Forever War (Trump's Version)

Summary

Pod Save the World — “Forever War (Trump’s Version)” July 15, 2026, with Tommy Vietor & Ben Rhodes

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Tommy Vietor and Ben Rhodes return to dissect a new chapter in U.S. foreign policy: the resumption and continuation of conflict between the United States and Iran, with Trump openly adopting “forever war” posturing, branding the U.S. as the “Guardian of the Hormuz Strait.” The hosts break down the confusing statements from the Trump administration, analyze the implications for global security and press freedom, examine international corruption, discuss the latest from Venezuela, and cover how terrorists are using AI. The episode also includes an in-depth interview with Rep. Ro Khanna about his recent detainment by Israeli settlers in the West Bank.

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Key Topics & Takeaways

1. World Cup Musings & Cultural Touchstones

• [02:48–04:55] Tommy and Ben open with reflections on the recent Spain vs France (and Argentina) World Cup games, rigging accusations, and underdogs, mixing humor and global sports as an entry point for the episode’s more sobering geopolitical topics.

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2. U.S.–Iran “Forever War” Resumes

• [05:01–15:43] Main Segment

A. Background & Escalation

• The Trump administration has ended a short-lived ceasefire with Iran; the conflict, initially promised to last "three to four weeks," has dragged on four months (“a brand new forever war in the Middle East” – Tommy, [09:43]).
• Trump now declares the U.S. to be the “Guardian of the Hormuz Strait,” echoing imperial language.
• Conflicting and incoherent White House statements are highlighted in a “supercut” montage, with shifting positions on regime changes and U.S. intentions ([10:05–11:30]).

B. Key Quotes

• “There’s, like, a very thick layer of bullshit that overlays what is actually happening…80 to 90% of what they say is just complete and utter bullshit on any given day.” — Ben ([11:38])
• “The Iranians control the Strait of Hormuz. This war is a catastrophe. Trump has no answer on the…questions that were the stated purpose of the war. The regime has not changed, if anything, just gotten more hardline.” — Ben ([12:18])

C. Strait of Hormuz Tensions

• Dispute over control, with Iran and the U.S. each asserting different interpretations of a recent MoU ([13:26]).
• Iran starts charging tolls, fires on ships, U.S. responds militarily—market repercussions predicted (“Nacho trade: Not a Chance Hormuz Opens.”)

D. Reflection on Military Effectiveness

• [21:48–23:16] Washington Post reporting reveals U.S. military leadership made repeated errors leading to high risk and deaths among troops. Ben questions military competence at the highest command levels.

E. Oil, Economics, and “Magical Money”

• [13:43–23:29] The war’s impact on global markets—oil prices up, new pipelines discuss—but near-term is chaotic.
• Trump’s unfounded claims of being reimbursed by Gulf states (“Does any American feel that money? Are you getting that money? Does that exist in the physical world?” — Ben, [23:16])

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3. “Ahmadinejad Plot” — Israeli Intrigue

• [26:20–31:05] Revealed: Israel’s botched, bizarre plan to extract and install former Iranian President Ahmadinejad as a puppet leader, using connections with Hungary’s Viktor Orban and clandestine Mossad meetings.
• Plan involved bombing his compound, “rescuing” him, only for Ahmadinejad to refuse cooperation and end up under house arrest.
• Ben: “Their capacity to actually build something—under what scenario was Ahmadinejad going to leave this safe house and assume power in Iran?” ([29:44])
• Critique of presumed Mossad “competence” and increasingly reckless Israeli and allied intelligence operations.

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4. Air Force One Security Crisis & Press Freedom

• [31:05–36:36] Trump’s shift from the new Qatari-bribe Air Force One back to the older plane due to security flaws sparks a major leak investigation.
• The administration issues subpoenas directly to journalists, skipping normal protocol, under FBI Director Kash Patel’s supervision.

Notable Quotes:

• “It’s a total new Rubicon…should scare people. It’s fucking Putinesque behavior.” — Ben ([36:03])
• Tommy: “A massive attack on press freedom that skipped all the normal steps…and went straight to intimidate and potentially prosecute these journalists.” ([32:39])

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5. Corruption Watch: The Gordie Howe Bridge

• [36:38–44:49] Ben and Tommy unfold the saga of the Gordie Howe Bridge between Detroit and Windsor, a story blending cross-border infrastructure, a billionaire’s shakedown, and Trump-era graft.
• Trump’s donor receives financial concessions after a million-dollar super PAC donation; U.S. and Canada forced into a "deal" benefiting the private bridge owner and raising corruption questions.
• Ben: “If you point a camera at something and pause it, you find something like this…a big shakedown operation.” ([43:05])

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6. Venezuela: Earthquake & U.S. Interference

• [47:56–51:15] After a devastating earthquake, U.S. aid is meager ($300M). Marco Rubio, acting as quasi-viceroy from Washington, micromanages Venezuelan affairs—including how their money is spent.
• B: “To what end? Marco Rubio's ego is being satiated, but is life any better for Venezuelans?” ([49:27])
• Ongoing problems of U.S. oversight without real benefit to either’s population; recurring theme of foreign policy as crony enrichment.

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7. Terrorists & Artificial Intelligence

• [51:14–60:46] Cambridge University report documents Boko Haram’s evolving use of AI: battlefield tactics, bomb-making, weapon repair learned via models like Claude, ChatGPT, and Grok. ISIS has reportedly provided AI training.
• Discussion broadens to the dangers of unregulated AI advances—enabling both criminal and state actors.
• Tommy: “Is there any moral version of war where you’re bombing thousands of targets a day?” ([56:34])
• Ben: “There’s a dark web…there will be a dark AI, and we’re just not even having conversations about regulating it.” ([54:41])

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8. Gift-Giving at NATO: Erdogan’s Guns

• [61:04–63:50] Turkish President Erdogan gifts engraved .357 Magnum pistols—loaded—to NATO leaders, causing customs headaches and awkward symbolism.
• Ben: “The inclusion of bullets is quite extraordinary to me…not the gift I’d go for. It doesn’t scream peace.” ([62:51])

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9. World Cup Corruption & Political Interference

• [66:00–70:50] The U.A.E. intervenes to reverse an American player’s World Cup red card, at Trump’s request, bypassing process.
• Sports and politics collide; FIFA’s notorious corruption is highlighted as U.S. athletes become global villains.
• Ben: “What is amazing about the Trump era is just how easy it is to predict how things went down.” ([67:21])

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10. INTERVIEW: Rep. Ro Khanna on the West Bank

• [73:50–95:47] Ben interviews Ro Khanna about his recent trip to the West Bank, where he experienced detainment by armed Israeli settlers and inaction by the IDF.

A. Decision to visit:

• Ro: Focused on seeing conditions firsthand, led by Palestinians, not official Israeli tours. Highlights the rarity and official ire of such a visit ([74:50]).

B. Detainment:

• Settlers with guns held up Khanna’s group; the IDF sided with the settlers instead of dispersing them ([76:43]).
• Ro: “If we were Palestinians, we would have, I’m 100% sure, faced some violence.” ([78:46])

C. Israeli Government’s Response:

• Netanyahu downplays settler violence, labels perpetrators “juvenile delinquents.” Khanna counters that Palestinians are the ones being terrorized.
• “The only people in the west bank that I saw who were being terrorized were the Palestinians.” ([81:06])

D. U.S. Complicity & Internal Party Fallout:

• Khanna reflects on having helped vote for the aid enabling such tactics: “I voted in the past for the aid that led to arguably my own detention.” ([83:58])
• Democratic Party establishment attacks Khanna as performing “publicity stunts”—a pattern used to discourage challenging the status quo ([86:21]).
• Khanna discusses the generational and grassroots shift toward demanding accountability and justice for Palestinians.

E. Human Stories:

• Personal accounts of Palestinian families suffering under settler and IDF violence, dehumanization, and loss.
• Khanna finds hope in the warmth and peace-seeking among Palestinian hosts, and in the activism of young American allies ([93:06]).

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• “There’s, like, a very thick layer of bullshit that overlays what is actually happening…80 to 90% of what they say is just complete and utter bullshit on any given day.” — Ben ([11:38])
• “The only way you’re actually going to open the strait in perpetuity is through a diplomatic deal with Iran.” — Ben ([17:39])
• “It’s fucking Putinesque behavior.” — Ben, on Trump’s press crackdown ([36:03])
• “If you point a camera at something and pause it, you find something like this.” — Ben, on pervasive corruption ([43:05])
• “This is a brand new forever war in the Middle East. I know you’re excited.” — Tommy, sarcastic ([09:44])
• “I appreciate someone who’s not gonna just go with the crowd…But it was just kind of fun to pretend Row.” — Ben, after a Norwegian fan refuses to join in World Cup “Viking Row” ([65:19])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [05:01] – Main U.S.–Iran war discussion begins
• [13:07] – Intelligence tip: Iranian plot against Trump
• [17:39] – Strait of Hormuz: lasting conflict realities
• [21:48] – Costs to U.S. troops, military mismanagement
• [26:20] – Ahmadinejad: Israeli plot details
• [31:05] – Air Force One, journalist subpoenas, crackdown
• [36:38] – The Gordie Howe Bridge: corruption unwrapped
• [47:56] – Venezuela earthquake & U.S. involvement
• [51:14] – Terrorists and AI: the new front lines
• [61:04] – Erdogan’s NATO gifts: guns & bullets
• [66:00] – Trump, FIFA, and World Cup corruption
• [73:50] – Ro Khanna interview on the West Bank

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Conclusion & Tone

The episode is biting, irreverent, but earnest—mixing righteous outrage, dark humor, and grounded policy critique. Tommy and Ben expose the through lines of incompetence, corruption, and disregard for human rights running through U.S. and allied foreign policy, while also foregrounding the stories of those most affected and the activists (like Ro Khanna) resisting these trends.

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For anyone looking to understand the latest in U.S. foreign policy dysfunction, media threats, international corruption, and on-the-ground realities from Gaza to Detroit, this Pod Save the World episode is essential listening, deftly blending global headlines with human stories, sharp critique, and characteristic wit.

Transcript

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[A]

Welcome back to POD Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor.

[B]

I'm Ben Rhodes.

[A]

Man, Spain just kicked the crap out of France in the World Cup.

[B]

I didn't see that coming. I thought France was pretty much going to kind of glide. Yes. So I, I. Not that I consider my soccer knowledge to be considerable, but I definitely don't know what I'm talking about.

[A]

Yeah, I've been watching it for about three weeks, so I'm surprised that I'm wrong. But also it doesn't matter anyway because it's all rigged for Argentina.

[B]

I believe that. I've come to believe that.

[A]

It's crazy when you look at all the, like, replays and clips of like, bullshit as Argentina got.

[B]

Outrageous.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

I mean, that Egypt game was kind of nuts. They disallow a goal, they call for

[A]

a foul like 90 yards away.

[B]

Yeah. It's all very peculiar to me and even Norway because I was deep on that bandwagon and I felt like I had some validity on the bandwagon because I was in Norway, which, by the way, is an awesome experience watching them win at a bar, but. And then watching tens of thousands of Norwegians walk. So, Tommy, they, they walk to where the Royal palace is, which is like right in the center of Oslo. Okay. And they sit in formation and start rowing.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

In the middle of night.

[A]

We're gonna do some rowing talk at the end of the show until the family comes out.

[B]

So anyway. But Norway got kind of screwed too. Like, they got totally screwed. Like, I don't get the, the penalty that would they. That was called to disallow that goal. Yeah.

[A]

And the ball, like the whole thing, it's just, it's heartbreaking. I like Erling Holland, though. He looked like he wasn't taking it too hard. He was out at the clubs in Miami that night.

[B]

Yeah, he had the stuffed raccoon.

[A]

Yeah, stuffed raccoon with a tequila bottle. He had a good ass time in America.

[B]

I, I fully support that guy's moment, everyone. He deserves it.

[A]

Yeah, well, I'm going to be sad the World Cup's over. I, I like, genuinely am not sure what I'm going to do with all my time now.

[B]

I feel like it already ended because I'm an underdog guy. And once you got to the semis, I was, like, looking around and. And I, I guess. Guess I'm rooting for England now. I thought.

[A]

I thought, like, one underdog might win, but not a single one.

[B]

Not a single one. I wanted that one team to get through. I guess I'm. I'm Team England now, but it's not to get behind whoever is coming out of nowhere.

[A]

Me, too. Me too. Well, it's great to have you back in studio. We missed you.

[B]

I know. In the flesh. Thank you for holding it down.

[A]

Look, you know, it's. Mehdi was great, but we missed you. We got a great show for you guys today. We're going to cover the resumption of the war between the US And Iran. Who could have seen this coming? Ben honestly barely paused, if we're being honest. It sort of was always a war. But we're going to talk about the Trump administration's confusing and conflicting statements about what's happening and then tell you guys the backstory of how we got here. There's also some interesting new detail about this crazy Israeli plan to install former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as leader of Iran. Tell you about that. We're gonna explain about how concerns about security on Air Force One have led to a massive attack on press freedom here in the United States. So that's wonderful. We're gonna tell you about a story about a bridge to Canada and the price that we all pay because of government corruption. Then we're covering the latest from Venezuela, how terrorists are using artificial intelligence because we need more opportunities on this show. Weird gifts at NATO, some World cup talk at the end. And then, Ben, you did our interview earlier today. Who'd you talk to?

[B]

I talked to Congressman Ro Khanna. People may or may not have seen the news that he was on a trip to the west bank recently. A few days ago, he was threatened by a group of kind of you know, violent, heavily armed Israeli settlers. The IDF came, and instead of dispersing the settlers, they detained a US Congressman for the first time in several decades in any country. And so we talk about his trip, what happened, what he was trying to achieve there, what he saw there, the reaction to his visit from Prime Minister Netanyahu, but also he had Democrats criticizing him for just going to the West Bank. So we talked about that as well.

[A]

I was watching him on Fox News yesterday, and one of the questions was kind of like, how dare you not do basically the itinerary that the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. recommended you do. Like, how dare you not meet with families of hostages from October 7th? Which I'm not saying is like, not something that's totally important and valid to do, but it's like we're letting a foreign ambassador dictate a congressman's schedule while on a codel. What are we talking about?

[B]

There's so many things that piss me off about this, which we talk about a little bit, but the first is that even the Democrats, like Josh gottheimer and the dmfi, the Democratic Majority for Israel, accused him of going on a publicity stunt. What is every single trip that AIPAC sponsors where you go and get photos with Netanyahu and you visit some place that a rocket landed at some point, so they're mad that he went to the west bank instead of the photo ops they like, and then they ignore the fact that the west bank is not Israel. So why should the Israeli ambassador even be the host when you're visiting what is not recognized as Israel's territory? This is under an illegal military occupation.

[A]

Right. People kept saying, well, it's a closed area under military occupations. Like, yeah, that is the problem, actually, is sort of the structural challenges you're talking about. And also people are trying to argue, well, he wasn't really detained. He was just held up for 45 minutes by civilians with M4 rifles.

[B]

You guys all try all you, you know, keyboard warriors out there, I'd like you to go somewhere, get harassed by heavily armed people, and then have a foreign military come and, and not allow you to leave and tell me that you're not detained. I don't know what else that's called.

[A]

Yeah, and look, I mean, I'm not like, it seems like the IDF basically was like, look, we're going to wait here until the police come. That's how we're going to resolve this. Fine. But like, these random civilians, settlers with guns held them up for like 45 minutes. And it must have been incredibly scary.

[B]

I'm just going to guess too, that if, let's say Josh got him or I mentioned was in that position, the IDF might have been handled differently because they know who Ro Khan is and they know the positions he's taken.

[A]

Speaking of the west bank, our friend, friend of the show, Jasper Nathaniel, is doing great coverage of the West Bank. He's been there for about a month. Check out his substack. It's infinite jazz.substack.com he was once again, basically, like, with a group of Palestinians who got Roughed up and assaulted by a bunch of violent settlers. Jasper's a big dude.

[B]

He was with Roe on this trip. Yeah, so Roe talked about, you know, some. Because the other good thing is he talked about the actual Palestinian stories that he got. So we didn't just talk about Roe. And he credited Jasper with him taking the trip in the first place.

[A]

And look, Jasper's a big dude. Like, he's a big Jack guy. And this crazy settler was, like, punching him and kicking him. And it took all of Jasper's restraint not to just beat the fucking brakes off this guy, this weirdo. But check out his coverage. Infinite Jazz is the sub deck. All right, Ben, let's talk about Iran. We're back at war. This conflict that was once billed as a three to four week excursion has now gone on for over four months. And Trump is openly saying that now that the ceasefire is over, that it could go on forever. He's calling us the Guardian of the Hormuz Strait. So we have a brand new forever war in the Middle East. I know you're excited. I can see by the, you know, by your face you're pumped about this one.

[B]

The Guardians of the Galaxy is a little, you know, a little bigger.

[C]

Think bigger.

[B]

Think bigger.

[A]

Yeah, think a little bigger. So check out this supercut. Before we talk about what happened of the statements that Trump and his team were making when the ceasefire deal was inked and now compared to now.

[C]

I'm not looking for regime change, although this is regime change. The first regime is gone, the second regime is gone, and I think the third regime is more reasonable, but we'll find out. I got to know them, and they're stone cold crazy people.

[A]

The coolest thing about the progress we've made over the last few weeks is that you see people within the Iranian system, senior leadership, even IRGC officials, say, you know what, we may have some

[C]

animosity, we may have some mistrust, but we recognize the way that we've done

[A]

business with the United States for 47

[B]

years is a mistake.

[A]

Let's try something else.

[C]

Look, memorandum of Understanding. When you're dealing with sleaze, bags don't mean much.

[B]

It's an international waterway. No country is allowed to charge tolls or fees on an international waterway. That's existing international law.

[C]

I want to be reimbursed because we're protecting a very rich portion of the world. We're spending money. And so what we've done is we are going to be reimbursed for protection. So I put it out Yesterday, I thought it was good. I was called by different people, different countries, kings, amirs, and all of the people that we all know and we all love, said we'd love to do it a different way. We'd love to invest in the United States with billions and billions of dollars. The Gulf states are going to invest a tremendous amount of money into the United States, and that was very satisfactory to me. I think it's actually much better before,

[A]

Ben, before we get to the backstory and kind of the proximate causes that got us to this moment. Any. Any thoughts on the incoherent mess of statements we just saw there?

[B]

I think that the lesson we have to take away, which I don't know why people still need to learn this in year 10 of the Trump decade, is that there's, like, a very thick layer of bullshit that overlays, like, what is actually happening, that, like, 80 to 90% of what they say is just complete and utter bullshit on any given day about the success of the MoU or about 1 day they're great, and one day they're terrible.

[A]

The Iranian friends we made along the way.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. One day we're standing up for the principle that nobody can toll the thing, and then the next day we're trying to toll the thing. The Iranians, it's cool. It's cool how much we're talking today.

[A]

It's awesome how much we're talking.

[B]

But then they're fucking assholes. And this is the problem with a lot of conventional media that feels like obliged to run these, as if they're kind of credible argumentation for what the Trump approach is when the reality has not really changed. The Iranians control the Strait of Hormuz. This war is a catastrophe. Trump has no answer on the N questions that were the stated purpose of the war. The regime has not changed, if anything, just gotten more hardline. That's been the status quo ante here for months, and we go on this rollercoaster ride of rhetoric that really means nothing.

[A]

He talks so much and so often that he gets a pass for saying the exact opposite thing one day to the next, and just the total incoherence. But it drives me crazy. And it's useful, I think, to watch it all cut together.

[B]

It's very useful.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Because you were reminded. So just in terms of how we kind of got to this moment where the war is ramping back up, it seems like there are kind of two things that are worth mentioning. The first was that the Israelis passed along intelligence to Trump that said Iran was trying to kill him. I guess he didn't like that. I wonder about the veracity of the intelligence. We'll find out. I mean, they're like always probably trying to be trying to kill him, but I don't know if there was some new thing.

[B]

I don't think so.

[A]

That led to the following Truth social post quote, 1000 missiles are locked and loaded and aimed at the Islamic Republic of Iran, with thousands of more to immediately follow should the Iranian government act on its threat, pronounced in many corners of the globe to assassinate or attempt to assassinate the sitting President of the United States of America, in this case, me. So that was that. But more importantly, the US and Iran, as we've discussed, have been jockeying over who's going to control the Strait of Hormuz going forward. Remember, before this war started, the Strait of Hormuz was wide open and had been open for decades, even at times of great conflict between the US And Iran. But now Iran is asserting control over the strait in preparation for charging tolls in perpetuity. And they've been trying to force ships to sail through a channel that is closest to the Iranian coastline. But the has been providing support to ships that transit the Strait of Hormuz in a channel closer to Oman. The Iranians didn't like that. They started firing at ships in the OMANI Channel. The U.S. fired back. We had days of airstrikes on targets in Iran. The Iranians were firing missiles and drones at US Military bases in the Gulf. And here we are. So Iran, this points to this really sloppy language in the ceasefire memorandum of understanding to justify their actions and attempts to control the strait. Specifically, Ben, paragraph 5 of the MoU says Upon the signing of this MoU, the Islamic Republic of Iran will make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vehicles. And then later it says the Islamic Republic of Iran will conduct dialogue with the Sultanate of Oman to define the future administration and maritime services in the Strait of Hormuz. The US Side obviously says the Iranians do not control the strait because that language, the Iranians say they do. I for one, am shocked that JD Vance, Donald Trump's son in law, Jared Kushner, golf buddy Steve Wyckoff, didn't draft ironclad diplomatic language. So Ben, regardless, oil futures are up like 10% already. The wall Street Journal reported that the resumption of fighting revived a trading strategy that Wall street traders are now calling the Nacho trade, which is an acronym for Not a Chance Hormuz Opens. Goldman Sachs put out A report about efforts to build new pipelines and ports that would allow oil to get around the straight or Hormuz. But that's like a 2027, 2028 project. And in the near term, this is the new normal. It's bad, predictable, predicted, but back at war.

[B]

Yes. I mean, to just take up a couple of those things on these assassination threats and intelligence, do I think that maybe there's some aspiration that people in the Iranian system have to take a shot at Trump someday? Maybe. But do I think that Israel came across like a plot that the US Intelligence community didn't uncover and conveniently in the middle of the war that Israel would like to extend, like they foiled something? Now, I will say this. One reason that for most of human history, even when countries were at war with each other, even in like world wars, you did not have assassinations of leaders, is in part, people were concerned about the tit for tat. People might not remember because it happened, what, four or five months ago that the United States and Israel assassinated the leader of Iran. I mean, we may not like the supreme leader, but a lot of people in Iran do. And I just suggest that it doesn't justify anything. Quite the opposite. The point is that there should be a bright line around doing that. But if you assassinate, it's not just cost him some money. The leader of the IRGC that Trump assassinated in his first term, he participated and boasted about the assassination of the supreme leader of Iran.

[A]

Yeah, you're setting a precedent.

[B]

You're setting a precedent. And unfortunately, tragically, not just Trump, but any future US President is now in a different space. I mean, we've not talked enough about how extreme that was to just kill the leader of another country, even again, even an odious leader from our judgment. I also this loose taught thousands of missiles. First of all, Iran has weathered both a lot of missiles and threats to destroy their civilization.

[A]

There's no new ideas in that.

[B]

The truth. Social posts are so designed for American audiences and not Iranian ones. It's just so that Trump's lackeys, the dead enders on Fox News are like, oh, we feel really tough because Hugh Hewitt loved it. Yeah, yeah, we're going to kill some Iranian civilians. Maybe we'll kill some more schoolgirls with these weapons and we'll blow up the missile launcher that we already blew up, that they rebuilt already. This is not working militarily. And then the one thing I'd just say about the strait, the problem they have with this is Iran. Look at a map they're there, they're not going anywhere. So the only way you're actually going to open the strait in perpetuity is through a diplomatic deal with Iran. You can try to muscle as many tankers through for a few months or a few weeks, but, like, Iran's not going anywhere. And they could, two months from now, mine the strait again. They've demonstrated that they can do it. And so the only way this ends and that strait opens, you know, in a predictable and open ended way, is for there to be a diplomatic agreement.

[A]

Yeah. And I think Trump and his dumb team thought that this was an economic deal. Right. You always hear Jared Kushner be like, we think of diplomacy as a real estate deal. The Iranians did not. They had. They just, like Trump and Kushner and Wyckoff, they had no understanding of the nationalism and the pride and like the rage they created.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Among the IRGC and Iranian leaders by bombing the shit out of them. Right. And didn't factor that into their ability to get something done. So one thing I'm watching, like, last time we saw Trump propose an escort mission like this, Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi Crown Prince, basically shut it down by saying, you cannot fly through our airspace. I don't know if he's weighed in publicly this time, but I did see on Monday, the Saudis bombed a Runway in Yemen in Houthi territory to prevent an IRGC plane that was carrying Houthi leaders from landing there. It was a delegation that was coming back from the Supreme Leader's funeral in Iran. They bombed the Runway where they were trying to land, I think, to prevent them from getting back. But also they said there was a bunch of guns on this plane. Who fucking knows? But it was just interesting to me, Ben, because the Saudis and the Houthis have had this kind of unofficial truce in their war for about four years. And the nuclear option for Iran would be having the Houthis try to shut down shipping traffic in the Red Sea. Boy, you want to see an economic calamity? There you go. So this is one to watch.

[B]

This is the thing is this thing can continue to get worse. I mean, if we return to kind of a much larger scale war in Yemen and then the Houthis are trying to shut down traffic in the Red Sea and they're firing things at the Saudis and their efforts to paralyze the Gulf. Again, the longer this stays in this state of off and on war, the more risk you're accruing and the more you're perpetuating shortages of stuff not getting through the strait. There's no way out other than diplomacy. They want to believe that we're one Runway bombed or one tough night of strikes on Iran from having them capitulate

[A]

one Pete Hegseth statement away from victory.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. One more press conference or truth social. There's a reality and then there's what they're saying. And the reality is not much has changed since Iran weathered our assaults, closed the strait, and demonstrated the leverage that they have.

[A]

Yeah. And just on the cost of this war, one thing worth noting is the Washington Post had this really good piece over the weekend, this deeply reported expose over, you know, sort of the impact of the war in the Gulf. It was. The headline was, survivors of Iranian attack that killed six U.S. troops say generals ignored warnings. And it details the series of failures by army leaders during the war that included moving soldiers from one place that had air defenses to a smaller one that did not. It was poorly. This new place they moved them to was, like, poorly defended, easily surveilled. It talked about decisions by military leaders like prematurely asked soldiers to leave bunkers before it was safe, and then even alleges that one of the brigadier generals in charge of this unit didn't help rescue survivors after they'd been hit and, like, went and hid in a bunker. So it's just. It's great reporting. It's worth your time. That details the human cost to our service members who are hurt and killed in this conflict.

[B]

Yeah. And it's a bit of a reminder just to, you know, wade through the minefield of this discourse. But there's this kind of thing we do where we throw it clear and we're like, well, obviously the military did everything right, but Trump's an idiot.

[C]

Right.

[B]

I don't know that the military did everything right. Sounds like these guys are. In fact, when I look at the results of this war, I don't know what they did other than blow up a bunch of stuff in Iran. They didn't secure the facilities. They're not telling us again, for the hundredth time, the truth about how badly the damage is. We don't know how badly these people are injured, who are hurt. We don't know. We have no idea of what this strategy is. Militarily with the Iranians. Now, I'm sympathetic. This is not to impugn everybody in the military. I'm talking about the people at the top who run Centcom and Raisin Cain. Why are we led to believe that a Pete Hegseth run military is maximally competent. I don't think it is. And I think we're seeing some evidence of that. By the way, the only last thing I want to say, Tommy, in the category of what, what do you no longer believe? How many times has Trump told us that the Gulf is going to spend, you know, like Dr. Evil and Austin Power is like you know, $10 trillion, you know, does anybody believe this?

[A]

So this escort plan, having Navy ships escort all these other ships through the Strait of Hormuz, it went from we are going to charge them 20% per ship to now. Oh actually it's going to be paid for by Gulf countries fictional investment in the US but he's already trotted all these Gulf leaders to Washington and have them announce that they're going to invest

[B]

like right, a trillion, literally a trillion dollars. They said that? That's the thing that they said. And does. Do any Americans feel that money? Are you getting that money? Does that exist in the physical world?

[A]

Only if you work at like Nvidia.

[B]

If you work in the AI bubble, sure.

[A]

You know, that's it. Pod Save the World is brought to you by. Sundays. Have you ever actually looked at the ingredient list on your dog's food after the first ingredient? Well, good luck. You see, kibble is made from using extreme high heat to keep it shelf stable and inexpensive. So brands have to add back synthetic vitamins and minerals in the form of strange chemicals whose names you don't understand and definitely cannot pronounce. Is that really what you want? Your dog eating Sundae starts with 80% plus all natural meats and then adds superfoods like kale, ginger and blueberries. No fillers, no nutritional blends, no chemicals, just simple complete nutrition. And the best part, Sundays requires no fridge, no freezer, no prep, no mess. You get the quality of a home cooked meal with the scoop and serve. Ease of kibble. It's what dog food should have been all along. And Sunday's just launched a new brand new fish recipe. It's made with 80% whole and minced fish, including eco friendly invasive carp sourced from American rivers for a naturally rich flavor. In fact, did you know that many dogs naturally prefer fish flavors? So Sunday's fish recipe is especially great for picky eaters. Plus it's packed with omega 3 fatty acids that help support healthy skin, shiny coats, joints and brain function. It's complete and balanced nutrition for all of life's stages. Last week both Leo John's dog and Pundit Lovet's dog were in the office and John brought in Leo's sundaes and fed Leo here. And let me tell you, every single dog in this office bum rushed our office because they wanted a piece of that Sunday's food. They love it. They're obsessed with it. They were all trying to eat it before Leo could. And it's because it's made with real ingredients. And you'll see the results in your dog. Better mood, more calm and focus. Softer coat, less itching, better poops. All of it. Plus the dogs were doing better too. Make the switch to Sundays. Go right now to sundaysfordogs.com world and get 50% off your first order. Or you can use the code world at checkout. That's 50 off your first order at sundays4dogs.com world sundays4dogs.com world or use the code world at checkout. 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 the tools to claim your domain, build a professional website, expand your brand, and facilitate payments all in one place. With Squarespace's collection of cutting edge design tools, anyone can build a bespoke online presence that perfectly fits their business. Start with Blueprint AI, Squarespace's AI Enhanced Website Builder to get a fully custom website in just a few steps, using basic information about your industry goals and personality to generate premium quality content and personalized design recommendations. Every dream needs a domain. Squarespace domains make it easy to find the best name for your business at one fair, all inclusive price. No hidden fees or add ons required. Squarespace provides everything you need to bring more of your dream to life. Whether that means building a website or adding a professional email service, don't wait to claim your name. Invest in your dream domain today. Head to squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to Launch, go to squarespace.comworld to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Or that's squarespace.com world. One other thing so a few weeks back we learned about this Israeli plan to install former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president after the conflict started. For those unfamiliar with Ahmadinejad, not a great guy, well known for human rights abuses, stealing elections, boosting Iran's nuclear program and denying the Holocaust. So, you know, not the kind of person, not the obvious choice for Israel in this case. The New York Times had a bunch new details about the scheme and how they recruited him as an asset that just felt right up your alley. Ben so Israel used its ties with Viktor Orban and the Hungarian government to get a university in Budapest to invite Ahmadinejad. I love it, to a climate change conference because he's just a big guy, he cares. But obviously this was covered. To facilitate this clandestine meeting with the head of Mossad, Israeli operatives also met with Ahmadinejad during a visit he made to Guatemala. We think they probably did for, again, a conference about the environment. Their plan to free Ahmadinejad was to bomb his compound, kill his guards, send Mossad agents and I think a Peugeot to pick him up, and then take him to a safe house. But I think Ahmadinejad did not stay at this safe house, apparently because he

[B]

didn't feel very safe.

[A]

Quickly disillusioned by the rescue operation, and now he's under house arrest. Ahmadinejad is. He was last seen at the Supreme Leader's funeral surrounded by a bunch of guards. It seemed like very much a decision to kind of of show off what had happened to him. So, Ben, I guess my takeaway was, look, say what you want about the Mossad, like the pager operation. I think you and I talked about the questionable morality of having thousands of pagers blow up all across Lebanon and potentially kill kids and innocent people all around them. But it was a creative, technical endeavor.

[C]

Right.

[A]

It was impressive in the sense that they were able to pull this off, make a fake pager company. Right. This seems like completely ham handed and stupid and half assed and like, I have no sympathy for Ahmadinejad, but that boy, is that guy fucked.

[B]

Yeah, he's a bit like, are you a 1984 guy? Like when Winston Smith gets released from, you know, the detention and he just knows he's got. He's just dead.

[A]

Yeah, it's been a while since I've read that.

[B]

Yeah. So first of all, it is notable the Budapest Engel because, you know, Orban and Netanyahu's ties were super close. I wrote about this in my last or second book. You know, Netanyahu's political consultants on his 2009 campaign, Lo and behold, became Orban's political consultants on his 2010 campaign. And when Orban people hired Black Cube, same former Mosaic guys who spied on me to try to like do sting operations and you know, Project Veritas were going to record, you know, source linked people talking about how they don't like Victor Orban. Where'd they leak it? Oh, they leaked it to the Jerusalem Post and then Orban picked it up. The symbiotic nature of not just Orban but kind of the European far right in Israel is very notable. It's also very seemingly strange because Orban is also kind of an anti Semite. But it just shows you that Netanyahu and a lot of his defenders don't care about anti Semitism. So long as the people, they can say all the anti Semitic stuff they want to their far right base in their European politics, as long as they allow, you know, things like this to happen, then that's fine. I will also say it's kind of like what I was saying about, you know, centcom. There's this veneer of competence around the Mossad when what we have seen them being able to do is kill people. Like, they want to blow people up, they can find them and kill them. But their capacity to actually, like, build something. I mean, under what scenario was Ahmadinejad going to leave this safe house and assume power in Iran?

[A]

Like, right, the question is with what army, which apparently was supposed to be this Kurdish operation, which also.

[B]

Never think about how insane that is. Like, what game of risk are these guys playing in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv that a Kurdish army is going to come down from the north and meet up with Ahmadinejad, but storm the parliament or something? It's so nuts. And, and I just, I beg people like we've. You and I have been in these rooms, like, none. These people are not as all omnipotently smart as you think they are. And if you need any proof of that, just look at the outcome of every dumb fucking war they start.

[A]

Yeah, that's a great segue to the story about this intelligence that Israel passed along about this Iranian threat on Trump's life. So that intelligence that came from the Israelis, along with Trump deciding to ramp back up the war against Iran while he was abroad in Turkey at NATO, led to him to make a security decision, which was to fly back to the UK on his way to the US on the old Air Force One and not the new Qatari bribe version of Air Force One that he flew to Turkey. Trump said, we're sending it ahead so the troops can tour it in the base in the uk he made up some bullshit sounds, but the New York Times reported that the decision was made because the new plane is still lacking in security measures, especially missile defense systems. These reports reportedly outraged Trump. And then just two days later, a bunch of New York Times journalists were like, home at night on a Friday night, and they got served subpoenas from, I assume, FBI agents demanding that they testify in front of a grand jury in, like, on the next Wednesday, right? In, like, what, five days? So they were issued, and these subpoenas were issued by FBI Director Cash Patel after he apparently spent eight hours working out of the White House on Friday. Focused on this briefing, you know, I assume Stephen Miller and the political staff. So on Monday, Hegseth also announced that the Pentagon and the DOJ have created a joint task force to identify and prosecute leakers. So, Ben, I can look at this story and on some level, kind of understand why you look, this is a national security leak that I could imagine an administration being upset about. Now, I would argue that I think the lack of defensive capabilities on the Qatari bribe, Air Force One, were pretty well known and also was widely discussed. Widely discussed. Also widely discussed was what people assumed would be the time frame required to install those on this plane. It seems like they did a rush job and they just, I don't know, refurbished it to the tune of a couple hundred million dollars for taxpayers like us to pay, and then off we go. Trump was riding on the thing internationally, but in practice, like, what this is is a massive attack on press freedom that skipped all the normal steps in a national security leak investigation and went straight to, how do we intimidate and potentially prosecute these journalists? And that is a very new and real thing, because I know there are people out there who are like, well, actually us, and say, well, Obama had like eight espionage act leak investigations or whatever. But it's like, normally what happens there is you use every other means possible to figure out who, you know, like, broke the law, which government employee broke the law in leaking the information. You don't go after the journalists.

[B]

First of all, it's interesting to me that they made this decision. Somebody in the Secret Service and people that look at threat assessments. I've been in some of those conversations. We used to have pretty intense conversations. That obviously involves a lot of intelligence gathering around, say, the president deciding to fly to Afghanistan, where you knew there was an active threat potentially to Air Force One, and someone approved this plane without the countermeasures flying to Turkey, and then didn't approve it leaving Turkey. So something happened, like some intel came in. Maybe it was bogus intel, too, I don't know. But clearly there was a shift. Well, that shift is clearly going to get the attention of journalists. So it's no surprise that people noticed that the president chose to fly on a different plane. I do want to say something about the leak investigation point that you made, because I think anybody that listens with any regularity of this Podcast knows how much you and I are willing to talk about, wrestle with, reckon with things we thought should have done differently. This is wildly different in very important ways. If you have an open leak investigation because there's national security information that is made public. And the way these things normally go, as you said, is these investigations grind on for years. You and I got fucked by some of these investigations, even though we did nothing wrong, because they cast such a wide net. They talked to anybody and everybody that had access to that information. Before they even think about looking at journalists, it disappears from the White House. It's all in the doj. Back in the days when DOJ had independence and just like. Or US Attorneys or US Attorneys who sometimes like. Rod Rosenstein was the US Attorney who investigated the leak investigation of the Stuxnet issue in the Obama years.

[A]

The guy was a very conservative Republican.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You were not, like, safe because he worked for the administration and DOJ was doing the investigation. It was the exact opposite.

[B]

If you can't say, or if you're so intent on kind of virtue signaling or like, settling some score, you feel like you have with, like, Obama, that you can't see the difference between the president of the United States getting really mad about a story and the same fucking day, his FBI director canceling his trip to see his girlfriend play a country concert in a parking lot somewhere and sitting up in, like, the situation.

[A]

That's my favorite detail.

[B]

Good detail.

[A]

All the stories say this sitting there

[B]

for eight hours, and then within, like, what, 24, 48 hours, you've got reporters getting, like, the threatened. Like that. That has not happened. And so, like, let's focus on the thing that matters here, which is the President, United States, directing the FBI director to run an investigation out of the White House that immediately targets journalists, not the people that handle the classified information or the information about decision making around Air Force One is a total new Rubicon that was just crossed in this country, and it should scare people. It's fucking Putinesque behavior.

[A]

It's incredibly chilling. Also, there was a reporter, her name is escaping me at the Washington Post, who had her devices searched not long back because of some leak investigation about a story. I forgot what it was, but yeah, I mean, it really does sound like there was direct coordination between the White House and Kash Patel on this story. And then they literally summoned the guy to work out of the White House workspace to prepare this thing and turn it on fast. One to watch. And very scary for these reporters. Ben, let's do a little quick Corruption. Watch here. So this one, I want to tell you a story about Canada, a corrupt billionaire and a hockey legend named Gordy. How? You ready?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So, okay, there's a brand new six lane bridge spanning the Detroit river, linking Detroit to Windsor, Canada. It's been ready to go and, and you know, have people going across it since June 9th. So it's named after Gordy Howe, Canadian hockey legend who played most of his career at the Detroit Red Wings. I think he's a big fighter, no?

[B]

Yeah, yeah, Gordy against some of the old school pictures when they didn't have helmets too. It was fucking wild, these guys skating around. No helmet, kamikaze. No helmet.

[A]

Very few teeth.

[B]

Very few teeth, but a very good player.

[A]

Hell of a player. Don't cross that guy. So the opening of this bridge was delayed for weeks because the US and Canada were wrestling over the financial terms. So the backstory on this thing is Detroit to Windsor, that border crossing is really important. Nearly 1/4 of trade via truck go between the US and Canada moves through that Detroit area crossing. That's like hundreds of millions of dollars a day and around 100 billion a year. For years, there have been only two options for getting across the Detroit River. There's a tunnel owned jointly by Detroit and Windsor. Then there's this privately owned bridge, the Ambassador Bridge. It's, yes, it's very weird that this bridge is owned by one family. And the bridge is especially important because trucks can't fit in the tunnel, so they all have to go over the bridge and it's super shitty. And so as, as cross border trade continued to grow, especially after nafta, the Canadians in particular were increasingly desperate to find some other means of getting stuff across the border. And they were fought tooth and nail by this billionaire troll family that owned the Ambassador Bridge, this notorious Detroit slumlord named Matty Maroon, who's also a major Republican donor. And so Maroon, he obviously didn't want competition for his bridge. He was willing to fight dirty to prevent it. Long interesting story there that we won't go into. Finally, Canada offers to pay for the bridge itself at the cost of $4.7 billion, and then recoup the cost via tolls, which seemed like a great deal, including to Trump in his first term. Then you fast forward to this year. Matthew Maroon, the son of the aforementioned and now dead Matty Maroon, donated $1 million to Trump's Trump aligned super PAC. Then he met with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick a couple weeks later. And then hours after that meeting, Trump posted this insane screed on Truth Social that you probably remember that included a claim that China was going to terminate all hockey being played in Canada. Do you remember this?

[B]

I don't remember this.

[A]

And get rid of the Stanley Cup, I think.

[B]

Oh, I do now. I remember this.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. And that one also said, quote, I will not allow this bridge to open until the United States is fully compensated for everything we have given them. And also importantly, Canada treats the United States with the fairness and respect that we deserve. And we'll start negotiations immediately. With all that we have given them, we should own perhaps at least one half of this asset. Right. So that brings us to June, the opening ceremony. This bridge is canceled. Trump goes for one chance to shake Canada down on this bridge project that they paid for in full. Finally, they cut a deal that says Canada, the U.S. will split the net proceeds of tolls with the U.S. for 15 years, meaning Canada will still get repaid because those costs will get recovered before any net profits. And then the US will have to approve increasing tolls by 10% or cutting tolls below comparable bridges. Right. So they have this provision for their billionaire donor that just says this new bridge can't undercut the prices he's charging without US Approval. So Trump goes on. Social Media brags about this, but in Canada, it has become political fodder. So here's conservative leader Pierre Poliev.

[B]

That guy's still around. Yeah, yeah.

[A]

Followed by Mark Carney, who I just want to warn those who are watching, not listening, he's wearing kind of a unfortunate cowboy look that you just have to get past. Let's watch. Canada paid for the entire $6.4 billion price tag. We even funded the infrastructure on the American side of the, of the river, all with the understanding that we would collect 100% of the tolls until we recouped our money. Carney just agreed to give half the tolls to a Michigan economic development body that did not pay a dime to build the thing. This is our grandma master negotiator. Carney's approach of elbows up when he thinks the president is not looking and sucking up to his face is not working. The word net does a lot of work in this.

[B]

We are, we are sharing after Canada is paid back.

[A]

So we get the revenues, then the, the servicing of the cost of the bridge and paying the debt of the bridge, and then what's left over, there's a split of that, that for 15 years, there's not, not going to be

[B]

a lot of net to split.

[A]

So, look, it's a good deal for Canada. Such an interesting story about how corruption has real world implications, economic implications for people in Detroit, in Canada. I saw that all the Senate candidates in Michigan have actually been making content about this issue and trying to highlight it and make a part of their campaign. We'll see if they're successful, but hopefully our guy Abdul Abdul has made a great video on it. So it's just an interesting. An interesting story, something to watch and just the latest, like, kind of little sprinkling corruption that we've learned about. God knows what we have.

[B]

Again, for people now watching the YouTube, the cowboy look was a little weird. But Peter Poliev, like, why is he walking? Yeah, Like, I get. When sometimes you're. I mean, why is he on the go for this video that he's doing? Like, it's just a little disorienting. Look, the one takeaway you have to have from this, because it does matter a lot. The amount of trade that goes across these bridge crossings in places like Michigan and Canada is extraordinary. The main takeaway is in this administration, if you point a camera at something and pause it, you find something like this. Like, if this is happening on this bridge, it's happening on how many trade deals, it's happening on how many export controls of chips getting sold around the world. Like, these guys are treating the entire United States and all of these ancillary pieces of commerce and trade like a big fucking fruit to squeeze all the juice out of so they can get rich, so their donors can get rich, so they can get contributions to things. It's just a big shakedown operation. It's kind of how, by the way, it's how, like, certain really corrupt countries in the world are run where there's not a single, Like, Russia. Like, there's not a bridge built in Russia that doesn't have, like, some kickback for either Putin or some friend of his or some oligarch or some local official, whatever. Like, this is now what the United States is like.

[A]

Yeah, this story is just like. The reason the story was interesting is it's just like one of countless stories like this. Some we've heard of. The majority we haven't heard of.

[B]

No, that's the point. The majority we haven't heard of. And I also love the fact that, like, there's a similar cast that shows, like, Howard Lotnick is always showing up and things like this.

[A]

Always. His kids are often there.

[B]

Yeah, his kids are there. Witkoff, Kushner. Like, there's just this kind of inner circle of Grifters and corrupt like crooks. Basically like running the US government like a, a mafia family. And it's like, hey, nice bridge you got there. And how much can we squeeze out of this?

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

And I think what's amazing is how brazen it is. I mean right before we started recording a New York Times story posted with the headline Trump paid 2 million by South Korean company facing trade investigation.

[B]

It's just like there's so many things.

[A]

Cut him a check. It was described as a non refundable development piece fee in his financial disclosure report. He's not even trying to hide it.

[B]

People will be writing about this corruption for like 100 years because it's. We are just seeing, I mean this, the expression holds like this is a tip of an iceberg, like the amount of stuff happening. And why is there trillion half dollar Pentagon budget up like 60% like. Well, because it's like a huge trough that they can, you know, that's the easiest money to get.

[A]

And the Trump boys are investing in all these companies that are connecting to

[B]

the Everything is being monetized by Trump.

[A]

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[B]

If someone could come up with an idea for how to do that, maybe

[A]

Elon Musk could think of something. All the political ramifications are kind of playing out in real time. There are countless agonizing stories about Venezuelans who are like, you know, interviewed by a reporter next to a pile of rubble. They were hoping the government would come and help them rescue their loved one. That loved one is no longer alive. They're hoping for help now for just like, body recovery operations. And President Delsey Rodriguez, she did herself no favors by sporting a $1,300 ski jacket while out visiting with victims. So that didn't go for very well. And there's all these, like, the Times had a story that said, quote, you know, repression turns to rage after quakes in Venezuela. It's about people just, like, openly criticizing the government and losing their fear. So we'll see if this becomes a political problem. And then speaking of Trump, then the Times had a big story about how Marco Rubio, Secretary of State Marco Rubio is literally running Venezuela for. From Washington. He's not visited the country since the. The Delta Force operation did oppose Maduro, but he decides how Venezuela's money is spent, what businesses can operate there. He's even vetting some of Delsey Rodriguez's social media and media appearances. It's like that level of micromanagement, which is, I think, what all of us assumed was happening on some level. But to read the level of micromanagement in black and white was still. Still kind of shocking to me.

[B]

Yeah. But my takeaway from that story is, to what end? Marco Rubio's ego is being satiated. But is life any better for Venezuelans?

[A]

Oh, no, no.

[B]

The government is repressive and corrupt. It's just now corrupt in a way that probably benefits some of Trump's cronies. Are Americans better off for this? Are you better off? Like, are the prices down at the pump because of some windfall of Venezuelan oil? No. And so I kind of don't like this. Wow. We're running it. Marco's text chain. Well, running what? Can anyone detail? Give me a list of how things are better for Americans or Venezuelans. Because Marco Rubio is able to approve Delsey Rodriguez's social media and media appearances. Has he freed everybody who's in jail for political crimes? Has he set an election date for, like, a free and fair election Venezuela? Like, what are we getting for this other than the kind of ego of a late 19th century gunboat diplomacy, colonial enterprise?

[A]

It's just crazy that we have a. There is a viceroy. I mean, Rubio is literally the viceroy of Venezuela and he's sitting in Washington.

[B]

But they can't even articulate, like, what. Because Delsey Rodriguez is a communist, you know, and a repressive one at that and a corrupt figure. So they can't even explain to us whose interest this is in. The detail I rest on is approving business deals. Because that probably tells me that there's like, Trump, you know, Florida cronies, like, people that hang around Mar a Lago who want to, like, you know, to build infrastructure in Venezuela. And they're getting contracts at Marco's, like suggesting Delsey approved.

[C]

Right?

[B]

It's, it's, it's no different than the Canadian bridge. Right?

[A]

It's just a bribe.

[B]

It's the same thing.

[A]

Avenue for bribes. All right, Ben, switching gears here because there's not enough anxiety in your life already. We wanted to talk about how terrorists are using artificial intelligence. This comes via a research paper by the University of Cambridge titled God has Helped Us and so Will AI how the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI. So the New York Times got a first look at this paper, wrote it up, up. The paper's now online. The paper itself includes interviews with 27 former Boko Haram soldiers and commanders who talk about using these LLMs like Claude and Chatgpt and Grok. But what's interesting is they're using it to actually improve their tactics on the battlefield. It's not just like AI for propaganda recruitment stuff. It's like day to day operations. The report says specifically the group uses AI to plan attacks, design explosive devices, service and troubleshoot weapons and improve operations security. ISIS has provided AI training for Boko Haram. I guess both groups have dedicated AI units. A couple quotes that jumped out at me, Ben, from some of these Boko Haram members quote, we mostly used it three ways. The first one is to learn how to assemble and use guns and how to manufacture bombs. The second one is for surveillance and how to improve our surveillance strategies, to monitor what is happening in our camps and also better understand our enemy and prepare attacks. The third one is to make plans. Like, when we come up with new ideas on how to attack, we ask IT for tactics, on how to make it work in practice and to be successful. Another person said, before the bomb explosion was not that big, but then they studied it. AI told us what chemicals to put in that made the explosive heavier. So chilling stuff. For what it's worth, this is describing activity from 2023 and 2024. All the spokespeople who were asked to respond to the TIME story got very defensive and they said, well, the models are more powerful now, but it's all. Everything is safer. I don't know that I believe any of that. I guess we'll find out. Ben, what'd you make of this kind of nightmare story and what it tells us?

[B]

It is a nightmare story, and it's eminently predictable in the sense that when you first had that chatgpt moment, when it was released for the first time, one of the very first things people started to talk about in security circles is, well, wait a second, why couldn't this develop the recipe for biological pathogens or, or God forbid, dirty bombs, or all the way down to the more tactical level? Just things like how do you create better explosives? Or how can we get better targeting for some extremist group or some dictatorial leader? And this is what happens when you build technologies without developing the guardrails because you've convinced yourself that you're either in some race against the Chinese or, you know, you've got frontier companies that need to get as big an IPO as possible, so they have to move as fast as possible without regulating or self regulating. Because we are building a technology that I don't know how many people are asking for. Tommy. Not many people in my life are asking for it without regulating it, without legislation, without any international discussion about things like this and how you can guard against it. And by the way, in the reporting, it suggests they were using American models. But even if OpenAI and Anthropic, if chatgpt and Claude, for instance, have a better trigger to say, I can't tell you about that. If you open source any bit of these models, the replica AIs are going to be able to do the same thing. So in the same way that there's a dark web, there's a dark Internet, So if you want to, to buy and sell arms or drugs or, God forbid, engage in human trafficking and pedophilia, like people have a dark Internet, there will be a dark AI. And we're just not even having conversations about regulating it. All the conversations are about the scale of investments and the IPO for the stock market. Yeah, the stock market. And this is happening. This is going to happen. Yeah.

[A]

The other day I just jumped on the phone with this guy named Hansa Chaudhary from the Future of Life Institute, this organization, like, trying to raise awareness about technologies like AI or like nuclear weapons and just sort of steer us all away from the extreme risk towards, you know, behaviors that actually benefit humanity. And I was just struck by how many different policy touch points they're trying to work on. In dc, there is like, securing the AI tech, the chips, and then the models themselves. Because, like you know, you worry about China just stealing the model weights. It's another way they can just, you know, leapfrog us. There's like the sort of soft cyber abuse use cases, which is like using AI to supercharge, phishing and trying to get your password, or financial scams or disinformation. Then there's like the major cyber operation which we saw with the Mythos model, the Claude model, which is using it to find zero day exploits, go after governments, go after big companies. Then there's the integration of AI into military systems, which raises huge questions about, about, you know, targeting, for example. Right. Like you're hearing people say, well, with AI, we can, we can generate thousands of targets per day and no one's really asking the question, like, is there any moral version of war where you're bombing thousands of targets a day? Like, is that effective?

[B]

War targets equals good.

[A]

That's crazy. There are all the debates on China that you just mentioned. And then the scariest one to me, Ben, is the, is the bio threats, because AI hopefully will help us cure diseases and find new drugs and all these good things, but that same exact technology can make it easier for people to build dangerous biological pathogens and do it faster and maybe even make something novel, like something that doesn't currently exist. And the process for catching up to that kind of development is just going to inherently always be slower than the process for developing this stuff.

[B]

Yeah. And look, to be clear, just so we're not all negative about everything here, I get it. This technology is going to be developed, it's going to have some benefits. I think curing disease is going to be very high up on that list. I'd like to see what it can help do with clean energy and dealing with climate change. The issue I have is the manner in which you develop the technology. I don't think we've seen a technology, if we take the people's words for it, who are developing it, a technology that is this transformative, that is being developed entirely in private hands with no guardrails, no government involvement really whatsoever. The proprietary information in all the tech companies far exceeds what governments even know about it. No guardrails, no regulatory framework around it, no legislative regulatory framework around it, it no dialogue between the United States and China, the two AI superpowers. And it's inevitably going to lead to all of these issues. I mean, just to. We can continue to talk about this because it's such an important issue in other shows. I'll just pick up on one. For instance, if you're running one of these companies, your interest is like beating your competitor because that's what capitalism is about. I'll add one to your list. Like who's vetting the employees? Do you know how easy it would probably be for the Chinese or Russians to try to. I won't name a company because I'm not trying to put a spot on it. But like, you know, we want to get somebody in the door and you know, if you work at a national lab associated with the US nuclear weapons, you know, you get pretty vetted before you enter that facility. Are they vetting who they're hiring? Like just all. There's a million questions like this, you

[A]

know, Nicole Pearl Ross Roth, who is spent like a decade of the New York Times working on cyber security, digital espionage, all this stuff has an entire series out right now about the North Koreans training people to be like expert coders and then getting them hired at major companies as IT employees.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So they have like godlike access to these systems and apparently these companies are like, well actually, you know, we don't want to fire this guy. He's like a really good employee.

[B]

Really get suffering, you know, but they're,

[A]

they're just this pervasive problem and like they have no idea how, how deep it goes.

[B]

Yeah. So I, it just, it's indicative of there's many things like this. Right. And, and again I don't in some ways like the companies are doing what companies do in capitalism, like the government to step in. Like I'm not, I'm actually not even just picking on Sam Altman here. Although, you know, it's the US government and is not performing its function in regulating a transformative technology because it's totally dysfunctional and corrupt and there's no international community. In any normal times there would be un convened summits with every country in the world. We'd be in round 20 of those negotiations if this happened 20 years ago. It's crazy that that's not happening.

[A]

Yeah, we pick on OpenAI sometimes because Sam Altman is annoying mostly and because he seems so duplicitous. But, but you know, for everything you're worried about what they're doing. Like Grok is they're far more responsive

[B]

and like what meta has been, you know, meta released back in, you know, not that long ago. They were the ones who are like we're going to release our model. And the Chinese pop up thank you Deep seek and are like hey yeah, like thank you for doing that. So there's a lot of, there's not, there's not one villain to this story. The overall villain is just that we can't control ourselves. We can't, we, we can't slow this thing down and put some rules around it.

[A]

Yeah. All right, Ben. So the. When we were in the Obama world, in the Obama administration, our track record was not perfect when it came to gifting foreign heads of state gifts. So Obama gave British Prime Minister Gordon Brown DVDs, ones that were formatted to play only in North America.

[B]

Well, yeah.

[A]

And Brown gave Obama a pen holder carved from timber from a Victorian era anti slave ship. Yeah, that was not great.

[B]

They gave it a little more thought on their end.

[A]

We gave the Queen an ipod. So we, look, we tend to tread lightly on this subject.

[B]

IPods are coming back. Do you see this, by the way?

[A]

No.

[B]

There's like a Gen Z, like, you know, we're going analog.

[A]

Stay off your phone. That's good. But even I was a little surprised when I read about Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan's gift to all the other NATO leaders who came to the summit in Ankara. Check out this video. It's from Slovakia's president. He's opening up his gift from Erdogan. Let's watch. He's opened up a box there and inside we see a huge gun with a note. And then I believe there are six bullets next to it. This is the more I think the official photo of the gun and ammo that was presented to the leaders at the NATO summit. Quite beautiful. So this is a personally engraved vintage Turkish pistol. It's a.357 Magnum with six live rounds. Because obviously you don't gift someone an empty gun. That's just rude. And so hilariously though, Ben, this meant for a bunch of these European leaders, they had to figure out what to do with these things to avoid running afoul of gun laws in their own countries. For example, Belgium's prime minister realized that he had transported a firearm across international lines after he landed back home and had to hand it to the cops. Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, said thanks, and then I think, donated it to a military museum. Other leaders had to leave their guns at their embassies in Turkey with plans to decommission them. According to the Guardian, Canada's Mark Carney quote, took his revolver with him, but left the ammunition in Turkey. They did not explain why. So, fun fact here, Turkey is now the third biggest exporter of small arms in the world. So this is a bit of marketing from Erdogan. But what do you make of the gift here? Is there a subtle message?

[B]

The inclusion of bullets is quite extraordinary to me because you could actually take the gift and immediately shoot someone.

[A]

Kill somebody.

[B]

Yeah. So look, it's not the gift I'd go for. It doesn't scream peace or defensive alliance to me, but the inclusion of ammunition is wild to me. How quaint that there are countries with gun laws that you can't bring it in. I will tell you what came into my mind though, which again, we're getting old enough that we keep revisiting things from the Internet, but do you remember the Olympics? That Turkish guy who looked like a. A aging middle aged man and, and he was in the shooting competition and he was just like holding out like a six shooter, like sideways, like totally like people Google that. Turkish gun Olympics. See what I'm talking about? Because it looks like that's kind of what Erdogan was gifting.

[A]

Everyone else had like perfect form and was posing and like sniping targets. And this guy looked like he had like a heater in his mouth and was just like popping off, like side style.

[B]

Yeah. So it did bring that back to me. That's the good I take away from this. But yeah, like it's just this. The world doesn't feel. It's kind of not what you want happening at the NATO summit. You want like doves released or something.

[A]

Yeah, everyone's an odd duck. All right. Finally the World cup is almost over again. We talked about the Spain, France game on Wednesday. The day this comes out, England is going to play Argentina. Rigged. You were in Norway for some of the games. So we talked about the. The Norway fans doing the Viking Row. Folks might have seen this. They did it in stadiums, they did it it on the street, they did it on escalators, they did it all over the place. Ben, did you see the one fan who refused to join?

[B]

I did. I did. I consumed all the Norway content.

[A]

I love this guy. His name is Emil Honors Lapin. Here's how he explained himself in an interview with Sky News. Let's watch. This is Emil Aners Lapin in the

[B]

middle of a crowd of rowing fans.

[A]

But he went viral for refusing to join in. A little earlier I asked him why.

[C]

Why?

[A]

First of all, I just find it really stupid. That's.

[B]

That's the thing.

[A]

I thought when they came up with it that it was stupid and annoying and I didn't want to do it. And then it copies a lot of

[B]

what the Iceland were doing.

[A]

And it's factually Wrong. They didn't row, they say, over the athletic. I love his oars in the background. Like, this guy's a pro.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

He knows rowing.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, I appreciate it. I always appreciate someone who's not gonna just go with the crowd. Just, you know, at the same time, like, it was just kind of fun to pretend Roe. I mean, I think people seem like they're having a good time.

[A]

Norway fans were having a blast.

[B]

Like, I'm not sure the historical accuracy was the point. Like, you know, they were just digging it. But hey, man, you do you. And if you want to correct the record on how they got to Iceland, like, that's totally fine. I get it.

[A]

Point taken. Point taken.

[B]

Point taken.

[A]

We got you last week, Ben. Also, I talked with Mehdi about the controversy around Flo Baligan, one of the great American players. He had a red card. He was supposed to have to sit out the game against Belgium. And then Trump called the president.

[B]

I wrote a substack about this.

[A]

I know you did. And Mehdi actually called it out on the show. And then Trump calls the head of FIFA. The problem is magically solved. Flo Baligan gets to play against Belgium. Doesn't matter. And, you know, for the. For the result of the game, we got our asses kicked. So it didn't really matter. But it was pretty sketchy and pretty shady. Check out this new detail on how it all went down. This is from Dan Patrick on the Dan Patrick Show.

[C]

When that decision was made to lift

[A]

the automatic ban, which is an unprecedented action, it was done by one person and one person only. From what I'm told, Chairman Mohammed Al Kamali of the United Arab Emirates. The committee was neither informed nor consulted. The UAE is a top tier relation to the Trump family's business interest and government relationship. This was one person who made this decision. So when President Trump said he is the one that made this happen, he probably did. But my source said that this, this came from the chairman, Mohammed Al Kamali of the United Arab Emirates. So the committee wasn't even told of this. The least surprising news ever.

[B]

It's the least surprising thing that the United Arab Emirates might have somebody in the middle of a corruption scandal associated with both Donald Trump and international sports. Like, what a shocker. You know, it's exactly what is amazing about the Trump era is just how easy it is to predict how things went down. Because this is what I thought, again, anybody would know this, like, where's the corruption? It's the Gulf. And if Trump wants something fixed there, who's he gonna go through? And sure enough, it's the Emirati chair of some fake, fake committee for, you know, his sycophantic FIFA president friend. I will, I will say Tommy to do a little sports media criticism. Good. By the way, good for Dan Patrick, because I, I, on my podcast, I'd have a lot of sports podcasts. I'm not even gonna call any of them out because it's not worth it. But, like, I heard some people, like, actively running away from the importance of the story, you know, like, hey, like, we, I mean, you know, Trump did that thing, but, like, we don't need to talk about that. Clearly wasn't that important. Or, and, and I sense people being afraid of their audience. You know, I get you don't like to mix sports and politics, but President United States, like, clearly intervenes. I can tell you who was interested in that story. Every other sports fan, soccer fan in

[A]

the world, every human being alive, every

[B]

human being on earth following the World Cup. And so we can't, like, pretend, like, and by the way, like, I, I, I'll be there. The smart, like, the liberal that people get mad at. Like, no, I don't think Trump did one good thing. Like, he would have if we had won, which I wanted us to do. He would have fucked it up because everybody in the world would have been like, they cheated and that's the only reason they won.

[A]

Yeah. My takeaway was I didn't think it should be a red card. I thought it was a bad call. Yeah, I, I, Obviously what Trump did is sketchy, but honestly, like, I was less grossed out by him because on some level, like, presidents advocate for their countries. FIFA is a disgusting, utterly corrupt into its core organization, and this will be something that is hung around their neck forever. And, like, I think the pushback you hear is like, FIFA is so corrupt. You know, there's all the DOJ. There's the DOJ indictments from 2015. There are the allegations of, you know, taking bribes to give various countries, like Russia or Qatar, the, the World cup location that it almost, like, kind of washes over you because it's such a broken organization. But I actually think this was Mehdi did too. I think this is actually different because it impacted the play of the game during the cup, not like, who gets a sponsorship deal.

[B]

Well, that's the thing. And, you know, we, like, you know, I mean, it took me back to being a kid and learning about, like, the ways in which the Soviets used to fuck around with, like, the Olympic judges and stuff. You know, like when you get into the. Because do I think you should have gotten red card?

[C]

No.

[B]

I also don't think, you know, I think Egypt got screwed. I think Norway got screwed on a goal. Like, you know, I, I don't, I bitch about. I'm insane. People just go look at my Twitter feed, which the majority of my Twitter feed for the last six months has been complaining about calls against the Knicks. And it got so out of hand that I actually went back and like deleted some because I was embarrassed if someone like searched the volume. So like, I get it, like complaining about calls, bitching about calls, but like, like I would like the integrity of sports to be settled on the field and I feel bad, you know, for our guys because they become villains internationally and they didn't. I don't blame any of them, you know.

[A]

Yeah, it sucked. And then, you know, Belgium rubbed it in our face by doing like the Trump dance every time they scored and

[B]

stuff, which was pretty funny.

[A]

We just looked bad. Not a great outcome all around. All right, we are going to take a quick break, but when we come back, you're going to hear Ben's interview with Congressman Ro Khan about his time in the west bank getting detained by settlers and all things that he observed while he was there. So stick around for that. Ponzi of the World is brought to you by Helix. I got a Helix mattress. I forget the exact mattress model because who the hell remembers those things?

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[B]

Okay, I'm very pleased to be joined by Congressman Ro Khanna from Silicon Valley, who serves on the Armed Services Committee, the Select Committee on the Strategic Competition between the United States and China, and on the Oversight and Accountability Committee. Ro, thanks so much for joining us.

[C]

Thanks for having me, Ben.

[B]

Okay, so you and I have been in touch. You just got back from a trip to the west bank that drew a lot of attention. I wanted to start with your decision to visit the west bank where you were detained by Israeli settlers in the idf, which we'll get to. But my experience in politics is that most visits to that part of the world are basically an Israeli government facilitated tour of what the Israeli government wants you to see. Maybe occasionally you go to Ramallah in the west bank and see the Palestinian Authority. What led you to make this decision to center your visit more on the west bank and the conditions there than the more conventional type of an approach that most members of Congress take.

[C]

Well, honestly, I was inspired by your insights and Jasper Nathaniel's insights. And Jasper is a journalist on the ground who has done protective presence, which is protecting some of the Palestinian villages from settler violence. And you and him and a young guy who works for me, Kam Kaski, said the only way you're going to really see this is if you have a tour on the West Bank. If you go there and you actually have Palestinians lead it, go into Palestinian homes, go see Hebron from Palestinian eyes, go talk to Palestinian Americans. And so that's what I wanted to do. And it's interesting that what's really upset, if you look at some of the Israeli government statements, what's really upset them is that I did not coordinate with them. Of course we notified them that I was going notify the American Embassy. But they're just not used to this idea that an American politician would dare go to the west bank on a Palestinian led tour and not make the obligatory stops in Israel.

[B]

Yeah, no. And I think it bears saying because I've seen some of the criticism, which we'll get to, that the west bank is not Israel. So you're visiting what is supposed to be under international law, Palestinian territory. But I do want to. Let's talk about the incident that you experienced while you were there. We've had Jasper Nathaniel on too, and obviously he's been very powerful in his journals and people should check him out, follow him on Substack. He's been recording a lot of these types of incidents that happened to you. Now you are a sitting member of Congress. You had a video that you posted online this weekend in which armed Israeli settlers blocked your convoy. The IDF showed up and basically ended up detaining you instead of dispersing the settlers. What happened? Can you walk us through what your experience was?

[C]

So this was the one part of the tour that actually was not Palestinian led. It was led by Nadav of Breaking the Silence. And Nadav is a former IDF officer who believes that the occupation is unjust and started Breaking the Silence to help help Israel end the occupation. And he's taken people there many times before. In fact, just four or five months ago, he took members of Congress there, Congressman Cast in and Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro. And so we went to Zonada village. This is a village that has been destroyed by Yannan Levy, who is an extremist settler and has an outpost which is illegal even under Israeli law. It's a settlement that even Israel, Israel recognizes is illegal. And Yanan Levy was caught on camera murdering Ottawa, a Palestinian. And so he raised this village. And we were taking pictures of the elementary school that he had raised. Suddenly, two hoodlums in the. Around 2122 come one brandishing an M4, and I'm told, get in the van. Get in the van. We all get in the van and they have parked their car outside right in front of our van so we can't leave and are cursing at us, wiping our windows, videotaping us. And then the IDF comes 20, 30 minutes later. I say, okay, thank you. We're gonna be free here to go. And the IDF actually says, no, we're on the side of the settlers and we think you're in an illegal area. Now, even the IDF has acknowledged it wasn't an illegal area. But we have to wait 75 minutes. And finally we get someone on the American Embassy, a great career official, David Brownstein, who contacts the Israeli government and the police come and, and we are let out. But if we were Palestinians, we would have, I'm 100 sure, faced some violence. The fact that they were, we were Americans. They were probably a little bit more careful, though. So they said, we don't care. And they didn't care enough to let us, let us go.

[B]

And did anybody apologize to you for this?

[C]

I thought when I came back, the Israeli government would do kind of what Netanyahu did, which is say, oh, these are juvenile delinquents. And then maybe just say, I'm sorry this happened to Americans. It's not typical of what happens. This was not reflective on who we are. And we apologize to not just me, but the two other Americans and the New York Times photojournalist and others who were in our delegation. But instead they have basically said, well, I didn't coordinate the trip. They've said that it wasn't a detention because they, they. We weren't held at gunpoint. Yeah, we weren't held at gunpoint. But having people brandish their guns and block the only road out of the Zunada village, you could call it false imprisonment, detention. You know, in fact, one person said, it's just like being delayed in traffic. I mean, so it's just mind boggling how they have been describing the incident.

[B]

Let's play the clip of Prime Minister Netanyahu and how he responded to this on Meet the Press when he was asked about what, what happened to you. I want to, to play that and then get your reaction to the Prime Minister.

[C]

In the west bank, in Judea and Siberia, we've had thousands, thousands of attempted attacks and warnings against terrorist activities against innocent Israelis. Families, mother with their children driving along the road. They're stopped by terrorists and they kill them. There is a vigilante Air force, not

[A]

by the settler community.

[C]

They're 99.9%, you know, law abiding citizens.

[B]

They work, they serve in the army and so on. There are 150 juvenile delinquents that are

[C]

not part of that community. They come from the other parts of

[B]

Israel and we are working to put them under the law.

[C]

But I think if we put things in perspective, we should see that we have thousands of attacks. Israel, unlike our neighbors, is a democracy and a country of law and we act against those who break the law.

[B]

So, all right, I'm going to lead a bit with a question here, but is the structural dynamic he describes, which is that this is like a hotbed of terrorism with a handful of juvenile delinquents? Is that the reality you experienced not just in your detention, but in what you saw in general during your visit to the West Bank?

[C]

Think, well, he's right that it's a hotbed of terrorism against the Palestinians. I mean, the people who are being terrorized are the Palestinians. The, the Umel Care, the village. I was at a home of Salman. I remember it so vividly in settlers rattling the windows of his home, throwing things at his home. His 18 year old daughter saying, I can't study, I need to go somewhere else. And this happening night after night after night, night. And then they planted an Israeli flag over a Palestinian home. I was in one of the rich areas of Palestine where Palestinian Americans were living, who had done very well here, worth millions of dollars here, having beautiful homes there. And they said to me, we are still treated as brown Palestinians with no standing. One father talked in tears about his 14 year old who was killed by, by the IDF and how he still has the room unchanged in his house. Another gentleman talked about how the settlers came and vandalized his home, destroyed his car, beat a lady in the car and no justice. I went to a school where there was a school shooting and I saw the blood of a 14 year old who had died. Now we have school shootings in America. The difference is even though we don't agree on gun policy, we all agree, 99% at least, that the school shooter should be brought to justice here. The principal was not consulted about the shooting. No one in the school was asked about the shooting. I said, what happened to the school shooter? Principal said, I don't know. The IDF or the police never asked him. It is awful. You can't imagine it unless you experience it. The only people in the west bank that I saw who were being terrorized were the Palestinians by these extreme settlements and buy the idf.

[B]

And I just want to ask you, you get detained like that as an American member of Congress, which I can't imagine happening just about anywhere in the world at this point. But you also know that you go to work in a building where people vote regularly, either through direct financing and assistance or through military sales to arm this government, where there are regularly resolutions expressing support for this Israeli government, where this idea that they're a democracy, including a democracy, I guess, that governs people who have second class citizenship, if that, in places like the west bank or under military occupation. What is that like to recognize that you are at least briefly victimized by the impunity that, that the Congress where you work has kind of supported with this blank check of support.

[C]

That's ironic because I voted in the past for the aid that led to arguably my own detention. I mean, I of course voted against the aid after October 7 and voted against the $220 billion to Netanyahu. But before that I was a member of Congress who would vote every year for the $3 billion aid. And now it's literally leading to the detention of Americans and to the detention of Palestinians, Palestinian Americans. But it's relevant now because this week we're going to have a vote on the Massie amendment to zero out the aid, which I support. And Greg Kasar is the chair of the Progressive Caucus, actually talks about what happened to me and other Americans saying how can, how can we vote for aid? And while I don't want to make this about me, I mean, I'm glad it's got an attention. I'm hoping that we'll actually get to show the Palestinian videos and that that's what's going to become the topic of conversation. I will just say factually, someone pointed this out that the last time a member of Congress was overseas and either shot at or detained by people who had guns was in 1978 with Leo Ryan in the Jonestown massacre in Guyana. And so this is not a common occurrence and you would think that Israel would be profoundly apologetic instead of hunkering down in their corner and trying to justify what happened.

[B]

Yeah, I want to talk about the Democratic Party here too, though, because not that surprising that you had certain Israeli and Republican voices in this country criticizing you. But I also saw the Democratic majority for Israel, the dmfi, which is kind of like a APAC light that spends a lot of money trying to elect pro Israel Democrats, come out and attack you and essentially call this like a publicity stunt. That wasn't. I Saw Josh gottheimer, a colleague of yours in the Democratic Caucus of the House, come out and say, you went somewhere you shouldn't have. And at the same time, we see these primary results where there are a lot of reasons why we've seen five incumbents defeated in primaries, but a through line in all those is that the challengers to those incumbents took a different position on support for Israel. When you see those kinds of attacks from your colleagues in the Democratic Party, do you talk to those people privately? Do you reach out to them? What is that like?

[C]

I haven't seen Josh. I know Josh well. We came into Congress together. We usually have a pretty good rapport. I was surprised by him and I was surprised by Kathy Manning. We had a decent rapport. I would have just thought they would would say, look, this violence shouldn't have happened and we're glad Congress are kind of safe. We disagree with his views. We don't think that this was deliberate on Israel's part. It was a mess. But we understand settler violence is bad. But you know, their attack on me is not just an attack on my policy positions on Israel, that I've said genocide or that I've said the facts on the ground or apartheid. They want to discredit my character. They want to say, say he's a liar. He's just in this for publicity. He's just doing this to further his own ambitions. He has no credibility because they're threatened by the narrative. And they know, as a Indian American of Hindu faith who's not Muslim, who was a supporter of Israel for many years in Congress, who represents Silicon Valley, who worked for, as a junior person for the Obama administration, that they can't just paint me as fringe. They can't just say, ah, this guy's out in left field. And so what they're trying to do is show that, yeah, this guy's not in the mainstream, he's not to be trusted to discredit my criticisms of Israel. And it's a very cynical strategy, but it's why members of Congress are reluctant to speak out. It's not just the AIPAC money me, it's the assault that you face in terms of your character and, and your values. Now, what we've seen, though, is politically, at least in some of these primaries, being attacked by some of these folks actually is one of the biggest markers to the progressive base and young people that, that you're willing to fight. And it's almost a badge of honor.

[B]

Yeah. What frustrated me is I, I can accept you know the policy differences. There was like a willful effort to. To discredit even the idea of visiting the West Bank. As if that's somehow. It's a publicity stunt to go to the west bank, but not to go and get your picture taken with Bibi Netanyahu or something, by the way.

[C]

And just to interrupt. But no one, nor do I think it is, but no one is like Rahm Emanuel. That's a publicity stunt to go to Tel Aviv and give a speech to run in 2028. Right. Whereas he was explicitly giving a speech outlining his vision. No one's calling that a publicity. Stunning. But going to the west bank is so foreign to these folks. How could you do it? And the reason they're attacking me is they don't want other people to do it. Yeah.

[B]

They want people to see the Palestinians and what's going on there. This is clearly going to be a huge issue. It already is in this cycle. It's going to be in the presidential primary. I saw Hakeem Jeffries come out today in support of. He would not support an end to military assistance to Israel. What do you make of that? Having a leadership that feels so out of step with where most Democrats are.

[C]

Yeah, I was disappointed and surprised. Obviously I'm going to support it. I'm a co lead of that amendment with Massie. I will say Hakeem, at least he reached out to me day after the whole incident happened. It was very supportive. But I think that the party is not, not understanding where the base is and they're underestimating how important an issue this is. I'm not sure Claire Valdez, Brad Lander, certainly Darrell, Issa Milott, Anna Lilia or Adam Hamawi would have won their races if it weren't for this issue. Not saying they don't have other great attributes to them, but this was one of the biggest issues. And the reason it's become a big issue is, is people are saying, if you can't be honest about what we're seeing with our own eyes and willing to take on this power structure, how can we trust you? So it's become a character test, not just a question of the details of are you for calling it a genocide or apartheid, it's are you willing to take on power to fight for a more just world? And I think a lot of our political base is just out of touch out where the party is on this. Where the base of the party is.

[B]

Yeah. No, clearly it's also a threshold test of whether you're willing to take on powerful interests like AIPAC or whether you're willing to save what's happening in the world. I do want to get into the specifics of the policy because you were there looking at the west bank and obviously experienced settler violence. You've talked about the need to, to ban military assistance. What about the settler issue in particular? What kind of policies do you think could be used to introduce some accountability for this violence and to try to create some leverage over what is seemingly an unaccountable situation in the west bank of settlers feeling like they have impunity?

[C]

We should have sanctions on the banks, we should have sanctions on the construction companies, sanctions on the government officials pushing this policy. Right now, as you know, they're subsidizing basically the settlement. So if you're Israeli and even if you don't have a sense of the greater Israel, you can get just cheaper land and free child care and government assistance if you move to the settlements. And there needs to be an end to that. But on a very immediate basis, a new administration should come in and say, within 100 days, here's the people, we want to arrest it. You know, I'm Leviticus. There are a number of these other extremist settlers who are terrorizing folks. Here are the outposts that we expect IDF to destroy within 100 days. And this is not some kind of dialogue or peace plan. This is what the United States expects you to do. Because the Palestinians that I met, they first just need to stop being terrorized. They need to stop feeling that they could be subject any whim, any moment to the whims of a settlement color. And we have all this, I guess this is the thing that I saw on the ground. We have all these grandiose ideas of will it be a two state solution or a confederacy? Will it be how do we get to peace and what do we do with Hamas? And right now, a lot of these folks, they just want to live a normal life. And they see the United States as not having lifted a finger to make that possible. And what they want is to see some action to stop their harassment and threats on a daily basis.

[B]

Well, last thing I want to ask you then is, is there something that a Palestinian that you met with said to you or that you saw in terms of their experience that that stuck with you, that you'd want to share with people about what life is like in the West Bank?

[C]

Well, sure, two things. I mean, I will share walking down the street of Hebron where shop owners were pointing up top and saying, here's where they throw the metal parts and the rotten vegetables. And then when we put a stronger barricade so that the settlers above ground level couldn't throw that at us, they started urinating on us and, and putting acid on us. And I, I just thought, how dehumanizing. How utterly dehumanizing. And then the fathers, couple of fathers I met whose kill children were either detained or killed and felt totally powerless. They'd go to the one of them whose son was detained, an American citizen, said there was no trial. He was detained for 10 months. He went in looking like a normal, healthy kid, came out totally emaciated and scarred and went from Florida. But I'll tell you what struck me, because they invited me into their homes. They were so warm. I was there in some parts with Jasper, who's Jewish American, and Cam Caskey, a young Jewish American parkland survivor. And they welcomed us. They gave us a moglub, this delicious dish. And they hugged Cam and they hugged Jasper and I. And all they had for us was love and decency and warmth. And I said, no bitterness towards Jewish Americans. One time there was an Israeli Nadab with us. No bitterness towards Israeli. They just want peace. They want a better life. And that gave me hope because I was inspired by Cam and Jasper and the commitment. I mean, Jasper's literally pulling his body on the line every night as a. As a Jewish American for protecting Palestinians. Cam is, you know, he's always pushing me, saying I'm not strong enough on the issue, is anytime I equivocate in the slightest, he'll send me a long email. He's 25 years old. So they see the possibility of peace. And the Palestinians, I believe, won't hold a bitterness. They're not going to be resentful. There's a large population that would embrace that. And so that's what gave me hope that something better is possible. And I'm not one to romanticize the younger generation, but on this issue, they certainly have it much more right than past generations have.

[B]

Well, that's a great note to end on. Ro Khanna, thank you so much for the trip you took and for coming on to share some reflections on it. So we'll continue to watch what you're doing. People should follow what you're doing on social media and other spaces, and we'll keep in touch.

[C]

Thank you, Ben, thank you for your work on this.

[A]

Thanks again to Congressman Connor for joining the show. That's it for us this week, but we're going to have a bonus Pod for you guys. Later in the week, Ben and I are going to go hang out with some. Some blobby friends out in Aspen. Aspen Security conference. See if they'll let us in. I kind of think they might be trolling us.

[B]

Yeah, I'm not sure how to feel about the mics are all off. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[A]

It'll be fun.

[B]

Yeah, no, it'll be good. And it's nice to, you know. Who doesn't want to be in Colorado this time of year?

[A]

Exactly. Yeah. Pod Save the World is a crooked media production. Our show is produced by Ilona Minkowski, Michael Goldsmith, and Anisha Banerjee. Our team includes Matt de Groot, Ben Hethcote, Jordan Kanter, Kenny Moffitt, David Toles, and Ryan Young. Our staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. In moments like these, it's easy to feel overwhelmed and even easier to feel powerless. But we are neither. I'm Stacey Abrams, and on my podcast, Assembly Required, I take on each executive action, legislative battle, and breaking news moment by asking three questions. What's really happening? What can we do about it? And how do we keep going together? This is a space for clarity, strategy, and hope rooted in action, not denial. New episodes of Assembly Required. Drop Tuesdays. Tune in wherever you get your podcast and on YouTube.