Trump’s Top Spy Has One Job: Revenge

Summary

Pod Save the World — “Trump’s Top Spy Has One Job: Revenge”

Date: June 3, 2026
Host: Tommy Vietor
Co-host: Ben Rhodes
Special Guest Interview: Aya Ibrahim, AI Now Institute

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Episode Overview

This episode centers on the alarming appointment of Bill Pulte — an unqualified businessman and Trump loyalist — as Acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The hosts argue that this move signals a transition toward politicizing and weaponizing U.S. intelligence for retribution, not for security. They also cover critical updates on the Iran war, escalating tensions in Lebanon and Gaza, Ukraine, right-wing influencers’ Moscow pilgrimage, the upcoming Colombian election, and Trump-era corruption. An interview with Aya Ibrahim explores the intersection of artificial intelligence, politics, and regulation.

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Main Topics & Key Insights

1. Trump Appoints Bill Pulte as Acting Director of National Intelligence

Summary

• Trump appointed Bill Pulte, a businessman with zero intelligence experience, to be Acting DNI.
• Pulte previously headed the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), where he allegedly used mortgage data to manufacture criminal cases against Trump’s enemies.
• His only qualification: unwavering loyalty and commitment to executing Trump’s retribution agenda.

Key Discussion Points

• Weaponization of Intelligence:
  • “The only reason you make this guy the top spy in the US Government … is to get him access to all of our intelligence data … to go after Trump’s enemies. It’s to move that retribution project … to the DNI’s office.” — Tommy (07:13)
• Democratic Response:
  • Tommy urges Democrats to block intelligence reauthorization (esp. Section 702 of FISA) if Pulte keeps the job, citing “self-evidently crazy” jeopardy to national security.
  • Ben warns: “If this guy could comb through the mortgage records of Tish James to invent a conspiracy theory … what’s he going to do with the NSA’s capacity to collect all the phone calls in the fucking world?” (10:49)
• Current Intelligence Community Leadership:
  • Simultaneously, Cash Patel, another Trump loyalist, runs the FBI.
  • Ben: “We’re getting the worst of their actions and also the worst of their neglect and incompetence.” (12:40)

Notable Quotes

• “This is what dictators do. This is how countries slide into becoming police states.” — Tommy (07:10)
• “He’s going to run all the most powerful intelligence agency community in the history of the world. And he’s also going to run Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac. Side Hustle.” — Ben (10:30)

[14:30] Dildo Meme Stock Conference Clip

• Tommy and Ben present video evidence of Bill Pulte’s unseriousness; he was filmed at a meme stock conference receiving a dildo slap and a “tramp stamp” award.
• “This man is now … going to be the acting DNI … top spy overseeing 18 component parts of the intelligence community.” — Tommy

[16:10] Pulte’s Podcast Credentials

• Pulte’s only experience is in HVAC and countertops; Ben reminisces about the original intention and seriousness in creating the DNI role post-9/11 and how this appointment subverts it entirely.

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2. Foreign Policy Crisis: Iran War and Strait of Hormuz

[22:30] War in Iran and Failing Peace Negotiations

• Strait of Hormuz remains closed, choking off oil and gas exports, nudging the global economy toward crisis.
• US-Iran peace talks center on a 60-day pause, opening the Strait, and phased sanctions relief. Trump pushes for Iran to remove enriched uranium; rumors swirl of a $300B postwar fund for Iran.
• Trump’s approach: leaks/lies to manipulate oil markets, denying accountability, obsessed with “not doing what Obama did.”
  • “[Trump’s] so fucking fixated on Obama … this isn’t even about defending Obama. It’s about, like, how absurd it is that he’s desperately trying to spin …” — Ben (29:30)
• Media criticism: Outlets like Axios called out for “amplifying minute-to-minute fake scoops” that serve to calm or manipulate markets, not drive public understanding.
  • “What Axios has done … is allowing themselves to be used to affect oil markets.” — Ben (25:40)

US Bases/Assets: Actual Damage Downplayed, Underreported

• Reports reveal actual Iranian capabilities remain robust; Pentagon curtails media access. Damage to US bases and equipment is extensive and censored.
  • “The damage is worse than we’ve heard … The reason you get corporate authoritarian takeover of media is so … the bad news that the leader doesn’t want reported [goes] underreported.” — Ben (34:32)

Notable Quote

• “There’s a desperation and a lameness, frankly, to Trump’s efforts to post his way through this and to talk his way through it in friendly interviews. He’s finally done something that is the opposite of what he said. … This has already been a catastrophe and everybody can see it.” — Ben (30:32)

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3. Escalations in Lebanon and Gaza

[39:45] Israel-Hezbollah Conflict in Lebanon

• Despite claims of ceasefire, UN data shows overwhelming disproportion of Israel’s attacks vs. Hezbollah’s.
  • “Quite a ceasefire there … hundreds of projectiles being lobbed over the border every day.” — Tommy
  • “There’s no international legal basis for just claiming part of another country and saying that’s a buffer zone.” — Ben (44:12)
• Israel expanding its de facto occupation of Southern Lebanon as a buffer, displacing 1 million Lebanese.
• Trump reportedly yelled at Netanyahu to hold off airstrikes, but Israel continues bombardment — Bibi’s political survival may depend on keeping “some war he can show” prior to Israeli elections.

[45:10] Gaza Update

• Netanyahu publicly proposes to seize up to 70% of Gaza’s territory.
  • “My directive is to move to … [someone in the crowd yells] 100%. … First of all, 70%. We’ll start with that.” — Netanyahu, via Tommy
• Civilian conditions described as “hell on earth,” with DWB reporting 90% of water and sanitation infrastructure destroyed. The so-called Board of Peace is a sham.
• UK bans critics of Israel (Hasan Piker, Cenk Uygur) from entry; Ben calls out the “shameful moment for the Starmer government.”
  • “For a center-left government to be doing it, it’s absolutely chilling … maybe they’re not a center left.” — Ben (50:15)

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4. Ukraine and Far-Right American Influencers in Russia

[55:00] Ukraine: Russian Strikes, Threats to NATO

• Russia launches massive barrages on Ukrainian cities; a stray Russian drone hits Romania, raising NATO concerns.
• US sends a representative to Russia’s St. Petersburg investment conference (Rodney Mims Cook Jr.), alongside far-right influencers Candace Owens, the Tate brothers.
  • Candace Owens posts fawningly about Moscow. Ben: “Pyongyang is pretty clean too. Uber-repressive societies can keep the streets pretty clean… That doesn’t mean people have any political rights whatsoever.” (58:50)
• Far-right influencers are being used as “goodwill” props by authoritarian regimes, while repression and economic stagnation persist for Russian citizens.
  • “Go outside of Moscow … see disabled, broken veterans returning home, and you’ll get a better sense of, like, what the cost of Putin’s policies are.” — Ben (60:20)

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5. Latin America: Colombia’s Election as a Battleground

[60:30]

• Colombia heads to a runoff between left-wing Senator Iván Cepeda and Trump-backed right-winger Abelardo de la Esprilla (“The Tiger”).
• Right-wingers promote Bukele-style mass detention as a solution to crime.
• Trump actively trying to create a hemispheric bloc of like-minded right-wing, often autocratic, leaders.
  • “When the US is kind of invested in a right-wing bloc against the left-wing bloc in Latin America, [it] has not ended well.” — Ben (63:56)

[64:00]

• Discusses Trump-era extrajudicial “murder boat” strikes against alleged traffickers: 200+ killed, $4.7B spent, no reduction in cocaine supply; mostly, it’s murder, not war.
  • “As has been pointed out … it’s not a war crime. It’s just murder.” — Ben (65:51)

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6. MAGA Grift and Corruption

[65:52]

• ProPublica reports that Don Jr.’s venture firm reaped windfalls from a Pentagon loan ($620M) to a rare earth mining startup, Vulcan Elements, after Peter Navarro intervened from prison.
• Trump Org’s Vietnam golf project displaces cemeteries after strategic tariffs.
  • “The looting that is going to take place … when they control these budgets, is just going to be extraordinary.” — Ben (68:04)
  • “Whatever karma is going to accrue … for digging up Vietnamese graves is not good. I’ve seen several poltergeist films.” — Ben (70:57)

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Interview Highlight: Artificial Intelligence (with Aya Ibrahim, [74:08])

Main Points

• The Pope’s encyclical on AI breaks ground by providing a moral framework, contrasting a vacuum of moral/policy leadership from governments.
• Policymakers (especially in the US) feel too “helpless” or deferential to Silicon Valley; regulation is voluntary, lacking teeth.
• The “AI arms race with China” narrative is a false, dangerous paradigm — it’s a “race to the bottom” that benefits only a few, risking democracy itself.
  • “Do we win if we let seven guys decide the fate of this country—its capital markets, people’s 401ks, the distribution of water and electricity? I don’t feel like a winner…” — Aya (91:03)
• Policy should build from established rights and not allow Silicon Valley to rewrite the social contract.
• Open source and small models mean AI dangers aren’t limited to big governments — guardrails are necessary at every level.
  • “You don’t need the most powerful or the largest model in order to do damage … you can do quite a bit of harm with a fairly simple and small model.” — Aya (92:51)

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Notable Quotes, Timestamps & Moments

• “This is what dictators do. This is how countries slide into becoming police states.” — Tommy (07:10)
• “He’s still going to run that housing agency, while he’s running the DNI, is the most comic part of this.” — Ben (10:30)
• “Remember the little fascist munchkin… at a neo-Nazi conference focused on remigration, i.e., ethnic cleansing.” — Tommy (11:26)
• “We know there are terrorists… who is minding the store is going to be an incredible story, because nobody’s minding the store.” — Ben (12:23)
• On Bill Pulte’s meme stock conference video: “Your thoughts?” — Tommy (14:31)
• “My first job in Washington was for Lee Hamilton… I’m not so sure about that whole process.” — Ben (17:05)
• “Trump’s so fucking fixated on Obama. … The fact that we’re held hostage to this man’s obsession and ego…” — Ben (29:30)
• “For a center-left government to be doing [banning critics of Israel], it’s absolutely chilling.” — Ben (50:15)
• “We should be ready for that — this Trump craziness is not going to plateau. It’s going to get exponentially more weird and crazy.” — Ben (11:18)

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Recommended Listening Timestamps

• 07:10 — Why Bill Pulte’s DNI appointment is so dangerous
• 14:30 — The viral “dildo meme stock” video contextualizing Pulte’s unseriousness
• 22:30 — Iran war and Strait of Hormuz: global stakes, U.S. failure
• 39:45 — Lebanon conflict: statistical reality behind the “ceasefire” myth
• 55:00 — Ukraine update, American right-wingers in Russia
• 74:08 — Aya Ibrahim interview on AI, power, and the myth of the U.S.-China race

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Tone, Language & Flow

• As always, the exchange is sharp, witty, and often laced with dark, gallows humor. Ben and Tommy maintain their signature irreverence while dissecting serious, often chilling subject matter.
• The show moves briskly between deep policy critique, incredulity at the Trump administration’s chaos, and the occasional moment of farcical news reality (“dildo meme stocks” as DNI credentialing).

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TL;DR

This episode sharply critiques Trump’s appointment of Bill Pulte to head U.S. intelligence, exposing it as a move for raw revenge and corruption. Updates on Iran, Lebanon, Gaza, and Ukraine reveal escalating crises made worse by governmental incompetence and media failures. The show calls out the dangerous drift toward authoritarianism, both in America (through intelligence and grift) and abroad (from Moscow to the Middle East), while the featured interview with Aya Ibrahim offers a timely deep-dive into the need for a moral compass and robust policy in the age of AI.

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If you care about democracy, oversight, and keeping up with the world’s chaos, this is essential listening.

Transcript

[Tommy Vietor]

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[Aya Ibrahim]

As the day wraps up, get the scoop on what's been happening with here's the Scoop, a new podcast from NBC News, with me, your host, Yasmin Dasugian. We'll take a deep dive into the day's top stories with with NBC News trusted Journalist. It's a fresh take that's sharp, thoughtful, and it's informative, bringing you closer to the headlines and conversations that are shaping our world. From the front page to the zeitgeist, here's the scoop from NBC News. Listen daily wherever you get your podcasts,

[Dan Pfeiffer]

I'm Dan Pfeiffer. For years, I've heard from candidates, activists and political staffers who turn to Pod Save America for political strategy and messaging advice because they don't have access to a political consultant or or a pollster. That's flattering to hear, but it's a huge problem. If we're going to defeat MAGA and protect democracy, we need everyone to have access to the best information and advice possible. That's why I recently launched Message Box Pro, a subscription consulting product for people working at every level of politics. Subscribers get weekly strategy memos, data driven messaging insights and polling analysis. Plus, you get access to an incredible community of smart, committed political pros. Whether you're running for office, staffing a politician, organizing your community, or working in communications at any level, Message Box Pro is built for you. To learn more or sign up, go to messageboxpro.com

[Tommy Vietor]

yes you can. A five minute quick and easy calorie burning workout. Give it a try. Come join our sweat sesh on TikTok. Welcome back to Pod Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor.

[Ben Rhodes]

I'm Ben Rhodes.

[Tommy Vietor]

Ben, is this the best week of your life? You get the Knicks going to the NBA Finals. Your second book is now out into the world. Are you more confident that the Knicks can beat Wemby or that you can beat Fox and Friends? Co host and Real World star Rachel Campos Duffy on the New York Times bestseller list. That's your competition, buddy.

[Ben Rhodes]

I guess the gauntlet I'd throw down is I'm probably more confident in the Knicks, but that's more because of my confidence in the Knicks than my self doubt or anything. That is some tough comp in the book market though. I mean, Fox and Friends, man, that's a rabid audience.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yep. And she can market the hell out of it. So that's why you guys gotta go buy Ben's book. It's very important. We got a great show for you today though. We're gonna cover Trump's insane new choice to serve as acting Director of National Intellig. We are going to explain why this feels like a step towards the intelligence community being just used and abused to punish Trump's enemies. We're going to walk you through the latest on the mess that is the war in Iran, the failed negotiations to end the war and to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. We'll talk about the escalation in fighting between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. And then some conflicting reports about whether Trump maybe or maybe did not yell at Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu about Lebanon. It felt very Biden era, Ben to read about, you know, private scolding, how upset he was.

[Ben Rhodes]

Nothing changes.

[Tommy Vietor]

Nothing changes. We'll do a Gaza update. We'll update you guys on the war in Ukraine and try to figure out why a bunch of far right influencers from the US Or Europe are descending on Moscow. Finally, we will tell you about presidential election in Colombia and what's at stake there and if we have time, maybe some stories about MAGA grift. Ben, you did an interview today. What are folks going to hear?

[Ben Rhodes]

So I talked to Aya Ibrahim, who's with the AI Now Institute and has worked on AI and foreign policy in the past in the Congress and the Biden White House. We talked about the Pope's encyclical that you and I talked about last week. What's important in it, Trump's new executive order announced today on artificial intelligence. Whether the idea of a race between the US And China on AI is kind of the right policy framework and just what would the right approach to regulating these technologies look like? So we've been talking for a while about doing a little bit more AI on the show because it's coming for everything. So this is a great conversation with a people should check it out.

[Tommy Vietor]

We should interview Claude Mythos on the show, maybe see how that goes.

[Ben Rhodes]

We should actually that'd be quite interesting.

[Tommy Vietor]

Just be like hello Claude, how are you? At the very end of the show, our friends of the POD Discord subscribers will hear Ben and I answer some questions from the Discord community. So stick around for that. So Ben, in summary, I think our ask for listeners today are root for the Knicks, which is a tough pill to swallow for me as a, as a card carrying but I will try. Bye Ben. All we say available now. It's truly excellent. You can also hear Ben with Jon Favreau talking about speechwriting on the Pod Save America feed and but you know, also help him displace Rachel Campos Duffy on the best seller chart because that is offensive that she is I think number three right now. That's very upsetting.

[Ben Rhodes]

We do have to beat her.

[Tommy Vietor]

We do have to be got to do that. Please help us do that. Subscribe to Pod Save the World wherever you get your podcast or on YouTube and then if you are horrified by BARI Weiss gutting 60 Minutes over at CBS, want to help a progressive media company grow, consider becoming a friend of the pod paid subscriber. For 10 bucks a month you get bonus content, bonus Pod Save America episodes ad free episodes, deep dives into polling from Dan Pfeiffer and much, much more. So it's good spend, good value and

[Ben Rhodes]

Tommy I I have two crooked book crossovers today. Wednesday Alex Wagner and I will be in conversation in New York city at the 92nd Street. Yes, there are a few tickets left if people want to check that out. And then next Monday Jon Favreau and I will be in conversation in la. You can find links to this, we'll put them in the show notes, but they're also on my website, benroads.info.info.

[Tommy Vietor]

okay, you got the coveted.info.

[Ben Rhodes]

yeah, I got the dot info. You know, every time I have a book, I have to like, redo a website, but it's all up there.

[Tommy Vietor]

Listen, I get it, I get it. All right, so we were going to lead the show today with this head spinning, you know, like tweets and fucking sirens and, you know, fake scoops about Iran. But then the news broke this morning that Donald Trump has installed a goober named Bill Pulte as Acting Director of National Intelligence. And to me, that was just a five alarm fire. So just to back up, to explain, Bill Pulte is this random businessman who Trump installed as the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, or fhfa. Without getting too wonky, FHFA is supposed to oversee Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and other parts of, like, the government systems that provide loans, mortgages. But in practice, what Pulte has done is he's used his access to sensitive mortgage data to manufacture criminal cases against Trump's enemies like Letitia James. It is very obvious then what is happening here with this news from today because Pulte has no experience in intelligence. He has no national security background, literally none. And the only reason you make this guy the top spy in the US Government, overseeing the entire intelligence community is to get him access to all of our intelligence data and all of the authorities they have and all of the collection tools they have to use those to go after Trump's enemies. It's to move that retribution project that started in a, you know, backwater housing agency and move it to the DNI's office. And so that is absolutely chilling. This is what dictators do. This is how countries slide into becoming police states. And I'm sure that the Pulte marching orders will include cherry picking data to, you know, prove that the 2020 election was stolen. Right, like the old Trump hobby horses. But it will not stop there. Like, we know this guy is willing to say and do anything to make Trump happy, and so is Cash Patel over at the FBI. And that combination is scary as hell. And Democrats need to fight this tooth and nail. So, Ben, the arguments I would make to Democrats like listening to this are that I would just scream to the world are one, putting someone with no intelligence experience in, in charge of the intelligence community is self evidently crazy. And makes all of us less safe. And Pulte doesn't meet the statutory requirements for the job. Like they should just raise hell about how unqualified he is. But then, two, I think the leverage for them is, I would say I'm not reauthorizing any intelligence collected collection authorities, in particular, section 702 of FISA, which lets the US government force American telecom and tech companies to give over data without a warrant. If this guy is in that job, period. Draw a line in the sand. Do it now. This is fucking crazy.

[Ben Rhodes]

Absolutely right. And this is one of those tests of whether Democrats understand what's happening or not. Because Bill Pulte has no interest whatsoever in national security. He's not someone who's thinking about China. He's someone whose pure role is to exact vengeance on Trump's political opponents or to advance Trump's conspiracy theories. If it wasn't enough that he has no experience or background whatsoever ever in intelligence and national security, Tommy, the fact that he's still going to run that housing agency while he's running the DNI is the. I thought, the most comic part of this. He's going to run all the most powerful intelligence agency community in the history of the world. And he's also going to run Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac side Hustle. Yeah, yeah. If this guy could comb through the mortgage records of Tish James to invent a conspiracy theory to try to prosecute her, what's he going to do with the NSA's capacity to collect all the phone calls in the fucking world? You know, so buckle up here. And absolutely, if you're concerned that someone's going to say that you don't take intelligence seriously because you're not reauthorizing section 702. Like, do you think Bill Pulte and Donald Trump are taking it seriously? Those are the guys that don't give a shit about keeping us safe. It does also make me worried, Tommy, about what we're in for for the next two and a half years of the Trump administration. Because, remember, in the first Trump term, by the end, we were down to the dregs. You know, I don't even remember the name of the guy who was Attorney General. Kash Patel was chief of Staff at dod. We had Rick Grinnell as acting director of dni. We're already kind of entering this phase where the people are just getting weirder and weirder and more and more vindictive. And so I think that's another. We should be ready for that. This Trump craziness is not going to plateau. It's actually going to get exponentially more weird and crazy going forward.

[Tommy Vietor]

I'm glad you said about the dregs because, like, just in a sign of how extreme the White House is, remember Greg Bevino? Remember the little, like, fascist munchkin who was in charge of customs and border patrol and wore, like, his, like, big Nazi coat? That guy popped up over the weekend in Portugal. He was at a far right. Someone's called Neo Nazi conference focused on remigration, I. E. Like the ethnic cleansing of migrants in various countries. And that included representatives from far right parties like the AFD from Vox. There was fascists, like, literal fascists from Belgium and the Netherlands. And he did, like, Bovino did an interview leading up to the conference where he literally gave a shout out to Erwin Rommel, AKA The Desert Fox, the Nazi field marshal who ran the Africa campaign here, when he was, like, talking about how his kind of improbable rise from, like, agent out into the field to leading organization. So your point about that we're being down in the dregs of the Trump administration landed with me well.

[Ben Rhodes]

And it is, like, the only thing I was going to say, too, is that cash running the FBI and this guy running the intelligence community? I do. Like, there are terrorists out there. There are adversaries. Like, who is mining the store is going to be an incredible story because nobody's mining the store. So it's. We're getting the worst of their actions and also the worst of their neglect and incompetence.

[Tommy Vietor]

Everything that happens, like Tulsi Gabbard leaves, you celebrate. She is obviously not prepared for this job. And it's like, God, careful what you wish for. But just to highlight how truly unserious putting Bill Pulte in this position is, Ben Michael and our team dug up two clips that we wanted to show you. This first one is from a conference from back in 2022. At the time, I think Bill Pulte was really into meme stocks. Remember, like, the Gamestop phenomenon during COVID

[Ben Rhodes]

I think I saw this clip.

[Tommy Vietor]

Okay, this is. This is from a conference where he's trying to get people to buy Bed, Bath and Beyond stock, which did not end well for anyone who did. So here's the clip. Then let's talk about it. Let's watch P. Look at this fucking thing.

[Ben Rhodes]

All right,

[Tommy Vietor]

so what we're watching is a man slap another man in the face with a dildo. For those listening, not watching, you should subscribe to Pod Save the World.

[Ben Rhodes]

There you have it the first dildo slap in history live. So Bill, this says Bill Py. All right. Yeah. And then if you notice on it's got a tramp stamp with a butterfly.

[Tommy Vietor]

I like only the young one ass cheek said.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yes, it.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

It does say.

[Ben Rhodes]

It does say only the young on the back here.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Only young dis December 4th.

[Ben Rhodes]

That looks pretty badass.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

We have a mushroom stamp on the

[Ben Rhodes]

head of it and bed bath on one cheek and gme. Oh, GME on the other. I got too excited there.

[Tommy Vietor]

They broke their little statue. So they gave the guy Bill Holt. He was given a little statue by the man who just slapped the other man in the face with the dildo. That said Bill Pulte. Only the young that this man is now the. They're going to be the acting DNI, Director of National Intelligence, top spy overseeing 18 component parts of the intelligence community.

[Ben Rhodes]

Your thoughts? I have some more, like, sober, serious friends of mine who are like, you and Tommy sometimes get a little too immature. Like, you know, we are covering the news, people. We are covering the news. The reason that there is a man slapping another man in the face with a dildo and giving, you know, some pedophilia reference to someone is because that. That man who is involved in that is the Director of National Intelligence now. So we just have to report what's happening.

[Tommy Vietor]

Just the facts matter.

[Ben Rhodes]

I will say, like, for an administration that came in committed to depoliticizing intelligence, not weaponizing the justice system and rooting out pedophilia, Bill Pulte kind of seems to be checking the box on all three of those things in the wrong direction here. So not exactly promises kept among all the other disgusting and horrifying and troubling things about that video.

[Tommy Vietor]

I saw a nice clip of Ivanka today, Ivanka Trump, talking about how she and her husband were going to build a new paradise on an island. I was like, oh, Epstein has taught these people a lot. To our listeners who think that Ben and I have childish senses of humor. I know it sometimes occurs to me that, you know, we hear from, like, current and former prime ministers who listen to this show. Yes, yes, we're talking about this.

[Ben Rhodes]

I do actually listen.

[Tommy Vietor]

These are the facts. We were presented by the universe. We're just relaying them to you, Ben. So here's a second clip of Pulte again that Michael dug up from a podcast interview he did in 2022. I want to know if this makes you feel better about your concerns about his lack of experience. Let's watch.

[Ben Rhodes]

Oh, no.

[Tommy Vietor]

What did you learn about H Vac that kept you going deeper into that space. That leads you to a podcast like we're on today.

[Ben Rhodes]

Well, my first business was a countertop business. Kitchen and bath countertops. I don't know if you know a lot about countertops, but I'll tell you

[Dan Pfeiffer]

one thing about them.

[Ben Rhodes]

They're a pain in the ass. And to make, to manufacture life is so much easier in the H Vac space compared to counter. And I said a lot.

[Tommy Vietor]

That says a lot about countertops. Yeah, yeah, the, the like dying joke there reminded me of the NPR sweaty balls famous section. So that was Bill Pulte on the to the Point Home Services podcast talking about being in the H Vac business. So I guess if the AC goes down in any of the many intelligence community buildings, Bill Pulte can be there in the interview, he spends a lot of time bragging about his follower count on various social media platforms. So did that make you feel better about this choice?

[Ben Rhodes]

You know, Tommy, listeners may not know that, like, my first job in Washington was for Lee Hamilton, who was the co chair of the 911 Commission, which recommended the creation of the Director of National Intelligence to better coordinate, coordinate and manage and connect the dots between the different intelligence agencies in the United States. And then after that report came out, I wrote a lot of congressional testimony for Lee Hamilton in support of the reforms that created the dni. And now I'm not so sure about that whole process. Not because we don't need that, but because I don't think that the authors of that legislation of the 911 Commission envisioned someday a man taking the helm of all the US Intelligence agencies. Informed by his expertise in countertop renovation and various other podcast appearances. No shot to podcasters. But I think when Democrats lost the last election and there was this debate about showing up on podcasts, I'm not sure they had that one in mind.

[Tommy Vietor]

No, that wasn't the highest traffic podcast. Yeah, unless the dots Lee Hamilton was trying to connect were between heating ventilation and air conditioning. I don't know that we hit the mark here. Apparently this idea was pushed by Roger Stone. Roger Stone has a big Nixon tattooed on his back and was also found guilty of charges of obstruction, false statements, and witness tampering in 2019 for his role in the Russia investigation into the 2016 election. So everything is going great here. Ben, I feel really good about this. Not at all horrified and excited for Bill Pulte to watch this and for us to get on his radar screen as well.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, well, between him and Cash we're making friends everywhere. The other point I'd make to people is that there's a midterm election coming up and the basis of whatever fight fake fraud claims are going to make is going to be some foreign interference thing, because we saw that already when they said that Hugo Chavez and Venezuela intervened in the 2020 election, even though Hugo Chavez had been dead for years. So in addition to the weaponization of justice and trying to comb through records and target Trump's enemies, let's keep an eye on the space of whether Bill Pulte's job is also to kind of manufacture conspiracy theories about foreign interference to give a basis overturning elections in this country. Because that would be very bad.

[Tommy Vietor]

Because remember, you know, Tulsi Gabbard was down in was it Fulton County, Georgia, reviewing an FBI raid on a voting location. And we still don't really know why. And it's all very ominous. POD Save the World is brought to you by Fast Growing Trees. Did you know that Fast Growing Trees is America's largest and most trusted online nursery with thousands of trees and plants and over 2 million happy customers? They have all the plants your yard or home needs, including fruit trees, privacy trees, flowering trees, shrubs and house plants, all grown with care and guaranteed to arrive healthy. Whatever you're looking for, Fast Growing Trees helps you find options that actually work for your climate, your space and your lifestyle. Fast Growing Trees makes it easy to get your dream yard. Just click, order grow and get healthy, thriving plants delivered right to your door. Their Alive and Thrive guarantee promises that your plants arrive happy and healthy. There's no green thumb required, just quality plants you can count on. Plus get ongoing support from trained plant experts who can help you plan your landscape, choose the right plant, and learn how to care for them every step along the way. Fast Growing Trees is a great idea to help you figure out what to get what will look good, what will survive in your environment, how to keep it alive. It's really just like soup to nuts. Your plant concierge, they can help you figure out how to make your yard look better, how to make your house look a little bit better. Everybody wants some kind of greenery around, but most of us are very bad at helping it survive. Right now they have great deals on spring planting essentials, up to half off on select plants. And listeners to our show get 20% off their first purchase when using the code world at checkout. That's an additional 20% off. Better plants that are more likely to survive@fast growingtrees.com if you use the Code World at checkout fast growing trees.com code world now's the perfect time to plant. Let's grow together. Use World to Save today. Offer is valid for a limited time. Terms and conditions may apply. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Not everyone experiences summer as an endless parade of hot dogs, vacations and pool parties. For some people, life's woes don't abate when the temperature climbs and the days get longer. If you've got the summertime blues or are Simply feeling overwhelmed, BetterHelp is there when you need it. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, having served over 6 million people globally. And it works with an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 for a live session based on over 1.7 million client reviews. Better Help therapists work according to a strict code of conduct and are fully licensed in the US BetterHelp does the initial matching work for you so you can focus on your therapy goals. A short questionnaire helps identify your needs and preferences and their 12 or more years of experience and industry leading Match fulfillment rate means they typically get it right the first time. If you aren't happy with your match, switch to a different therapist at any time. From their tailored wrecks, Look Whether or not it's hot where you live, things are terrible.

[Ben Rhodes]

Often, yeah, both.

[Tommy Vietor]

In the political world leaders of all the countries, life can be a little scary. You need a therapist. You need someone to talk to and someone who'll actually listen to you and not, you know, just tune you out like your friends sometimes do. You don't have to say yes to everything. This summer you can find support and therapy. Sign up and get 10% [e-mail] Crooked World that's betterhelp.com Crooked World

[Marco Rubio]

all right,

[Tommy Vietor]

Ben, let's turn to Iran. It's now been more than three months since this war started, but despite weeks of, you know, countless breathless reports and tweets with sirens in them about some imminent peace deal, there still isn't one. Which means the Strait of Hormuz is still closed, oil and gas exports are choked off, and every day we get closer to some kind of breaking point in rupture in the global economy. But besides, that is going great in practice. Also, what we're seeing lately is escalation between the two sides. Over the last few days, there were US Airstrikes on Iranian air defense sites and drone sites, and then Iran shot down another American Predator drone and fired a ballistic missile at a Kuwaiti air base. Apparently U.S. air defenses intercepted that missile. But Bloomberg reported that the shrapnel injured five people, including US Service members. It's a pretty serious incident. The outlines of the deal that's being negotiated is reportedly the same as what we've talked about in the following. It's like a 60 day pause in fighting to allow for negotiations over the much harder issues around the nuclear program. Unrestricted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, and then a gradual relaxation of the US blockade on the strait. So Iran has to move first in this framework. The New York Times said that there could be some sort of post war investment fund of 300 billion billion for Iran. That surprised me. Sounds like Trump wants his money to come from Gulf countries so we can pretend the US isn't providing it. But that is insane. Like, I mean, you and I and Obama would have been drawn and quartered if something like this had been proposed during the JCPOA days. And then there's some sort of agreement looking to reach some sort of agreement over releasing frozen Iranian assets and then some sort of sanctions relief for Iran maybe as well. As usual. The sticking points are Iran wants the war to be over everywhere. That includes in Lebanon, which the Israelis are not happy about. And then Trump wants Iran to ship all of its highly enriched uranium out of the country. Though he did post something like a week or two ago that suggested he might be okay with that HEU being destroyed in place by the IAEA by international regulators. So on Monday, Trump called somebody at cnbc, Eamon Javers at cnbc, about the peace talks. And he said the following, Ben, I don't care if they're over. Honestly, I really don't care. I couldn't care less if they're over. They're over if they're not. You know, I think they took too much time, frankly. I thought they started to get very boring. That's an actual, real quote that he said to a reporter. So, Ben, this, you know, Trump has been spinning his wheels in place for the same couple of weeks on this policy. And I think what's driving me crazy is the White House is able to just churn out all these little mini updates and bullshit and fake reports, whatever to journalists to manipulate the oil markets. I shouldn't say fake reports. They're giving updates that never really bear out or never solve the underlying problem that needs to be solved. But all that kind of minute to minute coverage distracts everybody. And there's not a real, I think, understanding or focus on the big picture of what an absolute ongoing, massive disaster this war is and remains.

[Ben Rhodes]

I'll start with the media and then get to the substance of it. It's not just typical media criticism here. What in particular Axios has done in credulously, consistently, constantly tweeting out these reports that a deal is imminent with sirens is allowing themselves to be used to affect oil markets. And, you know, whether they know that they're doing that or not, that's what's happening. And probably a lot of people are profiting off of incentive trading, and it's also kind of giving people this kind of false sense of comfort. Look, I hope we get a deal today, like while we're recording this podcast, to reopen the Strait and lift the blockade and move towards a nuclear deal. But that leads to the second part, which is, I think what Trump is trying to do that is truly bizarre is he's trying to give people the impression with these leaks and with his own comments downplaying this, that there's not really war going on there anyway because we're not seeing big explosions and there's not a lot of firing back and forth, although there's some. But the reality is the Strait of Hormuz is still closed. Maybe a tiny trickle of ships is getting through. And so the global economic impact and the global shortages of not just oil and gas, but other vital resources like helium and fertilizer, that's. That's getting worse by the day.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah, there was a report that the US military had escorted like 70 some odd ships through the Strait over the last few weeks, but that's as compared to like 130 a day during peacetime.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, that's a tiny fraction. So I think we're kind of being lulled into the sense that something is not happening, that is happening and people know it because they're paying more at the pump. But essentially other nations have been tapping into their reserves to survive this and kind of prop up what is left of global energy markets. But with each passing day, that gets harder to do. And so there could come a time when what's already a horrific global economic disruption and disruption in people's lives could become a crash. And so I think there needs to be a little bit more attention not just on the imminent deal that is constantly being discussed, that everybody knows what it is, but on the consequences, that this is still a war. Just because it's kind of a semi frozen conflict doesn't mean we're not still in the state of war with all the consequences. And then on the deal. We've talked before about the elements of it and about how Trump may try to spin it as a victory when it's not reopening the strait that was open before the war. I think the other thing I'd say is on this money, because you're seeing the $300 billion investment fund reported in different places. You're also seeing maybe some upfront payment of 12 billion, some sanctions relief. What I think Trump is doing, he's so fucking fixated on Obama. And look, whatever happens, he's going to have to do something that eventually looks like the Iran nuclear deal, which, again, shipped the HEU out and did all these other things that he's trying to get. The reality is, I imagine, that this money is going to be probably Iranian frozen assets, and they'll try to pretend like it's.

[Tommy Vietor]

They'll say it was released by Qatar or whoever was holding or whatever, and therefore we didn't give it to Iran, which is just like, give me a break. You made the deal that released the money.

[Ben Rhodes]

But. And that's the point. In the Obama deal, Iran got money that had been frozen in other bank accounts because other countries had bought Iranian oil and that they had not been able to access those revenues. And so Trump is probably going to do the exact same thing. This is a message to anybody who follows this and message to the journalists who are going to be covering this. Just because Qatar or some other country is providing Iran access to that money. It's not like a Qatari check or some other country. It's the exact same mechanism as the jcpoa. And so the fact that we're held hostage to this man's Obama obsession and ego, like, this isn't even about defending Obama. It's about, like, how absurd it is that he's desperately trying to find some way to spin that he's not going to end up doing something that is somewhat analogous to the jcpoa.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah, it's going to look like the jcpoa. He just wants it to be able to say it's better. Did this resonate with you, Ben? This is a post from Trump. Iran really wants to make a deal. It'll be a good one for the USA and those that are with us. But don't the Democrats get it? And various seemingly unpatriotic Republicans understand that it's much tougher me to properly do my job and negotiate when political haps keep negatively chirping at levels never seen before over and over again that I should move faster or move slower or go to war or not go to war or whatever. Just sit back and relax. It'll all work out well in the end. It always does. I feel better. I feel better hearing that.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah. Well, first of all, because Trump and the Republicans never chirped at Democratic presidents when they're conducting foreign policy. Kind of the biggest glass house anybody's ever been in. I think that what that tells me, though, there's a desperation and a lameness, frankly, to Trump's efforts to post his way through this and to talk his way through it in friendly interviews. He's finally done something that is the opposite of what he said. It's not going to end out well. It's already been terrible. This has already been a catastrophe and everybody can see it.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah, it's a mess. There are also some reports that were later denied by the Iranians that President Possesskian had resigned because he'd been cut out of the decision making process by the irgc. Very well could have happened, but it came out of a London based outlet with ties to the opposition and then was denied by the government. So I don't know. We'll see. Ben, a couple recent comments that were worth playing for the audience. The first is we just wanted to juxtapose some of Trump's comments about the war and its impact on the Iranian military with comments made by Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Capitol Hill Tuesday.

[Ben Rhodes]

Let's watch Operation Epic Fury. Some of you didn't like it. Some of you did. Was highly successful in achieving its military objectives, which is dramatically reducing the defense industrial base of Iran. The ability to build these missiles and to build these drones, especially the missiles program substantially degraded their military.

[Marco Rubio]

We sort of left it alone because we think that their military is somewhat, somewhat moderate. They have other people that aren't moderate. We've taken them out. We've taken different forms of leadership out. We've actually left their military alone. People would be surprised to hear that.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah, I'd be very surprised to hear that because the entire message so far had been that Hegseth and his team had decimated the Iranian military. It's all you've told us. And now you're saying that they're moderate so you didn't bomb them. What on earth are we talking about here?

[Ben Rhodes]

It just shows how out to lunch he is and how disconnected he is and. But let's talk about Rubio for a second here because he gets this kind of participation trophy, trophy for sane washing what Trump should be saying to spin his war. It's like what A good job he did spinning this war on Trump's behalf. He should be president, or at least Republican nominee Marco Rubio is lying in that clip. They did not decimate the missile programs like that. We have reporting that over 70% of Iran's ballistic missiles and launchers remain intact. And so we kind of keep hearing. I mean, like, I know this is not a shot at the military at all, but there's this effort to say, well, it was militarily successful, it was not military successful. Like they said, they destroyed the Iranian navy, and the Iranian navy is still able to control the Strait of Hormuz. Like they said, they destroyed the ballistic missiles. And they still have most of the ballistic missiles and are still firing them at us. They don't tell. There were multiple reports, Tommy, including in the BBC and the Washington Post, about the extensive damage unreported to US Bases and facilities across the Middle east that Marco Rubio and Ptex never get around to telling us, even though we are the fucking taxpayers to pay for those bases.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah, it's a classic Washington problem of inputs versus outputs. You might have fired a lot of missiles and hit a lot of stuff, but the outcome wasn't that Iran's military is no longer functional. It's what you talked about, which is 70% of the stockpile is still sitting there and they're able to control. Control the straight. And then that BBC report about the satellite imagery about the damage to US Bases and assets in the Middle east is like staggering stuff. We. I wrote down a couple details, Ben. 20 US military facilities have been hit in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Iraq, Jordan, Bahrain and Oman. They took out 42 aircraft, F15s, F35s, 24 MQ9 Reaper drones, an A10 attack plane, and then three Thad missile defense batteries that cost a billion dollars each. And then they damaged this one E3 Sentry surveillance plane that was worth up to $700 million. So just like a vast amount of structural economic damage there and also like damage to the US Military's ability to station troops in the Middle east for

[Ben Rhodes]

a long time and look to draw forward the Axios point, because I've been saying for a few weeks now that the damage is worse than we've heard because I literally just have some friends in the Middle East.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah, me too. Sending me pict.

[Ben Rhodes]

I'm hearing this is much worse. And the reason that's important is this is the problem with our media. Like the corporatization and magification of so much of the media means that Like Americans know less about what's happened to American military bases than just like regular people that live in the Gulf. Like that is insane. And that, look, there's. The Post did a good report here. The Times has done good reporting on this. But like that's kind of. There's not much else. And that's by design. I think people have to realize, like the reason you get corporate authoritarian takeover of media is so that the bad news that the leader doesn't want reported kind of goes either unreported or underreported. Like only a small number of people who read a certain set of publications or wherever. Yeah.

[Tommy Vietor]

Even today we learned that the Pentagon has kicked the press corps out of their briefing room because they've declared it's now a skiff because the Pentagon speechwriters need to be able to sit in there. So now it's a classified setting.

[Ben Rhodes]

I didn't see that.

[Tommy Vietor]

It's crazy. The fucking Pentagon is the second built biggest office building in the world. There's like 3 million square feet of office space alone. And they're like, oh no, the speechwriters have to sit here. So we have to kick the reporters out of their other area. Last thing, Ben. So Trump waited on the war a bunch last week at the cabinet meeting. Couple comments caught our attention that we wanted to play for you guys. Let's watch.

[Marco Rubio]

And we'd like to have the countries we were talking about, Saudi Arabia, uae, Qatar and the others, we'd like to have them immediately join the. And Steve Woodcock is working on that with Jared and some others, but would like to have them join the Abraham Accords. It'll be historic if they do it. And we would. I think they, I think they owe that to us, to be honest. I think, because that really would be a tremendous sign and I think those countries owe it to us. Steve, are you going to get them to sign? We're definitely pushing it, Mr. President. I'm not sure. I'm not sure we should make the deal if they don't sign. You want to know that they would like to control. Nobody's going to control. It's international waters. And Oman will behave just like everybody else who will have to blow them up. They understand that. They'll be fine.

[Tommy Vietor]

So I'm sure that the folks in Oman, not Iran, were thrilled to hear about potentially getting bombed. And then, you know, this new effort to force everybody into the Abraham Accord seems to be going really great. So far, so good stuff.

[Ben Rhodes]

And it's important because we are dealing with a Man in the high rapidly losing his power. That's part of what's happening here. Because, look, the Abraham Accords, he did this at the end of his first term in 2020. He got tremendous bipartisan and media validation for it because there's a normalization deal with Israel. But I think it's just worth saying here, Tommy, the Abraham Accords have been a catastrophic failure. Actually, had they brought peace to the Middle east, the two problems they were supposed to solve is somehow like replacing an Israeli Palestinian deal and dealing with the Iran threat. Well, look at where we are today. The Palestinians have been subjected to a relentless campaign of war crimes by Israel that is bombing multiple countries in the region. Despite the Abraham Accords, we're at a war with Iran. This has been a failure. And Democrats, like, need to be much more outspoken about this because, frankly, even the Biden administration's efforts to kind of wrap themselves around the Abraham Accords, that ended terribly too. Yeah. And we just need to name that. And the fact that he's out there saying, demanding these countries join this at a time when Israel's never been less popular in those countries and across the Muslim world, it just makes him look feckless because even Witkoff couldn't say, yes, sir, we'll get them in the Abraham Courts, like, well, we'll push them.

[Tommy Vietor]

I'll make some calls.

[Ben Rhodes]

It's not gonna happen. Yeah, that's a weak leader right there. That's someone who's like, I got good press on this thing before, and I know I'm pissing off some of the pro Israel people in my coalition. So now I'm going to demand these countries joining the Abraham Accords. Well, they're not, because nobody's paying attention to what you're saying.

[Tommy Vietor]

I do think that the failure of the Abraham Accords is a really important point. I think Matt Duss had a great piece on this a few weeks or months back in like, foreign policy.com or something, where he's like, hey, the Abraham Accords have been a failure. They were agreements between countries that weren't at war that led to a distraction from the real conflict, which was the Middle east peace process and the need to create a Palestinian state. And there's all this reporting that Hamas did, took this, you know, did the evil thing they did on October 7th, the attack, because they were concerned about potential normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and they wanted to blow up any prospect of that. And so I think that is a reality of the Abraham Accords, that we should talk a lot More about than, you know, direct flights from the UAE to Tel Aviv or whatever people like brag about. Ben, let's talk about the conflict, Lebanon, because that's very much part of this broader war with Iran. But it also brings with it, like, these distinct challenges and complexities that make it all so much harder. So first we just, we got this voice note from a journalist named Justin Sulhani from Al Jazeera who's been covering the conflict. That will give you a sense of just how absurd it is when people refer to there being a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

[Justin Sulhani]

Let's listen just to speak of the disparity of attacks, because Hezbollah and Israel are still trading attacks. The most intense day in the last week before today. I have figures here from May 24th until June 1st that were provided to me by UNIFIL, which is the UN Peacekeepers in South Lebanon. The most intense day was Sunday, May 31. This is when 61 trajectories were counted by UNIFIL going from north to south. So that would be Hezbollah or other non state actors hitting either targets in south Lebanon or in Israel, and from south to north. So this is Israel firing back. 683. So that's 61 to 683 as the most severe day. Hezbollah's number of trajectories over the past week are often in the double digits, usually somewhere between, let's say 16 to 45, 46. Israel's lowest was 194 with an average over well over 300, 350. So just to give an idea about the disparity of the fighting.

[Tommy Vietor]

Quite a ceasefire there when you have hundreds of projectiles being lobbied over the border every day. As we mentioned earlier, Ben. So the Lebanon piece of the fighting has become a big sticking point in the peace talks. Iran wants the fighting over in Lebanon as well as everywhere else. The Israelis have said no way and in fact have used this latest round of fighting since February 28th is an opportunity to advance further into Lebanon and take more territory. And unfortunately, you know, before February 28th, the US was facilitating talks between Israel and the Lebanese government about trying to disarm Hezbollah. And those all ended when the latest round of fighting started. So on Monday, Axios reported that Trump called Netanyahu and yelled at him about Israeli escalation in Lebanon. The report said that Trump said to Bibi Netanyahu, quote, you're fucking crazy. You'd be in prison if it weren't for me. I'm saving your ass. Everybody hates you. Everybody Hates Israel because of this. Some factual statements in there about Netanyahu, but did that really happen? Unclear. There's an Israeli political analyst who a lot of people in Israel think is basically just another spokesman for the Netanyahu government. He tweeted that the Axios report is false. A friend of mine in Israel told me that this person, who I own, that name, is often called Bibi Shofar because Netanyahu blows air into him and out comes noise, which is really funny and great. But the analyst claimed that Trump didn't mention BB being in jail or that he's hated. But then Alex Ward, our buddy over at the Wall Street Journal, reported that actually two calls. The first was about a ceasefire, and the second one is where Trump was, like, talking shit, saying, you'd be in jail if not for me. Regardless, Ben, I think they apparently reach an agreement where Israel is going to hold off airstrikes on Beirut as long as they are not attacked. We'll see if that holds. And in the meantime, Israel is pummeling southern Lebanon with airstrikes. And they recaptured this ancient hilltop castle called Beaufort, which is Israel held 25 years ago during its previous occupation of Lebanon, which is bringing back terrible memories both in Lebanon and in Israel, of, you know, because that would. That war did not go well, and people were worried that this could become the beginning of a protracted Israeli occupation of Lebanon. And it comes after the IDF displaced, like, a million Lebanese residents in the south. And the overall Death toll is 3,400 dead in Lebanon, 27 Israeli soldiers killed. So, Ben, a lot there. But I do think, like the Lebanon piece of. This is the most clear point where you can see the US And Israeli political interests diverging completely, especially as the Israelis get closer and closer to their election.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yes. And it's because of what the nature of the Israeli military operation in Lebanon is. And at the risk of making this kind of media criticism day. And again, this is a reason why you should support independent media. If you're watching this from afar, like, what you're presented with by most of the US Media is that there's a fragile ceasefire in Lebanon in Israel's war against Hezbollah. In fact, there is no ceasefire in Lebanon. There's no such thing as a ceasefire where you're relentlessly bombing a country and occupying almost 20% of it. And at the same time, as much as Israel does have a challenge from Hezbollah, if you actually watch what's happening and the media criticism is like, these calls are smokescreen, like somebody from Trump's staff is Told to call Axios and say he said fuck you to Bibi. Watch what's happening. Not what you're told someone said in a phone call. Because Israel is continuing to do all these things. And what they're doing, it does not seem to be about disarming Hezbollah. It seems to be about taking southern Lebanon, where they're literally occupying like a huge swath of this country and depopulating it, making it uninhabitable, probably for the purposes of either annexing part of that territory or holding it as a kind of so called buffer zone. But there's no international legal basis for just claiming part of another country and saying that's a buffer zone. And my concern, as you point out, is that because there's an election later this fall, because Bibi completely failed to achieve the objectives he set out for the Iran war, he's just going to keep doing this in Lebanon so that he has some war that he can show the kind of right wing voters in Israel requires him to stay in office.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah, and speaking of Bibi's election, I mean, we should talk about Gaza for a minute because Netanyahu, again, as we lead up to this election, is talking about occupying more of the territory in Gaza. So there's a recent press conference, which I think he did from like maybe a settlement in the west bank or something he did from the west bank. And he said, quote, we are now in 60% of the territory of the Gaza Strip. We were at 50%. We move to 60%. My directive is to move to. And then someone in the crowd yells, 100%. And he says, take. He goes, take it step by step. First of all, 70%. We'll start with that. So Netanyahu is like playing to the crowd, saying, we're going to take 70% of the territory in Gaza. He wants to squeeze 2 million people into 30% of the Gaza Strip, where it was already one of the most crowded places in the world. Then Israel's Defense Minister, Israel Katz, tweeted last week, quote, we pledge that Hamas will not rule Gaza civilly or militarily. And so it shall be. The voluntary migration plan will be implemented all at the proper time, in the proper manner. So I guess everyone should get incited for some ethnic cleansing to happen soon, I guess. And then, as we've discussed, like, life on the ground for people in Gaza is hell on earth. There's a recent report from Doctors Without Borders that said Israel has destroyed or damaged nearly 90% of water and sanitation infrastructure in Gaza, including desalination Plants, boreholes, pipelines and sewage systems. And as a result of the damaged sewer systems, there's pests breeding in the wastewater. Rats are everywhere. There are lice, scabies, fungal infections, bug bites, rat bites, and nowhere near enough healthcare resources. And then, shockingly, Ben, the Board of Peace has accomplished exactly nothing. There's no funding, there's nobody on the ground, there's no nothing. So, like, maybe Jared Kushner got a good meeting at Davos out of it, but that seems to be the only accomplishment there.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, I mean, I think we have to again, consider that there's this veneer of a ceasefire in Gaza. What part of the ceasefire terms that were announced to such fanfare, with all these foreign leaders and all this credulous media attention back last fall, what part of that ceasefire agreement permitted Israel to take 70% of the Gaza Strip and then talk about, quote, unquote, the voluntary migration, aka the ethnic cleansing of the remaining 2 million people that are in these horrific conditions? And the problem is, there's no rooting in any of these policies in concern for the actual Palestinians who are there. There's no discussion about getting assistance into those people addressing those horrific conditions. We still don't have international media access to Gaza to see what's happened and to get an accurate death count, which is probably far higher than the 70,000 that's already been reported here. And so just goes to show that that again, while attention, the camera keeps swirling around and it's largely been focused on Iran and the Strait of Hormuz, the situation for the people in Gaza has continued to deteriorate since the ceasefire was announced. In the same way that the people of Lebanon are suffering such extraordinary consequences and the absence of any kind of moral framework of concern for those people, not just out of the United States, but frankly, out of a lot of governments, speaks to kind of the broken moment that we're in geopolitically.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah, I mean, you're not seeing any real international support for Gaza. Like, I'm not seeing any action, really, at the un. I'm not seeing a lot of fundraising, you would imagine. There's just nothing. There's nothing. I mean, we got the UK saying that Cenk Uyghur and Hasan Piker can't come because they're a threat to British society in some way, because they criticize the occupation or the war in Gaza. But there's just nothing to help the actual human beings on the ground who are suffering every single day, including lots of kids.

[Ben Rhodes]

And I'm just going to Say, like the idea that that tells you a lot about the priorities of the Starmer government and we should call this out because, like, whatever you think about Cenk and Hasan, the idea that that government has the time to say that because of their views on Israel, they're not even allowed to enter the country. But what are they doing to help the people of Gaza? What is the Star War government doing to help them? It's absolutely ridiculous and outrageous. Even if you disagree with Hasan Piker, by the way, he was going there to have a debate at the Oxford Union. So the forum that was set up was for someone else to be able to tell him he was wrong. Right. And so the idea that we're more afraid of free speech in places like the United Kingdom than we are of, like, risking the ire of Donald Trump by expressing concern for the people of Gaza, this is a shameful moment for the Starmer government.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah, Hassan told me he was going to go to the Oxford Union and do a speech and the last one he did there was about the danger of conflating Judaism and Zionism. He was trying to disaggregate them and to talk about combating anti Semitism. But then he was told by the British government that he can't travel because, quote, your presence in the UK is not considered to be conducive to the public good. It's just such a vague kind of, you know, 1984. Notice that. Anyway, it's just really fucking weird.

[Ben Rhodes]

It's chilling. It's actually, it's absolutely chilling. And for a center left government to be doing it, for a center left government be doing it, it's absolutely chilling. Or maybe they're not a center left.

[Tommy Vietor]

And like, if you, if you find the comments that either of those two guys made to be offensive or wrong or upsetting in any way, that's totally fine. I respect that. But like, yeah, I guess this is just the American in me, the First Amendment supporter in me thinks it's crazy to tell someone they're barred from your country for political opinions. I think it's bonkers. Pod Save the World is brought to you by hims. If something's been off in the bedroom, you're not the only one. A lot of guys wait longer than they need to to take action. The difference now, getting real treatment is simple. Through hims, it's 100% online. At some point you got to stop blaming stress, sleep or just getting older. If bedroom performance is in question, it's probably crossed your mind to do something about it. The good news? You don't have to jump through hoops to fix it. ED is way more common than most guys think. Millions of guys deal with it at some point. 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Is a military drone site also alarming, Ben, was a Russian drone hit an apartment building in Romania over the weekend. Romanian officials said the drone probably went into their territory because it was hit by Ukrainian air defenses and I think got knocked off course or something. But this is a big deal. We're going to watch and see if NATO responds in any way. But that is the political backdrop here as we get to our next point about Russia, which is the Russians are hosting this annual investment conference in St. Petersburg, and this year there is a much increased American presence. The White House is sending a representative. It is some dipshit named Rodney Mims Cook Jr. Who is chairman of the U.S. commission of Fine Arts. I think he's from Georgia, some whatever. And then a bunch of far right influencers are heading over. So check out this clip we put together to show you who's going. Okay. So the first, the first thing we saw was rt, the Russian propaganda network, put together some sort of like, video. They took a bunch of Candace Owens photos she posted on social media and commentary. Candace Owens, a far right podcaster and influencer, she posted a bunch of stuff, including commentary Like, I'm starting to understand why the talking heads panic and shout and lie about Russia collusion when they learn an American with a platform is traveling here. It's Plato's allegory of the cave. It is genuinely shocking how clean, beautiful, and ordered the city is. It's so far removed from media depictions. Yes, I, too, am stunned that famously beautiful Moscow looks beautiful. And then there were the Tate brothers, who were indicted a couple years back on charges like rape and human trafficking, who are also in. In Moscow, I guess, for this conference, but I don't really know, so I hope they have a good time. Ben, what do you think is happening here?

[Ben Rhodes]

Why.

[Tommy Vietor]

Why are these goobers descending upon Moscow?

[Ben Rhodes]

Well, I'm sure they're getting paid in some fashion here and, and. Or they're just trolling people like us. But the reality is that, like, Russia has managed these kind of consistent inroads in the right wing of the United States without doing anything at all differently in the conduct of their war or their repression. The war just keeps getting worse. Like, they've just been relentlessly bombarding Ukraine more under Trump than they did before that they have not made any meaningful concession towards peace whatsoever. The repression inside of Russia has gotten much worse, frankly. They've been restricting Internet access in ways that influencers in Russia don't have the capacity that the Tate brothers or Candace Owens have to go there and post things. And so it's quite remarkable to watch people kind of go there and claim that they're discovering some different Russia, when in fact, if anything, repression and the war have just been deteriorating. By the way, the fact that Moscow's clean, I mean, Pyongyang is pretty clean too. Like, uber repressive societies, like, can kind of keep the streets pretty clean sometimes. That doesn't mean that people have any political rights whatsoever. And it kind of connects to the Romania thing, because part of what's happening is Europeans are seeing this, right? So they're seeing kind of Trump's thirst for investment in Russia. They're seeing Trump's total disregard for Ukraine at the same time that there have been meaningful Russian sabotage operations in European countries, some of which have destroyed significant amounts of property. Now we have this drone attack. And so if you talk to people in Europe, the actual fear that Russia might do something that is a military escalation in Poland or the Baltics or a place like Romania, that's going up. And the more they kind of see this kind of weirdness and brokenness in the American right wing drifting in Russia's direction, I think more it's gonna just contribute to those anxieties at that precise time, by the way, Tommy, that Trump's threatening to pull US Troops out of Europe cause he's mad that they didn't open the Strait of Hormuz.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah, there was a weird back and forth last week about the US Maybe pulling troops out of Poland and then not. Or there's all sorts of weird threats to NATO. It's always so. It's so funny when influencers like Candace go over to a place like Russia. Like, yeah, obviously it's not binary. It's not like America good, Russia bad. Like, Russia's an extraordinary place.

[Ben Rhodes]

Incredible culture or Russian people. Yeah, Russian people.

[Tommy Vietor]

Incredible history, incredible architecture. Like, no one's arguing otherwise. The architecture that she's taking photos of and posting has existed for a very long time. A lot of people were well aware of it. These people, they're just like, never. They're never like, self aware enough.

[Ben Rhodes]

Wait till she finds out about Tolstoy or ballet, you know, Tolstoysk.

[Tommy Vietor]

Have you guys heard of this guy? Hey, you're there with like a minder. Probably taking you around to all these great cultural sites for a reason. Like, the same thing happened with Tucker Carlson when he was like, look at this unbelievable subway. And it's like, you know, who built the subway? You know, the cost was there. Like, then he went to the supermarkets. Like, guys, come on. Just like, give us a little more nuance and everything you're saying will be fine.

[Ben Rhodes]

And also, like, nobody does a goodwill tour better than an autocratic country.

[Tommy Vietor]

Right.

[Ben Rhodes]

You know, of course they're rolling out the red carpet and they're super nice and you're like, oh, these people are so lovely. Like, of course that's what happens. Again. It's not just similar in Gaza. Like, go outside of Moscow and go into some of those cities where people have been conscripted and they're disabled, broken veterans returning home, and you'll get a better sense of, like, what the cost of Putin's policies are.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah, it is embarrassing. Excited to see what content they crank out. Hopefully we'll talk about it next week. A couple more things, Ben. Voters in Columbia went to the polls this past Sunday, and Now there are two candidates heading to a runoff election on June 21st. So the contest will be between Senator Yvonne Cepeda, who's a left wing candidate running on a continuation of President Petro's policies. Petro's term limited. He's running against a right wing candidate that is backed by Trump named Abelardo de la Esprilla, who calls himself the Tiger, not the Tiger King. We're not going back to like Covid era, just the Tiger. The big choice for voters is about security and how to deal with the enormous amount of violence from drug cartels and rebel groups in Colombia. The kind of left approach to violence is negotiations and peace pacts. Well, the conservatives basically want to return to a policy of war on the cartels. And also now they want to build out a detention system like the one Nayib Bukele created in El Salvador, where he has thrown hundreds of thousands of people in mega prisons, often without charges. Senator Cepeda was from the left, was directly involved in Colombia's peace deal with a FARC rebel group back in 2016. Again, he wants to consider continue Petro's policies. The problem with that pitch politically in this moment is that the violence has gotten really bad. Last year we covered this. I think at the time a conservative politician was shot on the campaign trail. He later died. He was at a presidential campaign stop. And then there's criminal organizations who are launching armed attacks, they're carrying out drone strikes, there's kidnappings, there's homicides. Decades and thousands, thousands of people have been displaced. Ben, the Trump White House has made no secret of the fact that they want to see this, like, right wing wave in elections in Central and South America. And they will overtly meddle in elections to do it. Although I think they've been less overt in Colombia so far. What do you think, though? What do you think's gonna happen here? Is Columbia next?

[Ben Rhodes]

You know, it certainly feels like that. I mean, they're gonna make a push. Trump is, because, you know, they're trying to construct like a critical mass of right wing leaders that are kind of with this imperial project where the deal is that the United States gets to kind of do whatever it wants in the hemisphere, but we kind of back up, prop up or provide private security forces or what have you, or maybe even direct military support to some of these autocratic leaders. And Colombia's been like a key bellwether, like kind of swing state in that competition. It's a country that tends to veer back and forth between left and right wing leadership. By the way, you have an incredibly important election that we'll be talking a lot about later this year in Brazil. That'll be the key test of this. So I'd expect them to kind of lean in here. Look, whoever comes next is going to have to pursue some policies to try to get their arms around the security situation. Because what you kind of have is kind of cartel and other violence migrating around different places. We have seen in Ecuador, we've seen a lot of this in Colombia now too. But I do, I worry about the kind of construction of like this collection of Bukele and Miles and right wing leaders that we've seen in places like Honduras and Ecuador because again, it's going to polarize politics on a left right basis across the hemisphere. And in history, when the United States is kind of invested in like a right wing bloc against the left wing bloc in Latin America has not ended well.

[Tommy Vietor]

Does not go well.

[Ben Rhodes]

In fact, the conflicts in Colombia, like, like we're partly an outgrowth of that.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah. Also not going well. The New York Times, I think, just had a big piece about how we've reached this grim milestone of more than 200 people killed in the Trump Pete Hegseth extrajudicial murder boat strikes in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific. So far, experts say it is just as easy to find cocaine in the United States as it was before this policy started. The street price of the cocaine has not gone up, which means there's less availability, there's no scarcity. The purity of the cocaine is about the same. But Ben, the cost of the Pentagon policy to just murder people, murder fishermen, is about 4.7 billion and counting. So smashing success, would you say?

[Ben Rhodes]

I mean, the one thing I'd add to this is that like, there's going to be a lot of things that people go back and investigate and try to bring accountability to after the Trump administration is over. This should absolutely be one of them them because there's no legal or policy basis for this. It's just murder. Like there's not some authorization for the use of force against boats. There's credible reports that at least some of these strikes and it wouldn't be okay if it was even drug traffickers because, you know, didn't just like murder drug traffickers, but there's credible reports that some of these people are just fishermen. So like, keep in mind, like Pete Hegseth's orders, Donald Trump's orders through Pete Hexaf have been murdering people and have now murdered 200 people. It has no impact whatsoever on the amount of drugs in the United States. As you point out, for a time it seemed to be part of the Venezuela operation. And yet it still continues, even though that's over. What is it about other than the use of brute force? Because it seems to make Trump and Hegseth feel tough and it's grotesque. So there should be investigations into this. And by the way, as has been pointed out to me by experts repeatedly, it's not a war crime. It's just murder.

[Tommy Vietor]

Just murder.

[Ben Rhodes]

Because it's not a war.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah, it's just murder. Good, good point. Two quick, just quick things because we run out of time here. So Ben, last night I was, I picked back up Reagan land. Like great Rick Perlstein book, Ronald Reagan. There was a part on Jimmy Carter where it talked about how some members of Congress called for an investigation into Billy Carter, Jimmy Carter's kind of jerk off jackass brother, for apparently getting like sweet, a sweetheart deal on like wholesale gasoline for two gas pumps he owned back in Georgia. Right. So like, like that's the level of grift we're talking very, very low. That made me think of a story I read last week in ProPublica about a $620 million loan from the Pentagon to a company called Vulcan Elements. Vulcan Elements. There's this little startup in North Carolina. They think they can reduce America's dependence on rare earth materials. Rare earth elements that are critical for US Weapon systems and our phones and electric vehicles and like everything we do now. But remember we talked about this in the context of the China trade war. The Chinese have an absolute monopoly on what's the processing of these rare earth elements. And they were able to choke them off to great effect and put pressure on the United States. So the timeline of this story goes as following August 2025, 1789, capital, Don Jr. S venture capital firm, they took a stake in Vulcan Elements. At the time, the company was valued at $200 million. Three months after that investment, Ben, the US government gave them a $620 million Pentagon loan and I think like $50 million that were part of the Chips Act. So $670 million all in and by January of 2026. So a few months ago, Bloomberg said the company was valued at $2 billion. So a 10x increase in value in five months. And what ProPublica dug up was that the loan only happened after Peter Navarro, remember Trump's trade advisor who was like thick as thieves with Don Jr. Made a call from the White House over

[Ben Rhodes]

the convicted felon, convicted felon Peter Navarro

[Tommy Vietor]

to say get this done. And you know who visited Peter Navarro in jail? Donald Trump Jr. And he is mentioned.

[Ben Rhodes]

I didn't.

[Tommy Vietor]

I was the fucking acknowledgement of his book. Unbelievable.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, I mean it's just ranked corruption. And what they're doing is they're migrating to the biggest kitty that there is, which is the Pentagon budget. I mean, one reason out of many that they were a $1.5 trillion defense budget, is probably because they want to profit off of this. I mean, this is absolutely outrageous level of corruption. And again, to go all the way back to the craziness of Bill Pulte and what it says about the last two years, the looting that is going to take place, Tommy, in the last couple of years here, when they can control these budgets, is just going to be extraordinary. I mean, what is Don Jr. S particular expertise in defense contracting rare earth elements? This is just nothing. Yeah, yeah. This is just pure payment, right? To, like, the Trump family via the Pentagon budget, there needs to be, like, if Democrats do win back control of one or both houses of Congress, like, burring in on the corruption at the Pentagon and the Trump family, which seems to be an overlapping Venn diagram, like, that should be like an essential priority. And then if we do get a Democratic president, like, let us inhabit that hopeful future, like, there's going to have to be a lot of effort to kind of like, like uproot whatever. Like corrupt contracts have been planted at the Pentagon because it seems like a complete fucking boondoggle over there.

[Tommy Vietor]

A total boondoggle. And apparently they're also considering giving a similar loan to a company called Unusual Machines, which is a drone part manufacturer in Florida that. Oh, who would have thunk it? Don Junior's on the board of it and owns like millions of dollars worth of shares. So, yeah, it's all on the up and up. Also, Ben, we talked on the show a couple times about how the Trump Organization got this sweetheart deal to build a bunch of real estate, including a golf course in Vietnam. The Financial Times reported that families in northern Vietnam are digging up the graves of their relatives in order to accommodate The Trump Orgs $1.5 billion luxury golf club, hotel and villa project that's going to be built there. You'll be surprised to learn that some locals are not thrilled about uprooting the cemetery. But that's the price doing business these days. If you want to police Dear Leader, you got to dig up up your uncle's grave or whatever so he can have his golf course.

[Ben Rhodes]

And just to draw the continuum, the backstory on this is Liberation Day happens. Trump announces this huge tariff on Vietnam conspicuously around the same time this golf course deal is announced with, I think, Eric Trump. And here we are, fast forward, and we're digging up graves, right? So this is all a case where, like, the power of the United States. This is not just a country trying to gratiate itself. The power of the United States was leveraged via tariffs. The strategy for managing those tariffs by the other country was let's kind of wink, wink, like approve this golf course. You know, it doesn't have to be the, it's Vietnam. It's like a one party state. I'm sure that this development doesn't happen without the government being involved. All I'll say, Tommy, is I think whatever karma is going to accrue to the Trump family for digging up Vietnamese graves is not good. Oh, I've seen multiple intergenerational, seen several poltergeist films.

[Tommy Vietor]

Doesn't go well.

[Ben Rhodes]

Very bad, very bad. Intergenerational energy coming their way. So maybe that's where they'll pay the price.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah, even Ivana is buried on a golf course somewhere in a Trump resort and that's done. Well.

[Ben Rhodes]

Oh, I forgot about that.

[Tommy Vietor]

All right, we're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, you're going to hear Ben's interview with Aya Ibrahim about artificial intelligence. What's coming down the pike, the Trump administration's efforts or lack thereof, to regulate it. So stick around for that. That very, very important topic. Pod Save the World is brought to you by. Helix Sleep is maybe the most important thing we all do every day for our health. A good night's sleep for me means a great day. Usually a bad night's sleep can be just ruin the entire thing. You wake up in the morning, you feel terrible and you just know you're not going to be as sharp as you want to be. You're not going to be as happy as you want to be. You eat worse, you feel worse, it just sucks. And one key to getting a good night's sleep is a great mattress. Helix can help because they deliver mattresses right to your door with free shipping in the US and how do you know if the mattress is right for you? You take the Helix Sleep quiz and they match you with the perfect mattress based on your personal preferences and sleep needs. They have over 20 mattress models to choose from so you can find the perfect model for you. The Happy with Helix guarantee offers a risk free customer first experience designed to ensure you're completely satisfied with the new mattress so you can rest easy with seamless returns and exchanges. Plus, Helix offers 120 night sleep trial and limited lifetime warranty. We have a Helix mattress at our house. It's super comfortable. Everyone who's ever slept in that bed says I love that mattress. Where'd you get it? And the truth is, it's from Helix and it shipped right to our door and it couldn't be easier. And you could have one tomorrow if you wanted. Go to helixsleep.com world for 20% off site wide that's helixsleep.com world for twenty percent off site wide helixsleep.com world

[Dan Pfeiffer]

I'm Dan Pfeiffer. For years I've heard from candidates, activists and political staffers who turn to Pod Save America for political strategy and messaging advice because they don't have access to a political consultant or a pollster. That's flattering to hear, but it's a huge problem. If we're going to defeat MAGA and protect democracy, we need everyone to have access to the best information and advice possible. That's why I recently launched Message Pro, a subscription consulting product for people working at every level of politics. Subscribers get weekly strategy memos, data driven messaging insights, and polling analysis. Plus, you get access to an incredible community of smart, committed political pros. Whether you're running for office, staffing a politician, organizing your community, or working in communications at any level, Message Box Pro is built for you. To learn more or sign up, go to messageboxpro.com

[Tommy Vietor]

want to keep up with everything trendy? From breaking news to shareable jokes, pop

[Ben Rhodes]

culture bites to viral food spots, it's all on TikTok. Download TikTok now to explore. All right, I'm very pleased to be joined by A. Ibrahim, who is a senior fellow at the AI Now Institute and a former White House and State Department adviser in the Biden administration. It's really good to see you.

[Aya Ibrahim]

Likewise. Thanks for having me.

[Ben Rhodes]

So you and I have been talking about having this conversation about AI for a little bit, and I think that the encyclical by Pope Leo presents a good opportunity for jumping off point. And actually we also got an executive order from the Trump administration today. But I wanted to start with that encyclical that was released last week in which the Pope tried to apply a humanistic lens to AI, which has notably been missing from the creators of it. All too often he talked about the need for regulation. He raised issues like the risk of AI in warfare, obviously the risk of job dislocation, and also just kind of the risk to our humanity from the kind of omnipresence of this technology. Let's just begin with a kind of broad question about what you thought about the encyclical. How important do you think it was? What influence you think it can reasonably be expected to have.

[Aya Ibrahim]

Well, you're always going to be excited when something this big comes out. That confirms a lot of your priors. But I would say, look, engineers can and do build systems, but it's always been humanities, that humanities have built and sustained societies. And the Pope's entry into this conversation, I think, is so critical because there is this vacuum of moral authority and moral leadership on the questions of AI and what it's going to do to the world, even though it has such profound moral implications and the question of human dignity and the value of our labor and the value of our lives. He seems to be the only person who is taking these guys at their word about their desire to renegotiate the social contract. And one thing we have talked about that I find a bit frustrating is that we treat moral authority, having the moral high ground and exercising power as almost these mutually exclusive things. But the Pope stepping in here is a demonstration of, actually, the point of moral authority is to create space for you to exercise power in service of your vision for a more moral and just world.

[Ben Rhodes]

And so you've worked on. I want to talk about a couple more questions about the Pope. And you've worked on, I should say, foreign policy and on AI policy. So you're kind of uniquely positioned to talk about this part of it. I mean, one thing that struck me is the timing. I mentioned this last week, that it was probably not intentional, but notable that this encyclical came right after the summit between Xi Jinping and. And Donald Trump was a big nothing burger on AI. The people who watch AI, like you and me, were kind of expecting maybe something, and all we got was, like, a promise that they might talk about it. I'm wondering if you could talk to people about what the vacuum is that the Pope is trying to fill. Do you see any leaders globally who are bringing both a moral and policy lens to these enormous challenges from AI that we're all kind of feeling? Do you think that maybe this is a leading question, but, I mean, to what extent did the Pope step into a gigantic vacuum? Or do you think there are other voices that have been putting forward constructive ideas?

[Aya Ibrahim]

So I think he has been the most clear about the entire picture. Right. So there's the political economy questions that he tackles. Again, that this is about the allocation of resources and capital and labor and energy and so on, and what that means for people's sort of station in their own societies and in their own economies. He talks about the moral pieces. He talks about the spiritual ones. So, you know, there's like a very holistic kind of approach that only very few people, I think, can, can take in the way that he did. That being said, there is such a culture of fear and frankly, like learned helplessness among our policymakers here in the United States. United States, when it comes to questions of technology and technology policy. It's as if, if they themselves cannot build it, they can't code it, then they don't get to have a leading role in what this technology looks like and how it shows up in our lives. And the reality is that, like, our Energy and Commerce Committee is not stacked with chemists, but yet we have members of Congress that sit on that committee that oversees the FDA and prescription drugs. So I don't really understand why there is such hesitation. And more recently, Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Senator Sanders, they have their data center bill, which had some responses from members in other parts of the party that felt like it was kind of a Luddite approach to this question. I think people are trying, but there are structural constraints to how we would have the conversation here in the US and then as it relates to the rest of the world, if most of the compute sits here, it's really on us to figure it out. And the EU has had their conversations, but it's the United States and it's China.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, I mean, it's a good point in the sense that there have been efforts. The European Union passed an AI Act. They would have imposed a regimen for reviewing models before the release. And we'll get to this Trump executive order, but at the end of the day. And Rishi Sunak actually had an AI Safety summit at the end of his tenure as British Prime Minister, but at the end of the day, it's the US And China. And to your point, there's just a remarkable deference to the leaders of tech companies in this country, as if they're the only ones who understand it. I was curious, one last thing. On the Pope, I was curious what you made of the participation, that kind of clear influence of an anthropic co founder, Christopher Ola, on the announcement of the encyclical on the one hand, and I'm glad to see anthropic advocating for regulation and working with the Pope on the other end. They obviously have. They're also going public as a company. What do you think? Because you actually obviously do need some participation from these people. How do you think the relationship between governments, regulators and these tech company leaders? What would be a healthy version of that. And also just kind of what did you make of the participation of an anthropic co founder and essentially the Pope's rollout of his encyclical?

[Aya Ibrahim]

Yeah, I mean, it's pretty consistent with the whole shtick of we are the good guys. And I think the key here is you're all just guys. These are all companies that all have a bottom line. Many of them are rushing to ipo. So there are financial incentives here. And I don't want to assign like some greater nobility because fundamentally you're building a technology that you're saying might destroy the world. And we shouldn't have feelings about it because, hey, at least you told us and you said that you wanted to do the right thing. But you're definitely going to make money off of this technology either way. I think on the balance, or imbalances, I guess, in the relationship between governments, regulators, these companies. I think that's a good segue to the executive order that was issued today, which is entirely voluntary. Again, it's like, would love a preview of your potentially world ending technology, but like no pressure if not. And to me that does not feel consistent with what they themselves have named as the potential impacts of this technology. Like, you're not asking someone on a date, you are asking for oversight. Oversight technology, they themselves have said will change the way that we interact with one another, that we structure our economy and our societies and our, our governments like our world. And that's to say nothing of the actual characters at the helm of this ecosystem. Which we should talk about that at some point too.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, I mean, some of these people don't inspire a ton of confidence. I mean, on the executive order, it's interesting to me because it's been a journey and just to catch people up. Not everybody follows the twists and turns of this that closely. But there's an executive order in the Biden administration that similarly was focused on trying to set up a framework wherein new models are. The government has access to them before they're released. Then the Trump administration comes in. David Sacks has made the aizar. He's one of the guys maybe we should talk about. And all they care about is essentially removing any guardrails, any regulation. JD Vance flies to Europe and gives a speech scolding them for caring about AI safety, saying that it's innovation, not safety that should be driving this. And then Anthropic has a new model coming out, Mythos, that was so powerful that it freaked everybody out because nobody thought that they could defend against potential cyber Attacks from Mythos, for instance. And that seemed to have propelled this executive order, although to your point, it seems like it was pretty watered down. I guess the question is, do you think this executive order matters and what would a credible policy look like? Like, let's say you're David Sacks, right? I mean, you would ever be David Sacks, but let's say you're in that role as AIs are. What kind of elements do you think you'd want to look for in an actual credible start at regulation?

[Aya Ibrahim]

Well, when the Mythos stuff was first happening, having a background in financial regulation too, I just thought it would be so funny if the reason that we got AI regulation is because the banks were now exposed and that's because they're

[Ben Rhodes]

exposed to cyber attack. Right. That's the thing that freaked them out.

[Aya Ibrahim]

Yeah. And they met with the Treasury Secretary and with the Fed chair and it's this whole big to do, but at the end of the day, they may end up releasing it anyway. So again, this tech that's so dangerous, but there's always a path to making some money off of it. In terms of what an ideal framework would be, I would just take a step back and say that questions of technology policy are often about everything but the tech itself. And so we have more fundamental questions about, one, the way that we value and compensate and tax capital versus labor, the way that we protect or don't Americans privacy, the use of technology for purposes of surveillance and targeting and enforcement. It is not going to be limited to, okay, this is how much compute this model can have, how do you apply it, what are the consequences, and what are the structural and systematic questions or issues that this raises independent of the technology. And one of the things that I worked on when I was at the White House was the blueprint for an AI Bill of rights. And it lays out five things that should hold true regardless of the technology or its application. And so having a rights based framework would be my go to. But I think regardless, this technology is sort of a forcing function for a lot of the issues that we haven't dealt with, whether it's intellectual property or the fact that wages have not kept up with productivity for 50 years.

[Ben Rhodes]

This is interesting and I think it's really important because what you're saying is there's a kind of lowest common denominator which the Trump EO represents, which is like, yeah, like the. The government should be able to look at these things before they're released and maybe raise some questions, whereas actual regulation would look at different Issues and basically say, we need to regulate for people's privacy, we need to regulate for mass surveillance, we need to regulate for the capacity of AI to create a biological weapon putting on a national security hat. Or we need to regulate for the capacity of AI to do offensive cyber. That essentially. And to your point, we also maybe need to tax these companies in a different way, because right now they're making potentially trillions of dollars where ordinary people can't afford groceries. Is that a fair. Like, you're smarter than me about this. Essentially, the point is that rather than just kind of some broad. Yeah, we'll look at the model. It's more like, let's kind of make a list of the things that, the problems that are raised and have an approach for each of those.

[Aya Ibrahim]

Yeah, I mean, it's looking at the, like, the underlying policy question itself and then whether or not you actually need an AI specific answer for it. I mean, one of the things that these folks do over and over again is they say, like, this is a novel technology, but it's like the, the issue itself is not new. If whether it's a person or an algorithm that has made a lending decision, if that lending decision is biased, then fair lending law would apply. And they tried to argue that actually, no, we have to relitigate settled matters because this technology itself is novel. And I think this just circles back to the broader push that they are making. Actually the Social Contract itself we need to renegotiate, which personally feels an insane premise, and particularly insane given the specific cohort of people that are pushing for it.

[Ben Rhodes]

You're saying you don't want the small collection of Silicon Valley AI investors and developers to rewrite the Social Contract?

[Aya Ibrahim]

I am saying that one of the things that I thought was really important in the Pope's encyclical is he says that the technology is never neutral and it's always going to reflect those who devise it, those who, who finance it, those who regulate it, and those who use it. So I'm just thinking about, like, the people who are devising it and financing it. You know, you have characters across Silicon Valley and venture capital, men who brag about having zero introspection, you know, men who refer to people as meat computers, who have espoused all kinds of misogynistic and xenophobic rhetoric, and these are the people that we are supposed to entrust us to design this technology that again, will remake the world. No, thank you.

[Ben Rhodes]

I hear you on that. I do want to ask, on a kind of a foreign policy angle to this given pot, say the world. I think most people who work in foreign policy and national security policy, and you and I have been kind of a part of or adjacent to those fields, has kind of accepted the premise that there's an AI race between the United States and China. China that kind of conveniently overlaps with a lot of these hyperscalers and large language models in the sense of that we shouldn't put any guardrails on our development of this technology because we have to beat the Chinese Communist Party to it. And I'm wondering. And similarly, there were policies in the Biden administration that were devoted to kind of restricting inputs into Chinese AI, like export controls on certain chips and advanced semiconductors. I feel like right now there's a reconsideration of this happening. What do you think about the frame of an AI race between the US and China? Should we be thinking about a different paradigm? Try to approach it. I can see why. Obviously you would want the US to have a technology that, that China is developing. But I also kind of feel like who's actually winning this race other than the people with AI, which is a relatively small number of people here in the Chinese? I mean, how are you thinking about that right now?

[Aya Ibrahim]

I have always viewed it as a false choice. Right. It's either our biggest companies or it's our biggest competitor. Either we maintain our technological edge or we have privacy and competition and governance. As if there can be no, no third option. And this race paradigm, it feels like a race to the bottom because those who are driving the race are willing to sacrifice anything and everything. It's innovation at any cost, even if the cost is democracy itself and increasingly humanity itself. And they themselves have gotten. Those who are driving this ecosystem have gotten very comfortable just saying that outright. And so do we win if we let seven guys decide the fate of this country, its capital markets, people's 401ks, the distribution of water and electricity. I don't know that. That I don't feel like a winner in that instance.

[Ben Rhodes]

And then allow Pete Hegseth to use AI for autonomous weaponry and.

[Aya Ibrahim]

Exactly. And I guess, I guess you have had your own experiences with emerging technology, right? Drones specifically, knowing what we know.

[Ben Rhodes]

And social media.

[Aya Ibrahim]

And social media, knowing what you know today, looking back, would you have considered a different approach to how we leverage the edge while we had it? And that is the question that I think policymakers need to have front of mind. You hope. And we work towards having an edge for as long as possible. But you should not policy make on the assumption that that edge has no end.

[Ben Rhodes]

I'm really glad you raised this because the answer is yes, obviously on drones and social media, where I actually think the Obama administration should get more flack in some ways. But drones is a great example because part of what we've also learned that could be replicated with AI, right, is that we had this, you know, the US had this advantage. We were at ahead of everybody. But part of what's happened now is if you look at Iran, they're making cheap drones that have done extraordinary damage to the US presence across the Middle east and you know, probably contributed to their capacity to shut the Strait of Hormuz in the sense that they don't need a big, fancy, expensive drone like American defense contractors make, like they can make this in their garage. Something similar may happen with AI, right? Where if there's no thought put in how this technology goes out in the world, maybe you don't need the compute power that the US and China have, but in a few years people could be doing incredibly disruptive things with pretty cheap open sourced technology.

[Aya Ibrahim]

That's exactly right. You don't actually need the most powerful or the largest model in order to do damage or do harm, if that's your intention. You can do quite a bit of harm with a fairly simple and small model. And we, I think over indexed our focus on the largest model because again, we're just in the competition frame as opposed to like, do we have baseline constraints and safeguards on traditional and conventional means of doing harm or conducting conflict and warfare? Because the technology is just going to reflect or exacerbate what's already there. Like AI will give you speed and scale to what you might already want to do.

[Ben Rhodes]

Well, one last question, I mean, because we can go on about this forever, but you're working with the AI Now Institute now, which does research and work on developing, understanding, analysis of these things. If you're listening to this podcast, you're probably taking interest in geopolitics, foreign policy, issues like that and probably are wondering about AI, but it's hard for people to keep up and make sense of it all. Do you have any advice? What should people be following? Whether that's people, places, publications, trends. I know this is a broad question, but what would you tell someone who's like, you know what, I try to follow the news, but, but it's kind of hard to keep up on this AI stuff. Do you think there are particular places to go?

[Aya Ibrahim]

Yeah, I mean, it's a bit like drinking out of a fire hose. Like the cine community wants to say, just follow the money. And I think that actually a lot of the story will be covered in the IPOs, in the investment, in all of the activity around data centers. But I think that there are good publications like the Verge and Wired and they do really good reporting. Obviously I have to plug AI now and a lot of the research that they're doing and we will continue to do. And one of the things that I'll be working on is how do we take this incredibly rich research and make it so that anyone who is interested in these or worried about these issues can follow. There's almost too much out there.

[Ben Rhodes]

That's a good place to start. And actually the Virgin Wired may not be in the normal information diet for all of our listeners. They've actually done quite good work on both the people involved and the technology involved. And obviously people should follow your work. Well, thanks so much for joining us today. I'm sure we'll have occasion to talk about this again at some point.

[Aya Ibrahim]

Awesome. Thanks for having me Ben.

[Tommy Vietor]

Thanks again to Ibrahim for joining the show and we will talk to you guys next week. Pod Save the World is a crazy and media production. Our show is produced by Ilona Minkowski, Michael Goldsmith and Nisha Banerjee. Our team includes Matt de Groat, Ben Hethcote, Jordan Kanter, Kenny Moffatt, David Toles, and Ryan Young. Her staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

I'm Dan Pfeiffer. For years I've heard from candidates, activists and political staffers who turn to Pod Save America for political strategy and messaging advice because they don't have access to a political consultant or a pollster. That's flattering to hear, but it's a huge problem. If we're going to defeat MAGA and protect democracy, we need everyone to have access to the best information and advice possible. That's why I recently launched messagebox Pro, a subscription consulting product for people working at every level of politics. Subscribers get weekly strategy memos, data driven messaging insights and polling analysis. Plus you get access to an incredible community of smart, committed political pros. Whether you're running for office, staffing a politician, organizing your community, or working in communications at any level, Message Box Pro is built for you. To learn more or sign up, go to messageboxpro.com

[Aya Ibrahim]

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[Ben Rhodes]

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[Ben Rhodes]

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