Trump’s Top Spy Has One Job: Revenge

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You can now catch up on the week's best moments on MS Now on Saturday nights. MS Now is streaming an episode of highlights from your favorite Crooked Pods, packing as much analysis, funny moments, correct opinions into 40 minutes as humanly possible. Crooked on MS Now airs every Saturday at 9 p.m. Eastern, 6 p.m. Pacific. Welcome back to Pod Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, is this the best? Best week of your life. You get the Knicks going to the NBA Finals. Your second book is now out into the world. Are you more confident that the Knicks can beat Wemby or that you can beat Fox and Friends co-host and real world star Rachel Campos Duffy on the New York Times bestseller list? That's your competition, buddy. I guess the gauntlet I'd throw down is I'm probably more confident in the Knicks, but that's more because of my confidence in the Knicks than my self-doubt or anything. Some tough comp in the book market, though. I mean, Fox and Friends, man, that's a rabid audience. Yep. And she can market the hell out of it. So that's why you guys got to go buy Ben's book. It's very important. We got a great show for you today, though. We're going to cover Trump's insane new choice to serve as acting director of national intelligence. We are going to explain why this feels like a step towards the intelligence community being just used and abused to punish Trump's enemies. We're going to walk you through the latest on the mess that is the war in Iran, the failed negotiations to end the war. Reopen the Strait of Hormuz. We'll talk about the escalation and fighting between Israel and Hezbollah and Lebanon, and then some conflicting reports about whether Trump maybe or maybe did not yell at Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu about Lebanon. It felt very Biden era then to read about, you know, private scolding, how upset he was. Nothing changes. Nothing changes. We'll do a Gaza update. We'll update you guys on the war in Ukraine and try to figure out why a bunch of far right influencers from the U.S. or Europe are descending on Moscow. Finally, we will tell you about the presidential election in Colombia and what's at stake there. And if we have time, maybe some stories about MAGA grift. Ben, you did an interview today. What are folks going to hear? So I talked to Ebrahim, who's with the AI Now Institute and has worked on AI and foreign policy in the past in the Congress and the Biden White House. We talked about the Pope's encyclical that, you know, you and I talked about last week, what's important in it. Trump's new executive order announced today on artificial intelligence, whether the idea of a race between the U.S. and China on AI is kind of the right policy framework. And just what would the right approach to regulating these technologies look like? So we've been talking for a while about doing a little bit more AI on the show because it's coming for everything. So this is a great conversation with AI. People should check it out. We should just interview Claude Mythos on the show, maybe. See how that goes. We should, actually. That'd be quite interesting. Just be like, hello, Claude. How are you? At the very end of the show, our Friends of the Pod Discord subscribers will hear Ben and I answer some questions from the Discord community. So stick around for that. So, Ben, in summary, I think our ask for listeners today are Root for the Knicks, which is a tough pill to swallow for me as a card-carrying asshole, but I will try. Buy Ben's book, All We Say, available now. It's truly excellent. You can also hear Ben with Jon Favreau talking about speech writing on the Pod Save America feed. But, you know, also help him displace Rachel Campos Duffy on the best seller chart because that is offensive that she is, I think, number three right now. It's offensive, yeah. That's, very upsetting. We do have to beat her. You got to do that. Please help us do that. Subscribe to Pod Save the World, wherever you get your podcasts, or on YouTube. And then if you are horrified by Barry Weiss gutting 60 Minutes over at CBS, want to help a progressive media company grow, consider becoming a Friend of the Pod paid subscriber. For $10 a month, you get bonus content, bonus Pod Save America episodes, ad-free episodes, deep dives into polling from Dan Pfeiffer, and much, much more. So it's good spend, good value. And, Tommy, I have two crooked book crossovers. Today, Wednesday, Alex Wagner and I will be in conversation in New York City at the 92nd Street Y. There are few tickets left, if people want to check that out. And then next Monday, Jon Favreau and I will be in conversation in LA. You can find links to this. We'll put them in the show notes, but they're also on my website, Ben Rhodes dot info. Dot info. Okay. You got the coveted dot info. Yeah, I got the dot info. You know, every time I have a book, I have to like redo a website. It's all up there. Listen, I get it. I get it. All right. So we were going to lead the show today with this head spinning, you know, like tweets and fucking sirens and, you know, fake scoops about Iran. But then the news broke this morning that Donald Trump has installed a goober named Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence. And to me, that was just a five alarm fire. So just to back up to explain, Bill Pulte is this random businessman who Trump installed as the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency or FHFA without getting too wonky. FHFA is supposed to oversee Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and other parts of like the government systems that provide loans, mortgages. But in practice, what Pulte has done is he's used his access to sensitive mortgage data to manufacture criminal cases against Trump's enemies like Letitia James. It is very obvious then what is happening here with this news from today, because Pulte has no experience in intelligence. He has no national security background, literally none. But, you know, we're going to talk a little bit more about that in just a second. And the only reason you make this guy the top spy in the U.S. government overseeing the entire intelligence community is to give him access to all of our intelligence data and all of the authorities they have and all of the collection tools they have to use those to go after Trump's enemies. It's to move that retribution project that started in a backwater housing agency and move it to the DNI's office. And so that is absolutely chilling. This is what dictators do. This is how countries slide into becoming police states. And I'm sure that the Pulte marching orders will include cherry picking data to prove that the 2020 election was stolen, right, like the old Trump hobby horses. But it will not stop there. Like we know this guy is willing to say and do anything to make Trump happy. And so is Kash Patel over at the FBI. And that combination is scary as hell. And Democrats need to fight this tooth and nail. So Ben, the arguments I would make to Democrats like listening to this are that I would just scream to the world are one, putting someone with no intelligence experience in charge of the intelligence community is self-evidently crazy and makes all of us less safe. And Pulte doesn't meet the statutory requirements for the job. Like they should just raise hell about how unqualified he is. But then, too, I think the leverage for them is I would say I'm not reauthorizing any intelligence collected collection authorities, in particular, Section 702 of FISA, which lets the US government force American telecom and tech companies to give over data without a warrant if this guy is in that job. Period. Draw a line in the sand. Do it now. This is fucking crazy. Absolutely right. And this is one of those tests of whether Democrats understand what's happening or not, because Bill Pulte has no interest whatsoever in national security. He's not someone who's thinking about China. He's someone whose pure role is to exact vengeance on Trump's political opponents or to advance Trump's conspiracy theories. If it wasn't enough that he has no experience or background whatsoever in intelligence and national security, Tommy, the fact that he's still going to run that housing agency while he's running the DNI is the most comic part of this. He's going to run all the most powerful intelligence agency community in the history of the world. And he's also going to run Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Side hustle, yeah. Yeah. If this guy could comb through the mortgage records of Tish James to invent a conspiracy theory to try to prosecute her, what's he going to do with the NSA's capacity to do that? He's going to have to do something. He's going to have to do something with the CIA. He's going to have to do Buckle up here. And absolutely, if you're concerned that someone's going to say that you don't take intelligence seriously because you're not reauthorizing Section 702, like, do you think Bill Pulte and Donald Trump are taking it seriously? Those are the guys that don't give a shit about keeping us safe. It does also make me worry, Tommy, about what we're in for for the next two and a half years of the Trump administration. I know, man. I know. Because remember, in the first Trump term, by the end, we were down to the dregs. You know, I don't even remember the name of the guy who was attorney general. Kash Patel was chief of staff at DOD. We had Rick Grinnell as acting director of DNI. We're already kind of entering this phase where the people are just getting weirder and weirder and more and more vindictive. And so I think that's another—I mean, we should be ready for that. This Trump craziness is not going to plateau. It's actually going to get exponentially more weird and crazy going forward. I'm glad you said that about the dregs because, like, just in a sign of how extreme the White House is. Remember Greg Bovino? Remember the little, like, fascist munchkin who was in charge of Customs and Border Patrol and wore, like, his, like, big Nazi coat? That guy popped up over the weekend in Portugal. He was at a far-right, someone's called neo-Nazi conference focused on re-migration, i.e., like, the ethnic cleansing of migrants in various countries. And that included representatives from far-right parties like the AFD, from Vox. There was fascists, like, literal fascists from Belgium and the Netherlands. And he did, like—Bovino did an interview leading up to the conference where he— He literally gave a shout-out to Erwin Rommel, a.k.a. the Desert Fox, the Nazi field marshal who ran the Africa campaign. What are we doing here? When he was, like, talking about how his kind of improbable rise from, like, agent out into the field to leading organization. So your point about that we're being down in the dregs of the Trump administration landed with me. Well, and it is, like—the only thing I was going to say, too, is that Cash running the FBI and this guy running the intelligence community, I don't— I do—like, there are, you know, terrorists out there. There are adversaries, like, who is minding the store is going to be an incredible story because nobody's minding the store. So it's—we're getting the worst of their actions and also the worst of their neglect and incompetence. Everything that happens, like, Tulsi Gabbard leaves, you celebrate because she is obviously not prepared for this job. And it's like, God, careful what you wish for. But just to highlight how truly unserious putting Bill Pulte in this position has been, Michael and our team dug up. Two clips that we wanted to show you. This first one is from a conference from back in 2022. At the time, I think Bill Pulte was really into meme stocks. Remember, like, the GameStop phenomenon under encode? Yeah, I think I saw this clip. Okay, this is from a conference where he's trying to get people to buy Bed Bath & Beyond stock, which did not end well for anyone who did so. Here's the clip, then let's talk about it. Let's watch. Pulte, look at this fucking thing. All right. All right. What we're watching is a man slap another man in the face with a dildo for those listening, not watching. You should subscribe to Pod Save the World on YouTube. There you fucking have it. The first dildo slap in history live. So, Bill, this says Bill Pulte fucks, all right? Yeah. And then if you notice on, it's got a tramp stamp with a butterfly on the back. I like only the young. One ass cheeks, yes, it does say, it does say only the young on the back here, only young December 14th. Yeah, it looks pretty bad ass. We have a mushroom stamp on the head of it and a bed bath on one cheek and GME. Oh fuck, GME on the other. I got too excited there. They broke their little statue. So, they gave the guy, Bill Pulte was given a little statue by the man who just slapped the other man in the face with the dildo that says Bill Pulte fucks only the young. That this man is now going to be the acting DNI, Director of National Intelligence, top spy overseeing 18 component parts of the intelligence community. Your thoughts. I have some more like sober, serious friends of mine who are like, you and Tommy sometimes get a little too immature. Like, you know, we are covering the news, people. We are covering the news. The reason that there is a man slapping another man in the face with a dildo and giving, you know, some pedophilia reference to someone is because that man who is involved in that is the Director of National Intelligence now. So, we just have to, you know, report what's happening. Just the facts, man. I will say. Like, for an administration that came in committed to depoliticizing intelligence, not weaponizing the justice system, and rooting out pedophilia, Bill Pulte kind of seems to be checking the box on all three of those things in the wrong direction here. So, not exactly promises kept among all the other disgusting and horrifying and troubling things about that video. I saw a nice clip of Ivanka today, Ivanka Trump talking about how she and her husband. We're going to build a new paradise on an island. I was like, oh, Epstein has taught these people a lot. To our listeners who think that Ben and I have childish senses of humor, I know. It sometimes occurs to me that, you know, we hear from, like, current and former prime ministers who listen to this show. Yes, yes. We're talking about this. I do, actually. Listen, these are the facts we were presented by the universe. We're just relaying them to you. Ben, so here's a second clip of Pulte, again, that Michael dug up from a podcast interview he did in 2022. I want to know if this makes you feel better. Yeah. About your concerns about his lack of experience. Let's watch. Oh, no. What did you learn about HVAC that kept you going deeper into that space that leads you to a podcast like we're on today? Well, my first business was a countertop business, kitchen and bath countertops. You know, I don't know if you know a lot about countertops, but I'll tell you one thing about them. They're a pain in the ass. And to me, to me, actually, life is so much easier in the HVAC space compared to countertops. That says a lot. A lot about countertops. Yeah. Yeah. The like dying joke there reminded me of the NPR sweaty balls famous section. So that was Bill Pulte on the To The Point Home Services podcast talking about being in the HVAC business. So I guess if the AC goes down in any of the many intelligence community buildings, Bill Pulte can be there. In the interview, he spends a lot of time bragging about his follower count. And I think he's a great example of that. It's really just like soup to nuts. Your plant concierge, they could help you figure out how to make your yard look better, how to make your house look a little bit better. Everybody wants some kind of greenery around, but most of us are very bad at helping it survive. Right now, they have great deals on spring planting essentials, up to half off on select plants. And listeners to our show get 20% off their first purchase when using the code WORLD at checkout. That's an additional 20% off better plants that are more likely to survive at fastgrowingtrees.com if you use the code WORLD at checkout. Fastgrowingtrees.com, code WORLD. Now is the perfect time to plant. Let's grow together. Use WORLD to save today. Offer is valid for a limited time. Terms and conditions may apply. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Not everyone experiences summer as an endless parade of hot dogs, vacations, and pool parties. For some people, life's woes don't abate when the temperature climbs and the days get longer. If you've got the summertime blues or are simply feeling overwhelmed, BetterHelp is there when you need it. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, having served over 6 million people globally. 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You can find support and therapy. Sign up and get 10% off at BetterHelp.com slash Crooked World. That's BetterHelp.com slash Crooked World. All right, Bill. Welcome to Iran. It's now been more than three months since this war started, but despite weeks of countless breathless reports and tweets with sirens in them about some imminent peace deal, there still isn't one, which means the Strait of Hormuz is still closed. Oil and gas exports are choked off, and every day, we get closer to some kind of breaking point and rupture in the global economy. But besides that, it's going great. In practice, also, what we're seeing lately is escalation between the two sides. Over the last few days, there were U.S. airstrikes on Iranian air defense sites and drone sites, and then Iran shot down another American Predator drone and fired a ballistic missile at a Kuwaiti airbase. Apparently, U.S. air defenses intercepted that missile, but Bloomberg reported that the shrapnel injured five people, including U.S. service members. It's a pretty serious incident. The outlines of the deal that's being negotiated is reportedly the same as what we've talked about in the following. It's like a 60-day pause in fighting to allow for negotiations over the much harder issues around the nuclear program, unrestricted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, and then a gradual relaxation of the U.S. blockade on the Strait, so Iran has to move first in this framework. The New York Times said that there could be some sort of post-war investment fund of $300 billion for Iran. That surprised me. It sounds like Trump wants his money to come from Gulf countries, so we can pretend the U.S. isn't providing it, but that is insane. I mean, you and I and Obama would have been drawn and quartered if something like this had been proposed during the JCPenney meeting. So, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't CPOA days. And then there's some sort of agreement looking to reach some sort of agreement over releasing frozen Iranian assets and then sort of sanctions relief for Iran maybe as well. As usual, the sticking points are Iran wants the war to be over everywhere. That includes in Lebanon, which the Israelis are not happy about. And then Trump wants Iran to ship all of its highly enriched uranium out of the country, though he did post something like a week or two ago that suggested he might be OK with that HEU being destroyed in place by the IAEA, by international regulators. So on Monday, Trump called somebody at CNBC, Eamon Javers at CNBC, about the peace talks. And he said the following then, I don't care if they're over. Honestly, I really don't care. I couldn't care less. If they're over, they're over. If they're not, you know, I think they took too much time. Frankly, I thought they started to get very boring. That's an actual real quote that he said to a reporter. So, Ben, this, you know, Trump has been spinning his wheels in place for the same couple of weeks on this policy. And I think what's driving me crazy is the White House is able to just churn out all these little mini updates and bullshit and fake reports, whatever, to journalists to manipulate the oil markets. I shouldn't say fake reports. They're giving updates that never really bear out or never solve the underlying problem that needs to be solved. But all that kind of minute to minute coverage distracts everybody. And there's not a real, I think, understanding or focus on the big picture of what an absolute ongoing massive disaster this war is and remains. I'll start with the media and then get to the substance of it. It's not just typical media criticism here. What in particular Axios has done in credulously, consistently, constantly tweeting out these reports that a deal is imminent with sirens is allowing themselves to be used to affect oil markets. And, you know, whether they know that they're doing that or not, that's what's happening. And probably a lot of people are profiting off of insider trading. And it's also kind of giving people this kind of false sense of comfort. Look, I hope we get a deal today, like while we're recording this podcast to reopen the strait and lift the blockade and move towards a nuclear deal. But that leads to the second part, which is I think what Trump is trying to do that is truly bizarre. Trying to give people the impression with these leaks and with his own comments downplaying this, that it's not really war going on there anyway, you know, because, you know, we're not seeing big explosions and there's not a lot of firing back and forth, although there's some. But the reality is the Strait of Hormuz is still closed. Maybe a tiny trickle of ships is getting through. And so the global economic impact and the global shortages of not just oil and gas, but other vital resources like helium and fertilizer, that's that's getting worse by the day. Yeah, there was a report that the U.S. military had escorted like 70 some odd ships through the Strait over the last few weeks. But that's as compared to like 130 a day during peacetime. Yeah, that's a tiny fraction. So I think we're kind of being lulled into the sense that something is not happening that is happening. And people know it because they're paying more at the pump. But essentially, other nations have been tapping into their reserves. To survive this and kind of prop up what is left of global energy markets. But but with each passing day, that gets harder to do. And so there could come a time when what's already a horrific global economic disruption and disruption in people's lives could become a crash. And so I think there needs to be a little bit more attention, not just on the like imminent deal that is constantly being discussed that everybody knows what it is, but but on the consequences that this is still a war, just because it's. Kind of a semi frozen conflict doesn't mean we're not still in the state of war with all the consequences. And then on the deal, we've talked before about the elements of it and about how Trump may try to spin it as a victory when it's not reopening the Strait that was open before the war. I think the other thing I'd say is on this money, because you're seeing the 300 billion dollar investment fund reported in different places. You're also seeing maybe some upfront payment of, you know, 12 billion. Some sanctions relief. What I think Trump is doing, he's so fucking fixated on Obama and look, whatever happens, he he's going to have to do something that eventually looks like the Iran nuclear deal, which, again, shipped the H.E.U. out and did all these other things that he's trying to get. The reality is, I imagine that this money is going to be probably Iranian frozen assets, you know, and they'll try to pretend like it's. They'll say it was released by Qatar or whoever was holding or whatever, and therefore we didn't give it to Iran, which is just like, give me a break. Like you made the deal that released the money. But and that's the point in the Obama deal. Iran got money that had been frozen in other bank accounts because other countries had bought Iranian oil and that they had not been able to access those revenues. And so Trump is probably going to do the exact same thing. This is a message to anybody who follows this and message to the journalists who are going to be. Covering this just because Qatar or some other country is providing Iran access to that money. It's not like a Qatari check or some other country. It's the exact same mechanism as the JCPOA. And so the fact that we're held hostage to this man's Obama obsession and ego like this isn't even about defending Obama. It's about like how absurd it is that he's desperately trying to find some way to spin, that he's not going to end up doing something. That is somewhat analogous to JCPOA. Yeah, it's going to it's going to look like the JCPOA. He just wants it to be able to say it's better. Did this did this resonate with you, Ben? This is a post from Trump. Iran really wants to make a deal. It'll be a good one for the USA and those that are with us. But don't the Democrats get it? And various seemingly unpatriotic Republicans understand that it is much tougher for me to properly do my job and negotiate when political haps keep negatively chirping at levels never seen before over and over again, that I should move faster or move slower or go to war. Or not go to war or whatever. Just sit back and relax. It'll all work out well in the end. It always does. I feel better. I feel better hearing that. Yeah. Well, first of all. Because Trump and the Republicans never chirped at Democratic presidents when they're conducting foreign policy. Kind of the biggest glass house anybody's ever been in. I think that what that tells me, though, there's a desperation and a lameness, frankly, to Trump's efforts to post his way through this and to talk his way through it in friendly interviews. He's finally done something that is the opposite of what he said. It's not going to end that well. It's already been terrible. This has already been a catastrophe, and everybody can see it. Yeah, it's a mess. There are also some reports that were later denied by the Iranians that President Pesachian had resigned because he'd been cut out of the decision-making process by the IRGC. Very well could have happened, but it came out of a London-based outlet with ties to the opposition and then was denied by the government, so I don't know. We'll see. Then a couple of recent comments that were worth playing for the audience. The first is we just wanted to juxtapose some of Trump's comments about the war and its impact on the Iranian military with comments made by Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Capitol Hill Tuesday. Let's watch. Operation Epic Fury, some of you didn't like it, some of you did, was highly successful in achieving its military objectives, which is dramatically reducing the defense industrial base of Iran, the ability to build these missiles and to build these drones, especially the missiles program, substantially. Thank you. They're military. We sort of left it alone because we think that their military is somewhat moderate. They have other people that aren't moderate. We've taken them out. We've taken different forms of leadership out. We've actually left their military alone. People would be surprised to hear that. Yeah, I'd be very surprised to hear that because the entire message so far had been that Hegseth and his team had decimated the Iranian military. It's all you've told us, and now you're saying that they're moderate, so you didn't bomb them? What on earth are we talking about here? This shows how out to lunch he is and how disconnected he is, but let's talk about Rubio for a second here because he gets this kind of participation trophy for sane washing what Trump should be saying to spin his war. It's like, what a good job he did spinning this war on Trump's behalf. He should be president or at least Republican nominee. Marco Rubio is fucking lying in that clip. They did not decimate the missile programs. We have reporting that over 70%. We have reporting that over 70% of Iran's ballistic missiles and launchers remain intact. And so we kind of keep hearing, I mean, I know this is not a shot at the military at all, but there's this effort to say, well, it was militarily successful. It was not military successful. They said they destroyed the Iranian Navy, and the Iranian Navy is still able to control the Strait of Hormuz. They said they destroyed the ballistic missiles, and they still have most of the ballistic missiles and are still firing them at us. There were multiple reports, Tommy, including in the BBC and the Washington Post. There was a satellite imagery about the damage to U.S. bases and assets in the Middle East. It's like staggering stuff. I wrote down a couple of details, Ben. 20 U.S. military facilities have been hit in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Iraq, Jordan, Bahrain, and Oman. They took out 42 aircraft, F-15s, F-35s, 24 MQ-9 Reaper drones, an A-10 attack plane, and then three THAAD missile defense batteries that cost a billion dollars each. And then they damaged this one E-3 Sentry. And I think that's important. This is the problem with our media. The corporatization and magnification of so much of the media means that Americans know less about what's happened to American military bases than just regular people that live in the Gulf. That is insane. And look, the Post did a good report here. The Times has done good reporting on this. But there's not much else. And that's by design. I think people have to realize the reason you get corporate. over the past week are often in the double digits usually somewhere between let's say 16 to 45 46 israel's lowest was 194 um with an average over well over 300 350 so just to give an idea about the disparity of uh the fighting quite a ceasefire there when you have hundreds of you know projectiles being lobbied over the border every day um as we mentioned earlier ben so the the lebanon piece of the fighting has become a big sticking point in the peace talks iran wants the fighting over in lebanon as well as everywhere else the israelis uh have said no way and in fact have used this latest round of fighting since february 28th as an opportunity to advance further into lebanon and take more territory and unfortunately you know before february 28th the u.s was facilitating talks between israel and the lebanese government about trying to disarm hezbollah and those all ended when the latest round of fighting started so on monday axios reported that trump called net yahoo and yelled at him about israeli escalation in lebanon the report said that trump said to bb net yahoo uh quote you're fucking crazy you'd be in prison if it weren't for me i'm saving your ass everybody hates you now everybody hates israel because of this uh some some factual statements in there about net yahoo uh but did that really happen uh unclear there's an israeli political analyst who a lot of people in israel think is basically just another spokesman for the net yahoo government he tweeted that the axios report is false um a friend of mine in israel told me that this this person who i will not name is often called bb shofar because net yahoo blows air into him and out comes noise which is really funny and great um but the analyst claimed that trump didn't mention bb being in jail or that he's hated but then alex ward uh our buddy over at the wall street journal reported that actually two calls the first was about a ceasefire and the second one is where trump was like talking shit saying you'd be in jail if not for me regardless ben i think they apparently reached an agreement where israel is going to hold off airstrikes on beirut as long as they are not attacked we'll see if that holds um and in the meantime israel is pummeling southern lebanon with airstrikes and they recaptured this ancient hilltop castle called beaufort which is israel held 25 years ago during its previous occupation of lebanon which is bringing back terrible memories both in lebanon and in israel uh of you know it because that would that war did not go well and people were worried that this could be a problem for them and they're not going to be able to get out of it and they're not going to be able to get out of it and they're not going to be able to get out of it and they're not going to come the beginning of a protracted israeli occupation of lebanon and it comes after the idf displaced like a million lebanese residents in the south and the overall death toll is 3 400 dead in lebanon 27 israeli soldiers killed so been a lot there but i do think like the lebanon piece of this is the most clear point where you can see the u.s and israeli political interests diverging completely especially as the israelis get closer and closer to their election yes and it's because of what the nature of the israeli uh military operation in lebanon is and at the risk of making this kind of media criticism day and again this is a reason why you should support independent media um if you're watching this from afar like what you're presented with by most of the u.s media is that there's a fragile ceasefire in lebanon in israel's war against hezbollah and in fact there is no ceasefire in lebanon there's no such thing as a ceasefire where you're relentlessly bombing a country and at the same time as much as israel does have a challenge from hezbollah um if you actually watch what's happening and the media criticism is like these calls are a smokescreen like somebody from you know trump's staff is told to call axios and say he said fuck you to bb watch what's happening not what you're told somebody said in a phone call exactly because israel is continuing to do all these things and what they're doing it does not seem to be about disarming hezbollah it seems to be about taking southern lebanon where they're literally occupying like a huge swath of this country and you know depopulating it making it uninhabitable probably for the purposes of either annexing part of that territory or holding it as a kind of so-called buffer zone but like there's no international legal basis for like just claiming like part of another country and saying that's a buffer zone and my concern as you pointed out is that because there's an election later this fall because bb completely failed to achieve the objectives he set out for the iran war he's just going to keep doing this in lebanon so that he has some war that he can show the kind of right-wing voters in israel requires him to stay in office yeah speaking of bb's election i mean we should talk about gaza for a minute because netanyahu again as we lead up to this election is talking about occupying more of the territory in gaza so there's a recent press conference uh which i think he did from like maybe a settlement in the west bank or something something he did from the west bank and he said quote we are now in 60 of the territory of the gaza strip we were at 50 we moved to 60 my directive is to move to and then someone in the crowd yells 100 and he says take he goes take it step by step uh first of all 70 we'll start with that so netanyahu is like playing to the crowd saying we're going to take 70 of the territory in gaza so he wants to squeeze two million people into 30 of the gaza strip where it was already one of the most crowded places in the world uh then israel's defense minister israel katz tweeted last week quote we pledge that hamas will not rule gaza civilly or militarily and so it shall be the voluntary migration plan will be implemented all at the proper time in the proper manner so i guess everyone's should get incited for some ethnic cleansing to happen soon i guess um and then as we've discussed like life on the ground for people in gaza is hell on earth there's a recent report from doctors without borders that said israel has destroyed or damaged nearly 90 percent of water and sanitation infrastructure in gaza including desalination plants boreholes pipelines and sewage systems and as a result of the damaged sewer systems there's pests breeding in the wastewater rats are everywhere uh there are lice scabies fungal infections bug bites rat bites and nowhere near enough health care resources um and then shockingly ben the board of peace is accomplished exactly nothing there's no funding there's nobody on the ground there's no nothing so i like maybe jared kushner got a good meeting at davos out of it but that seems to be the only accomplishment there yeah i mean i think we have to again consider that there's this veneer of a ceasefire in gaza what part of the ceasefire terms that were announced to such fanfare with all these foreign leaders and all this credulous media attention back last fall what part of that ceasefire agreement permitted israel to take 70 of the gaza strip and then talk about quote unquote you know the voluntary migration aka the ethnic cleansing of the remaining two million people that are in these horrific conditions and the and the problem is there's no rooting and any of these policies in concern for the actual palestinians who are there like there's no discussion about getting assistance into those people addressing those horrific conditions we still don't have international media access uh to to gaza to see what's happened and to get an accurate death count which is probably far higher than the 70 000 that's already been reported here and so just goes to show that again while attention the camera keeps swirling around and it's largely focused on iran and the strait of hormuz like the situation for the people in gaza has continued to deteriorate since the ceasefire was announced in the same way that the people of lebanon are suffering such extraordinary consequences and the absence of any kind of moral framework of concern for those people not just out of the united states but frankly out of a lot of governments speaks to kind of the broken moment that we're in geopolitically yeah i mean you're not seeing any real international support for gaza like i i'm not seeing any action really at the un i'm not seeing a lot of fundraising you would imagine there's just nothing there's nothing i mean we got the you got the uk saying that uh jank weger and hassan biker can't come because they're they're they're a threat to uh british society in some way because you know they criticize the occupation or the war in gaza but you know there's just nothing to help actual human beings on the ground who are suffering every single day including lots of kids and and i'm just gonna say like the idea that that tells you a lot about the priorities and i'm just gonna say like the idea that that tells you that that tells you a lot about the priorities um and we should call this out because like whatever you think about chenk and hassan um the idea that that that government has the time to say that because of their views on israel they're not even allowed to enter the country um but what are they doing to help the people of gaza what is the stormer government doing to help them um it's absolutely ridiculous and outrageous even if you disagree with hassan biker by the way he was going there to have a debate at the oxford union so the form of the government is going to be a debate at the oxford union so the form of the that was set up was for someone else to be able to tell him he was wrong right and so the idea that we're more afraid of free speech uh in in places like the united kingdom um than than we are of like you know risking the ire of donald trump by expressing concern for the people of gaza this is it was like a shameful moment for the stormer government yeah hassan told me he was going to go to the oxford union and do a speech and the last one he did there was it was about the danger of conflating judaism and zionism um he was trying to disaggregate them and talk about combating anti-semitism but then he was told by the british government that his uh you can't travel uh because quote your presence in the uk is not considered to be conducive to the public good it's just such a vague kind of you know 1984 notice that anyway it's just really fucking weird it's chilling it's actually it's absolutely chilling and for a center-left government to be doing it yeah for a center-left government to be doing it it's absolutely chilling or maybe they're not a center-left and like if you if you find the comments that either those two guys made to be offensive or wrong. or upsetting in any way. That's totally fine. I respect that. I feel like, yeah, I guess this is just the American in me, the First Amendment supporter in me thinks it's crazy to tell someone they're barred from your country for political opinions. I think that's bonkers. Posse of the World is brought to you by HIMSS. If something's been off in the bedroom, you're not the only one. A lot of guys wait longer than they need to to take action. The difference now, getting real treatment is simple. Through HIMSS, it's 100% online. At some point, you've got to stop blaming stress, sleep, or just getting older. If bedroom performance is in question, it's probably crossed your mind to do something about it. The good news, you don't have to jump through hoops to fix it. ED is way more common than most guys think. Millions of guys deal with it at some point, and that's exactly why. HIMSS offers a straightforward way to handle it. 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Go right now to sundaesfordogs.com slash world50 and get 50% off your first order. Or you can use the code world50 at checkout. That's 50% off your first order at sundaesfordogs.com slash world50. sundaesfordogs.com slash world50 or use code world50 at checkout. Switching gears here, Ben. So we have some bad news and some weird news out of Russia. First of all, it's just been a horrifying, like, awful, week for Ukrainians. Russia launched a bunch of major strikes against a bunch of cities across Ukraine, including Kiev. The Ukrainian Air Force said Russia launched 665 drones, 73 missiles, 20 people were killed and 100 were injured. It was a big barrage. Russia was signaling this attack was coming. They said it was in response to a Ukrainian drone strike on what they described as a Russian college dorm that killed 21 people. I think the Ukrainians say, no, it was a military drone site. Also alarming, Ben, was a Russian drone hit an apartment building in Rome, Romania over the weekend. Romanian officials said the drone probably went into their territory because it was hit by Ukrainian air defenses and I think got knocked off course or something. But this is a big deal. We're going to watch and see if NATO responds in any way. But that is the political backdrop here as we get to our next point about Russia, which is the Russians are hosting this annual investment conference in St. Petersburg. And this year, there is a much increased American presence. The White House is sending a representative. It is some dipshit named Rodney Mims Cook Jr., who is chairman of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts. I think he's from Georgia, some whatever. And then a bunch of far-right influencers are heading over. So check out this clip we put together to show you who's going. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - Okay, so the first thing we saw was RT, the Russian propaganda network, put together some sort of video. They took a bunch of Candace Owens' photos she posted on social media and commentary. Candace Owens, a far-right feminist, far-right podcaster and influencer. She posted a bunch of stuff, including commentary like, "I'm starting to understand "why the talking heads panic "and shout and lie "about Russia collusion "when they learned an American "with a platform is traveling here. "It's Plato's allegory of the cave. "It is genuinely shocking "how clean, beautiful, "and ordered this city is. "It's so far removed "from media depictions." Yes, I too am stunned that famously beautiful Moscow looks beautiful. And then there were the Tate brothers who were indicted a couple of years back on charges like rape and human trafficking who were also in Moscow, I guess, for this conference, but I don't really know. So I hope they have a good time. Ben, what do you think is happening here? Why are these goobers descending upon Moscow? Well, I'm sure they're getting paid in some fashion here and or they're just trolling people like us. But the reality is that, like, Russia has managed to make these kind of consistent inroads in the right way to the right wing of the United States without doing anything at all differently in the conduct of their war or their repression. The war just keeps getting worse. Like, they've just been relentlessly bombarding Ukraine more under Trump than they did before that. They have not made any meaningful concession towards peace whatsoever. The repression inside of Russia has gotten much worse. Frankly, they've been restricting Internet access in ways that, you know, influencers in Russia, like, don't have the capacity that the Tate brothers or Candace Owens have to go there and post things. And so it's quite remarkable to watch people kind of go there and claim that they're, like, discovering some different Russia when, in fact, like, if anything, repression in the war have just been deteriorating. By the way, the fact that Moscow is clean, I mean, Pyongyang is pretty clean, too. Like, uber repressive societies, like, can kind of keep the streets pretty clean sometimes. That doesn't mean that people have any political rights whatsoever. And it kind of connects to the Romania thing, 'cause part of what's happening is Europeans are seeing this, right? So they're seeing kind of Trump's thirst for investment in Russia. They're seeing Trump's total disregard for Ukraine. At the same time, that there have been, like, meaningful Russian sabotage operations in European countries, some of which have destroyed significant amounts of property, now we have this drone attack. And so if you talk to people in Europe, like, the actual fear that Russia might do something that is a military escalation in Poland or the Baltics or a place like Romania, that's going up. And the more they kind of see this kind of weirdness and brokenness in the American right wing drifting in Russia's direction, I think the more it's gonna just contribute to those anxieties. At the precise time, by the way, Tommy, that Trump's threatening to pull US troops out of Europe, 'cause he's mad that they didn't open the Strait of Hormuz. - Yeah, there was a weird, back and forth last week about the US maybe pulling troops out of Poland and then not, or there's all sorts of weird threats that they know. It's always so, it's so funny when influencers like Candace go over to a place like Russia. Like, yeah, obviously it's not binary. It's not like America, good, Russia, bad. Like, Russia's an extraordinary place, incredible culture. - Or Russian people bad. Yeah, they're great Russian people. - Incredible history, incredible architecture. Like, no one's arguing otherwise. The architecture that she's taking photos of and posting has existed for a very long time. A lot of people were well aware of it. These people, they're just like never, they're never like self-aware enough. - Wait till she finds out about Tolstoy or ballet, you know? - Yeah, yeah. - Tolstoy, have you guys heard of this guy? It's like, hey, you're there with like a minder probably taking you around to all these great cultural sites for a reason. Like the same thing happened with Tucker Carlson when he was like, look at this unbelievable subway. And it's like, you know who built the subway? You know what the cost was there? Like, then he went to the supermarket and he was like, you know what? I'm gonna go buy a new one. And he's like, I'm gonna go buy a new one. And he's like, you know what? content they crank out. Hopefully we'll talk about it next week. A couple more things, Ben. Voters in Columbia went to the polls this past Sunday, and now there are two candidates heading to a runoff election on June 21st. So the contest will be between Senator Yvonne Cepeda, who's a left-wing candidate running on a continuation of President Petro's policies, Petro's term limited. He's running against a right-wing candidate that is backed by Trump named Abelardo de la Espriella, who calls himself the Tiger, not the Tiger King. We're not going back to the COVID era, just the Tiger. The big choice for voters is about security and how to deal with the enormous amount of violence from drug cartels and rebel groups in Columbia. The kind of left approach to violence is negotiations and peace pacts. Well, the conservatives basically want to return to a policy of war on the cartels. And also now they want to build out a detention system like the one Nayib Bukele. created in El Salvador, where he has thrown hundreds of thousands of people in mega prisons, often without charges. Senator Cepeda was, from the left, was directly involved in Columbia's peace deal with a FARC rebel group back in 2016. Again, he wants to continue Petro's policies. The problem with that pitch politically in this moment is that the violence has gotten really bad. Last year, we covered this, I think at the time, a conservative politician was shot on the campaign trail. Senator Cepeda died. He was at a presidential campaign stop. And then there's criminal organizations who are launching armed attacks. They're carrying out drone strikes. There's kidnappings. There's homicides. And thousands and thousands of people have been displaced. Ben, the Trump White House has made no secret of the fact that they want to see this right-wing wave in elections in Central and South America. And they will overtly meddle in elections to do it, although I think they've been less overt in Columbia so far. What do you think, though? What do you think is going to happen here? Is Columbia next? You know, it certainly feels like that. I mean, they're going to make a push, Trump is, because, you know, they're trying to construct like a critical mass of right-wing leaders that are kind of with this imperial project where the deal is that the United States gets to kind of do whatever it wants in the hemisphere, but we kind of back up, prop up, or provide private security forces or what have you, or maybe even direct military support to some of these autocratic leaders. And Columbia has been like a key bellwether, like kind of swing state. And I think in that competition, it's a country that tends to veer back and forth between left and right-wing leadership. By the way, you have an incredibly important election that we'll be talking a lot about later this year in Brazil. That'll be the key test of this. So I'd expect them to kind of lean in here. Look, whoever comes next is going to have to pursue some policies to try to get their arms around the security situation. Because what you kind of have is kind of cartel and other violence, like migrating around different places. We've seen in Ecuador, we've seen a lot of this in Colombia now, too. And I think it's going to be a big deal. I think it's going to be a big deal. But I do, I worry about the kind of construction of like this collection of bukeles and miles and right-wing leaders that we've seen in places like Honduras and Ecuador. Because again, like it's going to polarize politics on a left-right basis across the hemisphere. And in history, when the United States has kind of invested in like a right-wing bloc against a left-wing bloc in Latin America, it has not ended well. In fact, the conflicts in Colombia, like we're probably going to have a lot of conflict. Yeah. Also not going well. The New York Times, I think, just had a big piece about how we've reached this grim milestone of more than 200 people killed in the Trump, Pete Hegseth, extrajudicial murder boat strikes in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific. So far, experts say it is just as easy to find cocaine in the United States as it was before this policy started. The street price of the cocaine has not gone up, which means there's not like, less availability. There's no scarcity. The purity of the cocaine is about the same. But Ben, the cost of the Pentagon policy to just murder people, murder fishermen, is about 4.7 billion and counting. So smashing success, would you say? I mean, the one thing I'd add to this is that like, there's going to be a lot of things that people go back and investigate and try to bring accountability to after the Trump administration is over. This should absolutely be one of them. Yep. Because there's no legal or policy basis for this. It's just murder. Like, there's not some authorization for the use of force against boats. There's credible reports that at least some of these strikes, and it wouldn't be okay if it was even drug traffickers because, you know, it didn't just like murder drug traffickers, but there's credible reports that some of these people are just fishermen. So like, keep in mind, like Pete Hegseth's orders, Donald Trump's orders through Pete Hegseth have been murdering people and have now murdered 200 people. It has no impact whatsoever on the amount of drugs in the country. And so, you know, I think it's a very, very, very good point. I think it's a very, very good point. United States, as you point out, for a time, it seemed to be part of the Venezuela operation, and yet it still continues, even though that's over. Like, what is it about other than the use of brute force, because it seems to make Trump and Hegseth feel tough. And that's a, it's grotesque. So there's going to, there should be investigations into this. And by the way, as has been pointed out to me by experts repeatedly, it's not a war crime. It's just murder. Because it's not a war. Yeah. Good, good point. Two quick, just quick things. I was running out of time here. So Ben, last night, I was, I picked back up Reaganland, the great Rick Perlstein book on Ronald Reagan. There was a part on Jimmy Carter where it talked about how some members of Congress called for an investigation into Billy Carter, Jimmy Carter's kind of jerk off jackass brother, for apparently getting like sweet, a sweetheart deal on like wholesale gasoline for two gas pumps he owned back in Georgia, right? So like, that's the level of grift we're talking very, very low. That made me think of a story I read last week in ProPublica about a $620 million loan from the Pentagon to a company called Vulcan Elements. Vulcan Elements, there's a little startup in North Carolina. They think they can reduce America's dependence on rare earth materials, rare earth elements that are critical for US weapon systems and our phones and electric vehicles and like everything we do now. But remember, we talked about this in the context of the China trade war. The Chinese have an absolute monopoly on the, on what's the process of these rare earth elements. And they were able to choke them off to great effect and put pressure on the United States. So the timeline of this story goes as following. August 2025, 1789 capital, Don Jr.'s venture capital firm, they took a stake in Vulcan Elements. At the time, the company was valued at $200 million. Three months after that investment, Ben, the US government gave them a $620 million Pentagon loan, and I think like $50 million that were part of the CHIPS Act. So $670 million. And they took a stake in Vulcan Elements. And they took a stake in And by January of 2026, so a few months ago, Bloomberg said the company was valued at $2 billion. So a 10x increase in value in five months. And what ProPublica dug up was that the loan only happened after Peter Navarro, remember Trump's trade advisor, who was like thick as thieves with Don Jr., made a call from the White House over to the Pentagon. Convicted felon. Convicted felon, Peter Navarro. Yes, to say, get this done. And you know who visited Peter Navarro in jail? Donald Trump Jr. And he is mentioned- I didn't, I was going to say- In the fucking acknowledgement of his book. Unbelievable. Yeah. I mean, it's just rank corruption. And what they're doing is they're migrating to the biggest kitty that there is, which is the Pentagon budget. I mean, one reason out of many that they want a $1.5 trillion defense budget is probably because they want to profit off of this. I mean, this is absolutely outrageous level of corruption. And again, to go all the way back to the craziness of Bill Pulte and what it says about the last two years, the looting that is going to take place, Tommy, in the last- Last couple of years here, when they can control these budgets is just going to be extraordinary. I mean, what is Don Jr.'s particular expertise in defense contracting? Rare earth elements? This is just- Nothing. Yeah. Yeah. This is just pure payment to the Trump family via the Pentagon budget. There needs to be, if Democrats do win back control of one or both houses of Congress, burring in on the corruption at the Pentagon and the Trump family, which seems to be an overlapping Venn diagram, that should be an essential priority. And then if we do get a Democratic president, let us inhabit that hopeful future. There's going to have to be a lot of effort to uproot whatever corrupt contracts have been planted at the Pentagon, because it seems like a complete fucking boondoggle over there. A total boondoggle. And apparently, they're also considering giving a similar loan to a company called Unusual Machines, which is a drone part manufacturer in Florida that, oh, who would have thunk it? Don Jr.'s on the board of it and owns like millions of dollars worth of shares. So yeah, it's all in the up and up. Also, Ben, we talked on the show a couple of times about how the Trump organization got this sweetheart deal to build a bunch of real estate, including a golf course in Vietnam. The Financial Times reported that families in Northern Vietnam are digging up the graves of their relatives in order to accommodate the Trump org's $1.5 billion luxury golf club, hotel, and villa project that's going to be built there. You'll be surprised to learn that some locals are not thrilled about uprooting the cemetery, but that's the price to do in business these days. If you want to please your leader, you got to dig up your uncle's grave or whatever so he can have his golf course. And just to draw the continuum, the backstory in this is Liberation Day happens, Trump announces this huge tariff on Vietnam. Conspicuously, around the same time, this golf course deal is announced with, I think, Eric Trump. And here we are, fast forward, and we're digging up graves, right? So this is all a case where the power of the United States, this is not just a country trying to ingratiate itself. The power of the United States was leveraged via tariffs. for managing those terrorists by the other country was, let's kind of wink, wink, approve this golf course. It doesn't have to be the. It's Vietnam. It's like a one-party state. I'm sure that this development doesn't happen without the government being involved. All I'll say, Tommy, is I think whatever karma is going to accrue to the Trump family for digging up Vietnamese graves is not good. There's some bad intergenerational. Oh, I've seen Poltergeist. I've seen several Poltergeist films. Doesn't go well. There's some very bad intergenerational energy coming their way. So maybe that's where they'll pay the price. Yeah. Even Ivana is buried on a golf course somewhere in a Trump resort and that's probably not going well. Oh, I figured about that. All right. We're going to take a quick break, but we come back. You're going to hear Ben's interview with Aya Ibrahim about artificial intelligence, what's coming down the pike, the Trump administration's efforts or lack thereof to regulate it. So stick around for that very, very important topic. Pod Save the World is brought to you by Helix. Sleep is maybe the most important thing we all do every day for our health. A good night's sleep for me means a great day. Usually a bad night's sleep can be just ruin the entire thing. You wake up in the morning, you feel terrible and you just know you're not going to be as sharp as you want to be. You're not going to be as happy as you want to be. You eat worse. You feel worse. It just sucks. 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Go to helixsleep.com slash world for 20% off site wide. That's helixsleep.com slash world for 20% off site wide. Helixsleep.com slash world. Hey, it's John. Last year, 2,500 people joined us at CrookedCon for conversations with some of the smartest organizers, least annoying politicians, and most interesting voices in politics about how to fix this mess. We're doing it again, November 5th through the 7th in Washington, D.C. Even more podcast panels and workshops. Plus, there will be drinks, which we'll need after the midterms, no matter which way they go. Get your tickets at CrookedCon.com, where we'll also announce the lineup. If you're a Friends of the Pod subscriber, a limited number of discounted tickets are still available. Get them before they run out. See you at CrookedCon. All right. I'm very pleased to be joined by Aya Ibrahim, who is a senior fellow at the AI Now Institute and a former White House and State Department advisor in the Biden administration. Aya, it's really good to see you. Likewise. Thanks for having me. So you and I have been talking about having this conversation about AI for a little bit, and I think that the encyclical by Pope Leo presents a good opportunity for jumping off point. And actually, we also got an executive order from the Trump administration today. But I wanted to start with that encyclical that was released last week. And it's a very interesting one. You thought about the encyclical. How important do you think it was? What influence do you think it can reasonably be expected to have? Well, you know, you're always going to be excited when something this big comes out that confirms a lot of your priors. But, you know, I would say, look, like engineers can and do build systems, but it's always been humanities that the humanities have built and sustained societies. And the Pope's entry into this conversation, I think, is so critical because there is this vacuum of moral authority and moral leadership on the questions of AI and what it's going to do to the world, even though it has such profound moral implications. And, you know, the question of human dignity and the value of our labor and the value of our lives. I mean, he seems to be the only person who is taking these guys at their word about their desire to renegotiate the social contract. And one thing, you know, we have talked about that I find a bit frustrating is that we treat moral authority, having the moral high ground and exercising power is almost these mutually exclusive things. But the Pope stepping in here is a demonstration of actually the point of moral authority is to create space for you to exercise power in service of your vision for a more moral and just world. And you've worked on I want to talk about a couple more questions about the Pope. And you've worked on, I should say, foreign policy and on AI policy. So you're kind of uniquely positioned to talk about this part of it. I mean, one thing that struck me is the timing I mentioned this last week that it was, you know, probably not intentional, but notable that this encyclical came right after the summit between Xi Jinping and Donald Trump kind of was a big nothing burger on AI, you know, the people who watch AI, like you and me were kind of expecting maybe something. And all we got was like a promise that they might talk about it. I'm wondering if you could talk to people about what the vacuum is that the Pope is trying to fill? Like, do you see any leaders globally, who are bringing both a moral and policy lens to these enormous challenges from AI that we're all kind of feeling? Do you think that the you know, maybe this is a leading question, but I mean, to what extent did the Pope step into a gigantic vacuum? Or do you think there are other voices that have been putting forward constructive ideas? So I think he has been the most clear about the entire picture, right? So there's the political economy questions that he tackles, again, that this is about the allocation of resources, and capital and labor and energy and so on. And what what that means for people's sort of station in their own in their own societies and in their own economies. He talks about the moral pieces, he talks about the spiritual one. So, you know, there's like a very holistic kind of approach that only very few people I think can can take in the way that he did. That being said, there is such a lot of fear, and frankly, like learned helplessness among our policymakers here in the United States, when it comes to questions of technology and technology policy. It's as if they themselves cannot build it, they can't code it, then they don't get to have a leading role in what this technology looks like, and how it shows up in our lives. And the reality is that, like, our energy and commerce committee is not stacked with chemists. But yet we have members of Congress that are doing what they're supposed to be doing, which is the FDA and prescription drugs. So I don't really understand why there's such hesitation. You know, more recently, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Representative, excuse me, Senator Sanders, they have their data center bill, which had some responses from members and other parts of the party that felt like it was kind of a Luddite approach to this question. Yeah, I mean, I think that there's like, there are structural constraints to how we would have the conversation here in the US. And then as it relates to the rest of the world, if most of the compute sits here, it's really on us to figure it out. And, you know, the EU has had their conversations, but it's, it's the United States and it's China. Yeah, I mean, it's a good point in the sense that there have been efforts, the European Union passed an AI Act, they would have imposed a regimen for reviewing models before the release, and we'll get to this Trump executive order. But at the end of the day, and Rishi Sunak actually had an AI safety summit at the end of his tenure as British Prime Minister, but at the end of the day, it's the US and China. And to your point, there's just a remarkable deference to the leaders of tech companies in this country as if they're the only ones who understand it. I was curious, you know, one last thing on the Pope, I was curious what you made of the participation, that kind of clear influence of an anthropic co-founder, Christopher Adams, in the announcement of the encyclical. You know, on the one hand, I'm glad to see, you know, anthropic advocating for regulation and, you know, working with the Pope. On the other end, they obviously have, you know, they're also going public as a company. What do you think, because you actually obviously do need some participation from these people, what, how do you think the role, the relationship between governments, regulators and these tech companies is going to be? What would be a healthy version of that? And also, just kind of what did you make of the participation of an anthropic co-founder and essentially the Pope's rollout of his encyclical? Yeah, I mean, it's pretty consistent with the whole shtick of like, we're the good guys. And I think the key here is, you're all just guys, these are all companies that all have a bottom line. Many of them are rushing to IPO. So there are financial incentives here. And I don't want to assign like some greater nobility, because fundamentally, you're you're building a technology that you're saying might destroy the world. And we shouldn't have feelings about it because, hey, at least you told us and you said that you wanted to do the right thing. But you're definitely going to make money off of this technology either way. I think on the balance and the or imbalances, I guess, in the relationship between governments, regulators, these companies, I think that's a good segue to the executive order that was issued today, which is entirely voluntary. Again, I would love a preview of your potentially world-ending technology, but no pressure if not. And to me, that does not feel consistent with what they themselves have named as the potential impacts of this technology. You're not asking someone on a date. You are asking for oversight over technology they themselves have said will change the way that we interact with one another, that we structure our economy and our society. And our governments, like our world. And that's to say nothing of the actual characters at the helm of this ecosystem, which we should talk about that at some point, too. Yeah. I mean, some of these people don't inspire a ton of confidence. I mean, on the executive order, it's interesting to me because it's been a journey. And just to catch people up, not everybody follows the twists and turns of this that closely, but there's an executive order in the Biden administration that similarly was followed. It was focused on trying to set up a framework wherein new models are, the government has access to them before they're released. Then the Trump administration comes in. David Sachs has made the AI czar. He's one of the guys maybe we should talk about. And all they care about is essentially removing any guardrails, any regulation. J.D. Vance flies to Europe and gives a speech scolding them for caring about AI safety, saying that it's innovation, not safety. That should be driving. That should be driving this. And then Anthropic has a new model coming out, Mythos, that was so powerful that it freaked everybody out because nobody thought that they could defend against potential cyber attacks from Mythos, for instance. And that seemed to have propelled this executive order, although to your point, it seems like it was pretty watered down. I guess the question is, do you think this executive order matters and what would a credible policy look like? Like, let's say you're you're you're David Sachs, right? I mean, you would ever be David Sachs, but let's say you're in that role as AI czar. What kind of elements do you think you'd want to look for in an actual credible start at regulation? Well, when the Mythos stuff was first happening, I, you know, having a background in financial regulation, too, I just thought it would be so funny if the reason that we got AI regulation is because the banks were now exposed. And that's because they're exposed. They're exposed to cyber attack, right? Like, that's the thing that freaked them out. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, they met with the Treasury secretary and with the Fed chair. And it's this whole big to do. But at the end of the day, they may end up releasing it anyway. So, again, this tech that's so dangerous, but there's always a path to making some money off of it. In terms of what, you know, an ideal framework would be, I would just take a step back and say that questions of technology policy are often about everything but the tech itself. And so we have more fundamental questions about, one, the way that we value and compensate and tax capital versus labor, the way that we protect or don't Americans' privacy, the use of technology for purposes of surveillance and targeting and enforcement. It is not going to be limited to, OK, this is how much compute this model can have. How do you apply it? What are the consequences? And what are the structural and systematic questions or issues that this raises, independent of the technology? And, you know, one of the things that I worked on when I was at the White House was the Blueprint for an Annihilation of Rights. And it lays out five things that should hold true regardless of the technology or its application. And so having a rights-based framework would be my go-to. But I think. Regardless, this technology is sort of a forcing function for a lot of the issues that we haven't dealt with, whether it's intellectual property or the fact that wages have not kept up with productivity for 50 years. This is interesting, and I think it's really important. So what you're saying is there's a kind of lowest common denominator, which the Trump year represents, which is like, yeah, like the government should be able to look at these things before they're released and maybe raise some questions, whereas actual regulation would look at. Different issues and basically say, we need to regulate for people's privacy. We need to regulate for mass surveillance. We need to regulate for the capacity of AI to create a biological weapon, you know, putting on a national security hat, or we need to regulate for the capacity of AI to do offensive cyber that essentially. And to your point, like, we also maybe need to tax these companies in a different way because right now they're making potentially trillions of dollars where ordinary people can't. Afford groceries. Is that a fair. Like, you're smarter than me about this. Essentially, the point is that, like, rather than just kind of some broad, yeah, we'll look at the model, it's more like, let's kind of make a list of the things that the problems that are raised and have an approach for each of those. Yeah. I mean, it's looking at the, like, the underlying policy question itself, and then whether or not you actually need an AI-specific answer for it. I mean, one of the things that these. Folks do over and over again is they say, like, this is a novel technology, but it's like, the issue itself is not new. Whether it's a person or an algorithm that has made a lending decision, if that lending decision is biased, then fair lending laws would apply. And they try to argue that actually, no, we have to, you know, relitigate settled matters because this technology itself is novel. And I think this just circles back to the broader push that they're making. Like, actually, the social contract itself, we need to renegotiate, which personally feels an insane premise, and particularly insane, given the specific cohort of people that are pushing for it. You're saying you don't want, like, the small collection of Silicon Valley AI investors and developers to rewrite the social contract? I am saying that. You know, one of the things that I thought was really important in the Pope's encyclical is he says that the technology. The technology is never neutral, and it's always going to reflect those who devise it, those who finance it, those who regulate it, and those who use it. So I'm just thinking about, like, the people who are devising it and financing it. You know, you have characters across Silicon Valley and venture capital, men who brag about having zero introspection, you know, men who refer to people as meat computers, who have espoused all kinds of misogynistic and xenophobic rhetoric, and these are the people that we are supposed to entrust to design this technology that, again, will remake the world. No, thank you. I hear you on that. I do want to ask on a kind of foreign policy angle to this, given, I'd say, the world. There is a. I think most people who work in foreign policy and national security policy, and you and I have been kind of a part of or adjacent to those fields, has kind of accepted the premise that there's an AI race between the United States and China. There's an AI race that kind of conveniently overlaps with a lot of these, you know, hyperskillers and large language models in the sense of that we shouldn't put any guardrails on our development of this technology because we have to beat the Chinese Communist Party to it. And I'm wondering, and similarly, there were policies in the Biden administration that were devoted to kind of restricting inputs into Chinese AI, like, you know, export controls on certain chips and, you know. Advanced semiconductors. Do you. I feel like right now there's a reconsideration of this happening. What do you think about the frame of an AI race between the U.S. and China? Should we be thinking about a different paradigm for how to approach it? I can see why, obviously, you would want, you know, the U.S. to have a technology that China is developing. But I also kind of feel like who's actually winning this race other than the, you know, people. With AI, which is a relatively small number of people here in the Chinese. I mean, how are you thinking about that right now? I have always viewed it as a false choice, right? Like, it's either our biggest companies or it's our biggest competitor. Either we maintain our technological edge or we have privacy and competition and governance. As if there can be, like, no third option. And this race paradigm, it's like, it feels like a race to the bottom because those who are driving the race are willing to sacrifice. Anything and everything, right? It's innovation at any cost, even if the cost is democracy itself and increasingly humanity itself. And they themselves have gotten, like, those who are driving this ecosystem have gotten very comfortable just saying that outright. And so do we win if we let, you know, seven guys decide the fate of this country, its capital markets, people's 401ks, the distribution of water and electricity? I don't feel like a winner in that instance. And then allow Pete Hegseth to use AI for autonomous weaponry and the rest of it. Exactly, exactly. And I guess, you know, you have had your own experiences with emerging technology, right? Drones specifically. Knowing what we know. And social media. And social media. Knowing what you know today, looking back, would you have considered a different approach to how we leverage the edge while we had it? And that is the question that I think policymakers need to have front of mind. You hope, and we work towards having an edge for as long as possible, but you should not policy make on the assumption that that edge has no end. I'm really glad you raised this because the answer is yes, obviously, on drones and social media, where I actually think the Obama administration should get more flack in some ways. But drones is a great example. Because part of what we've also learned that could be replicated with AI, right, is that we had this, you know, the US had this advantage. We were at ahead of everybody. But part of what's happened now is if you look at Iran, they're making cheap drones that have done extraordinary damage to the US presence across the Middle East and probably contributed to their capacity to shut the Strait of Hormuz in the sense that they don't need a big, fancy, expensive drone like American defense contractors make. Like they can make. You know, they can make this in their garage. Something similar may happen with AI, right, where, you know, if there's no thought put into how this technology goes out in the world, maybe you don't need the compute power that the US and China have. But in a few years, people could be doing incredibly disruptive things, right, with pretty cheap, open sourced technology. That's exactly right. You don't actually need the most powerful or the largest model in order to do damage or to do harm if that's your intention. You can do quite a bit. Of of harm with a fairly simple and and small model. And we, I think, over indexed our focus on the largest model because, again, we're just in the competition frame as opposed to like, do we have baseline constraints and safeguards on traditional and conventional means of of doing harm or or conducting conflict and warfare? Because the technology is just going to reflect or exacerbate. What's already there, like I will give you speed and scale to what you might already want to do. Well, one last question, I mean, because we can go on about this forever, but you're you're with, you know, working with AI now Institute now, which is like this research and work on developing understanding analysis of these things. If you're listening to this podcast, you're probably taking interest in, you know, geopolitics, foreign policy issues like that and probably are. Wondering about AI, but it's hard for people to keep up, you know, and make sense of it all. Do you have any advice? What should people be following, whether that's people, places, publications, trends like just, you know, I know there's a kind of broad question, but what would you tell someone who's like, you know what, I try to follow the news, but it's kind of hard to keep up on this AI stuff. Like, do you think there are particular places to go? Yeah, I mean, it's like a bit like drinking out of a fire hose. I like the cynic in me wants to say, just follow the money. And I think. I think that actually a lot of the story will be covered in the IPOs, in the investment, in all of the activity around data centers. But I think that there are good publications like the Virgin Wired, and they do really good reporting. Obviously, I have to plug AI now and a lot of the research that they're doing and we will continue to do. And one of the things that I'll be working on is how do we take this like incredibly rich research? And make it so that anyone who is interested in these or worried about these issues can can follow. There's almost too much out there. That's a good place to start. And actually, the Virgin Wired may not be in like the normal information diet for like all of our listeners. Like they've actually done quite good work on both the people involved and the technology involved. And obviously, people should follow your work. Well, thanks so much for joining us today. I'm sure we'll have occasion to talk about this again at some point. Awesome. Thanks for having me, Ben. Thanks again to IA Abraham 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 Alona 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. 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