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- [00:00]
Brian
Everyone, we're back. Brian, Justin and Eric on Today. Brian, we somehow have not talked about the USS Trump yet. What does that tell us about the future of the US Navy?
- [00:17]
Justin
So exciting. Yes, it's so nice that the Navy's getting this top level attention. I think they, you know, they're happy to be getting, you know, the President involved in thinking about the future of the Navy, you know, back to like Teddy Roosevelt days of, you know, somebody actually caring what the Navy looks like. So I think they're super excited about that only to find, yes, he has some notes for them on how the Navy should develop. So now they've got to come up with a way to field this Trump class battleship, which I mean just if you do the rough numbers, it's like a $14 billion ship, it's going to cost as much as a Ford class carrier. But what so it's interesting is in the Navy zone war gaming that we've been doing with them, they there was this need identified for a larger new surface ship, surface warship. Because what happens is the Arleigh Burke destroyers that are the bulk of today's fleet end up becoming purely defensive platforms. If you get into any fight with anybody like a China or even if you saw with the Houthis. So they basically spend all their, their inventory of missiles defending themselves or defending whoever they're with and they just don't have anything left for go for offense. So if the surface fleet wants to be able to go on offense in the future in any sort of high end war fight, they need a bigger ship with more missiles and bigger missiles that launch longer, go longer ranges. So there was this like need for a larger ship. And I think what that sort of generated was some interest in the White House about well, let's go big. Let's, you know, that's the, that's the Trump way. Don't just go a little bit bigger, go a lot bigger. And this Trump class battleship is supposed to be like four times the size of today's destroyer and it's going to be not quite on par with a Iowa class from World War II, but like two thirds of that it's getting up there. It's the size of a amphibious warship that you carry like 800 marines on. So it's getting up there. In a lot of ways this is the result of sort of political freelancing. You've got the Secretary of the Navy and the President talk about, hey, we need this bigger ship. Then it just sort of escalates and I think it just gets Bigger and bigger. And as the conversation continues, and now the Navy's got to figure out how to turn this idea into reality or into something they could use. And I think that's going to be really difficult because obviously money might end up being tight in a future administration. So do you want to saddle yourself with a $14 billion surface combatant that you can't afford to keep building after the first, you know, after this administration moves on, or do you want to maybe try to coax the President and the Secretary into a smaller version of this that might be more like what the Navy needs? That management of the expectations will be really challenging, I think, for the CNO and the team over on the uniform side of the Navy.
- [03:20]
Eric
Can you back up, just for our audience purposes, and talk about the 1920s, the 1940s, and why battleships fell out of favor that in the United States Navy's experience. You mentioned the Iowa class. I think there was an original plan, I think, to put down keels for eight of them, and by 1945, only four were constructed because there was a recognition that battleships, as the ships of the line, was obsolete. And something had changed in naval warfare. Has something shifted back in the previous 80 years beyond just the ability to put guns or additional vertical launch systems on a vessel?
- [04:04]
Brian
Right.
- [04:05]
Justin
Yeah. So that's a really good point, Eric. So back in the interwar period, there was this transition from battleships to aircraft carriers that we saw. And then In World War II, aircraft carriers became the centerpiece of naval formations, but battleships were the centerpiece of naval formations up to that point because they had the longest range guns and the biggest guns, which gives you longer range. And so you'd build your naval formations, your battle groups around battleships. The battleship would be the centerpiece of it. It could shoot farther than anybody else. You could attack the enemy before he could attack you. And the battleship would be robust enough that it could take shots and be able to continue to fight. So you made these battleships the centerpiece of your formation. You put some escorts around it to help defend the battleship and then basically act as its. As its little scouting unit so they can go out and do scouting. And then the battleship would help you engage those targets at long range. Well, during World War II, sort of, we revealed that, well, the aircraft carrier is even the.
- [05:06]
Brian
More.
- [05:06]
Justin
It's a. It's a more. It's an extended version of that. Basically. Now the airplanes are doing the engagement at long range. So the aircraft carrier now becomes the platform that's able to engage the enemy before it can engage you and the air. The aircraft on the aircraft carrier can also do the scouting missions. So you now transition to the aircraft carrier being the centerpiece just because it has this range advantage relative to surface combatants. And then you'd array your escorts around it and then it would go off and be the centerpiece of your naval formation starting in World War II. And that persists until today. Right. So you still got the inherent advantage of airplanes relative to the guns certainly that you put on a ship, even rail guns and in some cases missiles. Right. So most, most navy ships can't carry missiles that go farther than an airplane can go. So you end up wanting to use the airplanes and airplane launched missiles to be able to reach your opponent and prevent your, before your opponent can reach you. And the challenge today is you've got land based missiles, anti ship ballistic missiles that can outrange the carrier plus its airplanes. So now the carrier is at risk at a place where it can't, you know, counterattack against those missile launchers. And the question is, well, is the aircraft carrier still relevant then in a world where you've got anti ship ballistic missiles that can reach farther than the airplanes the carrier has on it can reach? And that's the fundamental challenge that all these navies are sort of, including the US and China are contending with. I think the jury is still out entirely on, on whether that the carrier still is going to be relevant at the same time level it is today. But you know, we get longer range weapons, longer range airplanes. You can make the carrier relevant and you can sort of get that, you can get it essentially to a symmetrical range competition between anti ship ballistic missiles and the carrier and its airplanes. So now we're sort of at par. And I think that's an uncomfortable position for people who are used to aircraft carriers having this range advantage and they're having to think about how do I defend the carrier then in a situation where I'm basically in a symmetric fight with my ground based adversary. And that's why the destroyers end up being used entirely in this defensive manner in these future war fights and don't get to really go on offense because if they get close enough to go on offense with their, with their own missiles, they're well within range of the enemy's anti ship ballistic missiles and they get basically, you know, pounded and have to basically spend all their effort defending themselves. So you get no, no benefit on offense. So you, you lose that ability for the destroyer fleet to be able to be an offensive contrib contributor except in a less Contested situation like you face with the Houthis.
- [07:53]
Unidentified Male Host
There was a time when the range on our fighters was longer than it is today that we were launching from aircraft carriers. It seems like this solves the wrong problem. The seventies we had fighters that could fly longer than we do today. That seems like a much less intractable problem than let's make a bigger battleship that still can't get close to the A2AD bubble.
- [08:15]
Justin
No, you're right. Yeah, great point. So the, back in the Cold war we had a much more diverse air wing. So the carriers were smaller but you had a greater variety of aircraft on the, on the carrier. So you had these really long range strike aircraft like the A6 maybe you saw that in Vietnam quite a bit. And it would go, it had a combat radius of more than 1,000 miles. So it could fly a long way. It wasn't very stealthy and it could launch missiles and drop bombs and you know, it could keep the carrier well out from where it would be subject to anybody else's counterattack. F14s, similarly really long range aircraft. So you had this really diverse air wing in part because they faced the Soviet threat. So you had to deal with the fact that Soviet bombers and their missiles could go pretty far away. So you had to have this long range counter air capability to go after the bombers and this long range strike capability to go after the land targets. And in the years since after the Cold war, basically we tried to get a more efficient air wing because the more variety you have in the air wing, that's the more different kinds of supply chains and logistics and maintenance and all these technical aspects that make it more expensive and more difficult to keep the air wing maintained and supplied. So we went to basically an all Hornet and then Super Hornet air wing in the interest of efficiency. But it also means you make a bunch of trade offs because the Super Hornet is not as good at strike or anti air warfare or any of these missions as the specialized aircraft were. And now you kind of see the Navy going back to trying to restore some specialization in the air wing by buying F A xx which is really designed much more as a long range kind of counter air aircraft. And then ccas, these collaborative combat aircraft, these unmanned, these drones that are essentially going to fly off the carrier, they're going to be really specialized too. And then you've got MQ25 which is the specialized refueling drone that's going to be able to maybe do some surveillance missions too. So the kind of changing course back to the future and the carrier air Wing is going to become more diverse, but that diversity is going to come mostly because of uncrewed aircraft that are going to be about half the air wing within the next 15 years or so. Either that or the air wing becomes irrelevant. Basically, the choice the Navy has is either advance or make that carrier air wing more diverse and more relevant or accept the fact that the carrier is going to be increasingly vulnerable element of the, of the Navy force.
- [10:45]
Unidentified Male Host
Is there a spot in a war game for a reaction to the USS Trump being sunk by an enemy engagement in like 10 years that you're going to work in and figure out what the Republican administration's reaction would be to that?
- [10:59]
Brian
Eric will not stand for this.
- [11:04]
Justin
Absolutely. Yeah, we're gonna. So we're doing war gaming this year. Some of the games with the Navy, some just on our own. We're gonna, and we're gonna work these in various versions of this. So I think, you know, we're gonna work in like a cruiser that would be a smaller version of the Trump class battleship. We'll, we'll bring in the, you know, kind of largest version of this and just see how they perform. I suspect, you know, that the, the big Trump class battleship you will make. It can contribute some, but it's just not going to have the, the, the reach and the, the capacity to be a game changer. Right. So it'll be useful, but, you know, is it useful given the cost and the fact that you're going to have to give up? I mean, essentially, when the Navy is looking at its budget, it's going to be either you buy this Trump class battleship or you buy F A xx and they're going to not be able to buy both, I don't think, given realistic budget constraints. So then you have to ask yourself, am I going to. I'm essentially trading off my carrier for this battleship when it comes to the, the budget shenanigans you have to go through.
- [12:05]
Brian
Speaking of budget shenanigans, should we talk golden dome?
- [12:11]
Unidentified Male Host
Oh, this is why you're a professional podcaster. Just such good transitions.
- [12:15]
Justin
That segue is brilliant.
- [12:20]
Eric
Because we just spent a good 15 minutes, I think, talking about authentic shortcomings of contemporary naval warfare. That the struggle, Brian Illustrated is not new. That this is something that the Royal Navy contended with all throughout the 19th century when they were looking at French design or Italian design or Russian warships or later Japanese and American design, that they were constantly having to rebalance their budgetary constraints and their shipyard capacity around new technologies that were coming to the fort. So I think the discussion around future force design with the Navy is intellectually interesting and there's integrity there to shift to maybe science fiction. The anti ballistic missile shield is something that is grounded in a few realities. But I think that there's a bit of Harold in the purple crayon at work where the basic truths of the circumstance have been exacerbated into $150 billion. Something that strikes me as extraordinarily vulnerable to manipulation and the sale of divining rods, red mercury and other forms of skullduggery that would never happen to the Department of War.
- [13:42]
Unidentified Male Host
What was it? Was it, was it 1200 or was it 2200? I can't remember now the number off top of my head. Companies that qualified for the Golden Shield contract. Idiq.
- [13:52]
Eric
Yeah, there's a huge array of entrants into the idiq. I think the dog groomers and hair salons are going to contribute to it as well.
- [14:01]
Unidentified Male Host
It was like 75% something pickup rate of companies that applied to participate in it. But like for something that's going to move really really fast. There's been zero contracts even put out for solicitation yet.
- [14:14]
Eric
Yeah, I created an breakfast get ready.
- [14:17]
Brian
How are we going to contribute to this?
- [14:19]
Unidentified Male Host
I don't know.
- [14:20]
Justin
Late to the game.
- [14:21]
Unidentified Male Host
Yeah, I think we missed the initial one. But what we just. The good thing is we don't have to worry about 8A anymore as a deciding factor. So we can really set up wherever we want and be on an equal playing ground from everybody else.
- [14:37]
Eric
Hey Justin, can you anchor on that for a second? Talk about what 8A still is, what it was and what Pete Hegseth says it will no longer be.
- [14:47]
Unidentified Male Host
Yeah, so it's weird. So like they're the hub zones are really the biggest thing. So it's economically disadvantaged communities where companies that are founded within economically disadvantaged communities get for lack of a better term, points when they're being assessed towards a contract. Kind of ham fisted way to think of it. A better way to think of it is that all of the large contractors within government contracting have certain requirements to provide set asides for small businesses, small veteran owned businesses, small disabled veteran owned businesses, small women owned businesses and economically disadvantaged areas. And the point of that is the government says hey, we're kind of giving this largess to these large companies. We want them to put something back into the community. So 8A was a way to force companies, for lack of a better term to interact with non traditional defense contractors to provide some form of service. And it doesn't have to be large and it doesn't even have to be something that's. It's not them even like making weapons or making parts. It could literally be on this contract I have a line for administrative services or account services. So I hire an accountant from an economically disadvantaged area and that, that fills my need on my contract. But also yeah, we're putting something into that community in the form of, you know, capital going in there. Pete Hegseth has basically said in the language that he used was something about tribes. I stopped listening at some point, but he basically said we're not going to keep funding the tribes. Which is saying we're not going to require the 8A legal requirements within the contracts to be held by these large defense primes. But they're still going to have the small business set asides, the women owned set asides, the disabled veteran and veteran set asides within the larger constructs. So really this is very just targeted towards these hub zones and saying like no, you don't actually have to deal with them. And we're going to remove those requirements from contracting. You know what the economic impact is? We can guess. I would imagine that at a minimum it will not be positive to already economically depressed areas that are federally coded as in need of economic development. But it just goes to like it's the natural outflow of the antipathy to anything that looks like DEI within the department.
- [17:21]
Eric
And there's a all that is true. I want to add another layer to it just to give you some additional context. In my last Pentagon tour we lived and breathed based off of 8 because I was part of a new institution at the Pentagon that had no contracting authority. So we would have to go through something called Washington Headquarters Services, which is sort of like a catch all administrative support team for the pentagon in greater D.C. and it was excruciatingly slow, like six months to get a paper shredder. It effectively would chill any sort of attempt at interacting with the private sector. So 8As were a form of like lifeline. When we needed commercial legal support to establish a federal credit program inside the Pentagon and that that had been done before. There were a few federal credit programs, but ours was the first was going to be expressly commercially oriented. But we needed some legal support to help build legal documents. I mean I was a lawyer there, but I wanted project finance professionals. We had no way of going to Washington Headquarters Services, putting out a contract, having it bid and receiving services that would take anything less than six to nine months. As an alternative, we worked through a tribal 8A. They had commercial support services on an existing contract with money pledged against it. And we were able to get a big law firm to come in, support us and discharge responsibilities. And we were able to meet the mission that Congress set out for us. Congress gave us a timeline, but Congress didn't tell the Pentagon to contract faster. So we were truly in a no win circumstance and we received excellent support. I think the law Firm charged the 8A probably their hourly rate, which is, you know, $1,500 an hour for a partner. The 8A charged the government $2,000 an hour because there's just a convenience markup. And I say all that acknowledging that we definitely needed it, but it wasn't particularly a good way to do business because it was not efficient for the taxpayer, that we effectively had to go through this segment of the American tax code that was set aside for disadvantaged businesses and say, our normal contracting system is so fundamentally broken, we cannot meet a mission that Congress assigned to us. So we're going to go through this workaround. We're going to pay 30% over the top, but we'll meet mission. And everybody sort of says, well, that's just the game. So this is one of those moments where I find myself in directional alignment with the Pentagon because I think they're landing on correct answers, even if they are citing to bad reasons.
- [20:24]
Justin
Yeah, I mean, I agree trying to get away from having some of these set asides is going to be useful to ensuring that you get the, you know, best performer possible on contracts. But yeah, it's gonna, you're gonna. Unless you increase the speed and throughput of the contracting apparatus, we end up just getting ourselves, you know, behind the eight ball in terms of getting the work done. So you gotta figure out a. We gotta figure out a way to contract faster so that people are not forced to use these workarounds. But getting back to Golden Dome, I mean, I think the issue with Golden Dome is the contracting speed has not matched the speed of funding. So there's this Hundreds, I guess $110 billion that was allocated via the reconciliation bill towards Goldendome. And most of it's just sitting there, hasn't been spent. And because it was mandatory spending under the reconciliation bill, it's very broadly defined. So it's a little bit of a slush fund in terms of Golden Dome money. Because if you look at the reconciliation bill, each of those funding lines is just, you know, general description of this money is supposed to go towards this general purpose. And that kind of leaves up to OMB how you use it. So the longer those money sits without being put on contract, the greater the likelihood that it'll get repurposed for some other mission or some other objective. And this is true of multiple other places in the reconciliation bill too. So the Pentagon needs to get on the stick in terms of getting these contracts late because otherwise it might find that its money is going to start disappearing and going towards some other application.
- [21:55]
Unidentified Male Host
Has, has the Pentagon even looked towards like, is Northcom going to be in charge of like fronting? This is like, where, where do they see this resting on? Like, who's going to have primacy over Golden Domes implementation and actually like, you know, the, just the overwatch of it.
- [22:13]
Justin
Well, General Goodline, they, we have put this four star in charge of the Golden Dome project. So he's the deputy commander at Space Command and so of the Space Force, I guess. So he's a commander of Space Command. I have to, I have to check that. But in any event, General Guttlein's in charge of it. He was a, he's, he's from the Space Command, which sort of implies that Golden Dome's going to have this significant space component. And the few contracts they have led have all been related to space capabilities. So it's space based interceptors, space based sensing, which is likely to be the bulk of where Goldendome actually ends up materializing. But so they, they are notionally in charge of it. But it, yeah, again, once you get down below the level of sort of decision maker. General Goodlein, it's unclear like who in the program executive offices and who in the actually the contracting offices are going to be responsible for making this money, you know, go out the door to the correct people. And I think part of that is what's driving this delay is that you just don't have a coherent structure underneath him that is developing the plan and actually putting together the program just like you would with any other major acquisition program.
- [23:27]
Brian
Well, so it's January 2026, January 2029, when you're talking about, you know, building new battleships and space lasers and you know, a Golden Dome is really not that far away. So what happens to this stuff if, you know, given that there is probably a 80 or 90% probability that the next president is going to think this stuff is as sketchy as we do.
- [23:56]
Justin
So I think one what, so I think this, one, this should drive the administration to move faster in terms of getting this money allocated on contracts to somebody that would actually generate some material outcome from them. In particular, Golden Dome so that you can try to get some progress so the next administration can see some value in it and see some materialization of the vision. I mean with Golden Dome in particular, there could be, I mean you could create a space based interceptor constellation, combine it with a space based sensing layer that would provide some kind of ballistic missile defense value added. I don't know if that takes as much money as that they're looking to allocate, but if they continue to delay its implementation, you might find that that money is still laying around, we really haven't accomplished anything and the next administration can come in and say it's not, continue it, it's not worth it. So I think if there's any hope of getting any sort of improvement in ballistic missile defense capacity, they're going to have to move out now while this money is still available before it gets frittered away in the normal process of contract or program management.
- [25:06]
Unidentified Male Host
Yeah, I mean to me it looks like it's going to be the California high speed rail. Like, honestly, like it's going to be one of those things that's going to change several different times on what they're actually looking at and what they're going for. It's going to receive this time massive funding, but it's really going to result in very little because they didn't come out with a plan to start with and say this is what we're going to build towards. They said we're going to get a bunch of money and then we're going to build the thing, which is a.
- [25:30]
Justin
Recipe for spending a bunch of money in the meantime.
- [25:32]
Brian
And that is fundamentally because these are not great ideas and they don't have effect. So therefore there are not effective champions fighting for them who like know how to do this in a way that will really have staying power. Well, statement slash question mark.
- [25:48]
Eric
Yeah, just to expand on that, that anti ballistic missile conversations have come up a couple of times in American history. This Golden Dome is just the latest iteration. In the Nixon administration there were robust conversations about parking interceptors around capital and other critical sites to help check a limited strike from the Soviet Union. The Soviets were going to respond in kind. The ABM treaty came out of that. In the second Bush administration there were extraordinarily controversial discussions over putting land based interceptors into like the Czech Republic into Poland. The Russians freaked out about it because they thought that it was going to limit their strategic deterrent. It was all about the Iranians. But then in the wars of 2025, specifically the Iran, Israel United States conflagration. There was almost a proof of concept that there are, we now have examples of certain theater level ballistic missiles being successfully intercepted. So what was science fiction in like the, let's call it 20 years ago in 2006 or what would have required effectively nuclear targeting 1976 is now somewhat possible. So we are, we are entering a realm where we, we could, we, we can sort of say yes, we acknowledge that this is a sloppy process and that this administration isn't thinking particularly with great precision about national security affairs. Like I, I've used this excuse once already today, so pardon me for being repetitive, but they are directionally correct again for bad reasons, that anti ballistic missile technology is somewhat plausible and that there may be value in certain discrete investments that are coming along with this, despite the ridiculousness of House of Dynamite that I hope everybody has watched because that's probably got more impact than what we're talking through. There may be a Democratic president, maybe Reuben Gallego or somebody like that in three and a half years who's like yeah, this was really stupid, but I'm not going to turn the lights off.
- [28:01]
Justin
I mean, yeah, I agree the technology's advanced to the point where shooting down ballistic missiles, especially if you do it on orbit is feasible. And the question is if that's the focus that we're going to have on Golden Dome, then we should make that the focus and then allocate this investment toward it instead of the opening of it was sort of we're going to try to defend against any air threat which you then now you're getting a cruise missile defense and drone defense. And I'm, you know, there's a bunch of other missions there.
- [28:28]
Eric
Yeah. Kabaqua, separatists launching 107 millimeter rockets into Plattsburgh, New York or Potsdam.
- [28:35]
Unidentified Male Host
You never know, you know, for all of it. Yeah, well, and that's, that's, that's where I think like the, the, the issue with the focus on the Israeli Iron Dome actually comes in here is because there was such a fixation on the ability to shoot down mortars and rockets that Hamas and Hezbollah have fired into to Israel that, that became like, that became the blueprint that everybody could point to. And then of course Andy Jacobson releases a book and it scares everybody in Washington for some reason, even though there's some questionable stuff in her reporting. Whatever.
- [29:11]
Eric
There's a meme, there's the meme that illustrates Iron Dome launching with all of its directional contrails against a effectively a 107 millimeter barrage of straight trajectory rockets heading into populated areas of Israel. And if you haven't seen the imagery, there's probably scores of them. But there are a couple of notable ones that float around social media that I think have electrified a segment of the American political commentariat. I mean national security professionals recognize that shooting down 82 millimeter mortars with a cram or shooting down 107 millimeter rocket is not a national security challenge with the United States faces. Like we do not have territorial adversaries that do this. It is the more recent test of the atmospheric weapons systems that we know the Iranians have, we know the North Koreans have, the Chinese had tens of thousands. That there is one, a threat and two, there is now authentic capacity that can disrupt these processes. So I think Golden Dome is going to be rename something much less ridiculous. But there are going to be segments of it that are going to survive.
- [30:26]
Unidentified Male Host
I wonder if it just was too close to Star Wars. Like the actual idea of the Interceptor shoot down is just so close to Star wars that everybody was like, we got to do something different, we got to talk about it differently. But yeah, again, I still stand with the issue is they came in with a very ill defined problem. We want to shoot down anything in the air. And it's like, man, just a very large scope of problems across the territory of America. I mean, we have a 5200 mile border with Canada. Well, for now, border with Canada, it could become a state border, I guess at some point.
- [31:02]
Brian
That's right.
- [31:03]
Justin
Or when that would help eliminate the problem.
- [31:06]
Eric
The Alberta Angelus of 2029.
- [31:09]
Unidentified Male Host
Yeah.
- [31:11]
Brian
Oh, I mean is it is like Canada's bigger than Greenland. Right. Like that would be more better tax base. The oil's already there. You know, you don't have to like dig for it. Right. Yeah.
- [31:26]
Unidentified Male Host
I think the issue with the Canada thing is that if they were really serious about making it the 51st state, they would basically just cement that they would never be a Republican president or Congress ever again.
- [31:38]
Brian
No, keep them, keep them a territory.
- [31:39]
Unidentified Male Host
I think that's it. That's right. You'd have to crack Texas into like five different states to be able to offset the number of senators.
- [31:48]
Poet or Performer
I don't know.
- [31:48]
Brian
Texas is like 55, 45 nowadays.
- [31:52]
Unidentified Male Host
Like I'm sure you could draw the lines.
- [31:55]
Brian
Well. Yeah, but gerrymandering then it's not even big anymore. I mean, it kind of defeats the purpose. Right. Like what are you if you're just a little baby Texas.
- [32:05]
Unidentified Male Host
Exactly.
- [32:06]
Justin
I do admire there's A cultural aspect to that.
- [32:10]
Unidentified Male Host
You can break them up by their electrical grid. And that would basically be three states that would. That would fall exactly like you wanted it to be.
- [32:18]
Eric
I do like how Jasmine Crockett came out this week and was like, yeah, I'm running for Senate. I'm going to lose, but I'm going to do it in style.
- [32:25]
Brian
Remarkable.
- [32:27]
Eric
Remarkable disposition. Pay me money so I can create content.
- [32:31]
Unidentified Male Host
That's good.
- [32:32]
Justin
It's radical honesty.
- [32:33]
Eric
Yes.
- [32:35]
Unidentified Male Host
A catalytic contribution.
- [32:38]
Brian
Can we get Michelle to Foya on the pod? Where is she on defense policy?
- [32:43]
Unidentified Male Host
I wanna just talk to her.
- [32:46]
Justin
Doesn't matter.
- [32:46]
Unidentified Male Host
Yeah, come on. Shoot the shit. Let's. We make most of this up anyways.
- [32:56]
Brian
All right. I guess Greenland. I mean, that was. That was.
- [33:01]
Eric
Well, we do have to talk about, like, the. The end of the North Atlantic Treaty, that we are joking, and I don't want to be smug about talking about direct threats to Canadian territorial integrity and sovereignty to Denmark. We joke. We like. I think Americans sort of get to a point where they roll their eyes at the President, some of his attestations. Our allies do not think this is funny, and they shouldn't. And they recognize that there is a aggressive sickness in the American political conscience that allows politicians to speak like this. And eight decades of valuable treaty service, trillion dollars of trade, all of it falling away because of our internal inconsistencies. They see it as aggression, as vulgarity, as stupidity. And this is not winding down just because Davos is over. This is something that national security professionals of our general age are going to have to contend with forever, and they shouldn't forget it. It's an extraordinary act of disrespect.
- [34:05]
Unidentified Male Host
I think the exact text message I got from Australian buddy the other day was the fuck mate. Which I think summed it up really nicely. It was. It was well done.
- [34:14]
Justin
Succinct.
- [34:14]
Eric
Yeah.
- [34:15]
Unidentified Male Host
Yeah. I mean, that's. That, to me, is where the biggest threat of all of this comes from. That, like, is kind of like under. Under discussed is like the threats to Canada, like the actual country that has been our. The. The go with the. The ride along. The ride with whatever the term is the kids use today that's always been there with us is Australia. Like, they have. They have signed up every time America has asked them. Vietnam, they were there, like, Korea, we're in it. Like, whatever you need for Golf, War.
- [34:43]
Eric
1 and 2, Afghanistan Golf War 1 and 2.
- [34:45]
Unidentified Male Host
First ones on the line, they're ready to go. And when they start questioning, like, when their military starts going, like, what's happening. It's like, ah, okay, like maybe we've overstepped.
- [34:59]
Justin
Yeah, well, we, we just published this report on Australian force design that I think I mentioned to you guys. But one of the entering arguments for it was how does Australia deter aggression like from China if the US Isn't going to be there for it? And the, when we started it, it was mainly because, well, the US Is going to be tied up because, you know, or if we get into a fight with China, the US Military is not going to have a lot of capacity left over for Australia. But in the, in the intervening years since we started the study now it's like, well, the US might just decide that it's not worth them engaging if Australia comes under threat. So we had to build a force design for, for the ADF that's going to help them to deter without anybody's help. So they're, they're thinking about this now of, you know, how do we do this on our own? You know, and maybe, you know, they're, they're far away. So it's, it's not like they're a core interest of China, but they could certainly be pushed around by a China if they're not able to push back a little bit.
- [35:54]
Eric
Yeah, the Australian memory of Imperial Japanese air raids over Darwin is part of their collective memory that they recognize that for all of their geographic security, like Brian indicated, that there are enemies at the gate. And while that generation is starting to, starting to die off and immediate encounters with it are gone, they are not in a safe neighborhood. Especially if the United States elects to focus on the Western Hemisphere and plundering weaker countries throughout it.
- [36:33]
Justin
I mean, and there'll be some, I mean, there's going to be some US Involvement because we've got obviously US people down there a lot of the time. And then these submarines will be operating out of submarine rotational force west in Perth. So there'll be a little bit of, you know, we'll have some skin in the game and they'll contribute. But I could see situations where the US is not going to be intimately involved in pushing back on Chinese aggression. And especially if it's like a gray zone action where it's just China like they did with the circumnavigation last year, US isn't going to come and intervene in that. So it's going to have to be Australia doing a lot of that on its own. And it could take advantage of its geographic separation because you don't have to do too much to be able to make the. Maybe the juice not worth the squeeze for, For China. Right. If, if it becomes the potential is going to be I might lose some aircraft or I might lose some ships in this, you know, foray against Australia, then they might say, well, I'm better. I'm going to stick to my, you know, knitting back up to the north instead of getting involved in this thing with Australia. But you have to have some ability to impose some costs on the Chinese or else they'll see it as a free shot that they might as well take.
- [37:42]
Unidentified Male Host
Yeah. And I mean, I think just building on that too, like, obviously there was. There was always an antipathy for the, for NATO, but the. This has done more to exacerbate weaknesses that exist in the five eyes than I thought would. Well, than that I think is good for our national security. I'll just say that because there were already weaknesses with New Zealand and there were already issues with the way kind of New Zealand had positioned itself and some of its trade with China and things. You start losing Canada, you start losing Australia, then all of a sudden five eyes is. Maybe it's two eyes. But then, then you read. Kash Patel isn't even participating with MI5. MI6 exchanges, which we can talk about. Blew my mind.
- [38:32]
Eric
Do you bring your. Does he fly. Does the FBI fly team have a jet ski to go on the Thames, or does he have to like, is.
- [38:39]
Unidentified Male Host
It like it's pro, like the Suburban that. That Clinton used to have that used to come out and had the minigun that popped up whenever she went into war zone? I mean, jet ski.
- [38:49]
Justin
If MI5 and MI6 want him to come over there, they just need to have his girlfriend do a country concert in London. And I think if you can do.
- [38:57]
Brian
That, he'll royal, Royal out, pay people to show up. Oh, my God.
- [39:02]
Unidentified Male Host
Jesus Christ.
- [39:03]
Eric
Want to hear some Lee Green one covers? Come on out, Greater City of London.
- [39:07]
Unidentified Male Host
He wants to see a Premier League, but he doesn't want to see any shit show like West Ham. He needs to see Liverp. He wants to see Arsenal. Let's come on now.
- [39:15]
Eric
It's so unbelievably strange. Something that gets me about this moment is that there's a substantial amount of chatter I find among, like, the. The left and the authoritarian left. They're like, hey, America's always been like this. This is no different from the second Bush administration. This is no different from Bush one or Reagan. They're all the same. And it bothers the hell out of me. I know Cash personally. I sat next To Cash. I got my internship at the Department of Justice when I was in law school because Cash was a prosecutor there and we were close and he got me into it. Like, I have spent a substantial amount of time working with him, interacting with him. And the stories that the New York Times published yesterday, I assume are all perfectly true. They are well sourced, they reflect sort of what we all know. But this is a fundamentally different person than someone. It wasn't just like a handshake, like, oh, I met a celebrity. It's like, no, I know this person. I've still got his phone number in my personal cell. There has been a distinct shift in the way that certain American political figures behave in the past 10 or 15 years, and the country is moving with it. This is different. This is not the way that Ronald Reagan and team thought about negotiating with the Soviets at Reykjavik. This is distinct. And I think that there is a reluctance to grapple with how these changes are affecting America's standing of the world, its counterintelligence posture, its procurement. Everything is downstream from this cultural shift. And people need to recognize that characters like Cash or Mike Ellis at CIA, someone else I knew really, really well from graduate school, like, he was just a really milk toast Romney guy. And now he has shifted his, like, entire disposition towards the world. And you could, you can say, okay, maybe they're keeping it buried. Maybe they were lying. Maybe they're always like this. But they're out. Their external behavior, their disposition, the way they speak and think and interact with the world is different. And if we are involved in sort of monitoring culture and monitoring defense policy and monitoring the way that the world is rising and falling, we have to recognize that this is. We can't rely on priors from, oh, Republicans in 1985 did X or in 2005 did Y. This is distinct.
- [41:36]
Unidentified Male Host
Yeah, I mean, Jordan, when you posted that, I had missed that and that, that blew my mind.
- [41:41]
Brian
Let's just tell the story. Sorry. So he goes to. Should we read it?
- [41:45]
Unidentified Male Host
Yeah. At least I think.
- [41:47]
Brian
I think we should read it because it's great. Okay, okay, okay, okay. One second. Let me pull it up. So. All right. This is a senior executive to. Every May, there's a five eyes conference with the head of every intelligence agency. This year it was in the UK and Cash was going in the lead up to all that. His detail starts making crazy requests and the Brits are getting pissed before the conference. His staff says he's unhappy because he doesn't like meetings in office settings. What he wants is social events. He wants Premier League games, He wants to go jet skiing, he'd like a helicopter tour. Everyone who heard about this was like, hold on. Is he really going to ask the MI5 director to go jet skiing instead of meeting? The schedule is set and every Five Eyes partner is doing this. They just can't say that he's not participating. Instead, he wants to go to a Premier League soccer game. This is a job, guys. His staff only cared about three things. What his meals were, when his workouts would be understandable, and what his entertainment would be. The biggest plan is how he's going to get his girlfriend in there so she can go to Windsor Castle. He's got Nicole Rucker as his assistant, like a true executive concierge. And when she's not getting the food or the workout she wants, she'll just start screaming at people. Make it happen. His staff was briefed multiple times that the Brits were going to talk about an FBI position that had been pulled. The FBI is arguably their most important partner. MI5 has 5,000 people, the FBI 38,000. If MI5 cease to exist, it would be very bad for us. If we cease to exist, it would be an existential threat for them. That person was working on a ton of sensitive stuff, including embassy penetrations and technology, and they want this position back. So the, so the MI5 director goes to Cash at the conference and says, hey, we really need this position. It's important for our mutual benefits. And he says, yes, that person's not going where, going anywhere. She's absolutely staying. The Brits rejoice. Two reads later, he reverses himself and removes her. The Brits are outraged. Cash will make promises and break them, and he doesn't worry about that. The last bit is a one hell of a kicker on that trip. The heads of the intelligence for the Five Eyes went to Windsor Castle and met with the King. There is a photo taken of all the Five Eyes people, some of whom are non disclosed, meaning their affiliation with British intelligence service isn't public. The Brits forward that picture as a keepsake for the individuals. They prefaced it with, this isn't to be shared. But Cass decided that he wanted to post it on social media. They have people trying to negotiate with the Brits about whether that's possible. They're fighting with the Director's office, being like, you cannot post this. Do not do that. They're arguing and he wants the picture out. You know, there's like, there's like the shame leaving American politics thing. I think there's like the criminal side of this also going away, right. Where you know that you can be part. You're gonna be pardoned for literally everything as you walk out the door. I feel like that kind of, like, would tamp down on stuff, and particularly given that Trump had all of these investigations that didn't go anywhere that, like, the threat of the law and breaking it is just, I don't know, is very different when you. When you know that as long as what you are doing is making the President happy, then he will pardon you for literally anything.
- [45:03]
Unidentified Male Host
But, I mean, yeah, we.
- [45:05]
Brian
It's probably more than that. Eric, Eric, what's your diagnosis?
- [45:07]
Eric
Or Justin, sorry, we're downstream from John Roberts immunizing the President for crime. Like, that's. That is the new world.
- [45:15]
Unidentified Male Host
I mean, yeah, this is. This is. This is the Frost v. Nixon. No, I'm saying that if the President does it, it's not illegal, just made true. Like, I am an extension of the executive, therefore, I can do it. And it doesn't matter, because as an extension of the executive, I have executive privilege to everything. The Five Eyes partnership in intelligence sharing is incredibly important. It was incredibly important in the counterterrorism fight. It will continue to be incredibly important just because, I mean, the truth is that Canadians and Australians and Brits can get in places that Americans can't, and vice versa. Americans can get in places that they can't. Therefore, the five of us are all stronger together. And this also goes back to another thing. Like, this is a somewhat personal story for me, but whenever it comes to threatening the Dutch, it was Dutch pilots. When my team was, for lack of a better term, pinned down, trapped in Syria, being attacked by isis. We were in a big sandstorm. It was Dutch pilots that were the ones that were on station that were dropping munitions in support of us. It wasn't American pilots or French pilots or any other pilots that just is who was. Was on. So when I see things like the President come out yesterday and say, maybe I should have, you know, triggered Article 5 for our Southern border invasion, you kind of want to be like, hey, the Only time Article 5 has ever been triggered was in defense of the United States. Like, those allies did come to our aid unasked, by the way, America didn't ask them to trigger Article 5. They did it after September 11th. So I, you know, I get it. Like, the. The world has changed, but I. I do wish that we could preserve the actual historical, factual basis of the old world and not just continue to destroy it. As we talk about what the new thing is going to be.
- [47:20]
Brian
In the cast. Yeah. Sorry.
- [47:23]
Justin
No, I was gonna say, I mean. Yeah, yeah. I mean, if people want to take a different direction because the countries politically decide to, you know, we need to go it alone and America first and all that, that, I mean, fine, that's. If that's what people's decision. But you don't erase the past in the process of doing that, you know, that we're making that change on purpose and not whitewash it by saying we were somehow aggrieved because of some past, you know, malfeasance by our allies.
- [47:50]
Brian
All right, close on Iran.
- [47:52]
Justin
Eric.
- [47:53]
Unidentified Male Host
Oh, goodness.
- [47:53]
Eric
Yeah.
- [47:54]
Unidentified Male Host
Well, really, bring it, Bring it up.
- [47:55]
Eric
Yeah. I spent the. The previous week in Riyadh at a professional conference dedicated to mining and minerals that was related to my actual job. It was extraordinarily interesting in unexpected ways. Before the more recent threats to go to war against NATO, there was a. Maybe 36 hours, maybe 48 hours where there was authentic open source intelligence and political commentary about the United States conducting retaliatory strikes against segments of the Iranian regime for their efforts to put down protests across the country in which at least 2,000, likely 3,000 Iranian protesters were shot by a variety of different security forces. And the United States was going to effectively punish certain segments of the state apparatus because the. But by that point, the protests had and effectively subsided. And there was a flurry of undisclosed diplomatic discussion, probably the Emiratis, the Jordanians, the Israelis, maybe senior officials of the Saudi royal family reaching out to Washington to tell them to pump the brakes and not do anything. And nothing has been done. Not yet. We have more recently, in like the past 12 hours, maybe, maybe 24, heard commentary from the president, from other people around him, that there are still naval assets that are moving towards Iran that will maintain the ability to conduct some sort of military action against the Iranians. So ostensibly around this spate of protests that took place. But there's another layer that we have to also acknowledge that there's a full court press. I hate to fall back on lazy sports metaphors, but extraordinarily aggressive advocacy from Iranian monarchists. We're trying to use this occasion to put the balance of American and to a lesser extent Israeli military force against the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, the artes, other segments of state power to create a window where the Shah, the last shah of Iran's son, could effectively parachute in and take control of the country for four months. And then there's a national plebiscite and they decide to become A democracy or the Shah, you know, gets a Lamborghini and something we have to monitor with some degree of, I hate to say seriousness is. With whom is the. The Shah to be speaking? How close are those intermediaries to the President? How much seriousness is being attributed to the Iranian monarchists and the people around him? The President has commented, says, hey, he's a nice guy. I don't think he's got the juice. And, and to the President's credit, that's probably correct. But it hasn't stopped this drumbeat of both the monarchists, their believers, people in the American media, who are also trying to back this attempt to finally cut the throat of the Iranian revolution on account of this recent crackdown on public protest. So the war isn't over. Just like the ostensible walk back that the President offered about Greenland, he can turn that light right back on the second he can't sleep and gets agitated and use some AI slob. The. The. The president has not walked away from military action in Iran either. That one of the problems of having the. This president in charge of a military hyperpower is that he can give the go order in a variety of different scenarios very quickly, and it can become very real very fast.
- [52:08]
Justin
And I assume we have the intel penetration to be able to understand exactly what targets to hit. So there's this. Just like with Venezuela, the fact that we've built this massive apparatus for targeting and engaging those targets makes it. So it's pretty easy to pull the trigger and do something that seems clean. And then obviously the chaos that results is going to be on our hands. But it makes it just seem like it's very easy to pull the trigger on these kind of interventions. And to Eric's point, a lot of what's happened is the administration has put into play a bunch of ideas that previously people thought were really not on the table. So even if he doesn't go through with Greenland or go through with Canada or whatever, all these ideas are now in the mix and can be picked up by him or somebody else later. And it seems a lot less of, you know, odd or, you know, much less of an outlier. I mean, it's an Overton window shift. So, yeah, I think that's part what's happening here is that everything is now, you know, negotiable.
- [53:10]
Unidentified Male Host
I sometimes wonder, as you were talking, Eric, this thought occurred to me, why is this not Trump? Syrian. Syria, red line, the Obama red line. If they attack protesters, we're going to do something, and then we find out they've killed 2,000 to 3,000 protesters and we didn't do anything purely because of.
- [53:29]
Eric
The media environment screaming it happened.
- [53:31]
Unidentified Male Host
Exactly.
- [53:32]
Eric
Yeah. It's the media environment. Sebastian Gorka is not going on TV huffing and puffing about this grand betrayal that there's no media incentive structure to go after the president for this because he always sort of like, keeps his hand in his pocket and maybe he's got some quarters in it or maybe he's got a pistol, like you don't know. And that is a disposition that they like about him. But this is purely a reflection of a media environment that will echo, advance and support everything he does, regardless of any visible strategy around it. And not to take the Obama team off the hook, their behavior in 2013 was ridiculous. It was a moment of, I think, real shame for public policy professionals like myself who were intimately involved in this. At the time, I was a civil servant. I wasn't exactly Nexus Secretary of State Kerry. But he was going on TV talking about how the United States is going to conduct these extraordinarily minor airstrikes against the Syrians. They wouldn't even bother. But we tell them that we were serious. It was a reflection of a certain type of grad student infection where the fact that you have gone around the table and everybody gets to share their disposition and everybody has a voice is more important than whether or not you actually hit Bashar Al Assad's rotary wing assets that were dropping barrel bombs on civilians. And we had an opportunity to set something out and say that you shall not massacre children. You shall not gas field hospitals. And the Democrats in power at the time whiffed on it.
- [55:03]
Unidentified Male Host
Yeah, yeah. No, I.
- [55:07]
Brian
Coming back to our kind of, like, tiktokization of American policymaking. The fact that there were not as many videos as, you know, you would have had expected had they not shut down the Internet or what have you. Like, I do strongly feel like this would have played out differently if there were just more clips flying around than there ended up being.
- [55:31]
Unidentified Male Host
Yeah. I mean, the Green Revolution. Right. Or the start of the Green Revolution that ended up not coming all the way to a head, but when Masha Amini was killed, like, her picture was everywhere. And right now, the most famous picture that I think I've seen from this protest is the woman smoking, having lit a picture of the Ayatollah. Yeah. Lighting us. And it's just like that just doesn't have the same resonance as Masha Amini's photo. Just because that doesn't look like you're fighting oppression. That just looks like you're a pissed off grad student.
- [56:10]
Eric
Yep. This is something from Times Square rather than.
- [56:13]
Unidentified Male Host
Yeah, exactly.
- [56:15]
Eric
A horribly repressive government shooting people for having the temerity to advocate for individual liberty.
- [56:24]
Brian
And on that. Well, I thought the AI strategy was cool. We'll cover that another day.
- [56:30]
Unidentified Male Host
Yeah, I think, I think that deserves, that deserves a lot more time. Definitely.
- [56:33]
Brian
We need to. Oh, oh, let's do Justin. Bruce Catton. We'll close on that. Brian, you're dismissed.
- [56:40]
Unidentified Male Host
Thank you. Later. Brian. Yeah, Bruce Catton. Still been reading Making through my reading list. Mr. Lincoln's army, the army of the Potomac. Bruce Cadden. His look at leadership in that book and from a very human level is remarkable. And I think it's something that a lot of leaders could look at today. There's, there's been a lot of talk about promotion faster and we need to get more tech people and everything promoted quicker. I think his look at McClellan really throws cold water on the idea that what you really need is somebody that's technically capable and is a fast riser to be a commander. For the time, McClellan was the tech bro of the day. He was the ultra wealthy engineer who knew how to build and run trains and knew how to put out telegraph wire better than anybody else. And in the end he was a terrible commander in part because he was so risk adverse that he couldn't bring himself to risk ever, ever losing. And I think Bruce Catton really highlights that because while individually I think that McClellan was actually incredibly brave, he talked about at one point when Pope wants to return to Washington D.C. after getting beaten by, by Jackson and pushed back to Centerville. McClellan hears guns off in the distance and Pope's like, ah, we're gonna, we're gonna head back to D.C. and McClellan's like, well, I'm gonna go to where they're shooting. So individually, a very brave man. Like, I do think that he, he had that. But as a person who could. Was willing to risk reputation or risk his larger enterprise, he, he just, he didn't have that in him. And I think in part that was because he had never faced failure until unfortunately for him, they put him in charge of the Union Army. And I think there's a lot there as we look at restructuring the officer corps in the United States military and we talk about the way that officers are brought up. I'm not saying that I agree with the way that it's been done to date, but definitely the idea that you're just going to promote young people who have tech capability and they're going to be naturally better commanders. I think is historically inaccurate.
- [59:03]
Eric
So what you're saying is the CTO of Sauron's eye shouldn't just be insta commissioned as a lieutenant colonel, that he should have been getting a fair shot to be a second lieutenant or used to. Shut the fuck up.
- [59:14]
Unidentified Male Host
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean like that's what I would say. There's a lot of learning in the military, experiential learning in the military. That's important. And while each experience is an n of 1, I think being a lieutenant who gets told to shut the fuck up because you're the summer help is actually very important for everyone's ego.
- [59:33]
Eric
Like he needs to.
- [59:34]
Brian
But what if you're Napoleon? Justin, come on. I mean that was the model that they were all queuing off of, right? McClellan, 35, hot shot. Look the part. He could give a speech, you know.
- [59:45]
Eric
Yeah, but you know, lieutenants need to be able to do dancer do a barrel count in an arms room. Like they need to know the basics.
- [59:52]
Unidentified Male Host
Yeah, I mean it's one of those things like, you know, Caesar at 50, as the pro consul and commander of all of Gaul writes in one of his books that he never is going to amount to anything because at 35, Caesar or Alexander had conquered the known world. I think that's what it was. He was the same age as Alexander when Alexander was like on the warpath to India and he was only the proconsul in Gaul and it was a sign that he had passed his age. And it's just one of those things where, well then he goes on to be Caesar. Not saying that that's a good thing, nor that that should be replicated, but you can still make something of yourself at 50, you don't have to have the 30 year old tech bro just to swoop in and become the commander. Because the truth is that While individually brave, McClellan had no idea how to use his military to the point where the President of the United States has to reach down and say, since you're not using it, may I have your army to go make it do things like. Which I think is important to remember.
- [61:02]
Brian
I love Lincoln in those books too.
- [61:04]
Unidentified Male Host
God, he's so good. I want to believe that he was every bit as pithy as like every memoir and everything points him out to be. Because I imagine that there had to have been like his like straight guy sitting in the background just dying, laughing every time he says something to one of these guys, like, how could you be his friend to be in the room and not just laugh in all of these people's faces when he starts talking about.
- [61:29]
Eric
I remember like reading Team of Rivals a few years ago and it's almost like the way people speak of him, it's like, in 1860, we elected Jim Gaffigan like this, like this perfectly wholesome family comedian who's just got like all of these hilarious observations, like, well, I'm not going to get too upset about that because I just ate 19 cupcakes.
- [61:55]
Unidentified Male Host
Yeah, exactly. Like, it's just, it was just like you. It's the level headedness and just like the determined stick to itiveness too. Because, like, he is the inverse of the argument that I just made of all the people where he's like, I don't know anything about the military, and.
- [62:11]
Brian
Then I know enough that, like, you probably gotta fight the guys to beat them.
- [62:15]
Unidentified Male Host
But then he spends two. He spends the first two years basically giving himself, reading all the books, and then all of a sudden he's able to have arguments with Mead and Scott and even Grant about tactics and everything and, like, holds them to, like, have an opinion, which is again, super important. Like, I don't need you to always be right. It really would be good as a commander if you had an opinion and stuck to it.
- [62:41]
Eric
Wasn't it.
- [62:41]
Brian
Wasn't there some argument he had where, like, he wanted to do this, like, crazy amphibious assault, like, below Richmond? And Grant was like, we're not doing that. And he's like, okay, all right. As long as you've thought it through. Like, as long as you can tell me why this is a terrible idea.
- [62:56]
Unidentified Male Host
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And that's the thing. Hey, here's all my ideas. Hey, sir, I disagree with this one and this one. And these are the reasons. Perfect. You do what you need to do. You're the commander. This was, this was the. The ideas of an amateur or something like that. Like, he says that in like the closing letter, like, you know, amateur at war or something like that. Absolutely. But that also goes to his humility. Like, he's able to say, like. Like, there are still things that I don't understand.
- [63:17]
Brian
Were there any presidents? Have there ever been presidents remotely as funny as Lincoln?
- [63:23]
Unidentified Male Host
I bet you don't even think it was really funny. But no, I don't think, I don't think.
- [63:27]
Eric
Yeah, I'm gonna give you an answer that you're gonna hate. Donald Trump is funny. He's mean.
- [63:34]
Brian
You're right. You're Right.
- [63:36]
Eric
He's mean. He is mean. And that distracts from it. But I am old enough and I watched, like, late night TV as a younger kid to remember a little bit of it. But you can. You can see clips. Donald Trump's entire syncopation around jokes is a complete ripoff of Johnny Carson. Johnny Carson had a very distinct style of dead panning jokes that Donald Trump probably watched hundreds and hundreds of episodes because that was the 80s. That was, like, the center of culture. And if you see remarks, reading books. Yeah. Especially from, like, the first term when Donald Trump was, like, on stage with. With some American veterans group, and he's like, oh, you got a purple heart medal. He's like, oh, he's won one of those. And he said it in the exact way that Johnny Carson delivered jokes. So he's not original. I mean, some of his tweeting is authentically original. And, you know, he's got some bangers. He's affected the American syntax because of his prominence, because of his joke telling, but hugely, yeah, I think American. The American political opposition has disarmed itself in encountering him because he does know how to land a joke. And just because it's in poor taste to punch down, it doesn't mean that people won't chuckle about it.
- [64:58]
Unidentified Male Host
Yeah, yeah. And I think that's really. I think that's actually accurate. And it's one of those things, too, where like. Like, for all the things that I like about the way that Obama spoke, he always seemed scripted. When he made jokes in a public setting, it always seemed like it was something that was well thought out. And that is something that is different than when, like, you hear these guys that are very pithy. Like, you read some of the stuff that's written about Lincoln, and apparently he was very off the cuff with a lot of his humor. Like, he was just able to, you know, regale these long stories that end in a punchy. In a punchline. Yeah, I think that there's something to that. And, you know, like, I'm gonna be honest, I don't think Kamala Harris could have delivered a joke to save her life.
- [65:40]
Eric
Yeah. But there's an element, and if we want to. I think that's. That. That's fair. I mean, she had a good sense of humor. Like, she would laugh when she saw something funny, but I don't think that she was delivering. But if we want to fall back on pop culture, if you want to. To tie this out for today's broadcast, there's a remarkable scene of presidential humor. And it's punching down and it's nasty. But let's talk through it for a second. And it was in Oppenheimer, the remarkable film from Christopher Nolan in 2023, where J. Robert Oppenheimer is invited to the Oval Office following the delivery of his weapons systems into Japan at the conclusion of the war. And he is obviously in a moral conundrum about the amount of carnage that his weapon systems inflicted. And he's sitting across from Harry Truman, who saw combat in a really intimate way in a way that only a few presidents of the 20th century did. George H.W. bush and him being the exemplars. And Gary Oldman, who's one of Britain's finest actors, has a very brief scene, if you haven't. If you haven't seen it. And as Oppenheimer is going through his motions of public guilt, he pulls out his handkerchief and he offers it to the whimpering scientists to, like, dot his eyes and dry his tears. And it is. It's funny, but it's extremely mean. And that scene where. Resonates because Harry Truman's reputation, and this is before contemporary television, you know, of him being, you know, haberdasher, a wheeler dealer and, you know, brought into the Roosevelt administration because of that senatorial reputation, you know, he. And, you know, maybe to an extent, LBJ had some. Had some zingers. And Christopher Nolan gave us an example of one of those.
- [67:44]
Unidentified Male Host
Yeah. Yeah, I think it was. That's. It really is a great scene because I think it's. He's sitting there and he's crying. Like, I have. I feel like I have blood on my hands. And Truman, literally, the man who signed the orders and said to go do it, throws the handkerchief at him and like, well, wipe it off. Like, I've got nothing for you at this point. Like, who are you even talking to? No, it absolutely is. I do think. Yeah, there's just something to that. Like, that kind of dark comedy is also important. That's one of the reasons I said, I think jfk, like, in some of the memoirs, are written by him. He's funny. But again, it also is some of that gallows humor. Like, that's a guy who saved members of his PT boat and, like, swam however far it was.
- [68:25]
Eric
Combat veteran.
- [68:26]
Unidentified Male Host
Yeah. You know, another. Another one that, like, there's. You've seen some. A certain level of bad. Badness. It becomes like, you. When you see something like that, you're just. You don't know how to deal with it. To some degree, you're just kind of like what is happening right now.
- [68:41]
Brian
Yeah, TR too. We gotta, we gotta do some TR content. I think we're, we've under indexed on him so far.
- [68:48]
Eric
I think if reporting in the. I think it was the Wall Street Journal just yesterday. Talk about regime change in Cuba before the end of 2026. I do think we should address the American experience from TR and the Spanish American war in San Juan Hill through Godfather Part 2 up through today. Let's do it.
- [69:11]
Brian
Stay tuned folks. See you next week.
- [69:15]
Unidentified Male Host
See you next week.
- [69:24]
Poet or Performer
At Davos in the Alps where the elite all meet Trump took the stage and called Greenland sweet Mark rooted's in the corner Sweating through his shirt saying transatlantic strong but man that guy is hurt he said no nation can secure that ice but the USA I don't need force we'll remember if you disobey Europe's having palpitations Checking their defense supplies while NATO's doing the hustle right before our eyes It's a NATO disco breakdown breakdown article 5 shakedown we're dancing on the precipice Devil's town Trump wants a piece of ice for world peace Mark Rud is crying NATO won't cease but the alliance is twisting to a tragic release Disco inferno, baby We've never got anything from NATO he declared it's a one way street While allies just stand he called it Iceland 5 times Freudian slip of the tongue Just a poorly located chunk of ice but the deal's not done NATO disco breakdown breakdown golden dome take down Copenhagen is ungrateful what a sound he wants the biggest dome ever built you see While Europe whispers his article 5 still free it's the boogie woogie breakdown of security. I see some prefer to stay home and watch the decline Said Trump to the absent ma oh, that's just fine but then came the climb down Framework deal he cried Tariffs are off but nobody knows what's inside Disco breakdown, breakdown Transatlantic Fake out, fake out the alliance is doing the panic shout we'll be 100% committed but will you be there for me? Me? It's the greatest geopolitical dance you'll ever see so grab your platforms and your nuclear keys so grab your platforms and.
- [72:00]
Unidentified Male Host
Your nuclear keys.
- [72:04]
Justin
How stupid were we.
- [72:05]
Eric
To give it back? It being coherence.
- [72:14]
Poet or Performer
Sam.