Trump & Carney’s Heated Rivalry

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They don't just tell you what happened, they explain how the decisions made 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 Pod Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, when your grandkids ask you, Papa, Mima, where were you on economic D-Day? Were you fighting on the, I guess, are we actually currently fighting because we're not buying Iranian oil? Are we part of it right now? I was fighting on 12 Vessels Beach, you know. Just battling some- Yeah. Just battling some- Shadow Fleet tankers or something? Just battling some OFAC licensing. You and Scott Besson. I want to ask you something before we get to the show. I was listening to a fascinating conversation the other day between Bill Simmons and Sammy Koppelman, 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, is now selling the teams in a fire sale. Sammy was saying that seeing all this private equity and foreign money come into sports has made him actually think that Jim Dolan might be a good owner and that Knicks fans are lucky. Thoughts on that? I heard that too. Do you want to apologize to Jim Dolan? No, I don't. Jim Dolan is running a mass surveillance enterprise at Mass Square Garden. So is Barack Obama. I guess. I will say, Sammy Koppelman gets a lot of shout outs for being a true Knicks fan too, by the way. He, like me, suffered through the Isaiah Thomas years. He's been 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 in some insurance scheme. So that's fair. I also learned from that podcast, the detail that I shared with you- I heard it after. in Terminal 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 something. He's a member of the Guggenheim Association. He's a member of the Guggenheim some random Guggenheim in-law 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 we tell. I also dipped into the Nick Singh actually triggered this. Enes Kanter was a Nick. I don't know if you saw him tossed out of the Indiana Fever Chicago Sky game. 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 entry to the culture wars. 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 simultaneously remember when Enes Kanter was like actually fighting authoritarianism rather than joining an authoritarian movement, but also made me feel very old. That was like seven, I was like combing transcripts, 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, Ben, why the kind of 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. Yeah, that's right. Then we're going to explain why it matters that Pete Hegseth 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 Poe C. Tang and Feroz Sidwa. Poe is the director of the new documentary film American Doctor, which everybody should see, which follows Feroz, 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, you know, who are these people? What motivated them? How they came back to the United States and took up activism, went on the media, started, you know, obviously pushing for politicians to change policy in Gaza. Yeah. I guess I – I'd say this, Tommy. 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. Yeah. 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 they're 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 Feroz for a while reminded me – just sort of 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 I don't know. It was unbelievable. It was an unbelievably courageous decision to go in and provide care given how many health care workers we now know were killed by the IDF or others or journalists, 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 if you cited on Twitter, for example, you were told – Yeah, no. You were told you were like regurgitating. Regurgitating propaganda or whatever. Propaganda, yeah. 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. An 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 questions from the Pod Save 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 slash friends. You get ad-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 out of 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 Save the World on YouTube. We're trying to build a progressive counterweight to all the right-wing crap. 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'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 to 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 that were uneconomic, unfair, and undermined 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 U.S. introduced 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. You're at war when you get attacked. We got attacked. At war with Canada. So the rupture came after months of negotiations. There has been a lot of great reporting, both in the U.S. and in Canada. Shout out to the Front Burner podcast from the CBC. It's sort of unpacked what Carney was saying there. It's a good show. Nice. It's a good show. 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 are made in Canada and the Ford F-350 and F-450. The U.S. 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 in Quebec. Remember that Air Canada CEO was forced to resign because he put out like a condolence statement only in English. Yeah. And he got shit out of there. The Trump people apparently wanted Canada to get rid of. Yeah. So the U.S. Remember that Air Canada CEO was forced to resign because he put out like a condolence statement only in English and he got shit out of there. The Trump people apparently wanted Canada to get rid of certain kinds of things. So the U.S. wanted Canada to get rid of certain bi-Canadian programs that Canada put in place to respond to U.S. tariffs without actually getting rid of the tariffs. So that doesn't seem fair. And the U.S. wanted to force Canada to essentially abide by certain U.S. trade policies when they cut their own bilateral deals with other countries, especially around U.S. steel tariffs. And for what it's worth, the U.S. side says that Mark Carney 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 pointing the finger. We're at Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Apparently, the Canadians liked Jameson Greer, the trade rep. But then Lutnick got involved, and he is famously a massive asshole. And things went badly. Lutnick 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 U.S. delegation was that even if a deal got done, the U.S. has the right to levy tariffs and change the policy. 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 Carney. There is a poll out today from the Angus Reid Institute, which is a Canadian pollster, that found that 76% of Canadian voters support Carney's decision to walk away from the talks. So now the U.S. and Canada, we're stuck in this escalatory tit-for-tat cycle. Like Trump announced $20 billion worth of tariffs on Canadian goods. Carney announced they'd respond in kind. Those go into place 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 it's not this like massive high-profile fight. Yeah, nothing is impossible, right? Especially in the Trump era where there are these huge swings. I think that at core what's happening here is Mark Carney. Better than any other leader of certainly an allied country kind of understands the new reality that we're in. And there's different components to that. The first is quite simple. It's that last thing you said. There's this line Carney had where he said we've learned that the deals that the U.S. makes are not signed in pen. They're signed in pencil. Which I thought was a pretty good line as a speechwriter. But it's because it's this dizzying game that Trump plays where you come. He cuts a mini deal and then he tariffs you more. And I think Carney saw this is just going to keep happening. And I might as well just draw the line right here and say, 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 Carney 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. What the U.S. was insisting on was not that like we'll sit in like literally review, you know, the negotiations that Canada is in 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 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. A bunch of steel in Canada that then gets sent to the U.S. at a discount rate, for example. But that means that Carney'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 his 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 closer. It's come close to seceding in the past, right? This is core to Canadian national identity. That's why there's – it's bilingual. 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, you know, 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 J.D. Vance and Donald Trump joking about Canada being the 51st state or we can see some of the outreach that has been done to like Albertan separatists 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 Canada has been treated, how – How cavalierly their sovereignty has been discussed and Carney's 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 Carney saw – not that he's perfect. We're not here to just act like Mark Carney'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 blink. I mean I think – I don't think Carney – Which he kind of did by I think delaying the reciprocal tariffs until January. Yeah. Trump did. I don't think Carney 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 percent support for this. What support does Trump have, you know? I think Carney realizes it in two democracies and we're still a democracy here. In a trade war, if public opinion 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 cuts some deal. Yeah, look. Economically, this sucks for Carney and it sucks for Canada. I mean Canada imports about $270 billion worth of U.S. goods per year. The Canadian economy is one-twelfth the size of ours. There was – Abacus, this Abacus data, it's an analysis company. They did a report. The Economist got – and they found that the Canadian economy like finally started to grow again by like 0.8 percent in the second quarter 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 question of sovereignty. And the politics of this are complicated for Carney. I mean you mentioned Alberta, which is the big oil-producing province. They have an 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 Carney currently is getting a lot of support from even conservative leaders. But there is a – That won't last. 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 Carney'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. Did 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. Retaliatory tariffs. I know emotionally it feels good to retaliate. I get that. But let's remember what happens when we retaliate. When retaliation happens, it means that everybody who is buying products from the United States are now going to face upwards of 50 percent, upwards to 50. So I think Doug Ford reportedly talked to Carney before he walked away from the deal and kind of got the briefing on it and told him, I actually will not – order stores to put U.S. booze back on the shelf because I think this is a terrible deal for us. So again, Carney'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 U.S. 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. Yeah. I don't diminish the economic risks for 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 to the U.S. All of that said, once again, to get to the politics and kind of 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 tourism that's been lost. Travel, yeah. Yeah, travel that's been lost. That's- 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? Does American national identity- I mean, it's quite remarkable to me. We've 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- Yeah, I mean, if he can hold that together, I think that's going to be very, very important. But if he can do that, and they can distribute pain in the United States in strategic ways, right, to certain sectors and 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- Yeah, I think that's going to be very, very important. So far, I find a lot to admire in how Carney's approaching this. That's not to diminish the risks. And I just, again, like Mark Carney, 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 our side, we've got Howard Lutnick and Donald Trump and Jameson Greer is like the sharpest tool in the shed. Like, I'm not sure that we're sending our best to the trade war. Well, look, I mean, regardless, like Mark Carney 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 hit 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. So the timing is right for him. I think the question with Trump is always like, what does he want? Yeah. Like, do you want, do you really want a new trade deal? Do you really think- Are you sure that softwood lumber- Right, more dairy is going to- He's not- No, he wants to dominate a smaller country. That's what he wants. And again, that's what Carney's right about. 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 not what this is about. And that, I mean, time to 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 Keir Starmer cut a trade deal with Trump, the EU. They all looked weak. Like, their political standing and their polls dropped. Like, I think Carney's right that, like, Trump respects strength, too. Like, Xi Jinping is the only other guy that really punched Trump in the face in a trade war and he won. And the big other challenge is, in terms of, like, back to nerdy stuff, is the U.S. 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 and 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 Canadians. So, like, Carney can either fight him now or fight him later. Like, it's going to happen on trade. Yeah, yeah. And maybe he can, Carney, if he's smart, you know, he'll get Claudia Sheinbaum on side. And, you know, that's what Carney'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. Strawberry.me is that kind of business, helping people take their career to the next level through expert coaching from top professionals who are invested in your business. Strawberry.me is that kind of business, helping people take their career to the next level through expert coaching from top professionals who are invested in your growth. The proof is in the reviews, and there are literally hundreds of them at strawberry.me slash reviews, all unfiltered and glowing. Here's a few excerpts. Quote, my coach was amazing. The experience was transformative. I landed a new job within weeks. 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It's even independently verified by Deloitte, so you know they're the real deal. Go to incogni.com slash PSTW and use code PSTW to get 60% off an annual plan. That's code PSTW at incogni.com slash PSTW for 60% off. Plus try it risk-free for 30 days with our money-back guarantee. The other big administration announcement this week was about Iran. The administration's calling it Economic D-Day. This was supposed to be Treasury Secretary Scott Besson's plan to crush Iran financially and win the war with sanctions. The official name was Operation Economic Outcast. A lot of names for this thing. Whatever happened to, what was the original one? Epic Fury. Epic Fury, sorry. They got rid of that name and renamed it to try to get around the war powers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I've lost track of the names. Yeah, I don't know. It's Infinite Jest maybe. Midnight Hammer. So Besson said he was targeting Iran's financial lifeline, specifically digital assets and crypto, technology, gold, aviation, and shipping. Treasury sanctioned, I think, 60 individuals or entities. That could be a business, a person, a ship. But the Trump administration has put over 1,000 sanctions on Iran since he took office the second time. So there's 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 avoids US sanctions. And many experts sort of pointed at Besson's announcement, and asked, like, 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? Well, we are giving everyone the opportunity to remedy bad behavior. Why would I want to blow up the global financial system? Great question. It does seem like we kind of of emailed, it's really like emailing, uh, the Nazis, the operation over are planned. 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 a trade war with China. When was that last year? This year? I don't remember. 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 US blockade has actually cut off a lot of their exports of oil and will really hurt the economy over time, will 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 over-promise, under-deliver. But also, it just seems likely that the IRGC won't really care about the economy, period. And the civilian political leaders don't really have any say. Yeah, that's the core substantive thing, is that the Iranians have priced in a lot of economic power. And they're not going to be able to do that. And they're not going to do that. And the reason I'm worried about that is both because we're in a war, but because what happens in Greenland? What happens in Panama Canal? What happens? Yeah, like, a little less yes, man. Because I can tell you, I've been in meetings where military leaders are like, that's, that's a bad idea. Yeah, there's usually like a lot of people will die, sir. Yeah, it'll be very bad. And by the way, the casualty number was updated to like something like 770 wounded US service members now. I mean, it just goes up and up and up. Yeah, and we still don't and that that's on the military too. Like we they're not exactly. Being the most transparent bunch over there. No, yeah, 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 been who's not excited about that waiting for 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 program the drone to fly to a specific place. In Ukraine, but then upon arrival, the drone 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 yeah, mostly trillion dollar company. So that's terrible. Also been earlier today. We learned that the CIA director John Ratcliffe made this surprise trip to Moscow. This is on Tuesday. We don't get no why. There's a lot of speculation that it could be the 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 U.S. has collected intelligence showing Russia's early preparations for a 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 scout a location for the newest Trump Tower. 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 Witkoff sent over there? It was actual professional. I find this kind of worrying because actually, this is a little sound strange. I'd feel better for Steve Witkoff in a way because that would just be probably another, you know, fruitless effort to resume some talks. Solve 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 Witkoff 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 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 U.K. that make the rockets or drones that the Ukrainians are then sending deep into Russia and And it wouldn't shock me if there was intelligence that the Russians are considering like hitting stuff and – or sabotaging stuff in like Germany. London, yeah. London, yeah, yeah. And that would be enough to get even the Trump administration, the CIA 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 Ratcliffe can carry because it's – I don't know what Trump is 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 attacks into 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 is basically going to help Ukraine build these long-range missiles, the storm shadow 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, hell-bent 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 of Prime Minister Burnham in Ukraine that was going around his social media. Let's watch. It's nice. It's in here. It's going about the practice. So here's my note to the 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 tinny shit when you don't plug them in. You just sound like a total goober when you're just kind of throwing away. Yeah. First of all, Andy Burnham does have good taste in music. Do you ever see the documentary 24-Hour Party People about the origins of the punk rock scene in Manchester? No. Should I watch it? Yeah, he loves it. It's all those, you know, the Clash and the Smiths and everybody. The other thing I'm going to 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 there have been like five or six since the war began. You know, like – That dude is part of the – That dude is part of the 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, Andy Burnham likes music. Let's get the music guy here, you know. Tony Blinken played Rocket in the Free World at the club back in the day. It was a little weird. Keir Starmer, I'm not sure what interest he had. Actually, the kind of thing that you do wonder about is that each British prime minister in trying to reaffirm this support for Ukraine, which I get. And I support. But it's like they need something new to announce, you know. And the timing should not be dictated by that. So, I mean, maybe this thing has been the works of – surely it 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. Yeah, it's not great. Last thing on Ukraine. A couple of 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. No, it's unconstitutional while they're under. They're under martial law, but something 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, 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 the House of Representatives. And we're going to 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. Vote Save America is identified. Twelve of the most beatable Republicans up for reelection in the House, a.k.a. 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 Vote Save America. VoteSaveAmerica.com. It is not authorized by any candidate or candidates committee. This message has been paid for by VoteSave America. distractions. 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 staged a coup and fired these three. Ben, 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 versus just sort of the obviously terrible precedent it sets and the principles involved. I think it's an enormous deal. And 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 and the millennial. But did you see Good Morning Vietnam? Do you remember? The whole subplot of that movie was he's like a broadcaster for the U.S. 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 thrown off air. Great movie. And I remember watching that scene and thinking like, ah, we fixed that problem. I mean, that's where we are. If you haven't seen Good Morning Vietnam, actually, we should. We're back to like the meathead censoring the news that the service members and their families can get. Because this is like Russian state media stuff. Because what they were reporting on, notably, they got rid of the editor in chief and the publisher and the Middle East correspondent. She'd been reporting on the Iran war. She'd just been reporting the news. Nothing woke about it. Probably reporting 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, this is a huge publication in its reach to service members, but also to base communities, right? Because they cover, I mean, you must have dealt with them, Tommy. They cover things that are of issue to military families, like lengths of deployments. And far more depth. And to me, this is a huge warning sign about the kind of state media that they want to shape military coverage. And, again, Pete Hexeth, I get. Where's Dan Cain? Like, I'm not trying to pick on the guy today, but like, I think, you know, I'm not to sound like an Atlantic. I think that's the value of picking a random three-star out of retirement. General Milley would, I think General Milley or Jim Mattis would have gone in there and been like, I've read Stars and Stripes for decades. Like, back the fuck off. You shouldn't do this. Yeah, I think the precedent here is chilling. The message it sends is chilling. For those who are listening and thinking, come on, these guys, you know, you're not going to be able to do this. You're not going to be able to do this. You're not just like, log onto the internet and get news anywhere. 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 were somewhere, like, let's say you're on the front lines in Iraq, someone would upload the PDF of the daily Stars and Stripes to the SIPRnet, 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, SIPRnet was always available. The Stars and Stripes was always available. So sometimes it was like the only thing you could read, like if you were sitting in a skiff or if you were online. On an aircraft carrier or something. Yeah. Or in a 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 and New York have won a lot of these elections. So let's talk a little bit about how these leaders seem to view El Salvador's president, Nayib Bukele, as their standard bearer and the person they sort of emulate. Listeners to this show, again, we've been doing the show for a while now. They've heard us talk about Bukele 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. So he's a very popular person. He's a very popular person. To better hide their violence, not really curb it. Then Bukele became a MAGA darling because I'm sure folks remember he allowed Trump to send migrants to Sukkot, their horrific MAGA prisons in El Salvador. Bukele's political success, though, has led a bunch of right-wing leaders out in Latin America to celebrate him, to emulate him, both in 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 da Silva and then the son of Jair Bolsonaro flogging Bolsonaro, who are facing off in October. Bolsonaro toured Sukkot, the MAGA prisons in El Salvador. He's explicitly campaigned on the Bukele model and promised five new maximum security prisons. Bolsonaro also campaigned with MAGA darling Javier Millet, president of Argentina. So Ben, I wonder what you make of these pieces, the influence of Bukele and like, I guess, sort of how to disaggregate his image from the kind of the Trump brand and the reality that like, kind of right-wing strong man, strong man, or wannabe strong man is not like a new political identity. It's 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, you know, buying the dip. And I think the two things are the clearly what Bukele is tapping into is people being fed up with violence and crime in large parts of Latin America, which is a real problem. However, the problem with Bukele'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 at the beginning of it. And it just gets, 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 you get on this 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 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 strongmen to kind of capture power and consolidate it. What's different about Bukele, 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 strongman is like, you know, military guy is already uniform. He's like a young guy. He like presents is kind of cool. Like, he's kind of wearing backwards hats. And, you know, he looks like a, you know, crypto bro. And he's very social media savvy. And so it's kind of like having the like, you know, Zoran Mamdani touch at communications combined with like the absolute strongman approach. It's an alarming, an alarmingly 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 somewhat where they are. And he's using social media. And yeah, I worry that, you know, it's a test for the center and the left in Latin America, like, hey, you're gonna have to take crime pretty seriously here. Like, because if you don't have an alternative solution, people are going to turn to guys like this. Yeah, look, Bukele is a dictator, like Sukkot is a crime it's like, it's just an 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 removed like all their magistrates on the Supreme Court and then forced through this change to make all judges over 60 retire so they could pack the courts. Like he's done like a lot of authoritarian things. I think people are willing to look past that because I think there's a lot of people out there in this country that had that level of gang violence or like war zone like levels of violence. I also think politically, Bukele married up a real skill set, which is like marketing, communication, 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 like crime stirs those emotions. And Bukele gets that and you very effectively use social media tools to highlight those issues, what he's doing about them. I mean, I can't remember which story it was. One of them talks about how El Salvador opened this amazing new library, which is like beautiful and really like an exciting thing and something to celebrate. But Bukele's quote about it was, and now it 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, the library, like this, this is such right wing strongman stuff where it's like, you know, you, you, you drive down crime, you throw all these people in prison, you consolidate power, then you kind of build some stuff that like, you know, monument to yourself. But then like 20 years from now, the corruption is really like rotted the economy. People are still rotting in prison. Like, cause even some of the, the wrenching interviews I saw from some more thoughtful journalists, cause I know Salvadoran oppositionists, right? And so they'll say, to me this is horrible and but but then you read these interviews where people are like, hey, isn't your son in prison in these mass detentions? And it's worth it. He'll get out, but maybe he won't get out. Over time, I think people will start to see, oh, wait a second, these emergency powers are permanent. 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 Bukele's setting. Now, Millet hasn't gone that far. Others haven't been able to go as far as he has because El Salvador is a smaller country too. But it's a dangerous normalization or renormalization of really right-wing strongman politics in Latin America. And we should say backed by the US entirely. Usually, it's the US that's like, hey, maybe we should 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 Bukele's more authoritarian instincts, although others question whether he would have cared. Yeah, I mean, as someone who's usually pretty hard on the Biden administration, that's what I'm saying. I'm not sure that they could have made much of a 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 and just show them to Ben and I. We're going to watch them. For the first time, potentially. Probably not because I'm on group chats. You guys were deep in these things, but we'll tell you what we see and how you can enjoy them too. All right. We've got. Oh, boy. We're doing kind of a gymnastics routine, cheerleader routine. Oh, and one of them is now on the ground. And this one, there's running this one into tires for no reason. Oh, kickboxing. Now we're doing kickboxing and karate. We're just, they look blind. Oh, this poor guy's trying to put the bar over. Oh, no. Oh, he fell down. Oh, that's the best one. 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, oh, there's just tons of these poor robots running into walls, just sprinting as fast as humanly possible into walls and then wiping out. That was just some dudes at the stretcher. Random Chinese guys carrying their corpses off of the, 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 because it was trying to run like a person would 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, 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 going to be these deep fakes, you know, where people are going to look like people or AI is going to look like people and you're not going to 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 where they look exactly like people. Terrifying. Like, imagine watching those clips, including some robot running. You know, while I'm exploding and it like looks exactly like a person, you know, like 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 going to take a quick break. But when you come back, you're going to 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. And we'll be right back. And if that option isn't right for you, there are additional treatment options available so you can find what works for your body. It's straightforward, transparent, and designed to make getting care feel easy. To get simple online access to personalized, affordable care for ED, hair loss, and much more, visit HIMS.com slash world. That's H-I-M-S dot com slash world. HIMS.com slash world. 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 doctors. So we're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back. American Politicians Accountable for the weapons, the violence that our tax dollars are funding. Before we get to our guest, we're going to 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 going to lose her right leg, left leg, and her left arm. And she's starting to wake up. Let's get her warm. As a Jewish physician, I knew nothing about Gaza. Like most Americans, I thought everybody out here were nothing but terrorists because 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. And 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 U.S. doctor who wants to see babies like my babies not be killed anymore. What surprised me most was how the carnage was focused on journalists, health care workers, and children. Where was that? That bomb hit the building. There was a 15-year-old. The kid ready for discharge was incinerated. 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. Feroz Sidwa, who's one of the people profiled in the film, who was on Patsy of the World last year, as well as the film's director, Posi Tang, who's with us, who was, I think, following for us 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 the 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. You know, it just felt like nothing was shifting in the United States. And as you know, I was a journalist long before I became a documentary filmmaker. So I've worked in various newsrooms and it was extremely difficult and painful to see, you know, former colleagues of 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, like, look, I don't want to do this job anymore. But what I did not know, I just knew that if I'm going to make a film, I'm going to have to quit my job and I'm going to have to find the story. And so that sort of started me off. And then I met Dr. Mark Perlmutter. I reached out to him because I saw a clip of him saying like very undoctorly things as he does in the film. And then he introduced me to Dr. Feroz Sidwa and Dr. Thayer Ahmad. 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 want to learn from them, when you meet three who couldn't be more different, that is a 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 the team are our Gazan colleagues, Ibrahim Al-Otla, our cinematographer, and Mohamed Sawaf, our co-producer. And we did it with them and team members spread out out of eight countries. You set the tone right away. You 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 harrowing subject matter that you are at times interacting with? 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, Ben. 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. If people see it in a theater, they're going to walk out. If they 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. So it's such a delicate balance, which until today, I still struggle with. But at the end of the day, 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 us, 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 the three doctors in their lives back home. And then ultimately, we'll get to the activism piece of it when you're back here and you're doing media and you're meeting with politicians. But I wanted to ask you, it's a peculiar thing to be a subject of a documentary in any circumstance. In this case, when you're in Gaza, you are interacting with a tremendous amount of trauma, but you're doing your job. 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 having been a subject, but now having seen this finished product, but to particularly see those images of when you were in Gaza? Yeah. Yeah. When I was in Gaza, I don't really remember being filmed. I knew Ibrahim was there and I talked to him, obviously, but the camera kind of disappeared just because everything was in total chaos. There was a lot going on. So when I watch it back now, it's funny. I've seen the movie like four or five times because 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 didn't understand why people thought it was difficult to watch sometimes. Some people have a harder time watching it. But then I watched it with a friend of mine and she actually grabbed my hand during some of the scenes. It was just because I – some of the stuff – I'm a trauma surgeon, so I'm used to seeing people that are hurt. I'm used to – and I've been in Gaza, so I'm used to hearing explosions. I'm used to feeling explosions. But most people aren't. And I think it kind of goes back to what Mark said. Mark says at the top of the film where – 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 – Yeah. – and documentaries about war and conflict and genocide, this one in terms of the graphic imagery, we scaled back. Oh, I know. You – yeah. People should know. This is not – you scale way back 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 want to see it. I mean, you know, I remember for the last time you were here, the question that I kind of felt you – because you're an employee. You're an unflappable guy. The question where I could kind of feel you, you know, absorbing it 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?" Yeah. Which is something you obviously wrestled with in the film. That's the discomfort more than just the – we have seen images of war. We've seen documentaries about war. 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 do media, you're starting to bring attention on it, 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. Maybe not spokespeople but activists or at least people trying to, you know, get attention on this. Yeah, 100 percent. So, you know, just to be clear, it's hardly – like, I'm not even the person at the forefront of those efforts. Yeah. It really – Thayer is. Yeah. But the – you know, physicians are – especially somebody who works in an emergency setting like I do. Like, Thayer is an emergency room doctor. I'm a trauma surgeon. I regularly testify at drunk driving trials, at murder trials, at assault trials here in the States because that's part of my job. You know? It's pretty common for doctors to witness the aftermath of crimes while they're providing medical care to people. For Thayer as an emergency room doctor, if he sees a suspected child abuse, suspected spousal abuse, any of those things are all reportable events, we call them. And we are mandatory reporters. In the setting of the United States, like a, 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 – Yeah. 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 report a genocide to? Yeah, exactly. And, you know, the – an obvious place to start seems to be the people carrying it out. I'm one of them. You're one of them. Poe is one of them. We're all paying for this but obviously not by choice. So you know, we do – you know, all the healthcare workers who have been to Gaza, we all communicate with each other a lot. And we've started – we've created a network. We've created a group called Peace Med and 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 – Yeah. Yeah. I can vouch for that. Yeah. Everybody knows that. 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 political question. In the end, that's – these are political – it is a political decision. You know, whoever is signing off on that arms transfer every single day, that's a political choice. As soon as he gets – he or she gets 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, you know, was just saying, look, we don't know who to talk to so we're going to go talk to Congress. I was struck by – you know, maybe it's because of my own, you know, history in both politics and media. But some of the strangely more uncomfortable scenes, obviously the most uncomfortable of what's happening in 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 we see sometimes like the very conventional like, well, isn't Hamas like going to threaten you if you are a doctor there? You know? 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 is Hamas' fault. You have a background in media like you've been at ABC News, right, and New York Times and other places like – how do you think about the role of the American media in either reporting or not reporting or obscuring the genocide? And why did you make this decision to kind of step outside of more conventional media platforms 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, when it came to established media, I mean, it cut real deep. You know? It cut real deep. I held all these different roles. I was a journalist long before I became a documentary filmmaker. And to live in New York, to see former colleagues who are 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, and Mark just 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, 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. Over time, as I was filming the three doctors, I saw them got better in how they were dealing. And so, you know, my hope is always with what you see in the world of these doctors, that some lessons can be gleaned here, you know, 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 in 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 Gazan 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 Thayer, what I learned from him, there's a scene in D.C. And all the doctors have come together to D.C. And they're about to descend on Capitol Hill. And Thayer 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 is how we wanted to make American doctor. Yeah, I will say Thayer 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 because even 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 as a former journalist, because it 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 really loved and respected in the way Thayer was and is, is that it what drew me to him was he's 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. 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 what purpose can I serve? And and I'm glad he let me stick with him. Yeah, yeah. Well, 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, it just reminds you they're all kids. They're all the same. And added to that. And for us, I want to ask you. Like 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 the capacity to provide care to people? There's still, you know, over a thousand Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the so-called ceasefire. Do you do you talk to people you're able to follow up? I mean, I think that's a really good question. I think that's a really good question. As a woman, as a woman of color, as somebody from a minoritized religious community, you know, I'm very perceptive to that. And so I just wanted to be in Thayer's world, in Marx's world, in Feroz'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, Poe, 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 7th. It's pretty extraordinary. As you said, some of the same journalists would be raising hell if that was the case somewhere else, 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, so little, you know, the social media and a very small number now of documentaries are the kind of 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 in kind of documenting what's happening and potentially galvanizing people? And is this, you know, as someone who's had a career in journalism, do you feel like, you know, one of the reasons public opinion has shifted on Gaza is because people are actually turning to other sources of information because they know they're not getting the truth from, or at least 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. You know, the cracks were there long before. And now, 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 this, 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 Gazan 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 wanted, what I really, really wanted to do, because it's not for lack of like 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. And, 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 watch 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 MD. So it was, how can we, how can we make The Pit? We understand the format of how that storytelling is. How can we make The Pit? Difference is, it's set in Gaza, and it's real. And that's how we're going to bring, you know, what's happening in Gaza back into the American psyche, in the format that people understand. You know, so that, 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, 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- It might not have happened a couple of years ago. It may not have happened a couple of years ago, but, you know, institutions are made out of people, and, you know, 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? 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. Wow. Okay. And what I didn't realize until I got there, that True Falls that year, this year, was sponsored by a 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. American Doctor, yeah. And that was always my hope, you know. Let's see whether we can Trojan horse this in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And still, he's laughing. And still, today, like, 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. We had the film now, you know, 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 Fa'er and to see the diaspora fighting really hard for Palestinians in Gaza, or they're coming in for Feroz, you know, because Feroz is Feroz. Or they're coming in for Mark because Jewish Americans. Yeah, no, which is an interesting experience to inhabit. Whatever reason they're coming in. They all leave the same. Yeah. They all leave wanting to do something. And that is enough for me. Yeah. There's a. This weird thing happened when I was walking out of one of the screenings where there was an older woman who was walking with probably a friend of hers, and they were talking about the movie after seeing it. And she was chiding herself for this, and I just heard it and 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. A big part of this movie is Fa'er's family. You know, like you mentioned, it's his sweet daughter, it's his wife. Like, they're such a sweet family. They're such a just quintessentially normal family. American family. What else would they be? But, you know, and she. Like, this woman was chiding herself for that. But this kind of. You know, 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. You know? I think the film does a really, really good job. Not just of Fa'er and his family, but the health care workers in Gaza. You know, you hear their stories. You see that, like, these people have gone through the same loss as 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. They're, you know, it's. I think people, when they leave, have a different impression of the world than when they went. I remember having these early conversations with Fa'er, 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. I'm 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. Yeah. And so that's. So much of it, you know, it's been such a huge privilege. Even working with our Gazan 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. You know, and I asked them, like, film. You know, I said to Ibrahim 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. Ahim, Dr. Abed, Samakuday, all the doctors and healthcare workers in the film. Because we don't know if we're going to get to see them again. Film Nasser 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. Well, and to take your point about the audience in Missouri. I mean, we have to remind ourselves. I mean, you're probably the world audience is presumably following this. But a lot of Americans, like, you know, they maybe they only hear the version that is sanitized. Or, you know, maybe just it's another conflict. And I think we cannot underestimate, you know, how. To me, it's actually kind of remarkable public opinion shift 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 Gaza, 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 murder 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, you know, by two administrations in a row. It's pretty shocking. And but people are aware that they, you know, when you point out to them, number one, what's going on. And number two, that we're responsible for it 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 of basic humanity, honestly. They're not uniquely American. So if I get to do that, that's a privilege, and I'm blessed for it. Well, I want to thank you both, Feroz, for all that you've done, including in Gaza. Pov, I think you kept your promise. It's an incredibly powerful film. Everybody should check out American Doctor. It's across the country in theaters. Hopefully it will have a life in theaters. It will then have a life in other places where you can watch it. So thanks so much for making the film and for being here today. Thanks again to Feroz and Pov for joining the show, and we will talk to you guys next week. Pod Save the World is a Crooked Media production. Our show is produced by Ilona Minkowski, Michael Goldsmith, and Anisha Banerjee. Our team includes Matt DeGroat, Ben Hethcote, Jordan Cantor, Kenny Moffitt, David Tolles, and Ryan Young. Our staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. Subtitles by the Amara.org community