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Tommy and Ben unpack the latest twists in Donald Trump’s chaotic regime-change war with Iran, which eleven days in is still plagued by shifting goals, contradictory messaging, and rising regional consequences. They break down the White House’s confusing claims of victory despite unresolved threats—from the hundreds of pounds of highly enriched uranium still loose inside Iran to signs that Tehran may be mining the Strait of Hormuz. The guys discuss the war’s mounting casualties, environmental devastation from Israeli strikes on Iranian fuel depots, and the dangerous escalation of attacks on desalination plants across the Gulf. They also dig into what we know about Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, explain why sending troops into Iran to secure its nuclear materials—or seize the oil hub of Kharg Island—would be a massive and risky military mission, and why Democrats in Congress must refuse to authorize more funding for the war. Plus: Israel’s widening war in Lebanon, the U.S. military’s new role in Ecuador’s fight against drug cartels, and the election of a GenZ rapper-turned-politician in Nepal. Then Tommy speaks to Michael C. Horowitz, Senior Fellow for Tech & Innovation at the Council on Foreign Relations, about the Pentagon’s fight with Anthropic and how AI is being used by the military.
For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [email protected] and include the name of the podcast.
For Friends of the Pod the guys answer questions about whether assassination-as-foreign-policy is making a comeback, which US military interventions were actually successful in the post-WWII era, and, like…dude, what the fuck.
Preorder Ben’s book All We Say: The Battle for American Identity: A History in 15 Speeches and subscribe to his Substack here.
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Hey, Lovator Leave It listeners, it's me,
the titular John Lovett.
Here to tell you that I'm coming back to Washington DC
for Lovator Leave It Live at the Lincoln Theater
on April 23rd, that's right.
Spring in DC is all about cherry blossoms
and Lovator Leave It bringing you a stack lineup of guests.
That's what makes it America's number one late night
gay live comedy political podcast.
We're so excited to be back to DC.
It's a tradition now that we come around the time
of the car response and even though the car response
in a really no longer has comedians,
that I believe there's going to be some kind of a magician
or a mind melder.
Yes, a magician.
Yeah, I'm a mentalist.
A mentalist, because I guess Trump wouldn't know.
And Trump's also going.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's in there, yeah.
There's a mental case and then Trump is also going.
That's how it is.
Tickets won't last long.
They're selling pretty fast.
So get yours now while you still can at crooked.com slash events.
Very excited for the DC show.
Got some big guests.
Some pretty exciting maybes, crooked.com slash events.
What can a pot say to the world, I'm Tommy Vittor, I'm Ben Rhodes.
I was the Iran war in Somalia for you.
I do have this kind of habitual fall asleep and wake up
at 3.30 in the morning and I was ready for my racing.
And then start reading stuff and then you're up, so not a good idea to look at your phone
these days.
Not a good idea to look at your phone ever in the middle of the night.
I break that rule frequently and I do think there's a weird instinctive, I'm not
trying to over dramatize this, but having in eight years had to feel like you had to work
when something terrible in a modern situation.
Yeah, I mean, you just kind of like there's this weird instinctive thing in my body that's
like, do you see the thing where the, where the, when the war started about all these
dads who were saying they had to monitor the situation?
Yeah, yeah, I did.
I did.
I watched CNN all day or in the SMBC or whatever.
Yeah, well, that's basically us.
Well, by the way, it's an interesting war in that regard because, I mean, I hate to
say this, but I don't find CNN's coverage to be particularly eliminating.
Like, I got that guy in CNN.
That guy's good, but some of the, let's just say some of the guest choices and the panels
are pretty, uh, uh, 2004 feeling, you kind of have to really search for your content
on this war.
You know, it's got your mix of outlets and social media and people in the region.
There's clearly censorship happening like, why, why does Al Jazeera have all these images
that don't seem to appear on other stations, you know, it's, yeah, a lot of people covering
it from Israel are probably having to deal with sensors.
The guy's name is Frederick, uh, Pleikin, Pleikin, PLE ITGN, he's doing great job.
He is doing great.
Uh, uh, Frederick, Pleikin, search for him on Twitter if you want to see what CNN's doing
actually in Iran, which is, I mean, it's pretty fucking brave to get in a car and drive
into Iran as it's getting bombed.
Can't get in the Gaza.
Right.
You can get in Iran.
That's a very good point, Ben.
Uh, we're obviously going to focus much of our time today on Iran.
We're going to talk about the total incoherence of the White House's messaging and we're going
to try to figure out genuinely whether this war is about to end, whether it's about to escalate
something in between.
Like, I genuinely don't know.
I'm excited to hear your opinions.
We have not talked about this.
Uh, we'll take through seven to latest, uh, developments from the last week, including
casualties, all things oil and then some scary signs of escalation.
We'll tell you what we know about the new Supreme Leader of Iran and what his selection
signals from the regime will also talk about what a ground operation to get Iran's nuclear
materials would actually entail the latest on the bombing of an Iranian girls school
and then what's happening in Lebanon, uh, and then finally, Ben, we're going to talk
about the US military's new counter-drug mission in Ecuador and then the Gen Z rapper who
is about to be a prime minister of Nepal.
That's actually a fun story.
That's a fun story.
Then you're going to hear my interview with Mike Harawitz.
Um, he's been on the show before he is an expert on how the Pentagon adopts and uses
new technologies.
We talk about the fight between the Trump administration and, uh, the AI company anthropic
over the use of its model, Claude, as well as growing concern about this munitions shortage,
especially missile defense system shortages and how the US is now turning to drone technology
from Ukraine to, uh, close the gap in counter these Iranian drones.
So very interesting conversation with them.
Yeah.
There's a lot there.
I do think, again, I'm glad you did that because the anthropic story is not getting the
attention that it might otherwise get, but it, for the future of humanity, it's hugely
important.
Yeah.
I'd love to know what the Pentagon is doing with, uh, super powerful AI systems.
Why they need autonomous weapons and mass surveillance capabilities.
Yeah.
It seems like something easy to say no to.
Also for those of you who are friends of the pod subscribers, you can hear Ben and I do
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And our promise to you in return is never to book Lindsey Graham on any of our shows,
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We promise to play clips of Lindsey Graham and to react to them and make fun of him.
You also, we also know fly zone for John Bolton.
Yeah.
Uh, although I'll be funny, yell at him, uh, Mike Pompeo, uh, he's in sufferable.
He's just, I just love how much he's disappeared.
Yeah.
He's gone.
Uh, yet another, uh, proof point that sucking up to Trump does not save you the humiliation
that always comes at the end of it.
But like somehow, Grammys, he's just like a barnacle on the ass of like whatever person
he thinks is in charge of.
John McCain for a decade.
It's not Donald Trump.
Now he seems to have real influence.
I mean, it's just, it's just terrible.
So I don't know.
We're not going to talk to that guy or take him seriously, but please become a friend
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Also just subscribe to pot save the world on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts
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Uh, all right, Ben.
So we're now 11 days into this regime change, where we're with Iran.
Um, the goals in the broader strategy are like somehow less clear, I think now than
when they started.
Uh, we'll do a broader update in a minute on like major developments since our last
recording.
But we just wanted to like recap this, this head spinning messaging shift from the White
House this week.
So the quick version is at the end of last week and over the weekend, Trump was suggesting
like really maximalist goals for the war.
He posted a message on true social where he said, quote, there will be no deal with Iran
except unconditional surrender.
Uh, that freaked out the oil markets, understandably, to the point where on Sunday night, you saw
the price of oil hitting above $120 a barrel, just like exploding.
So it seems like Trump freaked out, uh, the Wall Street Journal reported that his advisors
were telling him like, find an off ramp.
This is going to kill us in the midterms.
So he made this call to CBS news while markets were still open.
The US stock market was still open and basically was like, oh, yeah, the war is about to be
over.
Everything's going to be fine.
And that seems to have worked in the near term, remember because the stock market has
this taco phrase, which is Trump always chickens out, so it folded into that.
But once the markets closed, the messaging changed again.
We had Trump like talking to Republicans at this retreat.
We had him doing a press conference.
And then Pete Hegseth was out this morning, Tuesday morning, doing another press conference.
And this is a super cut that our team put together of Trump and Hegseth messaging from Saturday
through Tuesday that I think kind of gets at the incoherence.
Let's watch.
We're winning the war by a lot.
We've decimated their whole people that fire.
They'll continue.
I'm sure for a little while we took a little excursion because we felt we had to do
an excursion of some people.
And I think you'll see it's going to be a short-term excursion.
We've already won in many ways, but we haven't won enough.
You've said the war is, quote, very complete, but your defense secretary says this is just
the beginning.
So which is it?
And how long should Americans be working on this?
Well, I think you could say about it.
We could call it a tremendous success right now.
As we leave here, I could call it, or we could go further, and we're going to go further.
You probably see Iranian people, you would help them, but it sounds like you're willing
to end this fight after your military objectives have wrapped up.
Is that, isn't that unbetrayal?
Will I help them?
I'd like to.
If they can behave, but they've been very menacing.
Today will be yet again our most intense day of strikes inside Iran.
The most fighters, the most bombers, the most strikes.
I see in the media banners that say war expanding or war spread.
It's actually the opposite.
It's actually quite contained.
So again, I think excellent, super cut there.
So let's just take on this idea.
First of all, quite a message to the Iranian people.
If you can behave, maybe I'll consider supporting you.
What does that mean?
This idea that the war has been a success.
First of all, the nuclear material has not been secured.
We'll get into what that would entail in a bit.
But it's 900 pounds of highly enriched uranium sitting in Iran.
The ballistic missiles are diminished, but not gone.
The US and Israel are not saying they've gotten all their stockpiles.
Before the war, Iran was on a cusp of a leadership transition.
By killing the 86-year-old Ayatollah before he could regenerate himself.
We were so tough, we killed the 86-year-old man, that to die.
Now installed as much younger son, so that's great.
And we might have taken out Iran's navy,
but there are some reports we'll get into in a minute
that they are mining the straight-of-form moves as we speak.
And we only took out the people who are a thousand miles away
who are defenseless with no weapons
and killed them without saving them.
Yeah, we should talk about that.
Because right, there was an Iranian ship in the Indian Ocean
that I believe was unarmed that had been invited
as part of a parade of military assets that we sank,
which is probably a war crime.
Ben, is the war over?
Is it just beginning what's happening?
Trump talks about a war literally like it's a football game.
We got a big lead in the second quarter.
We're winning, and we can call the end of the game whenever we want.
And I think what those clips confirm,
I mean, there are a number of things.
The first thing is that he literally started this war
with no idea what its objective was or what it was going
to lead to or how it was going to end.
I mean, because he himself never defined it.
And we talked about that, but he essentially came out,
made it sound like regime change,
Iranian people rise up, the language of regime change,
the language of unconditional surrender.
He, I, BB Netanyahu, Lindsey Graham,
whatever, small number of people convinced him to do this.
Clearly made him think that this was going to be very easy,
then the regime was about to collapse.
Because by the way, that's the kind of argument
they've been making for years.
Like if only you bomb them, this will be easy,
and they'll all collapse.
I actually think BB Netanyahu knew full well
that this wouldn't happen.
BB Netanyahu knew full well that this would not be quick and easy
and simple.
And frankly, because he wants to destroy Iran
and have it be a violent chaotic place, that's fine with him.
But Trump cannot say what he talks about winning
and, you know, we're achieving our objectives,
but he doesn't say what they are.
Look, what our military objectives are.
I heard him say in the club, you know,
we're achieving our military objectives.
Well, what are the military objectives?
Because we're not achieving any clearly defined objective
that you or I could understand.
And he's got his finger in the wind here,
and it is just appalling.
And we should say it's appalling that, you know,
he seems to care the most about the markets,
you know, not the human beings who are being destroyed,
not the geopolitical consequences
to the United States.
U.S. service members dying, Iranian civilians dying,
Gulf state security being completely punctured,
you know, instability that could be unleashed
for years to come.
He cares about like the price of gas tomorrow
and the stock market, because that's the only kind of metric
that he knows how to pay attention to.
That's appalling.
It is absolutely appalling,
and we should not get accustomed to the fact
that he just lies test relentlessly about war.
Like he is no different than Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong-un.
I think we as Americans, even when we don't like our president,
tend to think of him as a, like a bad,
a really bad version of a bad U.S. president, you know?
So like, we've had president's lie about wars before,
you know, take your pick, I'll be Jay Nixon, whoever.
He's in a whole other category of,
he'll just make stuff up out of whole cloth, you know?
I don't trust anything he's saying.
Not a word.
And we probably get more, not what he said,
but the girl school, those types of things.
Oh yeah, we have another clip of that.
Yeah, so, show you that.
Yeah, unfortunately.
So then there's that.
And then the last thing I'm gonna say about Hegseth
is again, to take a historic analogy,
member the body count, you know, in Vietnam,
the only way that we could kind of try to quantify
the success was like the number of people we killed.
He's taken this to the level of, like the number of bombing
that we do every day is somehow a measure of our success
or that is an insane way to talk.
Today is gonna be even more bombing, you know?
Okay, what are we bombing?
Why are we bombing it?
Where is this going?
Like, he can't answer those questions
and he just goes out there and brags about how many bombs
we're dropping and missiles we're firing.
We don't know what the target set is.
We don't know what we're degrading to what end.
He certainly doesn't seem to know
and he's the Secretary of Defense.
And he does it in this like annoying cat and a hat rhyme scheme,
which is really grating for just being.
Yeah, and so like what you have is a kind of clueless
U.S. government that has no idea why it's doing this
other than maybe Israel was gonna do it
and we had to come in or I just don't know what we're doing.
Why that?
And we can go through like they can blow up
some more nuclear material.
The Iranians will regenerate it
because they know how to do that.
They can blow up a bunch of ballistic missiles.
The Iranians will regenerate their ballistic missile program.
They killed the supreme leader.
Now we're the younger supreme leader.
Like this, this is making everything worse.
It's not making anything better.
And it's creating all these risks,
some which we'll get in here.
And they don't even know why they're doing it.
Yeah, there's a big picture of strategy piece missing here.
So we're gonna go deeper on the supreme leader
in a second, the ground operation,
how Democrats should respond
and then the latest on Lebanon.
But just something like quick news updates
in the last week.
And so in terms of the casualty count
for the broader region so far,
these are from official government sources.
So for the U.S., it's seven U.S. service members have been killed.
But today we learned that 140 have been wounded,
including eight who are seriously wounded.
So that is new information.
Iran says 1,255 people have been killed
in 12,000 have been injured.
Obviously that number is probably growing as we speak.
Israel says 12 killed over 1,900 injured.
Lebanon says 486 killed, over 1,000 injured.
UAE's death toll is six Kuwait reports six dead as well
and Bahrain reports one.
And then on the oil front,
the Trump seems to primarily care about.
As we're recording, oil is back down to about 86 dollars per barrel.
But the Strait of Hormuz is still effectively closed.
And there are reports right before we started recording
that U.S. intelligence is either starting to see indications
that Iran is taking steps to deploy mines
in the Strait of Hormuz or CNN one even further
and said that Iran has begun laying mines.
They said it was a couple dozen in recent days.
So after those reports, Trump posted something
on true socials saying that, quote,
we have no reports end quote of Iran mining the Strait.
But that if Iran did do it, he wants them removed
or else there will be a major military response,
which as far as I can tell where are we.
We're major than doing.
Yeah, so that clears things up.
But if the Strait is mine,
it would be a disaster for shipping.
And if shipping is shut down in the Strait of Hormuz,
the oil producers in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iraq,
they can't ship their petroleum products out.
They will have to either further cut production
or fully stop production in ways
that could permanently impact supply.
So like watch this space as people say
and also like congrats Vladimir Putin
because you're now getting in a bunch more revenue
because the price of oil just went way up.
So first of all, we heard in that clip,
Pegs SA, this war is contained
and getting smaller, even though the bombing
is getting bigger.
There are 700,000 displaced people in Lebanon
because of this war.
Like the violence being unleashed in Lebanon
would normally shock the conscience,
the front page news.
I'm sure the reason Israel is doing it
is because they know that the tensions on Iran, so we go.
But the war is in Lebanon.
It's in every Gulf state firing missiles at Turkey.
It's like this war is not contained.
No, it's a further thing.
And part of what is so frustrating
is that the people, those of us
who've been warning against this type of war with Iran
for 15 years, all of these things were very predictable.
These are the things that were going to happen
and they seem caught off guard that they're happening.
And it is, it's horrible that we should just pause
for the people of Lebanon that there's a normalization
and a routinization of Beirut's being bombed again
for the umpteen time, right?
Then if you get to the straights of our moves,
again, any Iranian war game scenario knew
that the extreme version of what the Iranians could do
is mine the straight.
Because if they threaten the straights of our moves,
even if they blow up a tanker,
it has a huge impact for a period of time,
but then once the hostilities seem like they have diminished
that traffic begins, it takes months and months
and months to demine the straights of our moves.
And so if you are disrupting or halting
the traffic of 20% of the world's energy,
the oil and gas coming out of the straights of our moves,
the economic consequences that could be absolutely catastrophic
and go far beyond high oil prices and gas prices.
It could be a seismic shock to the global economy.
Again, very predictable.
I'm not sure why Trump is surprised by that.
And he has no strategy to do with it
other than to bomb them more.
That is a logic of escalation of a regime change war.
Oh, I'm not able to get you to do what I want by bombing you.
So I'm just gonna keep bombing you more,
which is gonna make you want to do more to hurt me.
I keep minding the straights of our moves,
keep shooting at the Gulf States.
And this is the other crazy thing I see
and how Trump talks about this.
He thinks he controls the timeline, he doesn't.
No, he can stop bombing in two weeks.
The Iranians could still mind the straights of our moves.
They're not going anywhere.
They could still launch supercell tax.
They don't give a shit about Trump's timeline.
The Israelis certainly don't seem to care.
And so this idea that he's in control of events
is such a fiction.
Like he has taken a war to,
like this is not the assassin of Soleimani
where you can calibrate or even the 12-day war.
We, by going for a regime change,
by killing the Supreme Leader,
who's also the religious leader of Gia Islam,
whatever you think of the guy and you as a creep.
During Ramadan.
Yeah, during the war.
Like the idea that you can like neatly say,
this is a, we had a 12-day war
and it's a 19-day war this time.
No, it's one big war.
This is the same war as the 12-day war, too, by the way.
Like you don't have multiple wars
with the same country within a year
and get to call them different wars
because you want to have shorter timelines.
We are at war with Iran on an open-ended basis,
even if we stop bombing in a couple weeks.
Yeah, this is not terrorists where you can turn it off.
Speaking of oil, I mean, over the weekend,
the Israelis bombed 30 Iranian oil depots.
I'm sure folks saw these images.
There were massive fires right in Tehran.
It created these like apocalyptic scenes
of these massive black clouds,
like it was dark during the day.
And then you had literally had oil raining down
on an entire city of 10 million people
that could create health problems for generations.
The Trump administration leaked to Axios
that they were mad about these strikes
that the Israelis did this,
but it's not really clear to me if they were mad
because this is oil that will be needed
by the Iranian people or if Trump was just mad
that it spooked the oil markets.
The other kind of major escalatory development
from over the weekend then was the targeting
of desalination plants.
So Iran accused the US of hitting
one of their water desalination plants.
So in return, they targeted a desalination plant in Bahrain.
And if that kind of like escalatory tit for tech continues,
it could have devastating consequences
because Bahrain is basically totally dependent
on desalination for its fresh water.
I think Israel gets 80% of its water from desalination quake.
It's 90% of its supply.
So I mean, that's people just like literally
not being able to drink, they'll die.
On Monday, as we mentioned,
NATO defenses shot down a second missile
from Iran over Turkey.
US diplomats were pulled from a consular facility
in southern Turkey.
So back to this thing being contained,
it ain't contained.
And then finally, there's some data out today
indicating that the UAE's missile defense systems
might be degrading.
On March 10th, 25% of Iran's drones
made it through the UAE's missile defense systems.
The previous high was 10% on March 3rd.
So it's like, it's not clear if the Iranians are learning
or if the UAE is like running out of missiles
or if the radar is being gone or something's impacting it.
There's also reports today that the US
is taking missile defense systems from Asia
and redeploying them to the Middle East.
So again, so much for dealing with the threat from China.
Well, first of all, on the oil strikes
beyond the horrific scenes and potential
horrific human cost of those strikes,
what does that have to do with degrading the ballistic missiles?
What does that have to do with degrading nuclear program?
Don't tell me that this is about degrading
and running capabilities.
Your Israel is trying to destroy Iran.
They're trying to destroy the Iranian regime.
But they're also just, I mean, what is that?
I mean, and so they're going to try to spin their victory
as, you know, we took out this many ballistic missile sites.
Well, then why are you bombing desolination plants?
Why are you bombing energy infrastructure?
Right?
The US is doing that too with the desolination plants.
By the way, on the oil piece, you mentioned this early,
but it bears repeating, and I have a sub-stack out on this,
if you want to check out my sub-stack.
Putin wins because energy prices are higher
and Russia benefits from that.
Putin wins because Trump even acknowledges
and gave India a waiver to buy more Russian oil,
because they know that they can't get the energy
from the Middle East.
In the long run, Putin wins if other countries,
including in Europe, potentially,
are like, well, we can't rely on oil and gas from the Middle
East, so maybe we have to go back to buying Russian.
By the way, these are all these countries that shifted
from Russian oil and gas to like,
Qatar, the energy.
Yeah, now the Qatar shut down.
And by the way, that takes a while to turn back on
if you shut it down.
This is not like a 12-day war kind of situation.
Putin wins, by the way, because Ukraine has to send
anti-drone technology and personnel down to the Middle
East, which they're doing to help protect the Gulf states
against Iranian drones.
Like, Putin is such a big winner of this war
that he could have designed it in a laboratory.
Now he's, of course, he's giving targeting to the reports
that he's giving targeting to the Iranians to speak.
Steve Whitcough says that he's not,
and that we take them at their word.
Is there more credulous idiot on the planet than that guy?
No, you know, and so the oil piece is a sign
that this is not to spread ballistic missiles.
It's also a huge boom to Putin.
The desalination thing is existential to the Gulf.
It's going to accelerate them thinking
that the US cannot be relied on because they put our security
in existential risk.
Again, even if he calls you into the war tomorrow,
the geopolitical cost of potentially
endangering the whole global economy for an insane war,
endangering the security of the Gulf states.
They're going to look for their own nuclear weapons.
They're going to look for their own security guarantee.
Like across the board, they just so comprehensively
didn't think through the consequences of this.
Again, I can see it might serve Israel's interests
to unleash this kind of violence in chaos in Iran,
eliminated any potential competitor,
have regional hegemony.
By the way, the UAE, which had been,
Israel's biggest partner in that effort
through the Abraham Accords,
is clearly being targeted more than the Gulf states
by Iran for that.
So the UAE didn't get security from the Abraham Accords.
They got, or from our bases.
Yeah, or from our bases.
And so this is going to reverberate for many years to come
if it ended today, you know?
And I think that is what is not being told
to the American people by their political leaders
sufficiently, that this has already been
like a catastrophic decision, but Trump.
Yeah, and like Trump might say,
well, you know, we've blown up the entire Iranian Navy.
And maybe that's the case,
but like you don't need the naval ship to.
Was that causing you a problem?
I mean, I was really worried.
We were, we were, was the Iranian Navy causing your problem?
I live in LA.
Was the Iranian Navy going to come invade their California?
And also, but like getting rid of the Iranian Navy
doesn't mean they can't mind the straightover moves.
You do that with small boats.
These little boats can carry like two to three mines.
The Iranians are estimated to have a stockpile
between 2000 and 6000 naval mines,
which they bought from the Russians and the Chinese,
by the way, and a friend of ours is an expert
in this stuff pointed out that even if they have decided
to do this, like whether or not they're successful,
is a pretty clear indication that they are all in on this war.
Yeah.
And that they are not seeking peace.
And we'll talk about the news.
Well, and just real quick,
the reason that they wouldn't do it, right?
It's because they sell their energy through
they straight so for moves.
But if Israel is bombing their oil facilities,
they can't sell it anyway.
So in a way, you're lowering the price tag for them
to sabotage the straight because they're just
fucking over the Gulf States and not themselves
because their shit is getting blown up anyway.
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There's also been a leadership change.
And remember early in the war,
Israel killed the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Hamane
and an air strike.
That was with US intelligence to help that.
Hamane, Ali Hamane was 86 years old.
He was about to regime change himself
or be a regime change by nature.
But now thanks to Trump, internet Yahoo, his son,
a younger, reportedly even more hard line figure
is now in charge.
This selection reportedly went against Ali Hamane's
written will and desire because he did not want Iran
to become a dynastic country again.
Like that was part of what the 1979 revolution was all about.
But 56-year-old Mustafa Hamane was the IRGC's choice
to lead Iran because that's the best way
to give the middle finger to Trump and Netanyahu
and the military goons like the Mustafa.
So here we are.
We don't know much about Mustafa Hamane.
He's been behind the scenes player in Iranian politics.
A lot of Iranians have remarked
that they've never heard him speak in public.
He doesn't have much of a public profile.
But he does seem to have operated as a chief of staff,
maybe for his dad, maybe he's like a liaison
between his father's office at the military
and the intelligence leaders.
So we know that they like him.
We know that the IRGC goons reportedly wanted
to be selected.
He doesn't have all the religious credentials
that you were supposed to have for that job.
And now he's in charge.
He's the spiritual leader of the country.
He's the commander-in-chief.
And he's the final decider of all political decisions.
And again, like time will tell.
But it seems like he won't want to make
nice with the US and Israel since so far in this war,
the US and Israel have killed his father,
his wife, his mother, and his son.
So that doesn't seem like someone
who will want to sue for peace.
Of course, he may not last long in the job.
The Israelis already tried to kill him
according to news reports.
The Wall Street Journal reported
that Trump would be cool with killing him.
But for now, at least he's the guy.
Ben, thoughts on this new Supreme Leader of Iran?
I think what I would say to people
who sincerely want a better future
for the Iranian people, right?
A lot of people in the diaspora, other people,
is that you would have had a better leadership transition
if we had not bombed and killed the Supreme Leader.
That regime was beginning to change.
Not because it wanted to.
It did not want to.
But you saw, again, the Women Life Freedom Movement,
it made the, it forced some societal changes, right?
People were beginning, women were beginning
to appear in public uncovered.
There was a sense of like prying something open
that was closed.
If in a, if in the normal course of events,
which would not have been much longer,
Hamine had died of natural causes.
The ability to force his son on the country
would have been, I think, much more difficult.
Yeah, there'd be protests.
There'd be mass protests.
There'd be competing people.
There'd be processes that would have been under huge pressure
because of the rally around the flag
that happens particularly among the IRGC
and the hardliners in the country
when they're under attack,
you have the most hard-line possible succession
like because that's what this is.
And it just puts the lie to the idea
that bombing a country and assassinating its leader
is a way to bring democracy to the country.
No, it's a way to ensure that the people
with the most guns in the country
are the ones who choose the successor.
Now, he may not last, he may be killed,
but I think what we learn is,
if he's killed, it'll be another IRGC-backed person, right?
Because they're the only people with power left.
When you are under assault like this,
the people with power in the country
are the people who are armed
and the people who are armed are the IRGC.
And we can keep killing one another.
I just think this is why,
even in times when there were no laws of war,
we didn't assassinate the leaders of countries.
Again, that doesn't mean you like Hamine,
but we don't just get to go and choose
that we assassinate the leaders of places we don't like.
And part because it ushers in a very dangerous new world
where that may become normal
and some of you have more and more assassinations.
When Trump is reportedly very angry
about the Iranians plotting to assassinate him,
well, I mean, that's the other piece of this.
They're gonna be trying to kill a US president
for a long time, including after Donald Trump's crisis.
And very senior generals and people who work to this.
They will do that.
They will be, this is why you don't end the war in 12 days.
Like they might try to assassinate the next US president
because of what Donald Trump did.
But the reality is that we've made the situation
internal to Iran worse by bombing and killing them,
but also by empowering the absolute most hardline people
in the country.
So that part's going good.
The other thing that I imagine,
like the actual national security experts,
both in the US and the Israeli government
are probably the most worried about
is this 900 pounds of highly enriched uranium.
That is, we think is buried under a mountain
at one or more sites, but we don't really know.
And securing those materials will almost certainly require
a sending in troops to get them.
That's why I suspect Trump has repeatedly refused
to rule out putting boots on the ground.
And Iran, here's a couple examples of him
kind of dancing around this.
What are the circumstances where you send it
ground troops?
How are you thinking about that?
I don't even want to talk about it.
I mean, that's, I don't think it's an appropriate question.
You know, I'm not gonna answer it.
Could there be possibly for a very good reason?
I have to be very good reason.
And I would say if we ever did that,
they would be so decimated that they would be able
to fight at the ground level.
So do you need ground troops to secure
the enriched uranium at the nuclear sites?
To find out about that, we haven't talked about it,
but it was a total obliteration.
They haven't been able to get to it.
And at some point, maybe we will.
You know, that would be a great thing,
but we haven't, we haven't gone after it.
But, you know, something we could do later on.
We wouldn't do it now.
Maybe we could do it later.
So, okay, so let's dig into what this kind of operation
would look like, because I got very triggered
over the weekend that I was reading this Axios report
that said, the White House doesn't view a mission
to secure Ron's nuclear materials
as boots on the ground or an invasion,
which is just like insane on every level.
This would be-
Who could be wearing socks on that boot?
Yes, this is it.
Yeah, we're just torturing the English language here.
So this would be a major military operation
that by any definition is men,
boots on the ground and an invasion.
So, there's been some good reporting
on what this operation would look like.
A lot of these plans existed when we were in government.
We've talked to experts about them.
So we got a good window into this one.
So, long story short, like you were talking about
sending hundreds of troops into Iran,
you would need a specialized team to find secure
and store the nuclear materials.
That might be a highly trained Delta Force team
or a Navy SEAL team.
And then on top of that, the Pentagon
would almost certainly send a troop to secure
a big perimeter around the sites
where the guys are digging up this shit.
You might have to send in like earth moving equipment
and stuff, like specialized equipment.
And I think that's why a lot of people's heads
parked up last week when the Washington Post reported
that the 82nd Airborne was given a change
and it's planning seemingly to be more ready to deploy
because they do this kind of stuff
like they go in behind enemy lines,
they seize airports, they seize strategic areas.
The Pentagon would also need to figure out
how to get those materials out of Iran,
hundreds of miles, that would either be by air or ground.
You would need like missile defense, drone defense
during the operation throughout.
And so this would not be a small operation
by any stretch of the imagination.
I just like don't get why a news outlet
would repeat this absurd spin
that it wouldn't be boots on the ground.
And then finally, Ben, earlier today, Tuesday,
Richard Blumenthal, Senator Richard Blumenthal
came out of an Iran briefing and said,
quote, we seem to be on a path
toward deploying American troops on the ground in Iran.
He also added that Russia seems to be eating our enemies
so he seems to be confirming that,
even though Steve Wykoff doesn't think that's the case.
He's putting it in his word.
Yeah, it's his word.
He's such a trustworthy guy.
He also said China might be eating them too.
So I guess we'll find out.
But what do you think the odds are that
there is this kind of like H.E.U. focused ground invasion?
And how is leaving this material in Iran
not like a red line for Netanyahu?
This seems to be the thing he cared about most
over the last three decades.
There's something surreal about the fact
that Trump has to simultaneously affirm his lie
that he obliterated the Iran nuclear program.
While leaving open the door to the fact
that we may have to do an incredibly complex
and risky operation to actually clean up the fact
that we didn't obliterate the Iran nuclear program
because as many of us have been saying for 15 years,
you can't bomb a nuclear program and obliterate.
It's physically impossible.
So that just shows you the kind of danger
of having someone who's this dishonest making decisions
because you can't really explain anything
because he's trying to keep these competing narratives
from bumping into each other.
Look, yeah, we've been there, we've studied this,
we've followed this because you can't bomb
all of the nuclear program away.
There has always been this idea
that if you were truly going to try to like take out
as much of the Iranian nuclear program as possible,
by the way, you can't eliminate it entirely,
they know how to do the nuclear fuel cycle.
So you can't bomb like the knowledge
that exists inside of Iran, how to do this.
But if you were to do this, you would need
a very complex special forces operation
with close air support and lots of personnel.
I will tell you this, Tommy, too,
that in some of the kind of wargaming on this
and I'll say like even out of government, right?
So this is not anything sensitive.
You might want the element of surprise.
You know, like pop up, here's the team
to get these materials.
This is the most telegraph punch, you know, possible.
Yeah.
So I imagine that that will make it harder
that wherever this is buried
and whatever, you know, things that they put in place
to try to protect against this operation,
doesn't mean you couldn't do it,
but it just being incredibly risky.
And whether it's Israeli commando's
or US commando's and special forces,
joint US Israeli military operation,
it's complex, it's risky,
it introduces ground forces into Iran,
even if you get some of these materials,
it still doesn't eliminate the nuclear program.
Because again, they know how to do this.
There are people inside of Iran,
like not even Israel in the US can kill that fast.
Who know how to do this?
Just set some back, complete.
It sets them back and we've told them
that the only way you could ever survive
is get a nuclear weapon.
So I guarantee you, if we see this, whatever we do,
there's still going to be trying to build
the nuclear weapon there, you know, on the back end of it.
Yep, so here we are.
The other kind of like invasion option
that I think people are talking about and worried about
is the US or Israel seizing a place called Carg Island,
which is this little island,
it's about 25 kilometers off the coast of Iran,
which is a key transit point for the export
of about 90 or 95% of Iran's oil.
So that would be a way for the US or Israel
to essentially take control of Iran's oil industry.
It would again be very risky.
You would be shot at, there's troops there.
It would be a big, big deal, but that's the thing.
I think nerds will tell you that like,
Sencom has had that plan on the shelf for a long time
and there's probably people in there want to do it.
But it's amazing and we're back in the 19th century here.
This is where we're at that we're just see,
I saw some people in Fox who'd never heard of Carg Island,
you know, we could go we're like,
oh, we're going to get the island and get the oil.
Like we're back in the empire business.
By the way, that would be the biggest terrorist target
in the world if we were like,
see some island and try to like run
the Iranian oil industry from there.
Like this is how we got an Islamic Republic
of Iran in the first place.
Because we overthrew a democratically elected leader
of Iran in 1953 because that leader
was nationalizing the Iranian oil resources
and lo and behold, you know, within 25 years
we get the Islamic Republic.
So the reason we've had an Islamic Republic
in the first place is because we tried to do this.
Disagree then, we are always the victims
in these stories, you can't ever make us a protagonist.
The one little bit of good news is that last week
there were all these reports that the US
was arming Kurdish militia forces,
especially in Iraq and encouraging them to go into Iran
and try to topple the government.
Trump now says he doesn't want the Kurds
to go into Iran.
Hopefully that's true when he's being honest,
but like, I guess put a pin in that one.
I always say about that is it seems pretty clear to me
that at least the Iraqi Kurds said no.
Because they were saying it very publicly.
Yeah, they were raising their hands, you know,
the people that are in the Kurdistan regional government
in Iraq were like, we don't want any part of this war.
So I don't necessarily give Trump credit for that.
I actually think the Iraqi Kurds would be like,
this had been insane thing for us to do.
Yeah, I saw one of them was interviewed on Fox News
and was just like, no, this is a really bad idea.
I don't think this is worth doing.
Also, I just, one last thing then.
I mean, I just think it's very clear
there's been a bunch of really good reporting now
about the nuclear negotiations that took place
between the Trump administration and the Iranians
specifically what Wicoff and Kushner were doing.
And it's just so clear to me now that Jared and Steve Wicoff
like fundamentally didn't understand the subject matter.
Obviously, right?
They're not nuclear experts.
They're not scientists, they're not PhDs.
But there was a, there was a transcript of a call
that those two Bozos did for press.
And like you can just tell, like they keep mistating
the name of the IAEA, like they're getting basic facts wrong.
And like maybe look, maybe Trump never wanted to cut a deal
and there was always going to be a war.
But those idiots definitely didn't make it better.
And it's kind of terrifying to think
that they're handling Gaza negotiations
around negotiations and Ukraine.
Like no shit that nothing's going well.
There are two scenarios.
One is that the entire diplomatic effort,
both last summer and this time,
were a facade of deception operation
so that we could bomb Iran.
That is outrageous and dangerous thing to do
because no one will ever trust US diplomacy again
if it's just meant to be a deception.
I'm sorry, yeah.
They were sincerely negotiating.
We make fun of these people.
We have a laugh about them, particularly Jared
because he's a moron who was born
with a winning lottery ticket and thinks
that he earned all that money.
But the reality is sending two complete idiots
into the most sensitive negotiations in the world
over and over and over again is not just embarrassing.
It is terrible for US interests.
Like an American sometimes make this mistake,
particularly right-wing Americans.
They think other people are stupid.
They're particularly brown people like the Iranians.
These are very smart, sophisticated people.
The Russians, the Russians are the toughest negotiators
in the world.
They are eating these people for lunch
every day in every negotiation.
The Russians are.
I mean, such that Steve Rickoff is reporting propaganda
that Putin is somehow not doing things
that he's clearly doing.
Or the Iranians aren't going to figure out
that these guys aren't serious.
And so it's not worth coming back into talks with them.
Trump would clearly like to be able to say
we're back in the talks of the Iran
because he's dangled it a couple of times
and the Iranians keep shooting it down.
So this is, this Jared Whitkoff show
is an abomination from a corruption standpoint,
but from a pure competence standpoint as well.
Yes.
And speaking of US credibility, Ben,
so it is just like increasingly clear, as you've mentioned,
that this airstrike on an Iranian school,
a handful of young school girls
that killed 168 children and 14 teachers
was an airstrike conducted by the United States military.
Iranian state media release footage
that has been confirmed by major news organizations
as authentic.
It shows a US Tomahawk missile hitting a naval base
that is directly adjacent to this girl school.
There have also been a number of news reports
that the Pentagon has been doing internal investigations.
They believe they were responsible for this strike.
But Trump, of course, is refusing to take responsibility.
He is instead trying to lie and spin his way through this one.
So here's a couple examples of his shifting story on this.
Did the United States bomb a girl's elementary school
of southern Iran on the first day of the war in 175 people?
Based on what I've seen, that was done by Iran.
Is that true, Mr. Hexat?
Is it wrong to do that?
We're certainly investigating.
Still investigating.
But the only side that targets civilians
is Iran.
Tomahawk missile likely destroyed
that Iranian girl school.
So will the Americans, will the US accept any responsibility?
Well, I haven't seen it.
And I will say that the Tomahawk,
which is one of the most powerful weapons around,
is used by, you know, sold and used by other countries.
You know that.
And whether it's Iran, who also has some Tomahawk,
say, wish they had more.
You just suggested that Iran somehow got its hands
on a Tomahawk and bomb the tone elementary school
on the first day of the war.
But you're the only person in your government saying this.
Even your defense secretary wouldn't say that
when he was asked standing over your shoulder
on your plane on Saturday.
Why are you the only person saying this?
Because I just don't know enough about it.
So like, we don't sell Iran Tomahawk missiles.
That's crazy.
Like, my understanding is that only the US, the UK and Australia
currently have Tomahawk's deployed.
Unless the Iranians broke into a British submarine,
sold Tomahawk and then dropped it on their own,
IRGC naval base slash girl school,
like the story's bullshit.
So Trump, he clearly thinks he could deflect
and wait for this story to go away, Ben.
But when you combine those lies with Pete Hegseth
bragging about getting rid of woke rules of engagement,
it sends, it's hard to think of a way
to make the US military look worse than that.
And all of us, you and I paid for that bomb
that killed those girls, right?
We American taxpayers paid for this.
Those girls are dead today because of decisions
that Donald Trump made and because of the way
in which we spend our tax dollars.
And look, just to take a couple of these pieces,
the investigations that are very thorough
that are out there that this is our missile.
I just point out a couple of things.
The idea that these were the children of IRGC people
that went to the school.
So the idea that they got this conspiracy theory
that is all over the internet.
The reason we have to address this
is because this is all over the internet.
I assume these railways are super charged.
Yeah, the bots are out there with this stuff.
I had an Iranian woman come up to me in LA.
I was like hanging out with Lizette.
Lovely woman, couldn't have been nicer,
but it was like spouting like insane made up propaganda
about the war and be like, tell everyone that, you know,
Iranians like the war.
I'm like, well, not the one's getting bombed.
And she was like, well, the IRGC is the one
who bombed that school.
It's like, man, that's not what happened.
It was 100% off.
If you think that, I feel sorry for you.
Because you're unwilling to look like truth in the eye.
And here's the other thing.
We gave a lot of shit to the Biden administration
during the Gaza war for defending the IDF, right?
And every time there was some horrific incident in Gaza,
which is very regular.
Remember it was always, this is being investigated
or this was the Hamas Pentagon, you know,
every hospital had the Hamas Pentagon under it.
There's a way in which we are becoming like that.
Like the Trump response to this, and even the Hegseth response,
which weirdly Hegseth is actually not going as far as Trump.
He's more reasonable than Trump.
Because the US military, I believe there are still
some people with some honor, I mean this.
I'm not trying to, I'm saying this as a compliment,
who have some honor in that institution
who are like, we do not lie about our mistakes.
Most of the military is horrified that they did this.
This is a massive intelligence fuck up.
And I'm sure that people are like, just devastated.
Devastated.
But this is why you don't do what Biden and Trump both
have done with the idea, which is go along with this bullshit
that every single child who's killed is like a Hamas terrorist
or every single hospital that's blown up
is a secret target, you know, or a secret Hamas command center
or every single one that you can't possibly defend.
You just say we're investigating it,
but we never get you the results of the investigation
and oh, by the way, it's Hamas's fault.
We are now doing that about Iran.
We're doing the same language.
We're investigating it.
We'll get back to you.
But maybe they did it.
They're the only ones who killed civilians.
Not us.
Like we cannot become and should not become
that kind of country, but I fear that, you know,
with Trump as president, like that's where we're at.
But that is a dangerous, dangerous, dangerous place to be.
Not alone because of what we saw already with these girls,
which the whole war is not worth it.
I'd rather have those kids back
than all the missile launchers that we've blown up.
Like that's why we had to be an anti-war party
in this country because this stuff can happen.
Let's talk more about how our tax dollars
should be spent in the Democratic Party
because as listeners probably know,
like last week, the House of Representatives
voted down a bill to stop the war in Iran,
not Trump would have vetoed it,
but it was important symbolically.
Four Democrats voted in favor of allowing Trump
and Pete Hegseth to continue this regime change
war of choice in Iran, which is just insane to me.
But Politico reported that the next step in Congress
will be the administration coming back to them
to request an estimated $50 billion in additional funding
for the war.
That's on top of the nearly $1 trillion
Pentagon budget for 2026.
Over the weekend, CNN's Jake Tapper asked Senator Chris Murphy
about this request.
Let's play that exchange and then talk about it.
The administration is reportedly weighing Congress
to approve an additional $50 billion in funding
for these operations.
You have said you're a hell-no,
not just a no on funding the war.
We have seen this movie before.
We know that that vote will be cast as,
especially if you run for higher office,
you voting against the troops.
Oh, come on.
I mean, the American people don't want this war.
They don't want this war.
They have seen what happens when American troops go
into places like Iraq, places like Afghanistan.
Ultimately, we get a lot of people killed.
We waste a lot of dollars.
The one thing the American people are clear about
is that they do not want the United States
dragged into another long-term war in the Middle East.
If you support the troops,
then you should be voting against funding this war
so that we get our troops out of harm's way.
Virtually nothing good happened from sending thousands
of Americans to die inside Iraq in the 2000s.
And if we don't learn that lesson,
then shame on every single one of us.
It's a good answer by Murphy there.
So I teed off on this on Pots of America
on Monday, so I'll be quick.
I want to make sure that every Democrat listening
understands that you cannot oppose the war
and then vote for funding.
That is not a position that exists in the real world.
That's a thing people in Washington convince themselves
is rational and it's actually incoherent.
Also, I just want them to understand that
like opposing funding is the right thing
to do strategically, morally, and politically.
This is not 2004.
Jake is wrong.
We're not going to watch the same movie.
The Pentagon doesn't need more money to sustain operations.
They have a trillion dollars.
There are not guys sitting in Fallujah
waiting to get an M-Rap that might not show up
if you vote against the 77 billion
or whatever the funding request was in 2004.
Like, Trump could end this war tomorrow.
He has basically declared victory a couple of times.
It suggests that it might be over tomorrow.
And I also voters will reward you.
If you say, let's not spend 50 billion more
bombing girls, schools, and Iran.
Let's spend it on education, healthcare.
Literally anything else.
That will be like the most popular thing
you ever do as a lawmaker.
Absolutely.
And first of all, you're right.
The Jake Tapper from 2002 doesn't need
to like conduct that interview.
I mean, we have Barack Obama.
The very first meeting I was in with him.
The first time I met him was in 2007
when he decided to vote against the supplemental
that funded the surge.
And the argument that was cast at him
was if he was voting against the troops.
And lo and behold, if it wasn't for his opposition
in the Iraq war, he never would have become President
of the United States.
This political thinking is so outdated
that it's astonishing to me that it still
gets currency in the kind of media framing around these issues.
I also want to say you covered the argument
well about the obvious political point
that people don't want to be spending this money that this war
is not popular.
I also think that one of the things that
drives people crazy about the Democratic Party
is it seems like it's a party that
has constantly got its finger in the wind
and is trying to figure out like what it stands for,
what it actually believes,
what will be the most politically fruitful?
Are we tough?
Are we tough?
Can I afford to piss off these donors?
Look, if you vote for the funding of this war,
you should be primary.
I don't want you in the Democratic Party.
And I'm not trying to be obtuse or stubborn,
but this is a threshold issue.
Like I would like to have a big tent on this party.
I think there should be people with different ideas
of how to get health care, different ideas of taxation.
To me, this is not a left center issue.
This is a right and wrong issue.
Morally, what do we stand for as Democrats?
If you as a Democrat can't say that I'm against a war
and I'm not going to fund a war that is being launched
by an authoritarian president illegally
with no rational basis that has explained
to the American people that has already unleashed
these consequences.
If you can't stand against that,
you don't stand for a fucking thing, okay?
And everybody can see it.
How is anybody going to trust you to fight for their health care
if you're too afraid to cast a vote
that someone might call you weak
or some donor might call you in complain?
So I'm sorry I got a little hot today.
I came in hot, but I don't know what to say anymore, okay?
It's an astounding lapse in judgment,
I think, to trust Donald Trump and Pete Hexf
to lead a regime-chained war of voice with Iran,
along with Dvian Netanyahu.
And like we didn't put it on the run down today
because it's just like the things to be mad about
are endless.
But Trump wearing a hat to the dignified transfer
ceremony really bothered me
because I know you've been,
I'm sure you've been to Dover.
I'd never went to Dover with President Obama,
but I went to Walter Reed with President Obama in like 2000.
So like 2009 or 2010, it was like me,
Reggie, Matt Flavin in Obama in Marine One
on the way there.
And then I chilled out with the press while he went
and net with wounded service members
for like three, four hours, whatever it was.
And then we all flew home together.
And like my memory of flying there
is talking and people like, it was fun, right?
It was cool.
And on the way back, it was like the heaviest situation
I've ever been in, like you could feel the weight
of what Obama had just experienced on his shoulders
and the devastation you'd seen and the families
and the people's lives were just ruined.
And he didn't say a fucking word,
nor did anybody else.
And just like to see Trump kind of winging it out there,
doing press events, goofing around,
you're like he's talking about the Iran war
in front of like the Miami,
inter Miami soccer team cracking jokes
about the renovations at the White House.
He's just like a fundamentally unserious person
who is not conducting this war for a serious strategic reason.
It's all about his politics.
It's all about Lindsey Graham fluffing him 10 times a day
and like doing whatever Netanyahu tells me to do.
And it's just, it's a fucking embarrassment to vote no.
Yeah, and to your point, I mean,
the guy is showing up at the dignified transfer of caskets
of dead service members coming home
because of decisions he's made.
And he's wearing a USA hat that looks like the kind of thing
that you could buy like a gas station rest stop, right?
Which no offense against us.
Those are great hats I bought his head stare.
But the point is that were afraid of being called weak?
Right.
Were afraid of being called unsatisfied old man
in a weird way.
Were afraid of like there were against the troops?
The guy against the troops is the one who's getting them killed.
Yep, for no reason.
Exactly.
And he was showing up in a fucking baseball cap
for a dignified transfer ceremony.
Like this is not a hard argument to make.
Very easy.
I just couldn't agree more.
Ben speaking of our feckless Congress
as we did a minute ago.
So November is going to be a huge election
at a load side of Democrats are in control of the House.
Maybe we can take back the Senate
or Trump just maintains his iron grip on the trifecta.
Winning the House is going to be the fastest way
to put a real check on Trump's abuses of power
and the Republicans enabling them.
So we got to go on offense and try to win
as many seats as possible.
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Let's end this around section by talking about
like Hezbole Lebanon and the fact that the country
is once again getting hammered by the IDF.
So the numbers are really grim, Ben, as we mentioned at the top,
like we're talking about nearly 500 people dead in Lebanon
and nearly 700,000 people have been displaced.
So Hezbole entered the conflict,
it started firing rockets at Israel
after the Supreme Leader was assassinated.
The Israelis leapt on this opportunity to retaliate
and just destroy them again
and like whatever was left of the 2024 ceasefire agreement
is now just fully eviscerated.
And the IDF has both been conducting massive airstrikes
in southern Lebanon and the parts of the suburbs of Beirut.
But also the IDF ground forces have pushed into southern Lebanon.
Last week the French offered to like intervene
and maybe support the Lebanese military,
Manuel Macron, like I jumped into the fray here.
I think the Israelis basically told him to fuck off.
I can't tell if anything came of that.
Europe not exactly is showing a lot of strength
on this around war in general.
No, not much.
I think my concern, Ben, though,
if I were Lebanese official like beyond the immediate security
and threat to people's lives
and the humanitarian situation
and humanitarian crisis that could develop
if this many people are displaced for this long.
Like I would wonder if Israel is going to use this opportunity
to just permanently capture parts of Lebanon
while the world is kind of focused elsewhere.
I think that's what's happening.
I mean, I think that they want to permanently occupy
if not end up annexing southern Lebanon.
Some Israeli political leaders talk about that openly.
They know that this is a chaotic and violent time in the region
so they can kind of ratchet it up in Lebanon
without it getting as much scrutiny.
They have not announced kind of what their end game is
in Lebanon, other than just destroying things.
And I think people have to realize that
these people have been through hell in Lebanon.
And 700,000 people being told to evacuate is,
I mean, just think about that.
Where are they supposed to go?
And many of them are gonna come back to homes that are destroyed.
And we've so thoroughly normalized
that level of destruction with this idea
that it's somehow like about Hisbela.
I mean, this is so far beyond Hisbela.
This is like breaking Lebanon completely yet again.
By the way, what always ends up happening,
I'm not defending corrupt Lebanese politicians
because they're plenty of those two.
But like they'll palm Lebanon for however long may bomb it
and destroy all this stuff and displace people.
And then nine months in a big call
that politics in Lebanon are so dysfunctional.
Like what the hell are these people supposed to do?
Right, yeah, that's like a city the size of Denver
just being pushed out of their homes in this place.
I mean, it's staggering.
Like, you know, and I guess we'll just keep an eye on it.
Like, I don't know, the world is just kind of anxious.
And then you'll get these people, you know,
who will like be posting pictures from like 1984
of like women in bathing suits in Beirut and be like,
this is what it was like before Hisbela or something.
No, no, this is what it was like before the place got bombed.
You know, however many times I've lost track of it.
Yeah, it's a nightmare.
Okay, so a couple more things from us.
So while the world is focused on Iran,
the US military has been expanding its activities
in South America.
Specifically, the US military is now conducting
joint military operation against drug cartels in Ecuador.
So this is on top of the boat strikes off the coast of Ecuador
and in the Caribbean.
The New York Times reported that US Special Forces are,
quote, advising and supporting Ecuadorian commandos
who are hitting drug facilities.
US Southern command ban.
I don't know if you saw that they tweeted out this weird video.
I saw that.
The helicopter taking off, right?
And then it was like a drone feed of like US troops
getting into the helicopter, but the way they filmed it,
it made it look like there's about to be an air strike
on our own helicopter.
It was all very, very weird.
As we've discussed on the show before,
Ecuador went from being one of the safest countries
in Latin America to becoming one of the most dangerous
and becoming a major transit point for cocaine
coming out of Colombia and Peru, usually to Europe.
There's also these Albanian gangs in Ecuador
and there's sort of like facilitating those cocaine
flows into Europe.
In 2024, the president, Daniel and the Bulla,
declared war on the gangs and on the cartels.
That set in motion, this huge crackdown
in a wave of violence does not solve the problem
but has led to a lot of deaths
and now apparently involved the US military.
Beno was just reading about this,
sort of marveling at how little attention it's getting
and then remembering back in 2018
when Trump said quote, we more and more
are not wanting to be the policeman of the world.
It feels like that's kind of.
That's out the window.
And again, another thing that we're doing
with no public discussion.
He clearly has this idea that there's this collection
of right wing leaders across Latin America.
It's kind of his team.
I think Kristi Nome is now like, isn't she the envoy
to the envoy of the shields of the America?
You know, I'm absolutely made up.
Curious if that actually happens.
Yeah.
If she gets a plane to go down Ecuador.
But the reality is this idea where the US
becomes like to.
Cory down Ecuador.
Cory, I mean, like Lewandowski would last long down.
Yeah.
Eric Prince could probably put him to work.
Yeah.
Eric Prince, I pose the Iran war.
I think I saw him quote it.
We're not banning, you know, and he opposed it.
And part because this is the kind of war he wants to fight.
I want to be.
Yeah, I want to be an equity pay for this.
But the reality is we're just going
to become the security force for every right wing
autocrat in Latin America.
What's the goal here?
What's the end state?
If we lose personnel, then there are Americans
going to know why they're there.
You had Ricardo on the way to deal with these drug cartels.
You first, you have to go off their money
because they're multi-billion dollar enterprises.
And it's going to skipping right ahead to like some
military operation for ambiguous purposes.
So yeah, we are on this kind of slippery slope
to being the kind of military force
for the shield of the Americas.
You know, and I just, that's yet another thing.
How much is this operation costing?
Good question.
Because they're not free, right?
So yet another argument to make that that's not lowering prices.
That's not doing anything to solve problems
in Americans actually because it's not even
doing anything about the fentanyl problem,
which is what Americans are most concerned about.
It's just buttressing some right wing autocrat
who tells Trump what he wants to hear.
It's not great.
Okay, let's end this by talking about
the recent election in Nepal.
So this ladies and gentlemen is Nepal's next prime minister.
Let's watch.
I go hard like a blastest.
Ackishan fire is the closer somewhere we're mixed.
Get it, I'm a seaman of the class.
It's full of weapons.
This is a duality net like a Baptist.
Like a Baptist.
Joe bitch got the kailish.
My dick is most stylish.
He dripped like me stylish.
They say they fly and got no mileage.
They say they fly and fly in private.
No kailish general and got no humor.
Next time we show up, you get beat like a drummer.
Give out their pipe pipe like a drummer.
I put you in drama.
I shoot like I'm gonna.
I mean, collab with Zora and Mamdani.
I mean, Michael had a better time watching that.
That guy's yes, and a bit in the list show.
Yeah, fucking finally.
Okay, so that's a rapper.
It's not bad.
It's pretty good.
Yeah, I know he's laying down the beats too.
It's pretty good.
That's Belendra Shah, a rapper, civil engineer,
return politician.
People call him ballin.
He's the former.
He's ballin.
Yeah, he's ballin out there.
Also, a pretty true cure has that same code.
I don't love cures.
Anyway, he's the former mayor of Kathmandu.
There's still kind of ballots, but so far he's leading
in what looks like a landslide election.
This election is the result of these Gen Z led protests
from last year that brought down the former government.
The protest kicked off.
Remember, there's the social media ban
that seemingly was just a cover to hide
that the children of the elites were just like
spending money in Paris and pissing away
from the government money.
But those protests exploded in size
because of deep frustration about corruption
and lack of economic opportunity.
Because Nepal is a very young, highly educated population,
but it also has a 21% youth unemployment rate.
So there's a brain drain and a lot of people
leaving to go work abroad.
19 people were killed during those initial protests last year
because the government violently cracked down on them.
Then 70 more on the unrest and chaos that followed.
So that forced out the prime minister at the time.
So Baldwin is part of the center's party.
He has campaigned on anti-corruption,
on creating jobs.
He says he's going to double per capita GDP
to $3,000 within the next decade.
Nepal is landlocked between India and China.
They have very limited manufacturing.
They rely on a lot of tourism to mount Everest
for their economy and its current GDP per capita
is about $1,500.
So delivering on that promise will be quite a challenge.
But Ben, thoughts on our new Gen Z wrapper king?
Yeah, look, I can't really vowed for Baldwin.
And I spent a bunch of time reading up on this
because it's fascinating.
We'll see how it goes.
Here's the main thing that I think I take away from this
that is hopeful.
Clearly, people across the world, particularly younger people,
are absolutely fed up with the corruption
and the kind of rotten establishments
that govern their lives.
And I do think that there is a connection between
the Zoran Mamdani campaign and what he did.
Did you see the Hannah Spencer Green Party campaign
in the UK?
This is, I mean, if people haven't watched Hannah Spencer,
she was a Green Party member.
We won a bi-electron recently.
She's 34 years old.
She had a very Zoran-esque kind of message in campaign.
Get more risk over there.
Where's Katz go over there and meet with some of those.
More is kicking the tires on taking over European politics.
Yeah, more Katz is a friend of ours who works
for Zoran Mamdani.
Like a kind of young, brilliant,
kind of experienced-
Brilliant, brilliant guy.
Yeah, absolutely.
Good for him going over to Europe
and meeting some of these progressive parties
because we need to trade best practices.
My advice to Europeans, and I know we have a lot of European
listeners, is like, talk to more Katz, right?
Because it's not just about having clever social media.
It's about having a smart message.
But, Ballon, you know, he capitalized in the fact
that Gen Z, I don't think it's some irrational thing.
Oh, we like the rapper.
It's that they're so comprehensively fed up
with their political establishment.
That they kind of ousted them in this protest movement.
And they're like, you know what?
Let's put this guy in charge.
Because at least we know he's different, right?
And at least we know he's not been tethered
to the same corruption.
At least we know he hasn't kind of taken money
from the same crowd that's been around.
And so I actually think the warning to politicians
everywhere in the democratic world
and the non-democratic world is that
this is kind of where people are at right now,
particularly young people.
And I actually think it's wrong to say
that Gen Z, they're disengaged.
They seem pretty fucking engaged.
And a lot of these places.
They're pretty engaged over there.
They're like some fires that they were engaged.
And they've been engaged.
We've seen it in Africa.
We've seen it in the Middle East.
We've seen it in this country.
We're seeing it in Europe.
And if you, again, I'll just talk to the places where,
if you are smart politician,
trying to appeal to young voters,
you got to get to that mood.
You know, that may be not the ball in video.
Yeah, it's established.
But the anti-established mood of like,
this is different.
This is a clean break.
This politics is going to look different.
It's going to feel different.
It's going to be funded differently.
Because I think that is increasingly
where the mood's going to go,
given the direction of events in the world.
Yeah, people don't like elites.
Get inside my seam in all the closet full of rap tapes.
This is how I do hallucinate like a Baptist.
That was a V-Tort joint.
No, that was a ball in joint.
Y'all said he also dropped Kyle Genter's name.
Whatever.
I heard the Colley Jenner in there.
Yeah, there's a lot of training
I'm trying to follow with the lyrics.
Hey, it sounded good.
There's more of a slant rhyme,
which Bob Dylan would tell us is an art form.
Ballon seems to not do a lot of media too.
I was trying to, it didn't give a lot of interviews,
let's just say.
It's a bit of a mystery.
But right here's some of the name Ballon,
I think of the big baller brand.
Yes.
Yeah, but.
Well, I saw them, by the way,
just to, I heard you guys in PSA
rightly complained about the video game message.
But I also hate them expropriating,
like I saw, I don't know,
one of their dance giving a war porn post said,
if you don't know, now you know.
Biggie Small's RIP does not want you taking
like his potentially best catchphrase from,
one of the greatest.
Biggie was not repping the military industrial.
Yeah, Biggie was not the police.
But said they don't know, now you know,
give me a break, shut up.
Dan Scavina or whatever, 23-year-old white nationalist
groipers now become a war porn addict.
Well, what's funny is I think actually,
they are trying to appeal to the kind of Nick Fuentes
young, white, angry, like in cell crowd
with this kind of content.
And I think it's falling on its face hard.
Yeah.
Because those guys actually listen to Fuentes,
like Tucker Carlson, a bunch of right wingers
who were opposed to the war in Iran before,
and now were opposed to it after,
and they seem consistent at least.
And you know, Fox News might fall in mind,
but like, who cares what they say?
Yeah, I will say I have some notes
for the kind of anti-war maggot crowd,
like in Tucker's among it,
because I sample this to see where things are going.
It is remarkable they'd lengths they go to somehow,
like solve Trump.
Yeah, like we should need to call this out,
like listen, I mean, actually don't listen,
like we'll listen to it for you,
but like they didn't have a two-hour conversation
on like Tucker, Megan Kelley,
and like, you would think that this happened to Trump, you know?
They'll blame like the undersecretary
for something something over the Pentagon.
Or by the way, they'll blame Netanyahu.
Like I blame Netanyahu, but that doesn't absolve Trump.
I blame Netanyahu too, but I blame Trump
for being too weak to stand up to Netanyahu.
More than Netanyahu.
Of course.
Like to be very clear.
America president, he's the American president.
He made the decision.
Every other American president of the 21st century
said no to this.
So it just, all the more reason for Democrats
to burrow it on this,
because just because there's some anti-war
maggot influencers, they won't call out Trump.
And Americans are not stupid.
They know that the down Trump,
either A should have done this
and B could have said no to BB Netanyahu.
Oh, Jesus.
Okay, so Trump truth as we were recording Ben.
I'm pleased to report that within the last few hours
we have hit and completely destroyed
10 inactive mind-laying boats and or ships
with more to follow.
I'm not really sure what that means or does exactly.
That means he's trying to tell the markets
and the oil futures to not price in a mining
of the Straits of Hormuz.
It's Google price.
Because all he cares about is that.
Now it's up at 8771.
So you don't really want the crude oil futures
to rip like Bitcoin, you know what I mean?
I just, yeah.
And you also want like and not to get too heavy here.
But like I kind of like a commander in chief
who cares more about the lives of US service members
and Iranian school children,
then he cares about tomorrow's oil futures,
which is clearly the only thing
that can get his fat ass, you know,
in gear to like truth social something.
Until Lizzie Graham gets them on the phone,
gets him a hot and bothered again
for another regime change.
Okay, I think that's it for us for the week.
Anything else pissing you off?
Should we wrap that up?
I will say the only thing pissing me off
is that I had two of my best friends come into town.
I got banger tickets to the Nick's Lakers game on Sunday
and the Nick's Clippers game last night.
Got to both games half-narrally.
And in the two games, the Nick's led one
by a single point and just fucking mailed it in.
I'm sorry, man.
Except for Kat.
Except for my guy Carl and 30 towns, he showed up.
The rest of these guys, not much.
I bet I love them, but they just didn't show up for me.
I bet when you're playing away in LA.
This is fun.
It seemed like, so this Saturday,
we were taking a new-
This is a Saturday game.
So we at 12.30 pm, 12.30 start.
So we're in the Uber over
because we're gonna like pound some beers at the game.
So responsibly took an Uber.
And I said to these guys, I was like,
Hey, I'm worried that our guys were at last night.
Like, it's LA, we got OG, we got Josh Harb,
we got these guys.
Maybe they wanted it to go out.
And like, no, no, no, the our guys are serious.
Our guys look like they went out for a night.
I think a lot of players go out every single night.
If you're young and rich and a great athlete,
you're probably having a good time.
Let me just say that Nick did not come out of the blocks,
run at a full speed on Saturday at 12.30.
No.
Luke looked like he was hungover,
but Luke always looks like he's kind of a great hungover.
And it doesn't matter.
Had a little bit hungry.
CNN headline, US Intelligence Community
ramps up warnings of possible retaliatory attacks by a run.
That's great, a cyber attacks.
I don't know, everything's really great.
So yeah, I came and kind of hissed off today.
Sorry about that.
It's hard to be light about a war though.
That's not fun.
It is not fun.
Okay, we're gonna take a quick break.
But when you come back, you're gonna hear my interview
with my car wets, we're gonna talk about
the Pentagon fighting with AI companies, drones,
new drone technology that will help us take out
Iranian drones that we're getting from the Ukrainian.
So very important conversation about the future
of warfare and technology.
So stick around for that.
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Hey, love it or leave it listeners.
It's me, the titular John Lovett.
Here to tell you that I'm coming back to Washington, DC
for love it or leave it live.
It'll link in theater on April 23rd.
That's right, spring in DC is all about cherry blossoms
and love it or leave it bringing you a stack lineup of guests.
That's what makes it America's number one late night
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We're so excited to be back in DC.
It's a tradition now that we come around the time
of the car response and even though the car response
in a really no longer has comedians,
that I believe there's gonna be some kind of a magician
or a mind-minder.
Yes, a magician.
Yeah.
I'm a mentalist.
A mentalist.
I guess Trump wouldn't know.
It's also going.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's right there.
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There's a mental case and then Trump is also going.
That's how it is.
Tickets won't last long.
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So get yours now while you still can.
At crooked.com slash events.
Very excited for the DC show.
Got some big guests.
I'm pretty exciting, maybe.
Crooked.com slash events.
I am very excited to welcome back today's guest to the show.
He's a senior fellow for technology and innovation
at the Council on Foreign Relations
and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania
and then from 2022 to 2024,
he served as US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense
for Force Development and Emerging Capabilities.
Mike Horowitz, great to see you again.
Thanks so much for having me.
You know, not like anything's going on in the world.
Yeah, slow week.
Also, it's very funny.
We booked you twice and you've been on vacation twice.
So I love to just ruin whatever you're doing in your real life.
But given all the fighting between the Pentagon
and these AI companies,
and then what's happening in Iran,
it seemed like an amazing time to get you back on the show.
So before we get to this big fight
between the defense department and entropic and AI company,
I was just hoping you could understand
how AI is being used in warfare.
Because we've now seen reports that AI was used
in the operation to get Nicholas Maduro in Venezuela.
There's lots of reports that AI is being used in the Iran operations,
including Claude in Thropic's model.
The reports that the Israelis were using AI
with targeting both in Gaza and now again with Iran.
What does that mean in practice to the best
you can kind of help us get it?
Yeah, absolutely.
So when you think about the integration of AI into warfare,
you separated into three buckets in your mind.
The first are the kinds of uses of AI
that any company might do.
Think like HR, payroll, processing, basic logistics,
like that kind of thing.
And the Pentagon should be full speed ahead at that,
although frankly that has taken a lot of time
to get moving as well.
The second bucket is in what's called intelligence surveillance
and reconnaissance.
So that is all the data and information
that say the American military gets about the world,
whether from satellites, whether from human intelligence sources,
whether from truth social or X or whatever you're like,
poison might be, and you're trying to aggregate that all together
to separate the signal from the noise.
The third, and this is both where the current
operational context discussion is,
and where the dispute between Anthropic and the Pentagon
goes is closer to the battlefield.
And those are essentially AI decision support systems
that help commanders in theory make better decisions
about how to use force within operations
and then autonomous weapon systems
that can involve AI actually on the edge,
selecting and engaging targets.
And it's that third category
where people have really raised lots of questions about
how much that integration is happening today
in the Iran context, how much happened to the Maduro operation
and then where it may go from there.
So I could imagine a scenario where over Iran,
the US and Israel have so many satellites or drones
or things bringing in imagery
that it's almost impossible to monitor them all in real time.
And you could imagine an AI that's trained to notice
the second that a shape that looks like
an Iranian ballistic missile launcher shows up on the screen
and then you immediately move to target that.
It's like that the kind of thing we're talking about
and maybe that data is cross checked
with some other sickened thing that's happened.
Like it's just, I think it's hard for people to understand
like the volume of data that's coming in
to through intelligence channels
and how quickly we need to move to kind of
act on it.
So there's two different categories
which I put some of the things that we have heard about
in the Iran context.
The first is this, that AI decision support category
I mentioned before.
And that is often using a platform built by the tech company
a tech company Palantir called Meven Smart System.
And what that's doing is aggregating all this data together
to try to give advice to the US combatant commander
in the in central command.
So the head of the US military in the Middle East
who has, and there are all these processes
for how the Pentagon selects targets,
makes decisions to engage them, legal reviews, checks, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
There's lots of really fantastical descriptions out there.
But imagine what Meven essentially does
is kind of the way a paralegal would support a lawyer.
Where they're doing all of this research and analysis
to simplify all of these sort of different tasks,
all of the sort of staff work that would normally happen on the battlefield.
Now it's still the lawyer that goes to court and argues
and still the lawyer that takes responsibility.
But that paralegal or team of paralegals or whatever
is doing a ton of the back office work to sort of cue things up.
That's the way that Meven essentially works
in the way that Claude that is integrated into Meven
to as one of many different tools
to simplify those data processing tasks even more.
So that's category one.
And then category two is more like that missile defense scenario
that you're talking about.
We're frankly, you don't need large language models.
Like you don't need Claude to do this.
But good old fashioned computer vision sort of algorithms
can do this sort of thing.
And that's just about detecting launches
and then moving systems in position to shoot them down,
which say like Israel's iron dome, for example,
has proven to be exceptional at
and the Patriot missile defense system for the United States
is much more expensive, but also very good at it.
Got it. Okay. Okay.
So we've talked on this show about this dispute
between this AI company and the Panagon.
The gist for those who have not followed this
is itthropics model Claude was at the time
the only AI model cleared for use
on the Pentagon's classified systems.
The department wanted Claude to sign a contract
that allowed them, quote, all lawful uses of the model.
But in Thropics said, no, we have some red lines
and they don't want Claude used for NASA surveillance
of Americans or fully autonomous weapons yet
because they say the software is not ready yet.
The two sides couldn't come to an agreement.
That led a bunch of people, the Pentagon,
to absolutely flip out on Twitter a couple of weekends ago.
And then Hegseth, Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense,
declared an anthropic, a quote, supply chain risk.
That is a designation normally reserved for companies like Huawei,
which has ties with the Chinese military.
Mike, what do you think happened here?
And can you explain the impact of a supply chain risk designation
on a company like Anthropic,
or just noticed as filed suit?
Yeah, that's not like the least surprising thing this week.
I think this to me is a dispute about vibes and personalities
masquerading as a policy dispute.
And what I mean by that is Anthropic, as you said,
was the first company in the door to work with the Pentagon
in a classified environment.
And there were no things that Anthropic was doing with the Pentagon
that either were either sidehead objections.
Furthermore, there were no asks of the Pentagon of Anthropic
for the future that Anthropic had an issue with.
Essentially what happened is after the Maduro operation,
it sounds like somebody from Anthropic called somebody from Palantir.
So remember I said that the way that cloud is implemented operationally
for the military right now is through this Palantir platform
called Maven Smart System.
So someone from Anthropic calls somebody from Palantir up
to be like, hey, did they use cloud in the Maduro operation
and that they even asked the question.
Apparently like really set off alarm bells at the Pentagon
and they were essentially to really simplify a bunch of things
that are like, why are these woke tumors asking all of these questions?
Like this seems problematic and the dispute really escalates
from that given the fact that there's no disagreement
between the company and the Pentagon about any current use cases
and the Pentagon is using cloud in Iran as has been widely reported
in the media calling them a supply chain risk,
calling Anthropic as a supply chain risk like Huawei,
means that the parts of any company that work with the federal government
say like the part of Microsoft that works with the government,
the part of Google that works with the government, et cetera,
isn't allowed to use cloud.
So any company, the part of the company that works with the government,
it's now illegal in theory for them to work with Anthropic
or, certainly, to use Anthropics technology directly.
I mean, that seems like a big, big deal for Anthropic
going forward.
I mean, that could kill off a lot of contracts for them, no?
I mean, it could be worse, I guess.
I mean, they could have made it so that it was illegal to do business
with Anthropic at all.
In that, they say the part of Microsoft that doesn't work with the federal government
still could work with Anthropic.
And so don't get me wrong.
This is a big hit to Anthropic.
And this is a bad move in my view from a sort of free market kind of perspective
because it means that the sort of best technology in the world
from an American company is no longer going to be available,
either to the Pentagon in that like they gave a six month time frame
for this to sort of happen.
And with other and for contractors who also are seeking to like work with the Pentagon
like for more ice that is a win for China and a loss for in a loss for America
and problematic from a free market perspective.
I mean, just from the Anthropic perspective,
don't you understand why they would maybe have some questions?
I mean, like this sort of like all lawful uses provision,
what federal laws are there regulating AI use right now?
I guess that part of the problem is that the federal government is completely asleep
at the switch when it comes to the use of artificial intelligence.
And then you have all these nerds out there telling us that this could be more powerful
than the atomic bomb.
I mean, like I don't understand what these companies are doing in practice
or the technology itself, but like the combination of those two things
controlled by Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump, like doesn't make me feel great.
Totally fair.
Just to be perfectly honest, comparing AI to the atomic bomb is vaguely triggering.
And so I'm going to leave that one aside for them for the moment.
But I think that the, what this really reflects in some ways is a breakdown
in trust between Anthropic and the Pentagon.
And that the Pentagon didn't trust that Anthropic would be there to,
Anthropic would be there for important national security use cases.
And Anthropic didn't trust that the government would use their technology responsibly.
I will say, I think, I think one can have some sympathy for the Pentagon actually on parts of this.
Like I certainly would have, when I, when I worked there at least, and here's why,
when Lockheed sells like an F-35 or a missile to the Pentagon,
it's not like Lockheed gets to say like, hey, you could use this against like Cuba,
but like don't use it against Iran or something or, you know, like, or something like that.
The, these, these companies like sell a product to the Pentagon
and the Pentagon then uses it the way that it, the way that it sees fit.
I think Anthropic is thinking about this more like terms of service in a software contract,
which is a thing in contracts with the Pentagon.
And they think that the, and they think that once they sell that they have the right to tell the Pentagon,
like, hey, we want to sign a contract for, you know, like, ex set of use cases,
but not why set of use cases.
And Anthropic has even said, we will work with you on, on, on like something like
something like how to make LLM ready for fully autonomous weapon systems.
But the, but I think that it is not true to say that there's no law or policy that governs these topics.
And there's two layers of this, one that has nothing to do with artificial intelligence.
So there's federal law and international treaties that require the US to use force
in ways that comply with international humanitarian law.
Using things, which we are ignoring left and right.
But like, but like, but like those are bombing the fuck out of boats in the Caribbean, like on the regular.
It's just no violation of international law.
No, no argument. Absolutely no argument.
I just mean that in theory, when it comes to like AI, the way that that boils down is essentially all uses for any use of force,
whether it's a bow and arrow, a radar guided missile or an autonomous weapon system,
there has to be human responsibility and accountability for the use of force.
And for example, in that like first boat operation back in September, that was really, I mean, not that they're not all controversial.
But in the first one, that got like got a lot of public attention, you know, attention focused on the specific military commander that authorized the second strike.
Like, there's always responsibility as a human responsibility.
And that is true, even in the case for an autonomous weapon system.
And that has nothing to do with any policies surrounding AI in particular.
It is also true that there is not law governing the Pentagon's use of AI for the most part.
Well, there is policy, like the office that I used to work for in the Pentagon wrote the Pentagon's policy on autonomy and weapon systems.
It's called DOD directive 3000.09.
And more people have probably downloaded and read that directive and became experts on it.
In the last like two or three weeks, then probably read it since it was like re-released in January 2023.
And that does sort of set out pretty clear guidelines, at least on the autonomous weapon system side.
For when it is that you could use them, it's not law.
And, andthropic did have questions.
I get, yeah, I mean, I hear you on the compare, like, look, if I were a combatant commander, the idea of calling over to a tech company to say, hey, can we do this thing?
You're right, on some level, it's untenable and unworkable.
On your Lockheed comparison, I mean, this is very imperfect.
I do think like Lockheed probably sells the US military F-35s, assuming they will not be used to bomb Boston.
Right? And it's sort of like a bit of what itthropic's getting at.
I'd like to think so.
I'd like to think so.
You would like to think so.
Not necessarily bomb Americans.
Well, let's get at this other piece of this, because then a competitor to an anthropic open AI, they sweep in, they ink a deal with the Pentagon to replace Anthropic.
You wrote in your Financial Times piece, where you also got into these sort of bigger picture philosophical questions, that they got 99% of the deal Anthropic wanted.
What does that mean in practice, and what's the 1% that they didn't get, and how relevant is it?
Sure. I think it's really interesting that open AI has gotten so much heat for this.
I think that it's a timing question in some ways, as much as it is a substance question.
So like, here, here's why.
The open AI deal says that their technology can only be used through the cloud.
It couldn't be used on the edge.
And so you couldn't put an open AI model, say like into a weapon system directly and use it.
If you were, you could in theory, then put an open, I guess in theory, put an open AI model in, you know, in the cloud and have it be like directing a weapon to the target.
But if you did that, it wouldn't be an autonomous weapon system.
The thing that makes it an autonomous weapon system, unless it's human supervised, is that there is no data link.
And that's because autonomous weapon systems are designed for, say, I don't know, like a war in the Indo-Pacific where you might not have access to satellites and all of that data.
And you need, and you want the weapon system to keep operating.
And so if open AI's technology can only be used in the cloud and not on the edge, then actually it means that the, you know, an autonomous weapon system without human supervision,
that their model simply can't, wouldn't, wouldn't work for.
On the surveillance side, it sounds like, then that, I'm, you know, personally a little less expert in, there are, there do seem to be concerns that the, that the technology, that the sort of deal that open AI side might not be quite as restrictive as what Anthropic wanted.
But some of this, I mean, to, to kind of like the back and forth, we are having about international, about international law and about the Pentagon sort of in general.
At some point, like if you, if you do business with the Pentagon, the business of the Pentagon is war.
And if you don't trust that the Pentagon will follow its own rules, sort of, or laws, then you, then you shouldn't, then it, you know, it's like, it's, you know, it's like a tough look then to do business with the Pentagon. And perhaps one shouldn't.
Yeah, no, I look at, I think that's sort of a very real part of this. It's getting less attention, which is like if, if Anthropic has, I don't know, yeah, if they're, if they're so concerned about how the Pentagon might use the models and maybe they shouldn't do.
Business with the Pentagon period. Look, I think the reason open AI got so much blowback is because Sam Altman looked like a total scumbag and he swept in at the last moment and swept up a contract from his competitor.
And he's seen as someone who has been willing to kiss Trump's ass more than, you know, any other AI CEO. And therefore he, you know, made a deal that it seems like Anthropic didn't want.
It's also my understanding that maybe Anthropic was looking for their concerns to be handled in the contract where open AI is now saying actually we're just going to kind of like hard code, the restrictions into the model.
And I think experts will then point out, well, then you can update the model down the road. And maybe we'd probably never know about it, right?
Not, not wrong. You saw, I mean, like, I think that that, that, that, that's in some ways because there is no, if what you are worried about is that the Pentagon's going to misuse your technology.
There's like two scenarios for misuse. One is that your technology would actually be very good at, at the thing that the Pentagon wants to do.
In which case, there's actually, there's probably very little you could put in a contract that would stop them from doing it if they wish to violate the law.
The, the second, and this is actually why I am personally less concerned on the autonomous weapon system side is that the Pentagon could attempt to violate your contract.
But the, if like you're correct that your technology isn't like ready to do the thing, that will come out in the Pentagon's own testing and evaluation process.
Like the worst thing, like the, like the last thing you would use an LLM for, like a large language model that, like, like, Claude or Chechi PT or something like that, is to put into an autonomous weapon system.
If you want to build an autonomous weapon system, you should do that with a bespoke algorithm trained on a data set of very specific things like say Russian tanks or Chinese fighters or something like that.
The idea that you would take a, you would take a large language model trained on the slap of the internet and like plug it into a missile and like send that missile off, like what are we even doing here?
And I feel like either the Pentagon's testing and evaluation process should clearly reveal that, like, or we've got like bigger problems that have nothing to do with AI.
Yeah, that's where, like, sometimes I've just confused about this fight. Like the mass surveillance piece of this really worries me because one major limiting factor when you talk about, you know, preventing the mass surveillance of an entire population, let's say all Americans, was that it was prohibitively difficult to work with that much data.
And I think AI has fundamentally changed that. But I guess my concern then would be about more about like contracts with the NSA or the CIA or other intelligence community components than the Pentagon.
I was wondering what your read was on that kind of piece of this fight.
Yeah, I'm super worried about mass surveillance in the context of AI technology and the way that it could help de-identify a bunch of data that like law says that the you're not supposed to have on the American people.
I'm not worried about the Pentagon is the locus of the American mass surveillance state.
I would be like much more worried maybe about like other departments and agencies that are in the news sometimes.
And so like I, and I think the, and I think the reaction of the Pentagon is telling in this context in that on the mass surveillance side, you can know, I mean to whatever extent one like views them as credible like on this and you know like mileage will travel for different people.
The like the Pentagon on the mass surveillance side is essentially like how could you ever say that like we would never do that that violates the fourth amendment.
And I suspect that they probably genuinely think that because again, I think other departments and agencies are a higher risk or maybe like an in between like the NSA.
I like I guess if you really wanted to worry, but man does the NSA of rules.
The, the if it wears their response to the autonomous weapon side, it's like well, we totally wouldn't do that now like we agree with you.
The tech isn't ready, but it might be at some point.
Right.
And inthropics like, yeah, that's why we want to work with you on that like, why are you kicking us out?
Yeah, it's all yeah, it just feels like the the the Pentagon, the Trump administration, they have one speed, which is to punch back.
It's hard as humanly possible and in in so doing escalated this fight.
Yeah, I mean, look, this is like the hexath Pentagon is on full send all the time, like no matter what.
Yep.
And in that case, like this is like going back to what I said before that this is like really about vibes and personalities, which I think are at least to me like our discussion in some places has illustrated the
in that kind of like breakdown and trust like, how do you crawl down from here there? How do you climb down from here then in some ways, if like if we're talking about a Pentagon that literally will never admit that it's wrong about anything.
Yeah, and it's like rage tweeting at 5 p.m. or like 10 p.m. on a Friday night for no reason about this issue.
Last sort of topic I want to talk about was is a lot of experts are very concerned about US weapons stockpiles in particular interceptor munitions that are being used in the Patriot missile systems and other systems to defend from Iranian missiles and drones.
And then also some offensive US missile systems that you can get into.
That is a problem in the near term with the war in Iran, especially for some of these Gulf states, which news reports are like within a week of running out of some of these interceptors, but more broadly for our readiness as a country to fight the next war, especially one with China.
How worried are you about these stockpiles and what do you make of these efforts to use new drones developed by the Ukrainians to defend from these Iranian drones, which have been used by Russia as a solve or a fix.
Oh, what a short question. I mean, like call back to the last time I was on, I talked about how we are in the age of precise mass and war, where advances in AI and autonomy and commercial manufacturing and the fact that precision guidance is now a 50 year old technology means everyone can now access precision strike.
And now we see that on display in Iran, sort of every day when Iran fires these Shaheed 136 weapons, you know, like the Shaheed 136 is arguably the best precise mass system in the world, it can go like 1500 to 2000 kilometers, it can carry a, you know, 50 to 150 kilogram warhead.
And unless you shoot it down, it gently depending on build quality will like hit the thing that it's aimed at. They can produce that for an average of $35,000.
A Patriot missile costs about $4 million each. So now we're using like two Patriot missiles to shoot down a Shaheed and like we're trying to be better about that with a bunch of different kinds of things.
And like the unit cost for say like Israel's iron dome is a little bit is a little bit lower, but because Iran has thousands of these Shaheeds and it's just firing them off, everybody in the region with Patriot missile interceptors is now is now using them.
And so the US is in a position where and Iran is starting to target the radars that try to track those that we use to ensure those missiles hit their target, which would mean in if those get really damaged, you would need to fire even more to intercept a single thing and add all of that up.
And the US is running short on missile defense interceptors, especially for the Indo Pacific, but even in the context of the Middle East, if the US wants to sort of re up the stockpiles of all of the Gulf states that have had our back in the context of this conflict.
And so guess what in some ways like China wins again. And while you focused more on the on the missile defense question, I'll note that the US has produced about the like premier US cruise missile for like both of our professional lives has been called the Tomahawk missile.
The US has produced about like 9,000 plus of them like over over that time period there. If you look at like inventory based on uses over time, retirements, tests, et cetera, the US inventory might be like around 3000 or even below.
Frankly, at this at this point in decreasing rapidly given the hundreds that the US has already used against Iran. And so we are running out of weapons. And in this age of precise mass like that's a big problem, which is why the US needs to be producing itself then a lot more of these low cost weapons our own precise mass systems like the Lucas, which the US debuted against Iran for the first time and is actually reverse engineered from an Iranian weapon. So like a little bit of iron here.
Yeah, yeah, sorry, when you say low cost weapons, you don't mean that the T lambs of the Tomahawk. Do you mean these new modern drones? No, like the so like the Lucas system what the Lucas system essentially is the US equivalent of the Shaheed. So the Lucas system cost the US like 35 to $50,000 a pop, which is really different than a Tomahawk missile that cost about like $2 million each.
On average, and because you can produce them with commercial manufacturing like the Lucas that the Lucas of rounds that the US is using in the Middle East were produced by like specter works like a tiny company in Scottsdale with like 13 employees, not like Raytheon or Lockheed shows you can really scale production of these kinds of things in a way that would give you know future American leaders like a lot more like depth.
And a lot more and a lot more options and so on the Ukrainian front I mean the Ukrainians have been dealing with the Iranians provided Russia with the Shaheed drones and now you know the Ukrainians will have swarms of them fired at Ukrainian cities you know maybe dozens maybe even hundreds of them at a time.
And so one option they have evolved to deal with that threat is low cost drones of their own which basically are like hunt these drones can you talk about that technology how effective it is and how quickly we might be able to put that to use in this conflict with Iran if at all.
Yeah absolutely like you think about like if we have currently been using you know 4 million dollar interceptors to shoot down like not just Shaheeds but things that are slightly more expensive but still maybe like like a running ballistic missiles that might be say I don't know like half a million dollars each.
Or something like that the the you need something cheaper than otherwise the cost curve just isn't in your favor you've got a couple of options if you want the cost curve to be really low.
The first and this has been like the dream of the 1980s like on repeat is lasers.
Like you could use directed energy microwave weapons things like that where the cost per shot is super low and now you've got options to try to take down these systems like Israel used iron beam which is their short range laser defense system.
I think maybe for the first time operationally in the context.
Recently right yeah this particular conflict with Iran your other option is to try to come up with a really low cost interceptor and there are a bunch of different companies that have been working on this including you know companies like Andrew some of the new defense tech companies in the United States.
But like like you said look the Ukrainians live this every day and no one is more incentivized to do it and so the Ukrainians have these sort of hit a bullet with a bullet.
Really inexpensive like a thousand to ten thousand dollar a piece defense defense systems they have a bunch of different like kinds of them and you know it looks like the U.S. is now importing.
A bunch of them because the U.S. actually purchased some of them from Ukraine to test them out and see how they work and so those that the U.S. purchase are now heading to the Middle East.
But now there's a prospect that the U.S. will get even more from Ukraine and that Ukrainian trainers are going to come help those people and that's actually really promising.
But again remember I said like China is the winner and all this before.
It's hard to see I mean unless this makes the Trump administration feel really favorable toward Ukraine and then re up them from a weapons perspective.
The like Patriot missile interceptor inventory going way down around the world is really bad for Ukraine.
Who needs more of those interceptors for when their inexpensive solutions fail to protect them from not like the Russian Shaheed variant necessarily but say like Russian hypersonics and Russian ballistic missiles that they also fire at Ukraine on a regular basis.
Well yeah I know it's I'm glad I'm glad we kicked off this a run war to just inject more chaos in dysfunction and horror into the world.
It feels like that's what we're missing. It was just another theater of war. You know we really needed this right now.
We're off to a great start in 2026. What can I say?
Being a great start bomb in eight countries and in 15 or 16 months president Trump the president of peace the fee for peace prize winner.
I can come back when Q was next listen. There might have been a deal cut hopefully maybe that won't happen but I know we got to get Lindsey Graham off TV.
He's talking about invading literally everything my car what's thank you so much for doing the show really appreciate it.
You you've made us a lot smarter on this topic and many other things we appreciate your time.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks again to my core what's we're doing the show and see you guys next week.
Unless we record something sooner. You never know. It's my possible.
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Hey love it or leave it listeners, it's me the titular john love it.
Here to tell you that I'm coming back to Washington DC for love or leave it live at the Lincoln Theater on April 23rd.
That's right, spring in DC is all about cherry blossoms and love it or leave it bringing you a stack lineup of guests.
That's what makes it America's number one late night gay live comedy political podcast.
We're so excited to be back DC. It's a tradition now that we come around the time of the car response and or even though the car is honest and are really no longer has comedians.
I believe there's going to be some kind of a magician or a mind, mind melder.
Yes, a magician.
Yeah.
I'm a mentalist.
A mentalist because I guess Trump wouldn't go.
It's also going.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's a mental case and then and Trump is also going.
That's right.
Tickets won't last long.
They're so I'm pretty fast.
So get yours now while you still can at crooked dot com slash events very excited for the DC show.
Got some big guests.
I'm pretty exciting.
Maybe.
Crooked dot com slash events.




