Trump & Carney’s Heated Rivalry

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They don't just tell you what happened. They explained how the decision-spaned in Washington could affect you. From gas prices and affordability to elections and other issues shaping your community. Listen every afternoon to the NPR politics podcast. Welcome back to Pots Day of the World on Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, when your grandkids ask you, "Papa, Pima, is it Papao?" Where were you on economic d-day? Were you fighting on the, I guess, are we actually currently fighting because we're not buying a Ronnie Noil? Are we part of it right now? I was fighting on 12 vessels Beach, you know. Just battling some shadowfully tankers, just battling some OFAC licensing. You and Scott Bessent, I want to ask you something before we get to this show. I was listening to a fascinating conversation the other day. Bill Simmons and Sammy Coppelman, who is a friend actually, about the Mark Walter scandal, which if folks haven't followed, he's the owner of the Dodgers and the Lakers, who seems to have committed some crimes as now selling their teams in a fire sale. Sammy was saying that seeing all this private equity and foreign money coming to sports has made him actually think that Jim Dolan might be a good owner and then Nick's fans are lucky. Thoughts on that. I heard that, too. Do you want to apologize, Jim Dolan? No, I don't. Jim Dolan is running a mass surveillance enterprise at Matt Sardin. So is Barack Obama. I guess. I will say, Sammy Coppelman gets a lot of shout-outs for being a true Nick's fan, too, by the way. He, like me, suffered the Isaiah Thomas years through a lot of dark times. But I will say, at least Jim Dolan seems to want to actually own the team and run his mass surveillance enterprise rather than leveraging the team. As a family business. Yeah, yeah. Rather than leveraging the team, some insurance schemes, so that's fair. I also learned from that podcast, the detail that I shared with you. I heard it after online, which is that the Guggenheim Associates, the name of this investment company that Mark Walters runs, is actually not the Guggenheim family. He just found some random Guggenheim, like inlaw or something, for like two seconds. Guggenheim partners used to include someone who was a distant relative of the museum Guggenheim family, and he brought him in to name it and then immediately pushed him out. Yeah, yeah. Incredible detail. I will say this is an organic plug of my sub-stack, notes on the stories you tell. I also dipped into, is the Nick's thing actually triggered this. And his canter was a Nick. And if you saw him tossed out of the Indian and Fever's skyguards skyguards. Yeah, he walked to half court and started talking shit to a player. Yeah, wearing a shirt that said woman noun, you know, not subtle as three of the cultures, but to write this sub-stack, I went back and actually read the entire transcript of his appearance on this podcast. Which is all about like Erdogan, right? Yeah, in 2019, which made me some of the things I remember when and his canter was like actually fighting authoritarianism rather than joining an authoritarian movement, but also made me feel very old. That was like 70, I was like combing transcripts of some seven-year-old Patsy of the world. Yeah, we've been doing this for a minute. Well, we got a great show for you guys today. We're still going. We are going to discuss our new trade war with Canada, how it happened, and at least in my opinion, then, why the political incentives and the economic incentives make it very hard to see a clear path forward to ending this thing anytime soon. We are going to evaluate the latest Iran sanctions that were called economic D-Day. We'll tell you if they lived up to the hype. This is on Iran, by the way. We're going to talk about this grim milestone in Ukraine when it comes to drone technology and speculation about why CIA director John Ratcliffe took a secret trip to Moscow today. Very interesting. You see the clips that kind of, I think this broke because there were a bunch of people in traffic in Moscow that saw an American motorcade go by and started filming it and posting it online. Everyone's just sort of like, what's that? Yeah. Anyway, cool. That's why we have telegram. Then we're going to explain why it matters that Pete Hexath just gutted a military newspaper called Stars and Stripes. How the guy who once called himself the world's coolest dictator has become the standard bearer for right-wing politicians in Latin America. And then Ben, you did our interview last Friday. What are folks going to hear? I talked to Posey Tang and Froze Sidwa, who Poe is the director of the new documentary film, American Doctor, which everybody should see, which follows Froze, who's been on the podcast before and two other doctors who are Americans that served in Gaza throughout the bombardment of Gaza. You see behind the scenes what it was like to be in Gaza, to be treating patients, to be dealing with horrific incoming wounded. But it's not just about that. It's just about who are these people, what motivated them, how they came back to the United States and took up activism, went on the media, started obviously pushing for politicians to change policy in Gaza. I guess I'd say this time, given that there's no international journalist inside of Gaza still to this day, this is actual coverage of what it was like to be there. Which we've had from Palestinian journalists, but to see this footage inside of hospitals, inside of Israeli attacks, that is an act of journalism that we are lacking. These three doctors are extraordinary people and to see the sacrifices they made, to see the kind of people that decide to kind of raise their hand to do this is truly inspiring. And you start to see the kind of shift in public opinion that they're a part of, that their bearing witness helped contribute to this continued shift we're seeing in the United States. So it's a great interview. They're both fascinating people to talk to. The film is in theaters. People should check it out. American doctor. Seeing them in the office last week and talking to Froze for a while reminded me, just brought me back to those early days of the war. I was just texting with him when he was going back in and out and it was unbelievably courageous decision to go in and provide care given how many healthcare workers we now know were killed by the IDF or others or journalist, Palestinian journalists were killed. But Ben, just in terms of like that shift you're talking about. I mean, it just, I was reminded the other day how now the Israeli government accepts the Hamas-led health ministry's casualty count. And before, that was something that have you cited on Twitter. Yeah, no, you're told you were like regurgitating propaganda. It's just like now it's like a lot of the things that people said were happening early on are just accepted. But I agree with you, unbelievably important story, a really important film, and very much worth your time. After Ben's interview, by the way, our friends of the pod subscribers are going to hear Ben and I take some some questions from the pod state of the world, discord. If you want to become a friend of the pod subscriber, a paid subscriber, it really is the most important thing you could do to help us grow and build as a company. So go to crooked.com/friends, you'd add free episodes, bonus content, all sorts of great stuff. And also last week, Ben and I recorded a YouTube episode about a couple things. We talked about the bizarre role that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's wife plays at the Pentagon. Very weird story from the times. We talked about the latest news about why Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are high tailing it at a California. And then why the U.S. is attacking judges on the International Criminal Court. If you want to hear that episode and lots of other bonus content we do for YouTube, please subscribe to pod state of the world on YouTube. We're trying to build a progressive counterweight to all the right wing crap from Fox News and others that you find on YouTube. And when you subscribe, it helps us out a lot. It helps us get good information into the YouTube algorithm and also it's free. So, you know, get your money, good money's worth. All right, let's talk about Canada, Ben. So the U.S. and Canada are now officially in a trade war, which is just what the economy needs. Over the weekend, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that Canada was walking away from these trade talks. Here's a bit of what Carney had to say and then we're going to explain you the backstory. We pursued every opportunity to reach an agreement that protects Canadian workers and their families, that strengthens our economy and that respects Canadian sovereignty. We've been under no illusions. We recognized from the start that America has changed. In recent days, the United States proposed new terms, the run economic, unfair, and undermine the net benefits for Canada and called into question the reliability of any deal. Last spring, I warned that America is trying to break us so they can own us. And I promise that that will never ever happen. The US introduced at the last hours, in the last hours, efforts to restrict our ability to have other trade deals, efforts to restrict our protections of our language, our culture, and in effect our sovereignty. When you get attacked, we got attacked. It wore with Canada. So the rupture came after months and negotiations. There has been a lot of great reporting both in the US and in Canada. Shout-out to the front burner podcast from the CBC. It's sort of unpacked while Harnie was sitting there. It's a good show. Nice. Yeah. So a couple quick things. So Trump apparently reportedly wanted to exempt certain kinds of trucks from the reduction in tariffs that would have come from the deal, which would have made it unprofitable for car manufacturers to have factories in Canada and basically get them shut down over time because a GM Silverado's are made in Canada and the Ford F 350 and F 450. The US wanted Canada to get rid of laws that would require streaming services like Netflix to feature Canadian content, including French language shows, and protecting the French language is a very, very big deal and Quebec. Remember that air Canada CEO was forced to resign because he put out like a condolent statement only in English. Yeah. And he got sent out of there. The Trump people apparently wanted Canada to get rid of certain by-Canadian programs that Canada put in place to respond to US tariffs without actually getting rid of the tariffs. So that doesn't seem fair. And the US wanted to force Canada to essentially abide by certain US trade policies when they cut their own bilateral deals with other countries, especially around US steel tariffs. And for what it's worth, the US side says that Mark Karnie kind of flirted with reviving the Keystone XL pipeline, but then wouldn't go through with it when it became kind of deal time, but who knows? So Canada is also putting the finger at Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik. Apparently the Canadians liked Jamison Career, the trade rep. But then Lutnik got involved and he is famously a massive asshole. Yeah. And things went badly. Lutnik also oversees the tariffs on cars, trucks, and metal. But I think the biggest issues of all were just trust in Canadian sovereignty. Ben, we obviously know that Trump kind of flies like it's breathing. But in this case, the official negotiating position from the US delegation was that even if a deal got done, the US has the right to levy tariffs and change the policy at any time, which makes you wonder what's the point of any of this. So those are the substantive reasons. And I think that made the politics a lot easier for Mark Karnie. There's a pull out today from the Angus Reed Institute, which is a Canadian pollster that found that 76% of Canadian voters support Karnie's decision to walk away from the talks. So now the US and Canada were stuck in this escalatory tip for Ted cycle, like Trump announced 20 billion worth of tariffs on Canadian goods. Karnie announced they'd responded kind. Those going to place us, September 8th, Trump then threatened even more tariffs starting January 1st. And on we go, how do you think they put the toothpaste back in the tube here? It feels like this has gotten so politicized when normally you just want trade deals to kind of get hashed out behind the scenes and then voted on or agreed to. So that's not this like massive high profile fight. Yeah, it's nothing is impossible, right, especially in the Trump era where there's these huge swings. I think that at core, what's happening here is Mark Karnie better than any other leader of certainly an allied country kind of understands the new reality that we're in. And there's there's different components to that. The first is quite simple. It's that last thing you said, there's this line Karnie had where he said we've learned that the deals that the US makes are not signed and penned, they're signed in pencil, which is pretty long as the speech editor. But it's because it's just dizzying game that Trump plays where you cut some mini deal and then he tariffs you more. And I think Karnie saw, you know, this is just going to keep happening. And I might as well just draw the line right here and say, you know, fuck you. We're in a trade war, right? Now, why did he do that? I think because all the economic questions are what they are. I think at core, it is a sovereignty question. And that's where I think Karnie does understand what Trump is doing is essentially really infringing upon core Canadian sovereignty. So first of all, this question about whether they could have their own trade deals. Essentially, you're looking into it and kind of making sense of the reports. And what the US was insisting on was not that like we'll sit in like literally review, you know, the negotiations account isn't with other countries. But the Canadian trade deals have to take into account American tariffs, you know, so that if we have tariffs and because you know, the Trump people like to try to control the supply chain through other countries. Yeah, they don't want China or some Latin American company dumping a bunch of steel in Canada that then gets sent to the US at a discount rate. For example, but that means that Karnie's entire strategy, which is we need to diversify away from the United States and we need to cut trade deals with the countries can't literally can't work because essentially you'll have to check over a shoulder with any deal that he makes. The second thing is this French language stuff is it's not that we're literally going in there and saying you can't speak French. But if you know Quebec has come close to seceding in the past, right? This is quarter Canadian national identity. That's why there's it's by lingual. That's why they have these specific protections in place for the French language, particularly in Quebec, including the kind of content that's on television is on streaming services, the kind of labeling on products. That's not just because they have some eccentric interest in the French language. It's because they made those agreements to keep Quebec as a part of Canada. And so it's about holding Canada together. And then this speaks to kind of the political backdrop, which is we can, you know, look at JD Vance and Donald Trump joking about Canada being 51st date, or we can see some of the outreach that has been done to like Albertan separatist as kind of weird eccentric things. You know what? If somebody was doing that to the United States, particularly a much larger power, you know, we would feel pretty bent out of shape about it, you know? And so I think all the accumulated grievance of how Ken has been treated, how Cavalierly, their sovereignty's been discussed. And Carnie's a whole theory of the case about middle powers having to kind of make their own deals, you know, all of that kind of compels him to take this action. And as you say, the kind of politics reinforces it. Again, what I think Carnie saw, not that he's perfect, we're not, you know, we're not here to just act like Mark Carnie's come down from on high, but he's a very smart guy. And he's got the politics and the economics and the sovereignty questions all in mind. And they all suggest, hey, better for me to just draw a line here and take a stand against this guy and try to have this fight. And frankly, hope that he'll blank. I mean, I think, I don't think you kind of did by I think delaying the reciprocal tariffs until January. I don't think Carnie wants to be in a trade war for the next two and a half years. But I think he does realize that, you know, after a few months, he has 76% support for this. What support does Trump have? You know, I think Carnie realizes it in two democracies. And we're still a democracy here in a trade war if public opinion is, is ready for it on one side and is not for it on the other, that he can squeeze us until essentially Trump declares some victory and cut some deal. Yeah, look, economically, this sucks for Carnie and it sucks for Canada. I mean, Canada imports about $270 billion worth of US goods per year. The Canadian economy is one-twelfth the size of ours. There was the abacus, this abacus data, it's a analysis company. They did a report that the economist got and the found that the Canadian economy has like finally started to grow again by like 0.8% in the second quarter of this year after contracting and stagnating in 2025 and unemployment was coming down. So this is really going to punch them hard at the time when the economy was just recovering. So it's terrible. But I do think you're right. It's a it's a quiz question of sovereignty. And the politics of this are complicated for Carnie. And you mentioned Alberta, which is the big oil producing province, they have a independence referendum in October. That would be a huge problem for Canada if they decided to leave because they contribute a ton of revenue because of oil money. And also like, Carnie currently is getting a lot of support from even conservative leaders. But there's a long there's long term trepidation. Yeah. So let's play a clip. This is Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario and then Danielle Smith, the premier of Alberta, talking about Carnie's decision. You sound a little more subdued than you did this morning on the radio when you said Donald Trump could kiss your ass. The prime minister tell you to ask you to tone it down a bit. No, he didn't. He wasn't against that. And I have a lot of real estate on my ass. So he has a lot of room to kiss my ass. The retaliatory terrorist. I know emotionally it feels good to retaliate I get that. But let's remember what happens when retaliation happens. It means that everybody who is buying products from the United States are now going to face upwards of 50% upwards to 50% tariffs. So I think Doug Ford reportedly talked to Carnie before he walked away from the deal and you know kind of got the briefing on it and told him I actually will not or stores to put US booze back on the shelf because I think this is a terrible deal for us. So again, Karnie's like kind of juggling all these complicated political equities. I do think though that Donald Trump has unleashed a rage from Canada and a sense of Canadian nationalism that is not going anywhere anytime soon. We can cut a deal and get US booze back on the shelf in all these places, but I think a lot of Canadians are going to say fuck you. We're not buying it. They're really mad. I don't diminish the economic risks where Canada, they're significant. It's going to have a harm to Canadian consumers in terms of prices. It's going to have a harm to Canadian growth because of how much they're dependent on exports of the US. All of that said, once again, to get to the politics and national identity piece of this, the Canadians are already having an impact on the United States just by taking American products off shelves. There's billions of dollars in tours in the lost, yeah, travel it's been lost. That shows you that is a people that is pretty united, not totally, as we just saw in that clip, around the sense that they need to stand up for their sovereignty. Are we united to do this? Does American national identity, I mean, it's quite remarkable to me. We generally, my whole life, been a more nationalist country. There's a stronger sense of shared Canadian identity, I think, right now, heading into this trade war than there is American national identity. If Carney can hold that together, and that will require pretty astute politics and good allies, but if you can do that, and they can distribute pain in the United States in strategic ways, right, to certain sectors in certain states and try to hit Trump's base harder, they're trying to focus the pain on red states, which is kind of interesting. Then I think, you know, it's possible that he comes out of this, yes, having probably suffered some short and maybe even medium-term economic pain, but if he can accomplish what he's trying to do, and show that Canada can stand up to the United States, show that they can diversify their trading partners, show that they can kind of maintain a sense of shared national identity through this. He's kind of, he's doing something more ambitious than Trump's doing. Like he's trying to kind of remake a sense of what Canada is, you know, it's a big project that he's involved in. While trying to model how can, you know, so-called middle powers survive in a tumultuous age in which the U.S. and China and Russia are all fighting with each other. So I don't know, I'm thus far, I find a lot to admire in how Karni's approaching this. That's not to diminish the risks. And I just, again, like Mark Karni, we've talked about this before, but the former head of the Bank of England, the Bank of Canada, like he knows this stuff. On the our side, we've got Howard Lutnik and Donald Trump, and if James and Greer is like the sharpest tool in the shed, I'm not sure that we're sending our best to the trade work. Well, look, I mean, regardless, like Mark Karni was elected for this moment. He was elected to take on this fight. And so he decided, it's a difficult decision because he knows the economic kid he's going to take, but he decided to take it on, and so far voters are supporting him. He also knows that Trump is weakened because of the war with Iran, and he's about to go into a midterm where he's likely to lose a bunch of seats and come out of that further hobbled. And the timing is right for him. I think the question with Trump is always like, what does he want? Like, do you want, do you really want a new trade deal? Do you really think, do you think he really wants like, you know, to make sure that softwood lumber is like he's going to, no, he wants to dominate a smaller country. That's what he wants. And again, that's what Karni's right about it. It's not even about a trade dispute about, I was in trade disputes with the Canadians actually often about softwood lumber. Like, that's something that this is about, and that, I mean, time I ask you, like, how many leaders have we talked about whose political standing and dignity has been undercut because they, you know, Macron tried to cut these deals with Trump, and he signed the, you know, Treaty of Versailles, MOU, like, you know, the Kier Starmer cut a trade deal with Trump, the EU. They all look weak. Yeah. Like, their political standing and their polls dropped. Like, I think Karni's right that like Trump respects strength too. Like, Xi Jinping is the other guy that really punched Trump in the face in a trade war and he won. And the big other challenge is, in turn, like, back to nerdy stuff is the US and Canada and Mexico are supposed to now go into these updating the USMCA trade agreement, the new NAFTA trade agreement. But Trump's, which Trump negotiated, right, which Trump negotiated now hates. But also it's very clear that like, Trump doesn't really think those negotiations matter. He was trying to dictate the terms of USMCA through this bilateral fight with the Canadian. So, like, Karni can either fight him now or fight him later, like, it's going to happen on trade. Yeah. Yeah. And maybe he can, Karni, if he's smart, you know, we'll get Claudia Shainbaum on side. Right. And, you know, that's what Karni's going to try to do is get other countries to stand up to the United States with him. Yeah, he immediately called her to coordinate. This show is sponsored by strawberry.me. People usually have to be pretty motivated one way or the other to take the time to write an online review about a product or a service they have used. You've seen these reviews, people feel quite strongly when they take to the comments. So you know that if a business continually receives one rave review after another from their actual clients, they must be doing something right. 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A lot of names for this thing. Whatever happened to, what was the original one? Epic theory. Epic theory, sorry. They got rid of that name and renamed it to try to get around the war power. Yeah, yeah. So I've lost track of the names. Yeah, I don't know. Infinite justice. Infinite hammer. So Besson said he was targeting Iran's financial lifeline, specifically digital assets in crypto, technology, gold, aviation, and shipping. Every sanctioned, I think, 60 individuals or entities. That could be a business or a ship or whatever. But the Trump administration has put over 1,000 sanctions on Iran since he took office the second time. So there was a lot of overlap with what was released Monday. Nothing really all that new. Far more important was what was not mentioned, which were specifically any big banks in China. China buys between 80% and 90% of Iran's oil. Chinese banks create these systems and financial architecture to facilitate the movement of Iranian oil in a way that avoid US sanctions. In many experts pointed at Besson's announcement and asked, "Couldn't this just give China time to adjust how they do things and avoid sanctions in the future as well?" We'll see. Besson was pressed on the plan during his remarks on Monday. Let's watch a clip of that. In the Second World War, D-Day marked the historic beginning of a campaign with our allies to target and drive the enemy from its positions, including those in third countries. Today, in that same spirit we are launching an economic onslaught against Iran's financial connections around the globe. Around the globe. You described this as an economic D-Day, but D-Day wasn't a threat of an invasion, and the US didn't give a timeline to Germany. So why not impose the sanctions today? Great question. It does seem like we kind of emailed, so we're like emailing Manazee's though, "Operation [BLANK_AUDIO] plan in advance. So, Xi Jinping is coming to Washington in late September. Trump clearly doesn't want to piss off Xi before that visit, but there's still a bigger structural problem which is that we got in the trade war with China. When was that last year? This year, I don't remember. And we lost that war too. Yeah, remember the Chinese said, hey, we have all these rare earth materials. We will bend you to our will, Donald Trump, by refusing to give them to you if you fuck with us. There's no quick fix to that problem. So, Ben, none of this is to say that Iran's economy is currently in great shape. I think the U.S. blockade has actually cut off a lot of their exports of oil and will really hurt the economy over time. We'll hurt the Iranian people over time. But two things. One, making such a big deal out of this, which is odd to me. They always overpromise under deliver. But also, it just seems likely that the IRGC won't really care about the economy period and the civilian political leaders like don't really have any savings. Yeah, that's the core substantive thing is that the Iranians have priced in a lot of economic pain for a period of time here. And so, this will have no impact. I think this is completely, it's as meaningless as all the other D days that we've discussed. I mean, you know, I have an impact marginally on their economy. But the idea that this is going to, what is it going to achieve? Like Iran's going to surrender. Iran's going to reopen the straight-of-horn moves. Like, I don't think that's going to happen. Look, a couple thoughts on this. The first is D day was like tens of thousands of people in the most complex amphibious invasion in history, getting into boats and literally storming beaches to fight Nazi fascists on the other side. This is Scott Bessent signing some papers and a few lawyers at Opaq finding 60 designations to make unsanction. We shall fight them on the beaches of Opaq. It is so laughable. It's just such an insult to D day and to any semblance of language. That leads me to Scott Bessent. Like, can we put him in the Marco Rubio category of somebody that is often passed as like a more competent and reasonable person just because he's able to string like three sentences together with that seem like a complete moron. This guy is completely mediocre. He's completely marginal mediocre figure. Did he practice the D day speech in the mirror? I was in touch. There's nothing about that suggested like strength and toughness and ah, you know, like really the IRGCs can be quaking in their boots. Like, the guys that are really shutting down the straight-of-horn moves, like give a shit about that press conference. I mean, all they're trying to do is fill programming every week on right-wing media. You know, like he heard is probably excitedly referring to the, you know, a D day in the same way he excitedly referred to the epic fury in the same way that he excitedly referred to the blockade. Like, they just kind of come up with this some new thing to throw into the trance of right-wing media to distract from the fact that they've lost his war and more get them to the midterms because the actually of the other day floated that they might resume full-scale conflict after the midterms. Well, then the then the Iranians will, and the rainy gets what they do. They will actually bomb stuff. They will hit stuff with like real-life things, not with like designate. I mean, Iran is nothing left to sanction. Like to your point, the only thing left to sanction is like the Chinese or the Indians, which would bring down the global economy, which cut best in itself like admitted said. So, so do Americans really believe it is worth tanking the global economy? Because if suddenly like major Chinese banks are taking off line, like the whole thing unravels, right? For what? To compel the Iranians to do what? I still don't even know what they want them to do. I think it's just like to crush the economy to inflict so much pain on the population that maybe they because you're so mad that you lost the government because you're so mad that you lost the war. I don't know like we're feels like we're just going through phases of losing this war. Yeah, we definitely are. Two other things, the Wall Street Journal had a great report out this week about how Trump was in fact warned about all the things currently going wrong and how they could go wrong. So they have, you know, Tulsi Gavard then the DNI warning him to killing the Supreme Leader with the two a more hard line regime that was more committed to getting a new weapon. Check. Stop off, right? They're on the closest straight or moose and hit US bases in the region. Check the DOD warning him about stockpile shortages of critical weapons and munitions and interceptors. Check. But it was like Hague Seth, Pete Hague Seth in the Raisin Cain. Yeah. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Dan Cain, basically telling Trump that the military could kind of handle any contingency and it would deal with it and Trump bought that line. Also, Ben, did you see that Iranian like tackers are believed to have shut down a like small-scale British power plant for four days. The Sunday telegraph broke the story. The British officials say there was no risk to their energy system. But it does show once again Iran's ability to retaliate with cyber operations way outside of their borders. And it follows on those attacks on US water infrastructure we talked about a couple weeks ago. Yeah. The Iranians have other ways of inflicting pain. And it's not that they're stronger than us. It said they don't care about the pain that we inflict. Because they're used to power outages. They're used to you know, sanctions are used to economic hardship. And they don't care about their people. Whereas if any of that stuff starts to happen in our country or in Europe or in the UK, like people are like, what the fuck is going on? Why is this happening? So it speaks to the asymmetry. There's a double asymmetry. There's an asymmetry of power. We have more of it. But the asymmetry that works with Iranians is that there's an asymmetry of how much pain people are willing to take, right? The only thing on their Wall Street Journal story, I thought that was important because it's kind of not on me here. Like it's easy to blame, Trump. It's easy to blame Netanyahu. It's certainly easy to blame Pete Hague set this more on. I've been wondering about Dan Cain, you know, and I've been wondering about Centcom. You know, people don't like to criticize the military. I've done it here a couple of times. Like it does feel like at minimum, there wasn't enough like, hey, just so you know that you can't change this regime with airstrikes. And a little too much like, sure, we can make this work. We have the strongest military in the world. You know, like I'm getting a little worried, frankly, about what kind of messages have come out of this war about whether or not we have military leadership that is willing to tell Trump that something's a bad idea or something won't work. Because the reason I'm worried about that is both because we're in a war, but because what happens in Greenland, what happens in Tenocht, Canal, or what happens? Yeah. Like a little less, yes, man, because I can tell you, I've been in meetings with military leaders who are like, that's a bad idea. Yeah. There's usually like a lot of people die, sir. Yeah. It will be very bad. And by the way, the casualty number was updated. It's like something like 770 wounded. Yeah. You have service members now. I mean, it's just goes up and up and up. Yeah. And we still know. And that's something military, too. Like they're not exactly being the most transparent bunch over there. No, no, they are not shifting military theaters here. Unfortunately, the war between Russia and Ukraine has reached another grim milestone. The deployment of autonomous killer drones, Ben, who's not excited about that. The New York Times wrote this up that's based on forensic analysis of this drone that that landed in somewhere in Ukraine by the Ukrainian military. The gist is that human operators in Russia programmed the drone to fly to a specific point in Ukraine, but then upon arrival, the drones selected its own target with AI and then attacked. Ukraine thinks the drone was trained with AI to strike fuel tanks to recognize and strike fuel tanks. The targeting decisions were made by an onboard MIDI computer produced by Nvidia, the big graphics company, chip company in the US. So congrats to Jensen Wong for his new business model. Yeah. Mostly kidding, but truly another company. So that's terrible. Also, Ben, earlier today, we learned that the CIA director, John Rackliff made this surprise trip to Moscow. This is on Tuesday. We don't get to know why. There's a lot of speculation that it could be to issue some kind of warning like, hey, we know via intelligence that you're planning to attack a NATO country or do something terrible. Don't do it. Remember this happened during the Biden administration. It was ineffective. We said don't invade Ukraine, but Bill Burns, the CIA director, went over to Russia to tell Putin directly, although I think you had to do it via phone, because Putin was in Sochi or whatever. The Wall Street Journal reported, quote, "The US has collected intelligence showing Russia's early preparations for possible military mobilization in Ukraine and plans for testing the NATO alliance or NATO's resolve," whatever that means. So it could also just be to scatter location for the newest Trump tower. Yeah. CIA could do that, too. Ben, any guesses to what this trip was all about? And I guess should we all just be happy that it wasn't Steve Whitcoff sent over there. It was actual professional. I find this kind of worrying because, this will sound strange. I'd feel better for Steve Whitcoff in a way, because that would just be probably another, you know, fruitless effort to resume some talks. It's all some Trump coin. The fact that the CIA director went to me suggests that there was some concerning intelligence, right? Because why else would you send the CIA director? Like, Trump always sends Whitcoff or Jared or some other kind of personal envoy if it's about resolving the war or something like that. And so we've talked a lot recently about these concerns that Russia might start trying to either escalate its sabotage operations inside of Europe. It might try to literally hit some targets in Europe like that. They've been kind of making statements that suggest that the places in Europe that are manufacturing the Ukrainian weapons that are hitting into Russia are fair targets. So there are places in Germany or the UK that make the rockets or drones that the Ukrainians are then sending deep into Russia. And it's I mean, it wouldn't shock me if there was intelligence that the Russians are considering like hitting stuff and, or sabotaging stuff in, in, like, London, yeah, and that would be enough to get even in the Trump administration, the C.I. director on a plane, and the other thing that concerns me to your point about Bill Burns is, I'm not sure that like what warning John Rackliffe can carry, because I don't know what Trump's going to do to ratchet up stuff on Putin. So, I don't know, watch the space for escalation from the Russian side. They've taken a lot of hits over the last six to nine months, whether that's further mobilization or whether that's further tax in Europe, both of those things would be bad, obviously. And along the lines of the retaliation to Ukraine supporters, or the retaliation against Ukraine supporters, British Prime Minister Andy Burnham took his first foreign trip to Ukraine. He was there this week. He was announcing that Britain's basically going to help Ukraine build these long-range missiles, the Stormshadow missiles, what they call, it's a joint French UK missile. He also spent some time with Ukrainian troops. We'll talk about that in a second, but the Russians flipped out in response. Dmitry Peskov said the UK was, quote, "helbent on pouring oil on a fire and plotting to prevent any kind of peace process." And then, last week, Moscow threatened the UK over Ukraine using British made drones. So, it's sort of a very live issue that you're talking about, but we enjoyed this clip, Prime Minister Burnham in Ukraine that was going around his social media. Let's watch. [Music] Here's my note to Prime Minister. He's playing a Smith song, I think. The thing about electric guitars is they're awesome and they're badass, but they sound like-- -Better plugged in. -Tinny shits when you don't plug them in. You just sound like a total goober when you're just kind of swimming away. -First of all, any Burnham does have good taste of music. Do you ever see the documentary 24-hour party people, the origins of the punk rock scene in Manchester? -No, I watch it. -Yeah, he loves it. It's all those, you know, the clash and the swimming scene, everybody. The other thing you say is that I'm looking at the Ukrainian guy and I don't know, they must find different people for the new photo op for each new British Prime Minister, because they've been like five or six since the war began, you know. That dude is part of a military and artistic unit that plays on the front lines, apparently. That's who Burnham was with. -So they must just do a profile of each of these British Prime ministers and they're like, you know, any Burnham likes music, let's get the music guy here, you know. -Tonny Blinken played rock in the free world, the club, back in the day. -It was a little weird. Cure Starman, I'm not sure what interest he had, but the actually the kind of thing that you do wonder about is that each British Prime Minister in trying to reaffirm this, you know, support for Ukraine, which I get and I support. But they need something new to announce, you know, like, and the timing should not be dictated by that. So, I mean, maybe this thing has been the works that surely must have been for a while with the French to manufacture this, like, on a long-range rocket. But, boy, like, this, someone, there's nobody that is de-escalatory right now, you know. Like, there are times in the past when the Europeans are trying to negotiate something. Obviously, Trump was right now, like, everybody's ratcheting it up and I, you know, I worry about where that's going. -Yes, not great. Last thing on Ukraine, a couple weeks back, we talked about Zelensky's botched firing of his very popular defense minister, Mikhail Fedorov. Last week, Fedorov released a video calling for new elections, so that kind of, I think, confirms what we all suspected, which is that Zelensky might view Fedorov as a possible political opponent down the road. -Yeah. And I don't see any elections happening during the war, but-- -No, it's unconstitutional while they're under martial law, but some to watch. We're going to take a quick break, but Mark Carney is not the only one who has the chance to check Donald Trump in the near future of Ben. We all do in November. We got the midterms coming up. We can stop the Trump agenda in its tracks by winning back a democratic majority in House of Representatives. And we're going to be kind of open on the Senate here, too. If we win, that means no more bills, gutting health care. It means actual investigations into corruption and subpoena power. And it puts us on a path to regaining power in 2028. Votes of America has identified 12 of the most beatable Republicans up for re-election in the House, aka the Crooked dozen. Sign up at VotesaveAmerica.com to learn more and get practical actions you can take between now and election day. We all have to step up. If we're going to flip the house and win other races up and down the ballot, go to VotesaveAmerica.com now to get involved. This message has been paid for by VotesaveAmerica. VotesaveAmerica.com. It is not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee. PotsaveTheWorld is brought to you by built. Here's a question. 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It was revived during World War I. Today it has an average of 1.4 million readers a day. It is partially funded by taxpayer money at the Staffer technically Pentagon employees, but traditionally there's been editorial independence. But last Friday the publisher max letterer and the editor in chief Eric Slaven and Middle East correspondent Laura Corti were all told they were fired for insubordination. So there's like a short version and a long version of this story. The short story is that CBS Sunday morning had done a piece about Stars and Stripes being under pressure from the Pentagon and Slaven and Corti were interviewed for it and the lines that caused a stir are these. I'm working for Stars and Stripes. Not for the Pentagon, not for any administration, not for any policymaker. I'm here to cover the military community. Editor-in-chief Eric Slaven may have to choose between his allegiance to the First Amendment and his obligation to obey Pentagon orders. Do you have red lines in your mind? Yes, I do. Don't run a perfectly accurate story. Run this instead. Here it is written by the Pentagon. That would be a red line. You have a sign on your desk. Pick your battles. Which foxholes are you willing to die in? We need to be able to provide independent news to service members. If we can't do that, if we were turned into something other than that, if we were public relations, that's the foxhole. That was considered in subordination. The tensions with the Pentagon press office and Stars and Stripes have been bubbling up for a while. Back in January, the Pentagon spokesperson, Sean Parnell, said the department was going to refocus stars and Stripes' content, "away from woke to see. They also barred the war in Iran, they also barred it from publishing comics or associated press articles and said only active duty personnel would write stories presumably because you can boss them around pretty good when you're in the military. Then they fired the Ombudsman, they installed this deputy editor and then that person I think kind of stayed to coup and fired these three. Then it's not at all surprising that Pete Hexeth and the gang want to kill off independent journalism or coverage of the Pentagon. This is a long slow-moving process we've been watching them do for a while. I'm curious how big of a deal you think it is in practice for the service members who actually rely on stars and stripes and versus just sort of the obviously terrible precedent it sets and the principles involved. I think it's a enormous deal and you know it made me think Tommy, I don't know why I'm revealing that I'm a little older than you. I'm like that edge of Gen X in the manual, but did you see good morning Vietnam? Do you remember that there's a whole the whole supply of that movie was he's like a broadcaster for the US military, Robin Williams. And then there are these two meatheads who sit there and censor all the news he can read. And he finally goes in there and he rips the actual news off and he reads it aloud and that's what gets him torn off air. Great movie. And I remember watching that scene and thinking like, ah you know that we fixed that problem you know I mean we're that's where we are like that if you haven't seen good morning Vietnam actually should we're back to like the meathead censoring the news that the service members and their families can get because this is this is like Russian state media stuff. It's because what they were reporting on notably they gathered the editor in chief and you know the publisher and the Middle East correspondent she been reporting on the Iran war. She just been reporting the news nothing woke about it probably reporting you know the truth about what's happening in the Iran war. And the military wants to keep that information from reaching service members. And to be clear like this is a huge publication in its reach to service members but also to base communities right so because they cover I mean you must have dealt with them Tommy like they cover you know things that are a issue to military families like lengths of deployments and far more. You know and like to me like this is like this is a huge warning sign about the kind of state media that they want to you know shape military coverage and again. Pete hexeth I get where's Dan Kane like I am not trying to pick on the guy today but like I think you know I'm not to sound like an Atlantic I think it's a value of jicking a random three star out of retirement general Millie would I think general Millie or Jim Mattis would have gone in there and been like I've read stars and stripes or decades like back the fuck off you know yeah I think the the precedent here is chilling the message it sends is chilling for those who are listening and thinking come on these guys can just like log on to the internet and get. I was talking to a former service member today who said no like stars and stripes was the main source of non TV news for this person whenever he was deployed because when you are somewhere like let's say you're on the front lines in a rock someone would upload the PDF of the daily stars and stripes to the sipper net which is the secret level classified network and while this guy said he had very little satellite bandwidth like go on the internet and surf news websites. Sipper net was always available the stars and stripes is always available sometimes it was like the only thing you could read like you're sitting in a skiff or if you were online. I'm aircraft carrier yeah yeah or the submarine right yeah so it is pretty significant. Let's end by talking about the rise of the far right and far right politicians in Latin America. So in recent years we've seen conservative politicians win elections in Peru Chile Ecuador Costa Rica Honduras Colombia. The New Yorker in the New York Times ran recent pieces about how these leaders seem to view El Salvador's president night bouquet li as their standard bearer and the person they sort of emulate listeners to the show again we've been doing the show for a while now. They've heard us talk about bouquet li for a long time he is very popular in El Salvador because he managed to drastically reduce gang violence. But according to amnesty international he did so via quote mass arbitrary detentions the suspension of guarantees and serious human rights violations that could amount to crimes against humanity. He is also believed to have cut deals with gangs to better hide their violence not really curb it. Then bouquet li became a mega darling because I'm sure folks remember he allowed Trump to send migrants to secote their horrific mega prisons in El Salvador. bouquet li's political success though has led a bunch of right wing leaders in Latin America to celebrate him to emulate him both in the kind of style and substance. One upcoming race we're going to watch this very closely is the presidential election in Brazil. You've got president Lula de Silva and then the son of Jair Bolsonaro Flavio Bolsonaro who are facing off in October. Bolsonaro towards secote the mega presence in El Salvador. He's explicitly campaigned on the bouquet li model and promise five new maximum security prisons. Bolsonaro also campaigned with mega darling Javier Malay president of Argentina. So Ben what do you make of these pieces the influence of bouquet li and like I guess sort of how to disaggregate his image from the kind of the Trump brand. And the reality that like you know kind of right wing strong man strong man or want to be strong man is not like a new political identity it just sort of revived I guess. Yeah I think there are a couple of things I'd highlight because you know the other thing we've talked about him over the years this is like kind of crypto obsession Bitcoin obsession he's buying the dip in right. I think the two things are the the clearly what bouquet li is tapping into is is people being fed up with violence and crime in large parts of Latin America which is a real problem. However the problem with bouquet li's approach and we've seen this in history and lots of places including Latin America is the high watermark for how people feel about the kind of mass arrest suspension of rights approach. Is it the beginning of it and it just gets work you know that over time because what he's done is sure the human rights violations started with the kind of mass arbitrary detentions. But then it became like oh and I don't really need a parliament that has any power and oh I have no term limits and and and you get on the slippery slope where then people look up in 10 years and nobody likes the guy anymore but he's just they're stuck with him and nobody has any rights and and so there's there's a real danger that this kind of short term interest in security leads countries to kind of repeat the history of allowing right wing strong men to kind of capture. Power and consolidated what's different about the Klee and this kind of came up in some of these stories that we were looking at this week is you know he doesn't present as like you know the traditional strong man is like you know military guy he's like a young guy he like presents is kind of cool like he's going to wear backwards hats and you know he looks like a crypto bro and he's very social media savvy. So it's kind of like having the like you know so I'm donny touch at communications combined with like the absolute strong man approach it's an alarming an alarming effective recipe that he's kind of cracked where his presentation isn't like scary it's kind of it's tough but it's also meeting people some of where they are and he's using social media. And yeah I worry that you know it's a test for the center on the left in Latin America like you're not to take crime pretty seriously because if if you don't have an alternative solution people are going to turn to guys like this yeah look a paquilla is a dictator like secote is a crime against humanity it's like it's just evil institution on top of that I mean he wrote he rewrote the Constitution in El Salvador to abolish term limits so he could run again he sent troops into parliament he. This party removes like all their magistrates on the Supreme Court and force through this change to make all judges over 60 retire so they could pack the court so he's done like a lot of authoritarian things. I think people are willing to look past that because I think we probably just don't understand what it's like to live in a country yeah that had that level of gang violence or like war zone like levels of violence. I also think politically bouquet le married up a real skill set which is like marketing communications social media savvy with an issue that is extremely visceral and easy to demagogue right like we all know social media we don't share the best most fact based vox explainer where you share like the video that makes us mad or scared or whatever it is and I think like crime stirs those emotions. And bouquet le gets that you very effectively use social media tools to highlight those issues what he's doing about the mean what camera which story was one of them talks about how. El Salvador open this amazing new library which is like beautiful and really like an exciting thing is something to celebrate. But bouquet le is quote about it was and that will be open later because El Salvador is finally safe like he makes his message a part of everything he does in a way that's very disciplined yeah and but even like the the library like this. This is such a bright wing strongly and stuff where it's like you know you you you drive down crime you throw all these people in prison you can sell a power and you kind of build some stuff that like you know money. Okay but then like 20 years from now the corruption is really like rotted the economy people are still rotting in prison like because even some of the the branching interviews I saw from some more thoughtful journalists because I know Salvador and opposition is right and so they'll say to me this is horrible and but but then you read these interviews. for people like, "Hey, isn't your son like in prison "in these mass detentions and like, it's worth it." You know, like, he'll get out, but maybe he won't get out. You know, over time, I think people start to see, "Oh, wait a second, these emergency powers are permanent." You know, and by the time people figure that out, it's too late because there's full state capture. And I think that's the model that Bukali's setting. Now, Miele hasn't gone that far. You know, others haven't been able to go as far as he has because, you know, El Salvador is a smaller country too. But it's a dangerous normalization, a re-normalization of really right-wing strongman politics in Latin America. And we should say, back by the US entirely. Usually, it's the US that's like, "Hey, I'm going to let some of these people out of prison." - Well, there's some people from the Biden administration quoted in the story saying they wish they had pushed back harder on some of Bukalais more authoritarian instincts, although it's others' question whether he would have cared. - Yeah, I don't think, yeah, I mean, or someone who's usually pretty hard on the Biden administration but certain things, I'm not sure they could have made much difference, yeah. - Finally, finally for the session with me and Ben. If you're in a group chat with me, by now you've probably gotten like a half dozen clips from the world humanoid robot games in Beijing. I will not apologize for that. I find them equal parts terrifying and hilarious. So I asked Michael and our team to pull together a few examples of some of his favorites that we've spotted on Twitter today. Just show them to Ben and I. We're going to watch him for the first time potentially. - Probably not, because I'm on group chats with you. - You guys were deep in these things, but we'll tell you what we see and how you can enjoy the do. - All right, we've got, whoa. - Oh, boys. - Backflips, backflips. - We're doing kind of a gymnastics routine, cheerleader routine, and one of them is now on the ground. And there's running this one at the tires for no reason. - Oh, kickboxing. - Now we're doing kickboxing and karate. We're just, they look blind. This one's, oh, this poor guy's trying to put the bar over. - Oh no. (laughing) - Shaking foot down. - Oh, he fell down. - Oh. - That's the best one. This one fell into a wall and then snapped in half. This one's flying. - Oh my god. What, oh, this one did a flip by accident. What's really interesting, Ben, is apparently, ooh, that's just tons of these poor robots running into walls. Just sprinting as fast as humanly possible into walls and then wiping out. - The system due to the scratcher. - Right in the Chinese guys carrying their corpses off of the track. That's a great little selection of these clips. Ben, so one of the clips has the robots that I think beat Usain Bolt's record run really funny. They kind of run like this. - Yeah, yeah. - And apparently, the AI trained itself to run that way. 'Cause it was trying to run like a person. What, with arms going up and down, but it kept overheating and like parts would burn up and stuff. So they had to just fucking train itself. So it trained itself to learn how to run really fast and stay stable. And that's our robot future. - Yeah, I'll be dystopian in this regard too. In the same way that, remember, I don't know, five years ago, people were like, "Hey, they're gonna be these deepfakes." You know, where people are gonna look like people or AI's gonna look like people and not gonna tell the difference. We're watching the robot Olympics where it's these kind of, they look like, kind of, you know, Imperial stormtroopers. - Yeah, they're kind of funny. - Like, I kind of feel like we're probably only two, three years away when they look exactly like people. - Terrifying. - Like, imagine watching those clips, including somewhere about running in a wall and exploding. And it looks exactly like a person, you know? I feel like, unfortunately, because humans feel compelled to build things that nobody's asking for. I feel like that's coming, too. - It is coming. All right, we are gonna take a quick break, but when you come back here and hear Ben's interview about what it was like to be an ER doctor, volunteering in Gaza at the height of the war. So stick around for that. (upbeat music) - Pots of the world is brought to you by hymns. ED is more common than guys talk about. 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Not available in all 50 states, prescription required, see website for details, restrictions, and important safety information. Sildenafil is the generic version of Viagra. Viagra is a registered trademark of Viatras specialty LLC. hymns is not affiliated with or endorsed by Viatras. (upbeat music) - All right, American Doctor is a new documentary film that provides a really gut-wrenching and important look at the experiences of three American physicians who went to Gaza to work in hospitals during the genocide and then documents their fight to hold American politicians accountable for the weapons, the violence that our tax dollars are funding before we get to our guest. We're gonna take a look at the trailer for American Doctor. - Three surgeons all working on one little girl for what, two and a half hours. And she's probably gonna lose her right leg, left leg, and her left arm. - And she's starting to wake up. - That's kind of warm, as a Jewish physician. - I knew nothing about Gaza. Like most Americans, I thought everybody out here were nothing but terrorists 'cause that's what I was told. - I'm not Israeli, I'm not Palestinian. I'm not Christian, I'm not Muslim, I'm not Jewish. I don't really have any connection to it. - But as an American, I just don't want my government involved in crimes. - I'm a Palestinian. I'm not a spokesperson. I'm a human being. I'm a US doctor who wants to see babies like my babies, not be killed anymore. - What surprised me most was how the carnage that's focused on journalists, healthcare workers, and children. - This bomb. - Where was that? - That bomb hit the building. - There was a 15 year old kid ready for discharge that wasn't centurated. - And if I had gone down and been changing that kid's dressing, there would have been three bodies and I would have been one of them. - All right, so that gives you a glimpse into a movie that I think everybody needs to watch. It opened in Los Angeles last Friday. It's in theaters in 90 other cities. So please look for American doctor in your community. Joining me today, we have a repeat visitor. Dr. Faroz Sidwa, who's one of the people profiled in the film, who was on Potsy the World last year, as well as the film's director, Posi Tang, who's with us, who was, I think, following Faroz with a camera the last time you were here. Thanks so much for being here. - Thank you for having us. - All right, well, Paul, let me just start with a question of how did you decide to make this film and how did you make it in the difficult circumstance of being able to film in Gaza and then, of course, back here in the United States? - So I'll say the starting point for me, the starting point was a year into the genocide. It just felt like nothing was shifting in the United States. And as I was a journalist long before, I became a documentary filmmaker, so I've worked in various newsrooms and was extremely difficult and painful as to see former colleagues in mine at Al Jazeera. I used to be a documentary commissioner at Al Jazeera English, former colleagues getting targeted and executed. It did something to me. And at that time, I was a studio executive for a studio and I thought to myself, "Look, I don't wanna do this job anymore." But what I did not know, I just knew that if I'm gonna make a film, I'm gonna have to quit my job and I'm gonna have to find the story. And so that sort of started me off and then I met Dr. Mark Promother. I reached out to him 'cause I saw a clip of him saying like very undocktally things as he does in the film. And then he introduced me to Dr. Froh Sidwa and Dr. Thair Amman. And that's when I thought, well, as a filmmaker, you're really lucky if you meet one participant who is so engaging that you can't stop watching and you wanna learn from them. When you meet three who couldn't be more different, that is our true privilege. And as anybody I'm sure in media, you feel that. You're like, there's something here. There's something I can learn here. And I'll be honest with you Ben, I live in New York. And so I have worked with people. I still work with people from different walks of life, different religious backgrounds, different ethnic backgrounds, different nationalities. And I had lost the language to be able to navigate and to talk to people effectively and also to speak from my heart. And so meeting the three doctors, it gave me a way to move in the world. And I'm grateful for that, as to how we did it. Now, I will say this, as a filmmaker, we are only the sum of our parts. And this team, the American doctor team, spans eight different countries. And at the heart of our entire team, our our gazon colleagues, Ibrahim Al-Otla, our cinematographer and Muhammad Sawaaf, a co-producer. And we did it with them and team members over spread out out of eight countries. - You set the tone right away. You're kind of dropped into this conversation that you're having with Dr. Mark about whether to show images of dead children. And he very, kind of almost stridently argues, like you don't pixelate this, don't blur it, people need to see what happened. And so we get a brief glimpse of something that is absolutely the most horrifying thing imaginable for anybody, but certainly a parent like me, which is an image of dead children. How did you wrestle with the need to bear witness and to bring the experience of these three doctors and the experience of people in Gaza to people with obviously the heroine subject matter that you are times interacting with? You know, that scene that you're talking about, that's the second day that I'm filming with Mark in his home, and he was very, very upset with me, because I wasn't sure of him. You know, as a nonfiction storyteller, as a former journalist, it's something that we grapple with. How much do we show? You show too much, it's gratuitous, you know, if he will see in a theater, they're going to walk out, it is he watch it on streaming platform, they're going to turn it off. Is that effective? You show too little, it's a huge disrespect to those who have passed and those who have survived those who have passed, and it's a disservice. It's such a delicate balance, which until today, like, I still struggle with, but at the end of the day, like, what was my purpose doing there? And Mark was upset with me because he was thinking you are just like the rest of them. And so, as a filmmaker, as a director, when you feel this kind of discomfort that just doesn't sit well, that's when you have to lean into it. And so that set the tone for what American doctor was going to be. For those, you know, one of the things that's so powerful about the film, which we should say, like, it encompasses footage in Gaza, but it also encompasses, you know, the three doctors like in their lives back home. And then ultimately, and we'll get to the activism piece of it, you know, when you're back here and you're doing media and you're meeting the politicians. But I wanted to ask you, it's a peculiar thing, you know, to be a subject of a documentary. And in any circumstance, in this case, you know, you, I mean, when you're in Gaza, you know, you are interacting with the tremendous amount of trauma, but you're doing your job as a doctor. But I can't imagine that you're even able to process because you're just working. You're just trying to save any life you can. What is it like for you to watch this footage with the slight remove of time? And does it take you back there? Like, what is the experience like not just of having been a subject, but now having seen this finished product, but to particularly see those images of when you were in Gaza? Yeah, you know, when I, when I was in Gaza, I don't really remember being filmed like I knew Ibrahim was there and I talked to him obviously, but the camera kind of disappeared just because everything was in total chaos. You know, there's there was a lot going on. So when I watch it back now, you know, it's funny. I, I've seen the movie like four or five times and because you know, we go to screenings and Q&As and things. And I didn't the first several times I watched it. I didn't think that it was I, I didn't understand why people thought it was difficult to watch sometimes like, you know, some people have a harder time watching it. And, but then I watched it with a friend of mine and she actually grabbed my hand during some of the scenes and like, you know, it was just because I some of this stuff, you know, I'm a trauma surgeon, so I'm used to seeing people that are hurt. And I'm used to, and I've been in Gaza, so I'm used to hearing explosions. I'm used to feeling explosions. But, but most people aren't. And I think, you know, it kind of goes back to what Mark says at the, at the top of the film were. And then like what Poe was saying, if you, there's a balance between showing too much and not making it real, you know. And I think this movie does a good balance of that. It makes, I think it shows people a little bit of what we saw in Gaza not so much that you can't watch. But enough that you can understand why we were so affected by it. And then why we had to try and do something about it when we came back. But you know, Ben, as far as movies about and documentaries about war and conflict and genocide, this one in terms of the graphic imagery, we scale back. Oh, I know you, yeah, people should know this is not the you scale way back and and but and you know what, I think this is my theory on why it's challenging and why people are like, oh my God, it's the guilt. They don't see it. I mean, you know, I remember for those the last time you were here, the question that I kind of felt you, because you're an infoppable guy. The question where I could kind of feel you, you know, absorbing a bit extra was when I was like, how did it feel to be over there and know that your tax dollars are paying for the weapons, which is something you obviously wrestle with in film. That's the discomfort more than just we have seen images of war or we've seen documentaries about war. And and first I wanted to ask you like the interesting, it's very interesting to watch. You transition into this kind of more activist role, the film kind of shows, you're starting to media, you're starting to bring attention on you're starting to try to get politicians involved. I was struck when I met you about how much you are first and foremost a doctor, you know, like your identity is that but you've clearly been on a journey here where you want people to see this, you want changes made in policy. Tell us a bit about the journey we see in the film of you taking on a bit more of a role with the other doctors of being spoke, maybe not spoke to people, but activists or at least people trying to, you know, get attention on this. Yeah, 100%. So, you know, just to be clear, it's hardly like I'm not even the person at the forefront of those efforts, it really fair is. But the, you know, physicians are especially somebody who works in an emergency setting like I do, like there's an emergency room doctor, I'm a, I'm a trauma surgeon. I regularly testify at drunk driving trials at murdered trials at assault trials here in the States, because that's part of my job, you know, it's very common for doctors to witness the aftermath of crimes while they're providing medical care to people. And for a thier as an emergency room doctor, if he sees suspected child abuse suspected spousal abuse, any of those things are all reportable events, we call them. And we're mandatory reporters in the setting of the United States, like, you know, reasonably normal place, it's obvious who you're supposed to report that to the police or the social workers or whoever it is. In the context of Gaza, when I'm the criminal, who am I supposed to report it to? It's kind of a weird situation to be put in as a physician. Who do you reported genocide to? Yeah, exactly. And, you know, the, the, an obvious place to start seems to be the people carrying it out. I'm one of them. You're one of them, pose one of them. We're all paying for this, but obviously not by choice. So, you know, we, we do, you know, all the healthcare workers who've been to Gaza, we all communicate with each other a lot. And we, we've started, we've created a group called peace med and we're, we're just trying to work on these issues at the level of the US government, because that's where, you know, the Israeli military can't do any of the things that it's doing without the United States. I mean, it would stop from trying. Yeah, I can. So, yeah, everybody knows that it's, it's hardly a secret. So, the, you know, the problem is actually here, and it's something that we can do something about. And since there isn't a court or an authority that we can go to, we just have to go to Congress. And like you said, you know, I think you said it, it's a, it's a political question. In the end, that's these, these are political. It is a political decision. You know, whoever's signing off on that arms transfer every single day, that's a political choice. As soon as he gets here, she gets the, the, the word a stop signing off on those arms transfers, they'll just stop. That's it. And then they'll stop. These arms aren't rolling downhill. We're choosing to send them over there. It's not, you know, it's not like the laws of the universe are just mandating it. So that was how we approached it. I was just saying, look, we don't know who to talk to. So we're going to go talk to Congress. Well, you know, Poah's I was struck by, you know, maybe it's because of my own, you know, history in both politics and media. But, but some of the strangely more uncomfortable scenes, obviously the most uncomfortable, what's happening Gaza, but back in the United States are when we see like the media, because the doctors are starting to go on cable news. And, and we see sometimes like the very conventional, like, well, as in Hamas, like going to threaten you if you are a doctor there. And, and, and you could kind of feel the failure of the American media, the traditional American media to literally just tell people what's happening. And actually, even worse, you see the kind of laundering of narratives about everything, Samas' fault. You have a background in media, like you've been at ABC News, right? And your times and other places like how, how do you think about the role of the American media in either reporting or not reporting or obscuring the genocide? And, and why did you make this decision to kind of step outside of more conventional media platforms to, to try to self finance or, you know, raise money for this kind of project? You know, because I felt like it's not for lack of facts that people are either not engaging or they don't know. And, you know, and it came to establish media. I mean, it cut real deep. You know, I cut real deep as, you know, I was a, I've held all these different roles. The journal was long before I became a documentary filmmaker. And to, to, to live in New York, to, to see a former colleagues with journalists, you know, who were not speaking up when it came to Gazan journalists, when they do speak up when journalists are taken in Russia, in Ukraine, in different parts of the world, what was going on? And so a lot of the film is critiquing the media. And this is from my years of being in newsrooms. But I had to hold myself back when filming, because in the early days, I could see Feroz, that Aaron Mark does getting pummeled and pummeled, and the film is purely verite. So you're just in their world. So I'm holding back, I'm just watching. - You want to jump in and be like, how can you ask them these questions? - I mean, there was a lot of rage. I had a lot of rage. This is terrible. How could you do this to doctors who just went to Gaza, telling you what they saw in your and established media, saying, oh, we can't verify that. Obviously, you can't verify that. You're not in there. And to pummel these doctors in such a way, but I thought to myself, let the tape play. Let's see where this is going to end up. But what was also incredible is over time, as I was filming the three doctors, I saw them got better, and how they were dealing with it. And so, my hope is always, with what you see, in the world of these doctors, that some lessons can be cleaned here, for the general public, and how they look at media, but also for journalists, and how they should be. And I've had conversations with so many journalists across the board, and all the newsrooms that I've worked with. This is incredible. You are brave. And I'm like, you know what? No, I'm not. I'm doing the job that we all would do if this was somewhere else, you know. And I'd say, you know what? I'm just trying. And you know who's brave? The gods and journalists are brave. The doctors who went there to work and serve alongside them. That's brave. We just have to do our best and push from within. And with that air, what I learned from him, there's a scene in DC. And all the doctors have come together to DC and they're about to descend on Capitol Hill. And that air is like leading. He's telling the other doctors, and he's telling them, don't overestimate what people know. Tell them a story, make it real. And that was how we wanted to make American doctor. Yeah, I will say that air is such a good activist that he occasionally was like popping up in my inbox. Like, who can I meet in Congress? You know, like he's just relentless, you know. But on that, you know, like, 'cause even for, I never saw him as an activist. I don't, I don't, even that term. Like I still cringe with it when it's mentioned because it's a former journalist 'cause it's somehow diminishes. No, yeah. It's more just like I need to go report this. It's your point. Like I saw a crime. I had to report it to the people who were responsible. What I, what I, what I, I learned really loved and respected in, in the way that I was and is, is that what drew me to him was he so reluctant. He never wanted this role. And he, in fact, many times in the, in the film and, you know, as for those of, you know, who, actually, it's already out there but he doesn't get to go into Gaza. Yeah. He ran away. He didn't, he was so ashamed. He didn't want to be part of the film. He just felt like, you know, what purpose can I serve? And, and I'm glad he let me stick with him. Yeah, yeah. Well, what's some of the most power I told you before. I mean, it's so powerful. He's got these two beautiful daughters, you know, in the juxtapose that with the kids in Gaza. This just reminds you, they're all kids. They're all the same. And, to that end, for as I wanted to ask you, like, you know, we talked about your experience last time you're here. I'm curious, what is your sense if you talk to former colleagues or people you know in Gaza? What is your sense of the health care infrastructure such as it is now, the capacity to provide care to people. They're still, you know, over 1,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the so-called ceasefire. Do you talk to people? You're able to follow up with both how things are going. And also, like, do you ever hear about people you treated? Do you get any report on how people are? Yeah, but when I, right after I left, yeah, that, you know, the last time I was there was April of 2025. I tried to go back in November, but I was blocked from entering. But yeah, no, I do. I keep in touch with a lot of, a lot of physicians from, from Gaza, you know, one of them, he, I mentioned him in the movie too. He's an anesthesiologist named Azar. You know, he just sent me a photo of him like he's with his family. He's just, they're in this tent encampment. And, you know, it's not these aren't like, these aren't manufactured tents. These are some sticks of wood and some tarping that somebody pulled off of, you know, this or that NGO tent that was blown up or they pulled out of, pulled out a sheet from someone's blown up home or something. And that's the, it's just a constructed apparatus that they're living in. They're under, you know, the, the hundred degree guzzan heat. They have no access to what look to drinkable water. The no pipe to water, they have to, you know, go pick it up and bring it back to themselves. If they can, if they can keep it at all, they have no access to a toilet. They have no access to a shower or, you know, they can't bathe. They can't clean their clothes. Gases, solid and liquid waste facilities have been completely destroyed or offline. So there's no way to dispose of garbage. There's no way to dispose of sewage. It's such a laboratory for debt that the hospitals are just overwhelmed now. Children are just constantly sick. You know, all of these things like a sewage system, clean water, clean food, healthy food, all of these things are meant to keep children alive until they get to the age of five. That's when they're kind of more robust and they can maybe survive a little bit of the challenges of the world. That's all been taken away in Gaza, you know? And then on top of that, the medical system has just been destroyed. I mean, it effectively doesn't function anywhere. Doctors go to work, they do absolutely the best they can. They do way, and not just doctors, doctors, nurses, everybody that's there. They do way more than you would expect with what they have. But, you know, right, the large majority of Gaza's hospital capacity has been destroyed, physically destroyed. The little bit that remains is mostly at Nostromedical Complex and Oxamarders Hospital and Daryl Ballad. Those are the two like hospitals right in the middle. That's about 300 to 350 hospital beds total for two million of the sickest people in the world. It's just completely, there's no way this is going to work, you know? But, you know, our colleagues, they get up and they go to work every day. And, you know, one of the things that they actually tell us is that they're kind of afraid that if they don't, if the community, every community lionizes and respects healthcare workers, it's just universal. These doctors and nurses, they're kind of afraid that if they aren't seen going into work every day, people will lose more hope than they already have. So, they just keep putting one foot in front of the other, you know? And people, I mean, you said you couldn't get in. I mean, who is left providing this healthcare? I'm not sure they're Gaza doctors, but there's also been doctors. They're not borders and doctors like you describe your, your journey there. I mean, how hard is it for someone to get in who wants to help? It's entirely arbitrary. So, like, you know, in my case, it's kind of ridiculous. I was supposed to enter Gaza in mid-November of last year. Five hours before I'm going to enter, I'm informed that I will not be allowed to enter. So, I'm already in them on Jordan, you know, literally getting ready to go down to the hotel lobby to get on the bus to go. I kept trying to appeal the decision. The Israelis were steadfast. They said, "No, you're not going." But I also, I had lectures scheduled in Israel after I was scheduled to come out of Gaza. So, I said, "Well, I don't want to abandon my friends there." You know, some of them are Palestinians who live in Israel, some are Jewish Israelis. They're mostly professors that've been growing in Tel Aviv University. And I didn't want to abandon that. They want you to tell your story. Yeah. I was getting, you know, the plan was to go into Gaza for three weeks, come out to Jordan, then go into Israel and give these talks. And these talks were like 20 people. It's not a big deal. They're not a big thing. You know, the universities wouldn't even give them a space like they, we had to do it guerrilla style. But I was like, you know, they blocked me from entering Gaza. Obviously, they're going to block me from entering Israel, too. But I was like, "Let me try." You know, I want to tell these people that I tried. So, I flew to Athens, flew to Tel Aviv, and they just said, "Why are you here?" I said, "For this reason, why are you, you know, you've been in Gaza, yes, I've been in Gaza twice, and you just blocked me from entering. Why did we block you?" I don't know. You'd have to ask the Shinbet why I was blocked. You know, they're the ones that did it. And then they just gave me a password. It was actually, that was the third time of entering Israel through Ben-Guray in airport, and it was the easiest entry I've ever had. So obviously, there was no security concern with letting me. And you know, the blocking of healthcare workers and about half of international healthcare workers try to go to Gaza are blocked from entering. The blocking, it's completely and totally arbitrary. It has nothing to do with security. It's completely ridiculous. And it's just a way of separating Gaza from the rest of the world, you know? Like, they are in the movie, maybe I shouldn't do spoilers, sorry. In the movie, it becomes apparent that they are being Palestinian. Is what is, it's Israel's excuse for not letting him go. And from his family. And his family, yeah, exactly. That's why he's not allowed to enter Gaza is because he's Palestinian. That's like, that's, that's should be the other way around. That's why he's entitled to enter Gaza. And not only is this family Palestinian, his family is from the Gaza Strip. Yeah, that's where they're actually grew up and actually are based. And, but it's not just stopping Palestinians from helping Palestinians. It's actually stopping plenty of other people in the world from doing it. It's a way of severing Gaza from the world. And for me, that was the heart of why I wanted to make the film. Like, who gets to say what? Who gets to do what? Who gets to go where? You know, there's a privilege in who you are and the identities that one carries. And, and to be able to navigate that, you know, with colleagues, there couldn't be more different. And I wanted to, I wanted to learn that for myself as. as a woman, as a woman of color, as somebody from a minoritized religious community. I am very perceptive to that. And so I just wanted to be in Thayer's world, in Marxwell and Verose's world. And let's see, everybody has different-- they can see different challenges. They can see different opportunities. They can walk into different spaces. And together, they can do something really, really, really hard, even though they are so different and they're not a monolith. So those were the lessons that I wanted to learn as a filmmaker and just as somebody living in the United States. Yeah, yeah. Well, Po, I wanted to ask you. The last thing I wanted to ask you is that the-- as we speak, international journalists are still not allowed into Gaza. They had not been allowed in since October 7. It's pretty extraordinary. As you said, some of the same journalists that would be raising hell if that was the case somewhere else, or notably, silent about this. I was struck in watching the film. And one reason why I wish to watch it is, I've seen so little social media and a very small number now of documentaries are the only glimpse you get behind the curtain of what's happening there. What do you hope people take away from this? What do you hope that the film achieves and documenting what's happening and potentially galvanizing people? And is this, as someone who's had a career in journalism, do you feel like one of the reasons public opinion is shift down Gaza is because people are actually turning to other sources of information, because they know they're not getting the truth from-- or this is the full truth-- from more traditional media platforms. I mean, do you think this is going to hopefully crack open the door to more storytelling or how do you think about this film as an object in the world in our current media environment? The door is already open. And there's no turning back. The cracks were there long before. And now we're seeing we're seeing-- you can't-- how are you going to stop? There's no way any entity or even the government can stop all these images being broadcasted or put on social media coming out of Gaza. And yes, foreign journalists, American journalists, Western journalists can't go in. But the Gaza journalists continue to do their job, and they continue to do it, even at the expense of their own demise, as they have to document it. And so I think so much of it in this film, what I really, really, really wanted to do, because it's not for lack of the carnage that you see on social media. I think it's there. If you're following, it's there. And if you want to look for it, it's there. But it was more of like, I wanted people to see. They're no different than we were. And one of the things that dawned on me really early on, because in my last job, I was an executive for a studio. And we watched how people watch things. It was not lost on me that medical dramas do very well. I'm a big fan of the pit. I was a big fan of ER, big fan of Grey's Anatomy, Love House M.D. How can we make the pit? We understand the format of how that storytelling is. Differences is setting Gaza, and it's real. And that's how we're going to bring what's happening in Gaza back into the American psyche, in the format that people understand. So that was always like the thought. And in terms of what people will get out of it and my hopes, I mean, this is what I've seen people have gotten out of it, and which has been very encouraging. When we premiered at Sundance, first of all, I didn't think that would happen, but it happened. But that's a very-- Not have happened a couple of years ago. It may not have happened a couple of years ago, but institutions are made out of people. But in this case, they really pushed for us. They really pushed for the film. And for that, I'm forever grateful. But Sundance is a specific kind of audience. It's critics, it's cinephiles, it's Hollywood, right? The true test, the true test was when it went from Sundance to Missouri, to Columbia, Missouri, to another festival called True Falls. It's still by far our largest audience yet. 1,200 people, OK? And what I didn't realize until I got there, the True Falls that year, this year, was sponsored by Medical University. So 1,200, full. I don't think people knew what they were coming in for. They came to see the film, because it's called American Doctor. And that was always my hope. Let's see whether we can troge and horse this in. Yeah, yeah. And still, he's laughing. And still, today, that was probably one of the most wild and electric audiences, because people didn't know. So when the film ended, people-- I mean, they stood, they gave a standing ovation, all right? But they started shouting, what can we do? We didn't know what can we do. And that's when I realized we have something. So in our experience now, having had the film now on the road, internationally, domestically, across the country, whatever reason people are coming in for, whether they're coming in, because they're from the Palestinian community, and they're coming to see that air, and to see the diaspora fighting really hard for Palestinians in Gaza, or they're coming in for pharaohs, because pharaohs is pharaohs. Are they coming in for Mark, because it's Jewish Americans? Yeah, no, which is an interesting experience and have it. Whatever reason they're coming in, they all leave the same. They all leave wanting to do something. And that is enough for me. There's this weird thing happen when I was walking out of one of the screenings where there was an older woman who was walking with a probably her friend of hers, and they were talking about the movie after seeing it, and she was triting herself for this. And I just heard it, I couldn't believe it, but she said, I'm embarrassed, but I've never thought of Palestinians as having families. And you know, a big part of this movie is theirs family. You know, you mentioned it's his sweet daughter's wife. There's such a sweet family. There's such a quintessentially normal family. American, what else would they be? But this woman was triting herself for that. But this kind of-- you can't explain to someone on CNN that Palestinians have families. It's not a thing. Like, they have to see it. And they have to say, oh my god, I can't believe I hadn't conceived of these people as people before. I think the film does a really, really good job. Not just of there and his family, but the health care workers in Gaza, you hear their stories. You see that these people have gone through the same losses everyone else in this territory, this besieged open air prison that's just been bombarded to hell. And they still are going to work. They're still trying to take care of their own families. It's-- I think people, when they leave, have a different impression of the world than when they want them to go in. And I remember having these early conversations to that, or, you know, like his entire community is under siege, right? In many ways. And so for him to open up his home and to let me film with his children, that's a lot. As a journalist, former journalist, I knew that as a filmmaker where the film I'm making is purely observational. That means we're not doing sit-down interviews and going to have to make it real for him to allow me to film his family. That's a huge privilege. And I remember telling him in the early days, I promise you I will try my best not to waste this. Yeah. And so that's so much of it. It's been such a huge privilege, even working with our guys and colleagues. I said, I promise we will not waste your efforts. Then they also made me promise. Then make sure you bring this film back to the United States, bring it to the American people. Yeah. And I asked them, like, film, you know, I said to Abraham and Muhammad, like, the American doctors, they're going, they're stepping into this world, your world. And it's a portal that they're stepping into. And so I want, please film the interactions that they have with Dr. A.M., Dr. Abed, Samakude, all the doctors and health care workers in the film because we don't know if we're going to get to see them again. Film NASA, like, it is the last time. But it also was for me trying to tell them, like, this is the record. This is the record that we are going to make. And whatever happens, we tried our best. Yeah. And to take your point about the audience in Missouri, I mean, we have to remind ourselves-- I mean, your pods say the world audience is presumably following this, but a lot of Americans, like, maybe they only hear the version that is sanitized or maybe it's just another conflict. And I think we cannot underestimate, you know, how-- to me, it's actually kind of a remarkable public opinion in the script as much as it has without, you know, the media coverage you'd want of this. So hopefully, this kind of opens up a new space. The last thing I'll give you the last word for rose, I'm just kind of curious, like, how is this whole process of both going to guys being a part of this film, doing things you probably didn't anticipate, like, media? How has this kind of changed your life? In the film, I say something like, you know, the reason I do this work is because I want to see my own country reach its moral potential. And I want to reach my moral potential. I don't want to continue to be forced to subsidize the mass murderer of children. I don't think you want that either. I don't think the vast majority of Americans want that. Nevertheless, we are being forced to by two administrations in a row. It's pretty shocking. But people are aware that when you point out to them, number one, what's going on, and number two, that we're responsible for, and that we have the ability to stop it at any time, they're just pretty genuinely horrified. I think that kind of thing can go a long way towards making the United States a place that actually lives up to its ideals. the ideals that are just a basic humanity, honestly, that's not. They're not uniquely American. So if that's, if I get to do that, that's a privilege and I'm blessed for it, yeah. Well, I want to thank you both for those for all that you've done, including in Gaza. Pope, I think you, you kept your promise. It's incredibly powerful film. Everybody should check out American doctor. It's across country and theaters. Hopefully you'll have a life in theaters. It'll then have a life, you know, in other places where you can watch it. So thanks so much for making the film and for being here today. Thank you for having us. Thanks again to Faroze and Poe for joining the show, and we will talk to you guys next week. Potsay the world is a cook and media production. Our show is produced by Alona Minkowski, Michael Goldsmith, and Nina Shabonurgy. Our team includes Matt DeGroat, Ben Heffkoat, Jordan Cantor, Kenny Moffat, David Tolls, and Ryan Young. Our staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. [BLANK_AUDIO]