And you mentioned also the capture of the state of the criminal justice system by mafias?

Yes, I think this is probably the most worrying of the three trends.

Most South Africans had a sense that organized crime was burgeoning in the country, but about a year ago, a lot of this burst out into the open when a senior cop from KwaZulu-Natal, Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi, went public with some explosive allegations about collusion among police, organized gangsters and politicians.

And that press conference where he was dressed in fatigues and had officers carrying guns right next to him, I mean, it looked like he was about to announce a coup.

That led to this public inquiry, which over the past year has proved kind of dramatic viewing across the country, and it's revealed more skeletons than a Halloween party, quite frankly.

These hearings have already led to the suspension or departure of, let me take a breath, the police minister, the police commissioner, his deputy, the head of the police's organized crime unit, and the lawyer leading a crack team supposedly tackling corruption within the national prosecutor.

And we knew there was deep corruption in South Africa.

What happens after?

When you join the dots, given somebody who's traveled on this continent and seen the challenges, the Trump administration or Trump Mark II, has that had a negative impact on the way that people in Africa view the United States, given the aid, for instance, is the most obvious thing that left? Or do they even care? Do the people on the ground bother?

Well, I think it depends what you mean by Africa and depends what you mean by people, right? So, I mean, starting with the latter, do ordinary people notice? Overwhelmingly, no.

I mean, to the extent that I think even if you would go, even if you went to somewhere like Kalicza, like the big township near where I live in Cape Town, like I'm sure all your viewers know it.

That was one of the original places where America funded anti-HIV treatments.

But I've been to Kalicza and I've asked people there, you know, how are you going to cope? Or how do you feel about these cuts? I didn't know.

I didn't know that the Americans were funding this.

And this is maybe a discussion for another time.

How do you do that? How do you keep the balance?

And how much of that shortfall of health workers on the ground has to do with the withdrawal of US funding that we've talked about on the show so many times?

Look, I think it's something of a perfect storm.

So the outbreaks in the east of the DRC, where I actually was a few weeks ago reporting another story, and in the east, there is very little state presence.

The capital of Congo is two thousand kilometers away, and there's this constellation of armed groups which make providing medical care difficult at the best of times.

At the same time, you've had these well-documented cuts to, to public health aid, which America was always in the lead of amongst Western countries.

So as it happens, I was at a NGO-led clinic in Goma, where there's just been a case announced of Ebola, and I was there to see how they were dealing with a measles outbreak.

And similar factors were at play there.

So in terms of what remains of, of international aid, what do you think will happen now? What do you think should happen now?

And how much of that shortfall of health workers on the ground has to do with the withdrawal of US funding that we've talked about on the show so many times?

Look, I think it's something of a perfect storm.

So the outbreaks in the east of the DRC, where I actually was a few weeks ago reporting another story, and in the east, there is very little state presence.

The capital of Congo is two thousand kilometers away, and there's this constellation of armed groups which make providing medical care difficult at the best of times.

At the same time, you've had these well-documented cuts to, to public health aid, which America was always in the lead of amongst Western countries.

So as it happens, I was at a NGO-led clinic in Goma, where there's just been a case announced of Ebola, and I was there to see how they were dealing with a measles outbreak.

And similar factors were at play there.Vaccines weren't getting to people who needed them, and also the types of community health workers that you would need to actually do the response weren't as numerous as they had been in the past.

So in terms of what remains of, of international aid, what do you think will happen now? What do you think should happen now?

But while John was working on his investigation, Jay was just getting more and more successful.

It was this very bizarre experience where I feel like I was the only person in the world who had access to all this information and who saw through the bullshit.

And while I was trying to sell this story, he just got increasingly more famous.

I mean, at one point when I was conducting this investigation, he interviewed President Biden in the Oval Office.

Why don't they seem to care?

Jay is emblematic of these macro trends in the media, which is that journalists as purveyors of information have been replaced by individual content creators.

There are so many guys like Jay who are out there crafting these narratives about themselves, telling their own story and kind of controlling their image.

The journalism profession has been decimated.