Xi’s Just Not That Into You

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But my hazy recollection of the early Doge days was them dismantling some of the cyber defenses of the U.S. government. Yeah. That got a lot of attention and a bunch of nerds were warning that this is going to lead to catastrophic hacks. So, yeah, maybe Kash's priorities of flying to the boondoggle ranch and paving the way. Yeah. Paving the way for bestiality enthusiasts to join the Bureau is not turning out so well. Yeah, firing everybody who was involved with prosecuting, like, January 6th insurrectionists. Maybe you should have focused elsewhere. Yeah, when asked, a representative from this hacking group, they were asked, like, so what are you going to do with this information now? And they said, what we plan to do is not something I'd call extortion, maybe coercion. That's pretty ominous. It's not great when the FBI is getting hacked. It just feels like that shouldn't be happening, Kash. Like, you know, from the cheap seats here. Yeah, I mean. Yeah. I mean, there's so many things you could say about this. I just point to one, which is the FBI is the entity that does counterintelligence. Yeah. Like, i.e. the people that are supposed to uncover hackers and people spying on us. And you don't have to be a fan of the Americans to know that probably not good if the hackers have all this detail on the people doing the counterintelligence. All their identities. Ben is in New York this week. He's at the UN General Assembly. You having a good time? Do you feel more international this week, every year? I do. I do love UNGA week. Coming to you here from my childhood bedroom, which was redecorated as soon as I went to college. But, yeah, I'm seeing a bunch of different people, activists, politicians. And let's just say the mood, though, is not ebullient at UNGA this year. There's a kind of, you know, grim fatalism about what Trump's going to say. And, you know, so we'll see. There's a lot going on, though. At least he's only there briefly. We have a great show for you guys. So we're going to preview. We're going to preview President Trump's state visit with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Talk about what they are likely to discuss. Maybe where the hell all of our leverage went in these talks. And then we're going to geek out about AI for a bit, especially the ways AI adoption that's currently happening is leading to national security problems today. We are going to tell you all about this week's UN General Assembly meeting. We'll talk about the latest with the Houthi rebels offensive in Yemen and how it has put Trump in this just brutal strategic bind with the Saudis. We're going to cover. Elections in Russia that just happened. Elections in air quotes. We'll talk about some other elections in Germany that really are a problem. We'll talk about why so many European leaders seem worried that Russia might test NATO. There was this sort of like cacophony of social media anxiety about it over the weekend that Ben and I were sending back and forth to each other. And then, Ben, I want to end this up with new, which is a bit of a choose your own adventure section about national security stupidity. You're going to get to decide how this episode is going to go. And so I'm excited for that. And then you did our interview today. What are folks going to hear? Tommy, we have another exclusive here on Puts at the World, which is Mahir Bhattar, who runs National Security Action Organization. I'm on the board of Progressive Advocacy Organization. They commissioned a poll ahead of the midterm elections on public attitudes about foreign policy and national security. And I have to say, like, I've read a lot of those polls over the years. And this is a particularly interesting one because it's quite different than any poll. I've seen before, you know, like the things like tariffs and corruption in the war on Iran are the foremost concerns of voters. People are connecting what's happening in the world to what's happening in their lives. So we talk a bit about, like, what the lessons are Democrats should take from that. We talk about AI and how some of the risks people are seeing in the economy and society are not yet mirroring risks that people see on the national security side and how Democrats might address that. And then just kind of what are the. Takeaways on on issues like Israel and Palestine, where there's obviously been public opinion shifts, and how should we think about the landscape for the midterm elections in the upcoming presidential campaign? Amazing. That's going to be upon us soon. The day after the election terms, buddy, it's starting. The engines are sounding. Yep. So it's a great time to do that conversation. And Maher really unpacks it well. Excellent. Well, I know we have a lot of congressional staffers and members of Congress and others who listen. So pay attention. To that section, because this stuff will be applicable. But let's start with Chinese President Xi Jinping's meeting in Washington this week. So he's coming to D.C. for his first state visit since 2015. He's skipping the U.N. General Assembly. As far as we know, maybe he'll make a surprise appearance, but I kind of doubt it. The visit comes as Trump is badly losing the war with Iran as concerns about AI are increasing and as the Chinese economy is sputtering pretty badly, actually. So the obvious ways to address those issues and more is with you. So I'm going to start with you, Ben. I'm going to start with you. economy. So it's going to be a reminder of what we're not doing that we should be doing. Yeah, I was talking to Evan Medeiros, who's an Asia policy expert who we worked with at the White House. And he said, like, what's the takeaway for him was like, there seems to be no serious preparation, very low expectations, and no clear deliverables that have been articulated in any way. I mean, on Iran, yeah, I'm with you. I think at a bare minimum, Trump could say to Xi, hey, could you please stop letting, you know, Chinese entities provide satellite imagery to the IRGC that's being used to target American service members and kill them? We'll see if he even does that. But I agree with you, like, it seems very unlikely that Trump will be able to talk the Chinese out of buying what is 80 to 90% of Iran's oil. The best case on an economic deal seems to be that they'll just kind of continue the detente on tariffs. A couple of places that Trump is weaker. I mean, we've discussed ad nauseum now, the fact that Xi Jinping and the Chinese have all these rare earth elements. Those are like the magnets and other rare earths that are used in missile guidance systems and smartphones and, you know, EV batteries. China has a near monopoly on them. The Financial Times reported that in August, shipments were actually down 13% from that August the year before and 20% from July. So it seems like the Chinese are sending a little signal that's like, hey, we can still, you know, screw you with these things and cut you off. They're nowhere near the kind of liberation. Day tariff nadir, which was, you know, maybe a tenth of what the exports are today. But it's sort of that's like the lever she can press that can, he knows, can kind of break Trump and push back on anything. I imagine Trump is going to hype up some random economic deals. Remember when he was in China, like they pretended that Boeing was going to sell all these planes. I don't think that's actually happened yet. The New York Times had a great piece on how back in May, China agreed to all these ag purchases, but the actual purchases are way behind. You have to imagine that Xi will continue to kind of methodically press Trump to try to weaken his or the U.S. commitment to Taiwan, maybe kind of roll back some of these arms sales. It's interesting, though, Ben, like what's not even on the table is human rights or, you know, like Hugh Hewitt, Trump's buddy, is always talking about Jimmy Lai, this publisher in Hong Kong. That doesn't seem to be freedom, though, Ben. This moment from Trump in the Oval Office the other day jumped out at me. I thought you'd enjoy this. China is one of the most repressive countries for journalists in the world. What signal does it send? Well, I don't know about that. I think we're repressive also. We get fake news. We don't repress, but they write fake news. So that was before he kicked a bunch of news outlets out of the White House. So hopeful stuff. Yeah, well, he would obviously prefer to have the press environment that Xi Jinping has where, you know, everybody's required to study Xi Jinping thought, you know, in China. I think you make a good point about, like, people should be mindful for the spin that's going to come out of here, right? Because, you know, Trump will spin something on Iran, for instance. Like, beyond not buying oil, there's another thing that I think he will want from Xi Jinping, which is that one of the reasons that oil prices didn't go up more is that China has a significant amount of energy reserves, and they simultaneously started using less energy, which we've talked about, to keep prices down, to keep demand somewhat down. And we're able to tap into, like, their substantial reserves. So the favor that I'm sure Trump would like to get before the midterm elections is some Chinese policy that, you know, releases some of the pressure, relieves some of the pressure on oil markets. We'll see if, you know, Xi Jinping is in a giving mood on that or not. My sense is he'll probably do very little, but maybe a little bit, Trump tries to spin as bigger than it is. But yeah, I mean, it's just, you know, they'll be pushing on Trump on Taiwan. Maybe this is the first summit since Trump, you know, disparaged South Korea. China's obviously allied with North Korea. I'd watch for whether, you know, in the Chinese readouts, they seem to get anything from Trump on Taiwan arms sales. I think there's a very significant Taiwan arms sale that's kind of frozen right now. I think $14 billion, so not an inconsiderable amount. So, you know, nothing about this will feel quite normal, including the fact that Trump will be envious. Not only will he not be raising press freedom and human rights issues, he will be envious of the system that Xi Jinping leads, which accounts for part of the reason why he's going to meet him at the airport. Yeah, to lick his boots. All right, let's turn to AI, because there's been a lot of discussion lately about kind of the existential threat to human rights. And I think that's a really important humanity that AI may or may not pose. The honest answer there is like, no one really knows. Everyone's kind of speculating or guessing. But there are a lot of ways that artificial intelligence is impacting our world right now that have national security implications that are worth discussing. So a couple examples, Ben. First, Bloomberg has a big piece out this week about this series of failures that led to the U.S. airstrike on the Iranian elementary school in Manab that killed over 150 people, including 123 children. The problem started with the fact that the U.S. was using dated intelligence and satellite imagery for its targeting that didn't show that what was once an IRGC facility had been renovated and converted at least partially into a school, an elementary school. But then CENTCOM relied heavily on artificial intelligence for its targeting processes, specifically this Palantir program called MAVEN that pulls together all these different data points, like 150 data points, to create a list of targets. I think military planners, according to this report, wrongly thought that MAVEN would identify and sort out outdated intelligence, but it did not. And MAVEN replaced in minutes with AI these processes that used to take human analysts hours and hours of painstaking work. And then on top of that, Pete Hegseth got rid of like 90 percent of the people who are supposed to step in and review targeting packages to prevent civilian casualties. So this cascade of failures that led to the worst civilian casualty incident in the 21st century involving children. The second piece we wanted to highlight was CNN had this article about how AI nearly started a war between the U.S. and China. So this story was this past spring, there was a military analyst who used AI to create a report, and the report falsely claimed that a Chinese ship was carrying nuclear weapons components. This flipped out everybody in the Pentagon. And luckily, they kind of double-checked this AI-generated Intel before U.S. forces were able to do anything to stop it. And so this was a very, very important thing. And so this is a very important thing. And so this is literally boarded the ship, but apparently it was a very close call. They were like hours away. And more broadly speaking, the article gets into the ways that the Pentagon and the intelligence community is really pushing itself to use more artificial intelligence today. But that adoption has been messy. It's different systems at different parts of the government using these different tools. And there's no real way to kind of account for the fact that these things just hallucinate shit sometimes and get stuff wrong. And the third, Ben, is there's been a bunch of reports about Times wrote up some examples of state-backed efforts by Iran and China to basically spam social media with these AI-generated posts. There's also private companies in Israel offering similar services. And the Wall Street Journal had a big piece about how the upcoming Israeli election is just like flooded with AI-generated videos and slop and crap. One Israeli research outfit found that one in eight recent Israeli election-related posts, social media posts, was created or altered by AI. So it's just this like deluge of garbage. So, Ben, I mean, obviously those intelligence failures at the top are horrific and tragic and, you know, kind of like things that need to be addressed immediately. I would say like in terms of the biggest risks I worry about in the kind of medium term from AI, it's like people like Trump or Bibi Netanyahu or other bad actors using artificial intelligence to rip our society apart, both through kind of like election disinformation, but also just like generally by spreading disinformation online. Yeah, I think let's kind of catalog some of these national security risks because, you know, we'll posit that people are worried about mass job dislocation. People are worried about data centers taking power and water and other resources. People are worried about, you know, their kids being taught by chatbots, you know. But if you take a step back, the national security risks are really acute. One is cyber risks. And so we saw in the last couple of years, you know, a lot of people have been trying to escape human control for a time and, you know, hack into the internet. I mean, massive cyber disruption because the AI got loose or got curious or was just trying out different things. That should be a concern to people. Just the ability to do offensive cyber and the ease with which you can do it, I think should be a concern for people. The risk that you can use AI to build biological pathogens, create biological weapons, something anthropic is warned about, you know, that's a concern. And then, yeah, as you point out, like AI being implemented into kind of command and control and targeting decisions before we put guardrails around it. Look, it's not a war crime if the AI is the one that picked out the girls' school. Like, it still is. And in the rush to adapt this technology and to think you're cutting edge, you know, I think most people would be pretty uncomfortable with AI making totally autonomous decisions to kill people, which is something that I think is, you know, happening with an alarming degree. Yeah. And I think that's, I think that's a really important point. And I think that's, I think that's a flavor of it. I mean, in the Biden administration, they were trying to negotiate the Chinese around getting AI out of any nuclear command and control for quite obvious reasons. And look, you talked last week, Tommy, about the Houthis using AI to mimic the voice of a commander in order to get them to surrender. I mean, if let's say the AI wants to mess with us, you know, well, one way might be interesting in a kind of war games, if anybody remembers that movie, but like, let's try to get the US and China into a war, like that might be interesting for the AI to observe, you know, humanity or something. So these risks are very real. And, and that comes back to the Xi Jinping thing. I think it's very important for us occasionally to do the thought exercise of what would be happening if we had competent leadership. Because what I think would be happening is, we would not be in a war with Iran, as like I said, we would not be in trade war. And this entire UN General Assembly would be dominated by concerns around artificial intelligence. And you would have a US Chinese summit that is setting up, you know, and I know people say, well, the Chinese, they may not want to negotiate this either. We fucking have to negotiate on this. And you'd be setting up working groups and all these different aspects of AI and the guardrails needed and the communication necessary to avoid misunderstandings or cyber attacks that can cascade. And that bilateral summit would, I think, probably inform some broader UN, I think, would be a really interesting thing to be able to do, you know, in the future. And I think that's a really interesting thing to be able to do, you know, in the future. I think that's a really interesting thing to be able to do, you know, in the future. Yeah. Trump mentioned artificial intelligence during his UN General Assembly speech on Tuesday. Let's watch that excerpt because it's sort of telling. The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for the artificial intelligence being spoken of so much now, here and after officially called super intelligence, changing the name, and that the use of the word artificial makes intelligence fall. It makes it sound fake, and it is not fake. It's actually amazing. In fact, it is exactly the opposite of what it purports. From this point forward, all of United States documents and hopefully the world's will be changed to use the much more accurate term super as opposed to artificial. So it's super intelligence. So he's worried about the branding for AI and at the same time. Not in any ways, he's actually refusing to regulate it or put a sort of global framework in place to protect us from the downsides of it. So that's great. Can you imagine being in that room and being a representative of some country that is not developing these crazy models that could kill us all? And you've got Donald Trump, the one person in the room who could actually do the most to put guardrails around this stuff. And he's just talking about a branding exercise and how super it is and, you know, probably reading an excerpt. That was prepared by like, you know, the all in Steven Miller, David Sachs or something. I mean, because Trump's concerns about AI, I think, amount to two things. One, it inflates the stock market. The whole stock market is kind of like this AI pyramid scheme where a bunch of companies keep passing the same money around like they they they build the they invest in the frontier companies that then buy the data centers and, you know, it just keeps on going around. And he doesn't want to stop the the juice because like the stock market matters that much to him, of course. And then the other thing is that his big donors like Elon Musk and, you know, all these other tech bros, you know, the Marc Andreessen of the world, Peter Thiel, they all want an unregulated thing and talk about the globalist elite that wants to regulate things like AI. And and that's all he cares about. And frankly, you know, he's 80 years old, he's not going to be around for the species extinction. I'm looking to that is that is, you know, being predicted as 10 percent. Yeah, he's not the not the leader we need for this moment, that is for God damn sure. Speaking of superintelligence, Ben, Crooked Con is coming up in the lineup is here. We'll have a bunch more announcements to come, but we just want to announce some of the first batch of names, including some elected officials, some campaign strategists, pollsters, organizers and some of your favorite crooked hosts. Some early names are people like Congressman Jamie Raskin, who, you know, is a critical voice on oversight. Van Hollen, Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen, who's been a really important progressive voice on foreign policy. Ben Wickler, master organizer from Wisconsin, Jennifer Welsh from the I've Had It pod. There are many, many more people on this list. I have like 30 names in front of me. I'm not going to read them all. But Crooked Con is going to be amazing. It was a blast last year. The vibes were immaculate. We expect nothing less this year. Please come join us. Prices will go up on October 6. So get your ticket now. Go to crookedcon.com for more information and to get tickets. That's crookedcon.com. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Mental health is top of mind for a lot of us these days and for good reason. If there's a persistent problem preventing you from reaching your goals or just living your life, therapy can be extremely impactful. BetterHelp therapists have at least three years and 1,000 hours of hands-on experience. 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They do some UN business and then they have a bunch of meetings on the sidelines with each other to try to get stuff done and destroy Manhattan traffic. Last year, Trump accused the UN of triple sabotage. Remember this? Because of the malfunctioning escalator. Oh, I forgot the elevator. Teleprompter and the audio issues. It was a triple sabotage. So hopefully it doesn't fall victim to them like Antifa elevator or something. But like the Met Ball, UNGA has a theme. Let me run this one by you, Ben. Restoring trust, managing transformation, a United Nations that delivers for all. It's good to see that like bad focus grouped democratic slogans have made it to the UN. It's real stirring. Yeah, I don't think that that one's going to pass the smell test with anyone. And look, the reality is there's very little that the UN and its staff and leadership can do. This is where I defend them. Right? I mean, we've got a permanent five members of the UN Security Council that include Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and have veto over, you know, the most important issues in the world, like in the US withholding dues and things like that. It's just you're not going to do whatever that word salad suggests you're going to do. I mean, Trump's building a board of peace that he personally controls with a slush fund to be like a counter institution. So I don't know. I. It's nice. I think it's a good thing. you know, issue by issue, taking on everything that was happening in the world. And that wasn't unique to us. I mean, that was the case for any U.S. administration for most of the last 80 years. Like now, Trump parachutes into insults on people, does a few meetings, probably raises some money and takes off. Yeah. I just like that they have terrible branding like other Democrats. So as you mentioned, though, Trump's like Trump's not a fan of the organization. He's tried to undercut it in a million different ways. He's cut off their funding, set up the Board of Peace, although the Board of Peace has just utterly failed. A big focus this year is AI. No surprise. For some reason, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is hosting an AI event at the U.N. I'm not sure what's happening there. This is the last UNGA for outgoing Secretary General Antonio Gutierrez. He's going to give his final address to the General Assembly on Tuesday morning. His successor has not yet been selected. CNN says that Costa Rica's former vice president, Rebecca Grinspan, is the leading candidate to replace him. But we all heard Trump float. FIFA President Gianni Infantino for the job over the summer. So this could always get dumber. A couple of notable things about this week. Trump delivered his speech Tuesday. It was mostly the same bullshit. It did include the AI comments we played earlier and then a threat to Iran that we'll play later. So Trump took some time out to meet with New York City Mayor Zoran Mamdani at Gracie Mansion. He also met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Tuesday. He's going to meet with French President Emmanuel Macron and have a pull aside with Venezuelan President. Trump is going to meet with British Prime Minister Andy Burnham for the first time. Then he goes back to D.C. to schlep. cheese bags or whatever, and lick his boots. Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu is coming to town. Sadly, Zohra Mamdani will not be able to arrest him. But that hasn't stopped Bibi from putting out super lame videos like this one. Let's watch. Shame on you, Mr. Mamdani. Shame on you for supporting the Hamas terrorist monsters who butchered our people. Shame on you for inciting riots against New York Jews. I'm coming to the UN. I'm going to tell the truth about our heroic soldiers. And I'm going to tell the truth about you. It's like every word of that is a lie. Also, like everyone hates Netanyahu. That's only going to help Mamdani. Like Israel's critics hate Netanyahu. Israel's supporters hate Netanyahu. Democrats hate Netanyahu. Republicans hate Netanyahu. And he's just like the Israeli ambassador to the UN was saying on TV that Mamdani should be arrested. It's like this is going to backfire on you fucking morons. I know you're playing election politics in Israel, but this is harming you here in the U.S. Yeah. I mean, if you stacked Zohran Mamdani's approval rating against Bibi Netanyahu's globally, like, you know, this is not a close call. And frankly, the percentage of people in the world that agree with Mamdani about Israel and Palestine and Gaza is got to be, I don't know, 80, 90 percent, you know. So, yeah, obviously, Netanyahu is only speaking to like his shrinking sliver of audience among American. And some smaller number of Americans than used to be the case. But it's just so stupid and hackish and it's offensive, right? Like, I was offended to see the Israeli ambassador be like, they should arrest Mamdani. Like, what other ambassador of a foreign country would like call for the arrest of the mayor of the biggest city in the country, you know? And two other things about this, Tommy. Like, one is I was mentioning this. I was mentioning this to our producers before we came on. But, like, I'm struck when I talk to audiences, like, yesterday I spoke to a group of kind of activists from around the world. They follow Mamdani very closely. Like, he is wildly popular around the world. Like, people are tracking his Instagram account. People are tracking what he's doing. So, Bibi's just elevating that. I mean, I guarantee you that that kind of video just redounds to Zohran Mamdani's benefit. No doubt. It's not persuading a single person to change their mind about Mamdani. It's probably introducing some people to Mamdani in ways that they'll probably end up agreeing. The other thing, I'm going to make the mistake, Tommy, of, like, responding to the comments a bit. Oh, no. Which is there's a narrative. Well, there's a narrative sometimes that I've heard that, you know, Mamdani shouldn't have called Bibi a war criminal. Because then he'll use that in his politics. And it could help him in the election. Let me tell you this. I have heard that same fucking narrative. Every election for the last, like, 15 years that Israel has continued to, you know, choose Bibi Netanyahu as its prime minister. And what that is a recommendation of is just never criticize Israel. It's the same mentality that led Joe Biden to never break publicly with Israel. It's like, we can't criticize them because if we do criticize them, they might use that criticism in their politics. Well, that's an insane way to go through life. That we should never. We should never use our voice because someone might try to manipulate further. They're already, you know, like, we've not gotten a very good window into the health of Israeli society in the last few days with the release of this new documentary film, Naza, about the genocide in Gaza, where they're going to try to denaturalize, like, the Israeli citizens who made it. Like, I'm sorry. I'm glad Mamdani's speaking out. And frankly, the fact that they react so hyperbolically indicates that they know they have a problem. Yeah. Indicates that they know that that's hitting the target. Yeah. And they think it's good politics. I just don't. And also, the Trump administration once again denied a visa to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. So he has to join events virtually, which, like, someone explain to me someday how that helps the peace process or, you know, get to a two-state solution as far off as it is. So, yeah, I mean, that's the gist of UNGA, Ben. Anything else kind of you're looking at this week or just kind of another underwhelming week here? The only thing I'd say, again. Like, in the, you know, demerit category is that this, like, is ostensibly, I think, climate week at the UN. Like, you always have climate week. And it is striking how much that's fallen off the agenda, given what's happening in the world. It might be time to bring that back a bit, given the gas prices that we're paying right now. Yeah, or the, like, super-alien, you know, we got out here. All right, let's turn to the Houthis. Last week, we did a deep dive into how the Houthi rebels took control of all this territory in Yemen and how they now essentially control access to the Red Sea via the Bab al-Mandib Strait. We're not going to revisit all of that. So, check out last week's episode if you want the kind of backstory. But since then, the Houthi military campaign has expanded. On Saturday, they launched a bunch of missiles and drones at Riyadh and at more oil facilities in Saudi Arabia. They are fighting at the same time to take control of more territory in Yemen's southwest mountains. Basically, what they're trying to do is control some territory that would allow them to cut off government forces in a city in the southwest, which would be a big deal. So, this week, we're going to take a look at some of the things that they're trying to do. A couple things worth just sort of noting. The Saudis claim the Houthis fired a drone towards Mecca. That would be a bit of an unsettling escalation, Ben, and a huge, you know, sectarian ramifications. The Houthis deny it, but just something to watch. The UN says that 130,000 people have been displaced over the last few weeks by the fighting in Yemen. Thousands of people actually crossed the Bab al-Mandib Strait to Djibouti. The BBC had some great coverage from a refugee camp there that's worth everyone's time. And the World Food Program says more broadly that 18 million people are facing acute food insecurity in Yemen. The AP reported that Houthi officials met with U.S. embassy staff in Oman and basically reaffirmed their commitment to the ceasefire with the U.S., which gets us to our next story, which is the New York Times had this big pullout about Trump's indecision over what to do about the Houthis. Basically, the gist is on Wednesday of last week, Trump was not going to get involved. Then on Thursday, he changed his mind. He changed his mind after another request from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. But then on Sunday, Trump apparently changed his mind again, like right as attacks were about to begin, as, you know, bombs are being loaded on the planes. And so it just seems like, look, I'm glad the U.S. is not getting deeper involved in the fight with the Houthi rebels again. I think people forget that we were bombing them for like 50 days last year and it didn't really do much. But it seems like Trump is in a terrible situation then. He goes after the Houthis. They're going to start targeting U.S. ships in the Red Sea. Oil prices will go up. Voters will hate us getting sucked deeper into the war. But if he hangs MBS out to dry, the Saudis are more likely to figure out, I think, a path forward that just sort of ignores U.S. interests. And I think Trump seemed to be alluding to the fork in the road he has generally about Iran policy during his UNGA speech. Let's listen to that excerpt. But I have a big decision to make. Will a deal be made? Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before? Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic? Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations? But I believe we'll make a deal right after the election because it doesn't make sense for them not to. They're waiting to see how I do in the midterm. What they don't realize is that I'm not running. So there's a little genocidal threat from the world. well of the UN General Assembly. Ben, what'd you make of the speech and kind of the reporting on, you know, Trump and the Houthis and sort of what's been happening on the ground over the last couple of weeks? Yeah, I mean, to continue the theme of like what's happening and what should happen, it is not tough or strong six months into the dumb war that you started that is creating massive global economic shortages, that is screwing over every country that is representing that hall to stand up and be like, I have a decision to make. I could not, like, guess what? Everybody's read the true social posts where you said the exact same fucking thing for like five months about this decision to annihilate them or not, you know, and nobody believes it because the reality is nobody thinks that the Iranians are begging for a deal because the Iranians are winning the war and the Iranians are pretty transparent. They say out loud that they're using their leverage to impose as much pain as they can on the, the United States vis-a-vis the global economy and to even put at risk the dollars or reserve currency. Like the Iranians are very, the world understands the Iranian strategy. They may not like it because they're suffering shortages. What they don't understand is what Trump is doing. And when he gets up there and says, I don't essentially know what I'm doing. I could do this or I could do this. And these are two wildly different things. It doesn't instill a lot of confidence and pointing to a midterm election that you are very likely to lose as like the, the key barometer of your decision-making kind of, so weird. I mean, I think what he was trying to tell the Houthis is like, don't play me for time to get past this election because I don't care about the election, but all it did in practice was show how focused he is on the election, that he is actually mentally tying the issues together. It was just like, seemed self-defeating. Everything about it was self-defeating. I mean, I just can't imagine he was like, oh, this is a great, and we should say, by the way, that the United Nations was founded out of the vision of the United States and Franklin Roosevelt to be a place where you prevented, nuclear annihilation from happening and to be a place where you tried to prevent wars. And so we have fallen a very far distance in the 80 plus years since that we now have a president of the United States standing in the well of the UN threatening to destroy an entire country. You know, that, that's not like something that we get a pass for here in the US. Now I should say like, in terms of what happened or what should happen, there's a, there's plenty of good reasons to not start bombing the Houthis, right? And one of them is that we've tried it. Like Trump tried it. Biden tried it. I mean, one of my favorite Joe Biden quotes was when he said, and do you remember this one, Tommy, where he said, is it effective, the bombing of the Houthis? No. Will it continue? Yes. Like that's, that's a thing that Joe Biden said out loud, right? They kind of summed up the insanity of American post 9-11 foreign policy. And the reality is like, what needs to happen with the Houthis as with Iran is a negotiation about the future of Yemen. Like we have to accept, and the Saudis have to accept that these people are not just like going to go away or surrender. They live in Yemen. They, they want some say over their lives, whether we like that or not. And, you know, unless we want this country to be a permanent humanitarian disaster in which there's periodic bombing campaigns and offenses and, you know, ceasefires that are routinely violated, like we need to negotiate something in Yemen, just like we need to negotiate something with Iranians. There's not a military solution to these problems. And, you know, 25 years after 9-11, like that should be apparent to us. Yeah. A couple more odds and ends about the war in Iran generally. So the Washington Post had a report last week that says the Pentagon is lying about the number of U.S. troops who have died in the war. So the official casualty count or death count is 18, but the Washington Post cites a couple of sources. One who says actually 22 service members have died. Another says 23, three contractors have also died. The post says, quote, not all of the undisclosed deaths are directly tied to the conflict. The Washington Post says, quote, not all of the undisclosed deaths are directly tied to the conflict, but have involved U.S. personnel who were in the Middle East amid ongoing hostilities, this person said. So just another piece of evidence about how this administration is lying and covering up the true cost of the war. And then Alex Ward at the Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump administration is proposing a $5 billion fund to help countries in the Gulf rebuild their energy infrastructure and kind of get around the Strait of Hormuz, which does not suggest that the Trump administration or Trump's team is confident about them solving the problem in the near term. And kind of loosening the Iranian grip on the Strait of Hormuz. It seems like they are making long-term plans for the Iranians to be in control of it, which is, I think, you know, again, another sign that they are losing. It's a sign that they're losing. It's a sign that they are adapting to a world in which Iran is quite likely, maybe in partnership with Oman, to extract revenue from the Strait of Hormuz. So they can talk tough, but their actions tell a different story, that they're adjusting to a reality created in a way that they don't want to. So I think it's a sign that they're entirely by their war. This was not a problem before the war. The other thing is, I'm not even sure that it's effective because the Saudi pipeline that was another way to get energy out of the region to global markets has been bombed and taken offline by the Houthis, you know, and other Iranian proxies. So it's not as if if we stay in this kind of forever war they were with Iran, it's not as if they couldn't do some damage to other infrastructure that is built to try to get oil and gas out of there from some other route. Yeah, they seem like the Houthis have been creative and their tactics have adapted and the U.S.'s have not. This podcast is sponsored by Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in-one website platform designed to elevate your online presence and drive your success. Squarespace gives you all the tools to claim your domain, build a professional website, expand your brand and facilitate payments all in one place. 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Pot Save the World is brought to you by Hungry Root. Anyone who has kids will tell you that figuring out what to feed them and yourself day in and day out is one of the hardest parts of the job. Hungry Root is a simpler way to handle meals during the week. There is no mental energy expended on meal planning because Hungry Root does it for you, delivering everything you need right to your door to eat healthy every day. Hungry Root takes into account your health goals, dietary preferences, and budget to create a custom delivery for you each week. From there, they tailor your deliveries accordingly. Once you note an ingredient to avoid, like gluten or dairy, it stays on your blocked list. They source only high-quality ingredients like meat and seafood with no hormones or antibiotics, plus organic produce and non-GMO options. Think of it as the convenience of a meal kit combined with the ingredients you need. If you've ever started with Hungry Root, couldn't be easier. You answer a few questions about your diet preferences, your budget, and your health goals. Hungry Root then gathers recipes based on your preferences and fills your cart with everything you need. All of those items are delivered right to your door, and you're all set with everything you need for healthy meals and snacks for the week. For a limited time, get 40% off your first order, plus get a free item in every box for life. Go to HungryRoot.com slash world and use the code WORLD. That's HungryRoot.com slash world, code WORLD to get 40% off your first order. 40% off your first box and free item of your choice for life. Let's turn to Russia. So Russia held its first parliamentary election since the war in Ukraine began. These were votes for the lower house, the Duma, which happened once every five years. Here's what we know so far about the results. In a shocking turn of events, Ben, United Russia, which is Putin's party, is on track to have its biggest majority in history with a record 355 seats in the body of 450. The other parties that will have seats in the Duma have basically support the war and don't oppose the Kremlin in any way. So it's, again, was not a real election. Turnout was reportedly 59%, but outside observers think those numbers are inflated. Russians were also encouraged to vote online this year because what could go wrong with that? And Putin even put out a video of himself like playing with his mouse at his computer, ostensibly claiming he's voting. As the voting was happening, Ukraine launched a major attack on Moscow. They hit an oil refinery, they hit a bunch of neighboring residential buildings, and Russia carried out a barrage of missile strikes on industrial facilities across Ukraine this week. Bigger picture, Ben, it seemed like the anxiety about Russia potentially testing NATO in some new way hit kind of a fever pitch over the weekend. It was a combination of kind of maybe fake news or misleading or alarmist news on social media, but then also real comments from European intelligence officials and European political leaders about growing concern about Russian hybrid attacks. There was French President Emmanuel Macron. He said he ordered a plan to protect French critical infrastructure, and he did this like big briefing for a bunch of the political parties in France. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Russia was planning drone and missile attacks on NATO countries that support Ukraine. Last week, we talked about that Russian drone strike on a train that that shortly after the train station shortly after a train went through. They had a bunch of like European national security officials and Boris Johnson, the former minister of the UK. So I don't know, Ben, you and I were were texting some of this stuff back and forth over the weekend. Like, what did you make of that? of the increased anxiety? And like, is there anything to say about the Russian elections? I feel like, of course, Putin's party did well. Yeah, the Russian elections are no surprise. I have to say, like, I was alarmed by some of the messages out of Europe. Me too. I talked to some people that, you know, are close to European governments and everybody kind of swears that, no, this is real. Like, I mean, Macron, for instance, you know, gathered all the potential presidential candidates in the next French election, their parties to kind of brief them, kind of an extraordinary show of like, this is a national issue, national emergency. The talk out of Poland was about the inevitability, essentially, of Russian attacks on European soil. You know, and these run the gamut from, you know, potential military actions into the Baltics to hitting European countries directly that are providing, you know, support to Ukraine. You know, in talking to people, what you hear is that the intelligence about, you know, escalating these kind of gray space things that have already happened, like kind of drone probing, potential kind of sabotage attacks, potential drone attacks themselves, that that's kind of what's in the intelligence, that this could become increasingly, you know, kinetic, to use a jargony word, but blowing stuff up in Europe, which is, again, already happened, but, you know, could escalate. And that, you know, that should get people's attention. I have to say also, Tommy, after kind of freaking out about that for a couple of days, when the Ukrainians, like, do the single largest strike on Moscow of the war, which they did a couple of days ago, it makes me nervous. Like, do I understand the Ukrainian desire to impose a cost on Russia? Sure. But like, I also think that, you know, at a certain point, that's going to lead to an escalation into Europe. And that, again, what should be happening is like a negotiation by people other than Jared Kushner and Steve Woodkoff to try to de-escalate this thing. Because right now we're going in one direction and it's not the right direction because you don't want to see attacks in Europe. I get the Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil and gas infrastructure because there's an obvious strategic path. You know, there's obvious, there's an obvious strategy there. It did seem like the strikes over the weekend were timed to be at the end of the Duma elections to send a political message and maybe scare the population, which I agree with you. It seems like, on one hand, I get it. On the other hand, it does seem likely to get Putin to further escalate because it seems like that is his only speed. Yeah. And it seemed like it was meant to kind of personally humiliate Putin, right? Who in the past has not taken kindly to any effort to, you know, when Hillary Clinton, criticized his parliamentary election, you know, 2011 or 12, I forget which year, you know, Putin responded pretty forcefully. So again, like, I know people could say, well, you know, you can't put any constraints on the Ukrainians. I don't know. Like, I just, when you have a bunch of Europeans saying that they're going to start attacking Europe and killing people in these countries, I'm not sure, like, a massive drone bombardment of Moscow is, like, you know, the right approach. Well, look, from a Ukrainian perspective, like, I'm not saying they want any Europeans to get hurt or killed, but they would certainly love them to be dragged in and to be part of this conference. To be involved in the war. Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I don't, I don't want to assign that intention to the Ukrainians. Yeah, I'm not saying that was their intent, but I mean, if that's what happened. Yeah, but, you know, one could draw that, like, and again, they're not, they're the ones fighting. They're the ones dying. They're the ones who got invaded. Like, none of this is their fault. They did not bring this upon themselves. And they're fighting an existential war. But I do think that that's, that's why it's important for external parties, Europe and the United States, to be doing more to try to turn the temperature down. In part for Ukraine's sake too, right? Because it's not as if, you know, they're not suffering in this war too. And it just, it feels like there's no blueprint for that other than Jared Kushner giving interviews in which he demands that the Ukrainians, you know, accept all Putin's terms. Right, exactly. As we saw last week. And then meanwhile, you know, we talked a couple of weeks ago about these election results in Germany where the far right, in some cases, neo-Nazi AFD party, took 44% of the vote in this region of Germany called Sachsen-Anhalt. It's a small state in Eastern Germany. There were more elections in Germany over the weekend. And the results were once again terrible for German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and the CDU party. First, there were elections in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. The AFD got the largest share of the vote there with 38%. But the CDU didn't even reach the 5% threshold required to get the vote. seat in the state parliament. Now, I think that will not be as a dire an outcome there because the Social Democrats did well enough that they can probably cobble together a coalition that will keep the AFD out of power. But it's still, you know, the trend is the same. The AFD is doing well and the CDU is collapsing. And then in Berlin, the left wing Die Linke party beat out the CDU in the mayoral elections. So, again, you have these centrist establishment parties getting crushed from new, more extreme parties from the right and the left. There was a poll released Tuesday by a broadcaster in Germany called RTL and TV. They found that 55 percent of voters in Germany would support Mertz stepping down as chancellor. There was another recent poll found that only 13 percent of respondents thought Mertz was doing a good job. He has vowed to stay in office, Ben. But boy, given all that we just discussed about threats to NATO and Trump and the UN being destabilized, it's not the best. It's the best time to have like a hobbled German chancellor as the far right neo-Nazi party rises. Yeah. I mean, if you're looking at a pretty unstable era for the next two years where the war in Iran could drag on with acute global economic challenges, maybe some financial crisis on the horizon, AI could lead to kind of like cyber disruptions like I talked about. Russia could escalate into Europe. We're dealing with a situation in which Friedrich Mertz clearly does not have the confidence of his own public. Right. And so, you know, I think it's a good time to and so much so that a far right party, the AFD, is kind of replacing the CDU as the right wing party in Germany. Emmanuel Macron is a deeply unpopular lame duck president as they prepare for an election in which Marine Le Pen from the far right national rallies, probably the front runner in that election. Right. Andy Burnham became prime minister of the United Kingdom like a few weeks ago. Right. This is not the ideal situation to be going through. Really acute political challenges in Europe. And, you know, like Burnham is off to a pretty good start. So that's a good sign. But like, man, there's a lot riding on the direction of French and German politics in the next couple of years. Yeah, it's a little scary. Finally, Ben, we're going to try something new to close the show out. So we're going to do the classic kind of choose your own adventure novel style ending. You get to choose how this episode ends. I'm going to give you three options for stories about military genius during the Trump administration. And you tell us which one you want to dig into. OK. Option one, loading the triumphal arch with drones and sniper ammo. Option two, the Pentagon implementing a waist to height requirements and grooming standards for anyone who wants to attend Pete Hexeth's state of the force speech whenever the hell it is. Three, operational security over the for the F-35, our fighter jet. We could talk about how fighter jet components disappeared in Hong Kong or could be accessed in Saudi Arabia. So we're going to do the three options. We're going to do the three options. Which option tickles your fancy? I think you just kind of identified the third option. I have one question for you before I answer, which is which of those three Trump scandals do you think I did an MS Now hit on? Oh, the arch. Height to weight, man. Oh, no way. That is like great programming. Yeah, yeah. What? Why that one? Because it's just so absurd, right? It's just like so, you know, Pete Hexeth's weird obsession. I'm going to go with the arch. Yeah, I think loading a fucking arch with ammo seems a little more absurd, but you tell me. And because here's like, you know, I heard you guys talk about this a little bit on Pots of America. I share your concerns that filling a gigantic landmark that is unobstructed from all directions with a massive amount of explosives that could detonate on some charge is probably not a good idea. Yeah. I will tell you that I'm so. So authoritarian-pilled too, though, that I was like, well, wait a second. Will the military coup in 2028 begin from the arch? Oh, yeah. I was literally like, is Trump going to be like pre-positioning like drones and ammunition around Washington so that when he calls Pete Hexeth and Raisin Cane or whoever's left in the military and says like, we must not allow this Ossoff election to go forward or whoever it is, I'm not picking a favorite. Um, uh, that, that, that thought weirdly, like was the first one in my mind more than the, uh, operational security. Maybe they'll fill the Kennedy Center with weapons, uh, to make it a national security imperative to rebuild it. I don't know. Uh, that's where my head went. I just, I think that the, like the, the earliest triumphal arches, the Roman iteration were commemorating when they sacked a city. So they would like take Jerusalem or whatever and build one. So I guess this is Trump. Yeah. It's like showing us all that he's taken Washington and taken our politics and now owns it. I hear you on the. anxiety about um uh this being where the insurrection could begin i mean like the idea that like you need to fill this thing full of drones or sniper ammo or any of like have a sniper pad on top of it is such obvious bullshit clearly he thinks that there's going to be all these legal challenges to the arch like there are to the ballroom and he thinks that some sort of made-up national security argument will help him get the construction green lit and and through the court system maybe that's right it's probably right given kind of what we've seen but like like unlike the ballroom which like i hoped i'm not really all that look it's stupid i wish they didn't do it i'm not like hell-bent on democrats tearing it down uh this arch i hope just never gets constructed or if it does i would rip it down fucking immediately because it is like a monument to authoritarianism and it's completely unnecessary it's a monument to authoritarianism it's a potential risk to flight and it's a potential risk to flight and it's a potential risk to flight right but it's also like again not to be i'm very rarely nostalgic about my time in washington um i do think one of the best and most beautiful things about washington is that you have the lincoln memorial and then memorial bridge which goes to arlington national cemetery which was a civil war cemetery and our guys the radical republicans after like stomping out slavery and defeating the south intentionally put that cemetery right in front of where robert e lee used to live you know so that part of dc is all about our civil war history and to just plop down some fascist arch in the middle of it um kind of ruins the whole vibe for me i should also say you know putting coup concerns aside which we probably shouldn't entirely there's a kind of militarization of washington i mean you know i've been in cities where the capital of a country is like a very militarized place and you see troops in the streets and kind of shows the military force like dc's creeping i mean the national guard out in the streets and now we've got ammo dumps in the arch and we've got some giant bunker underneath the ballroom that's being built and it we're starting to feel like a little you know i don't want to impugn any region of the world but like one of those countries that has like a military militarized capital and that's you know it's a little disconcerting yeah it's good in any way it's strange it's like it's bizarre to me that he wants this of all the things the ballroom like that there is some sort of function to it fine whatever he wants to have events outside he's a long history of thinking the white house needs a ballroom and he doesn't like tents on the south lawn and he called axelrod about this and whatever 2012 or 2011 whatever it was the arch makes no sense i hope it never happens i agree with you that it does you know you feel like you're in like uh napidar like you know myanmar or something where it's exactly a military capital or like pyongyang or something i just it's uh not what we need in washington dc it's nuts no i'm a tear down the arch guy like the other ballroom will have to manage in some probably other way but this one should not stand the light of day arches are for mcdonald's uh okay that's it for ben and i we are going to take a quick break and then you're going to hear ben's conversation with mahar batar about some really really interesting exclusive new polling about voter sentiment and national security ahead of the midterm election so stick around for that pot say the world is brought to you by quince we all have those essentials in our closet that never fail the ones we can't stop wearing the sweater that goes with everything the perfect pair of pants or the tea that somehow always gets pulled out of the rotation above all the others those are the pieces that make getting dressed easy and that's what quince does best quince focuses on high quality wardrobe staples made 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brand uh the brand itself was crazy expensive but right below it there was a quince ad about a pair of shoes that looked identical to the ones i had searched that were literally one sixth the price i bought them i wear them all the time i love them that is the quince experience you get great quality stuff that looks good and fits great but is like way way way cheaper than other options out there find your next fall favorites at quince download the quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com slash world get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns now available in canada and the uk too that's q-u-i-n-c-e.com slash world your sausage mcmuffin with egg didn't change your receipt did the sausage mcmuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just five dollars only at mcdonald's for a limited time price and participation may vary promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing i'm nate silver i'm galen druke and i'm claire malone we're back this time with our friends at crooked media for a new show called still counting yeah numbers are hard it takes her easy and frankly numbers have only gotten harder what does the data actually say how do we reconcile that with the other things that we're seeing in american politics and around the world and how do we reconcile that with the other things that we're seeing in american politics and around the world and how do we use that data to understand or maybe even dare to predict the future of american politics new episodes every wednesday starting september 9th subscribe to still counting on youtube.com slash at still counting podcast or wherever you get your podcasts okay i'm very pleased to be joined today by maher batar who is the executive director of national security action a progressive foreign policy advocacy organization and the national security action organization that i co-founded i'm still on the board no longer chair of that board um maher's also played many roles over the years in the obama administration and the biden administration a stint in between as the counterpart to kash patel on the house intelligence committee maher was on the democratic side in case you're wondering um so that was an experience but maher we're not here to talk about that we're here to talk about some interesting polling that national security action did ahead of the midterms that we wanted to lift up so thanks a much for joining us yeah thanks man thanks for having me all right just to kind of set the stage a little bit um you know before you get into the findings just tell us a little bit about like who who you guys polled in what states like what you were looking for in this poll sure so we we designed this poll to really uh meet the moment before the midterms so it's focused on seven battleground states where we have competitive uh primaries uh including in the senate so that includes everywhere from texas to michigan to iowa um and a few other states and we're going to look at some of those states and uh it's a it has a sample size that actually leans conservative uh just given the states um including uh voters who uh by a slight majority voted for president trump in 2024 and we wanted to cover the waterfront of issues uh both um kind of across national security and foreign policy issues including kind of overall favorability but really to dive deeper on some of the some of the top issues okay so let's jump into these findings which i think are very relevant both to the campaigns that are ongoing and to the issues that are ongoing and to the and then also frankly in framing the presidential campaign that will start shortly after the midterms um you and i have gone back and forth a bit on this polling why don't you just start by talking a bit about how front and center national security concerns are and foreign policy concerns are for voters usually that's kind of a secondary issue after economic issues what did you find about the salience of what trump and the united states is doing around the world in in the poll yeah i think what i think is important is that as we approach november foreign policy is on the ballot and the reason is that the decisions that have been made here in washington by the trump administration are boomeranging back at home in ways that are uh having a pronounced impact for democrats independents and even republicans so the numbers are pretty remarkable across the states that we polled on for example on gas prices and the war in iran people are tying the war and the uh war directly to the crisis that they're feeling at the pump same thing on tariffs so the numbers are sky high um over 90 percent of uh respondents that we had in um across the battleground states tied uh the iran war directly to the pain that they're feeling at the pump and over 90 similarly including a large number of republicans tied to tariffs to the cost of living crisis that they're facing so we're really at a point where every single day and i think you're seeing in other countries emerging um over the last few weeks and really i think you're going to see it over the next few weeks are really tying those two things together and demonstrating the the the amount to which americans are tying what's happening abroad to what they're feeling at home yeah and i mean that's a credit i guess to people um um and and it's also i think a testament to the fact that even more so than other foreign policy failures or misadventures in the past right i mean correlate directly to prices going up. people feel that. The war in Iran, even more so than past wars that the United States has fought, has had this direct inflationary impact. So it's a good sign that people get that these foreign policies are fundamentally economic policies. You know, I want to dig into a couple of other issues, which is that, you know, one of the issues that has emerged as a growing source of concern to Americans in the midterm elections is artificial intelligence, AI. You know, that has really taken off in the last couple of weeks as these kind of hyperbolic warnings have come from some of the various companies. You worked a bit on AI in the Biden years, so you're familiar with that terrain. At the same time, that doesn't yet really bear out in this polling in the sense that, you know, the data center issues, the one that's kind of gotten a lot of attention here in the U.S., it's kind of almost treated as a domestic issue, right, involving tech companies. And yet, you know, one of the justifications for plowing ahead with unregulated AI is that we're in some race to the death with China over it. Xi Jinping's going to be with Trump this week. Presumably AI will be on the agenda. What do you see in the data about voter concerns about artificial intelligence? And how do you kind of unpack the discordance that people might feel about wanting to compete with China, but wanting to slow down AI? Yeah, so we wanted to better understand exactly how people are starting to link or not link AI to some foreign policy arguments that are made here in Washington, including on China. And our findings, and I should caveat, the findings are, we conducted this poll in late August, early September. So before a lot of what has surfaced in just recent weeks that has really changed the debate and the conversation in Washington, which we can talk about. So take that with a grain of salt. But in the polling, we're going to be talking about, you know, we're going to be talking about, you know, the polling that we did find, in terms of whether AI is viewed as a top national security concern, it does not rank anywhere close to the top. People are not connecting it right now to national security concerns. When you asked them about China, and whether there's a race with China, we saw two things. One is in our focus groups that we did before the poll. For a lot of folks, they just, they don't view it in those terms that there's a race with China on AI. That's just not the way that they think about it. And for a lot of them, it was actually, it didn't compare, they didn't compare it with China. And for a lot of them, it was actually, it didn't compare it with China. It didn't compute right. It didn't make sense that we would view it in that way. At the same time, in this poll, similarly, it ranks towards the bottom in terms of priorities, in terms of our engagement with China. And I think that points to a few things that we're seeing on the AI front. One is that for a lot of people, AI is becoming increasingly a concern that is linked really to concerns that they have closer to home, including their own families and their own livelihoods. So there's other polling out there that points to the fact that people are quite concerned about what it will mean for their own jobs, but also, I think, importantly, for their children and kind of the next generation coming up. I think there's also real concern around data centers and what it means for the quality of life in their own communities. And then there are also, I think, bigger social concerns that are emerging where families are concerned about what AI is going to mean for their children and their teenagers. And very similar to the concerns that have arisen because of social media, right, over time. And because of all of that, I think making an argument that there is a race with China on AI where we need to beat China does not resonate with average Americans. Because the logical conclusion of that for many might be, wait a second, you want me to lose my job or sacrifice my job for some sort of hypothetical race on AI with China? Yeah. And those two things don't match. Now, there's a lot more that we, I think, need to better understand in terms of how the public is reacting to what's happening in AI. So we're going to build out more polling in this space to better understand this. But I think this is an important moment for candidates and others as they think through this and they look at the data that for Americans, it's a visceral, it's increasingly, I think, a visceral and a personal issue that they have to contend with. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting to me that, look, the tariff issue and the war issue are pretty straightforward. For Democrats, right? Like, this war is dumb. We shouldn't have fought it. We should end it. These trade wars are dumb. They raise prices. AI is obviously a more complicated thing. It is striking to me, Mara, and I'm curious what you think, because, again, you worked on AI issues in the Biden administration when you guys were starting to put some guardrails around this stuff before Trump dismantled them, that in the conversations I'm in about AI and that I think you're in, you know, the national security concerns are actually very important. They're actually quite acute. Like, someone could build a biological weapon with AI. The cyber risks, you know, particularly with this chat GPT hugging face incident where the AI agents, like, escaped human control and were hacking into the Internet and stuff. The chance of a massive cyber disruption is, you know, enormous. There are these autonomous weapons that use AI for targeting. There's suggestions that that may have had something to do with the bombing of the girls' school in Iran. I mean, is one takeaway maybe? That, like, frankly, people need to hear more about these risks on the security side because they seem like the public probably doesn't know those things that you and I spend a lot of time worrying about. Yeah, I mean, I think one takeaway from our polling, but also other polling, is that this is a very fluid environment where the public is just starting to understand and grasp the consequences of AI, both positive ones, but also potentially extremely negative ones for broader society, but also for their own families. When I worked on this, Ben, we had conversations. At the time, so this was at 2023 and 2024, I was the head of intelligence and defense at the White House, and we were crafting what was essentially the world's first national security strategy on AI. And we wanted to think about, you know, as we're writing this first draft, what are the guardrails that we have to build in, but also how could it be valuable for national security purposes? And that was a tricky balance at a moment where we could kind of foresee many of the consequences, some of which have come to pass, but otherwise we. We were also trying to kind of understand what this means as a transformative technology at that moment in time. I think we're now at a point where we're starting to see the likely and the real risks of AI advancement in certain areas. There are also huge promise in other areas. And as a result of that, this is a moment where there needs to be an all hands on tech effort on the hill in the federal government, which unfortunately we're not seeing. And then also an effort for the public to better understand what this is going to mean for them as well. And that sort of transparency is key. And I think that's an area where we as an organization, but I think, you know, in concert with a lot of others, it's going to be a crucial moment now over the next year or two, as we get also closer to 2028, where we've got to really understand what this means and help the public understand. Because I do think it's going to be also a very potent issue in the 2028 election. Yeah, no, I think this is. Like put a pin in that and we'll come back to it on this show, too, because we want people to kind of understand these risks clearly, because this is going to define not just our politics, but our society. Well, another issue that has obviously been front and center in democratic debates is Israel-Palestine. We've noted the shifts in public opinion related to support for Israel relative to support for the Palestinians or related to questions like whether or not people believe Israel's committed war crimes. What did you find? What did you find about how much things have shifted on Israel in the poll? Yeah, so we approached this asking essentially two sets of questions here, because we wanted to understand also where the public is broadly on questions around whether or not to withhold military assistance and weapon sales or whether to continue those without conditions. And so the findings, I think, are actually really interesting and demonstrate that there is a bipartisan consensus here. On broader questions, and then I'll get to Israel and Palestine in a second, but on the broader question, we found across the board, Democrats, Independents, and Republicans, broad support for conditioning military assistance, either to prevent the misuse of our own weapons, or also to shape the behavior of the countries receiving potential military assistance or weapons from the United States. We had about 20% or so across the board, across Democrats, Independents, and Republicans. We actually want us to just end military assistance to other countries outright. And then a smaller proportion who want us to continue providing weapons to other countries with no conditions and no restrictions, which I think demonstrates the fact that there is actually broad support for ensuring that the United States builds in accountability to the way in which it's supporting other countries or providing weapons to other countries. On Israel and Palestine specifically, our findings are quite consistent with some of the recent polls. And I would just remind you, and those listening, the polling we did was in battleground states that leans conservative with voters that were more likely to vote for President Trump than who voted for Kamala Harris in 2024. And they're very similarly. So about 60% of the respondents supported either withholding military assistance or conditioning it to prevent misuse of the weapons or to shape the Israeli government's behavior or to end it outright. And a smaller percentage was open to the public. to just continuing without conditions. And when you broke it up between Democrats, Independents, and Republicans, actually, there is, the numbers on the Democratic and Independent side are much more supportive of conditioning with also a certain number who want to withhold or completely restrict or end in a much smaller percentage that want to continue without conditions. On the Republican side, you see a higher number who do want to continue without conditions. But at the same time, you'd still see numbers that are open to conditioning aid or even ending military assistance in the process. I think it's reflective of the shift that I know you've discussed on your show and that we've seen since essentially the Gaza War in 2024 all the way to 2026. And that's also reflecting increasingly in the way members of Congress are speaking and the way members of Congress are voting on the issue. Yeah. No, I mean, it does suggest at a minimum the baseline of, like, I don't know, following U.S. laws on the books about providing assistance to countries suspected of human rights abuses or world war crimes, like, that that can be a guide for politicians at a minimum. I mean, I'd go farther to an embargo, but it's notable. No, but I think the takeaway, Ben, I would just say is I think there's a recognition that the U.S. has leverage and the U.S. should use that leverage when it's necessary. Yeah, there's a common sense. I mean, like, I'm actually hardened by these results because there's, like, a common sense through line to them that I think should be a wake-up call. To people that work in national security. Like, so the question I want to ask about that is I was struck by the fact that the things that, you know, national security people, elites, whatever you want to call them, tend to talk about as these, like, threats, right? You know, Iran or China or, you know, Russia are actually not kind of top of mind for voters in the same way that they're top of mind for people. And people are worried about the stuff that is impacting their lives. You know, tariffs and, you know, the war driving up gas prices. And, you know, we just talk about AI is a growing concern. Now, one way to interpret that is a kind of America first thing, which is that, you know what, we're done. Like, we're exhausted with all this. Let's just kind of pull up the drawbridge and come home. And there's some of that that I think is true, like, particularly as it relates to wars. At the same time, though, you know, you find support for alliances in this poll. You find support for NATO in this poll. I mean, what do you, if you take the two, and they're not really straw men, they're kind of the two recent approaches, right? The Trump, well, he says it's America first, but then he launches wars and stuff. So, but if you take the America first argument, say Tucker Carlson argument, you know, as one poll of opinion, and then you take kind of, you know, I don't know, to be, I think kind of the Biden, you know, the American exceptionalism and we have to do all these things because we're America. What's the third way that it starts? It starts to appear in this public opinion. Where do you think people are on that question? Yeah, so I was quite struck because, you know, on the one hand, the poll is very clear that the foreign policy decisions that are happening now and in the last few months are having a direct impact on the lives of Americans, and they're perceiving it and interpreting it that way. And it's really driving the way in which they feel that, like, the crisis at home is in part spurred by decisions by this administration to go to war and to be reckless. with tariffs. At the same time, what I was struck by when I looked at the data was that there is an emerging alignment that I'm seeing in the way the electorate is also viewing foreign policy priorities. And I think that's something that, you know, candidates in 2028 are, should take heed of. And that's, for instance, you'll see that in the polling, voters do want their government to keep them safe. They do support a strong military, but they also want to keep us out of unnecessary wars. And we have a contained experiment now with a war of choice that is boomeranging at home and creating all of this pain at home and creating, you know, these geopolitical ripple effects around the world that are going to haunt us for a long time. That's an emerging alignment that you're seeing. You're seeing an emerging alignment that folks want a foreign policy and a trade policy that's going to protect American workers. But it's also not one that is used for self-enrichment and corruption, right? And those two things, you're seeing that playing out in the polling as well. I was actually quite struck in the polling that on corruption, it was actually one of the top three concerns for Americans when you asked them what their concerns were about threats to American security and remarkable support for investigations in the next Congress of Trump administration corruption, including, I thought, quite remarkable numbers around Republicans. I think it was something like 41% of Republican respondents supported investigations in the next Congress as either a high priority or a medium priority of Trump administration corruption. And then the last thing I think you're seeing is that there's a desire to be engaged in the world, as you said, support for NATO, support for alliances, but also not to do it in a way that's spending wastefully, but also where there's accountability for the support we provide other countries, including with regard to weapons sales and military support. I think it's a common sense approach, but I think it also provides a roadmap as we look at what is going to resonate with the public and what ultimately is beneficial for them. - I guess to wrap this up a bit, like, okay, so the message, I take it that if you, well, two questions, like one on the midterms and then one on the presidential campaign. So like, if you were advising Abdul El-Sayed, you know, in the next few weeks, and maybe Abdul's listening to this while he works out or something, what do you think the, what are the messages you would advise him or another midterm Senate candidate to be hitting? - So one of them is don't miss the opportunity to really hammer home the costs of both the war and the tariffs. And I've seen him do it and others have done it too. For, you know, Michiganders, but also others around the country, it's really hitting home. And, you know, the spike in diesel prices, for example, is having deeply hurtful effects around the country. So I've seen that and that's, you know, make sure to emphasize those points when they're campaigned. And their campaigning would be one thing I would emphasize. I think, you know, someone like Abdul is also, I think hitting the nerve when he says, you know, I don't want US military support to go to other countries when we could be using it at home, right? And he's tapping into the nerve that I mentioned based on the polling that we have, that in fact, there is a good number of people around the country who do feel that way. And they see kind of how our weapons are being used or massive military sales that are being provided with US taxpayer dollars, given the way it works. Given the way the system works. But they're not seeing their schools being funded properly or they're having trouble with their healthcare. And he's really tapping into that. And I think you're gonna see that, you're seeing that already across the board, but I could see it as something that is also gonna resonate in 2028. - Yeah, and so the last thing I wanted to ask is, like we've identified a lot of opportunity for Democrats here, right? You know, running against the tariffs, running against the war and the cost of it, you know, running against kind of this unaccountable military assistance to other countries. What do you think are gonna be challenges? You know, like, what did you see in here that's like, oh, you know, as Democrats begin to prepare presidential primary campaigns, where do you see a need for Democrats to make up ground or to kind of meet the moment in a way they haven't? Like, you know, beyond the opportunity in the poll, where do you see places where we have to move the needle? - Yeah, so there's also some hard medicine in these poll results that I think we should, we should take into account and really think through how we work through kind of now, between now and the midterms, but also after that. One is on corruption. And we've seen this in other polling too, where ultimately there is strong distrust of both parties on corruption. And they view both parties as equally involved in corruption. I think, and we need to dig through this data a bit more, but I think, you know, some folks might be honing in on kind of individual stock trades. Some folks might be honing in by certain members of Congress from both parties, whereas others might be looking at just the obscene wealth that has been accumulated by the current president and his family and those around him in this administration, including, you know, corrupt contracts with the Department of Defense and others, kind of where they're building this web of interconnectedness kind of between their wealth and the government. But ultimately that distrust applies to both parties. And I think it's going to be really important for Democrats when they're, when they're speaking and legislating, legislating on this issue, that they are acknowledging that. And they're acknowledging that there is this system that has been kind of corrupt and rigged against ordinary Americans. The other area is there are discrepancies between the way, at least in our polling, folks see Trump and the disapproval that they have of Trump. But in certain areas, they are not as negative about the Republican Party versus the Democratic Party. And where as a result, kind of the negatives and the positive numbers are not as stark. And I think as a result, there's more work for Democrats to do to prove, to prove that they are able to actually be really effective champions of the people in this coming Congress, where I think there's going to be a huge focus on making sure that there's both an affirmative agenda, but also an accountability agenda, an oversight agenda that's going to deliver for the population. - Yeah, I think that's a good warning note. I was struck too that the concerns about corruption didn't tilt overwhelmingly against Republicans. a shared feeling. I recently talked to a pollster for a piece I wrote for the New York Times in which he said the same thing, that basically people think that the whole system is corrupt, you know, and both parties are in on it. And maybe Trump is enriching himself more, but there's just some, there's too much money in politics, there's too much special interests. I think we shouldn't take as a given and requires specificity, frankly, and also how you're going to do anti-corruption beyond just kind of yelling about Trump. Well, look, Mara, it's a fascinating, it's honestly, it's like much more interesting than these things usually are. I appreciate it. Well, and they're, because they're, you know, they're, it's both the snapshot of the mood of the country, but it, underneath it, it suggests shifting public attitudes. Like, I'm not sure this would have been anywhere near the same results five years ago, 10 years ago. So it's an important roadmap for us to heed. So thanks so much for coming on to walk us through this and we'll keep in touch. Great. Thanks. Really appreciate it. Thanks again to Mara 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. I'm Nate Silver. I'm Galen Druk. And I'm Claire Malone. We're back, this time with our friends at Crooked Media for a new show called Still Counting. Yeah. Numbers are hard, takes are easy. And frankly, numbers have only gotten harder. What does the data actually say? How do we reconcile that with the other things that we're seeing in American politics and around the world? And how do we use that data to understand or maybe even dare to predict the future of American politics? New episodes every Wednesday starting September 9th. Subscribe to Still Counting on YouTube.com slash at Still Counting podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.