because we were tired of it.

It was not launching, was not receiving the drones as much as we wanted it to. Like we were like, this is the source. This has to be it. We finally figured it out. And it seemed like it probably wasn't just based on the fact that we never saw them land or take off. They weren't.

To my knowledge, based on three PhDs, it is the shape in that video is the shape that you're seeing and that it is a pyramid and that it is self-illuminating.

It's that illumination is coming from the object itself. That's my understanding based on what I had.

I got three PhD people to look at it.

I don't know.

That's what it was in internal documentation. If there's a correction to be made, it's not by us, it's by them.

And then probably the most dramatic part of the event was once it moved to the starboard side of the ship, It just shot straight up into the air. And the word that the sailor that we spoke with used was, it zoomed, it zoomed, it zoomed straight up in the air. And when you ask him, did you hear anything? Did you see anything in terms of like, again, like exhaust or something like that?

Or a sound, right, did you hear it? Right, exactly. And of course the answer is no.

I mean, based on our understanding, the most reasonable explanation would be some sort of a drone or a UAV. And then you sort of go to the connotation that's attached with calling them what they actually are, which is an unidentified flying object UFO.