Pod Save the World - Don Jr.’s Big Fat Russian Wedding

Episode Date: September 16, 2026

The Houthis seize control of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, Trump rolls a grenade into Northern Ireland's politics, and a Russian oligarch funds Don Jr.'s wedding.Tommy and Ben break down some of the most alarming expansions of the Iran war: Houthi rebels have captured roughly 80 miles of Yemen's Red Sea coastline, Iranian-backed militants have blown up a Saudi pipeline in Iraq, and Iran's targeting has improved thanks to Chinese satellite imagery. An exclusive first look at a new Eurasia Group poll finds the Iran war's approval sitting at 34% nationally, with disapproval among independents jumping 13 points. Then Trump visits his Irish golf course on the taxpayer's dime and casually upends decades of US policy on Northern Ireland in an impromptu press conference. This week also brings multiple stories of brazen grift: ProPublica reports that a Russian oligarch with ties to Putin paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for portions of Don Jr.'s Bahamas wedding, and The New Yorker does a deep dive on how much Jared Kushner’s diplomacy is colored by his personal financial motives. And finally, a Russian drone strikes a Ukrainian train station minutes after trains carrying the national security advisors of the UK, France, Germany, and Italy passed through. At the end of the show, Tommy speaks to Hamza Chaudhry from the Future of Life Institute about the crazy last week in AI, how to judge tech leaders’ calls for a slowdown in development, and what to expect from Trump’s summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping.Hate listening to ads? Become a Friends of the Pod subscriber for ad-free episodes of Pod Save America, Pod Save the World, Lovett or Leave It, Runaway Country, Offline with Jon Favreau, and more—plus exclusive content, including bonus episodes of Pod Save America. Subscribe now at crooked.com/friends, on Apple Podcasts, or through the Pod Save America YouTube channel.You can request a transcript by emailing [e-mail]. Include the podcast name, episode title, and air date. Please allow 48 hours for delivery.

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the World sent you. Welcome back to Pod Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Then as our listeners know, we are big boosters of FBI director, Cash Patel on this show. Always. He was up on Capitol Hill today. He was testifying before the U.S. Senate. I'd like to play for you in exchange he had with Republican Senator John Kennedy.

Let's watch. What about the bestiality? Tell me what it said before. It automatically disqualified any individual who participated on either side of it. Obviously, we are never going to hire the criminals. The side of what? The bestiality. Yes.

So you disqualified the animal? Why would you even get into bestiality? We are not into beastiality, but a lot of these individuals... I know you're not, but you changed... But I'm trying to explain it. Hang on. You changed the qualifications and mentioned bestiality. If Joe participated in beastiality, not as the animal, but as the human,

don't you think he ought to be qualified, disqualified? If he voluntarily did it, sure, but if he was trafficked into it. Okay, how do you involuntarily do it? When you saw bestiality, I say this with respect, the person who recommended it, why didn't you just say what planet did you parachute in from? You hadn't seen that? I had not. That makes me so happy.

I've not been in line today. I'd love to know some context. I'm fascinated by the woman's... sitting next to him, who I don't even know that is, that's where I'm with the Senate at this point. I wasn't even watching. Who's just looking at her phone? Just like, she's Googling beastiality.

What is happening in the United States Senate? So, am I feeling a strange bit of sympathy for cash? No. The FBI lowered hiring standards. Oh, lowered. Oh, whoa, whoa, okay. To no longer discredit applicants who engaged in acts

of bestiality among other things. That seems worrisome. But it's victim. of bestiality. So, like, what are we talking about here? Like the animal forced itself on the human? How frequent is this use case coming up?

There must have been a trigger. I mean, now I'm with the lunatic John Kennedy here. I mean, was there a case that triggered this? What animal does Cash Patel want to fuck or has he fucked? I think is the question here, I'm wondering. Raises some questions, Tommy. That's what's going on at the FBI. Just asking some questions.

Like, I realize maybe they're having some recruiting problems over there. Maybe folks don't want to go work for cash. Like, there's a funny thing in the kind of Intel deep state world that we all experienced where to get into the CIA, you could have a lot more of a checkered past. The FBI, they were like the choir boys, Eagle Scouts, right? I knew somebody who had applied to be in the FBI and I think worked at a restaurant or a bar, found a bag of cocaine on the ground and gave it to a co-werews. worker and because this person didn't turn it into the police or whatever, like failed an FBI interview was like that level of bullshit. At the agency, you can do a lot more stuff.

Can we put a pin in my hobby orris, which is also Democratic president's done to come in, Joe Biden did this, and set the bar like marijuana use for security clearance. Yeah. Now, our boss. Apparently, you can go out to the- Yeah. Some waivers to that. But, yeah, apparently you can go out to the chicken coop and have a great time.

And that's fine. but if you take an edible. So that's what the deep state's up to. All right. That explains who's in the U.S. government. That might explain why things are not going too well internationally. We're going to talk about this stunning military offensive by the Houthi rebels in Yemen that humiliated the Saudi government and created huge new problems for the oil markets and for the Trump administration

and potentially a humanitarian disaster. We're going to dig into how it happened and what the ripple effects could be. Then we're going to unpack reports that Chinese satellite imagery has been helping Iran target U.S. military facilities in the Gulf and even kill U.S. service members. We're going to talk about some new numbers about the cost of the war and some exclusive new polling about how Americans feel about the Iran war. Is this our first exclusive? Probably ends up polling.

It's in a while. I mean, I feel like every day is an exclusive. Yeah, this is an exclusive show. These takes are exclusive. These are hot. Yeah, you've got to subscribe to these. And then we're going to walk you through Trump's visit to Ireland and how a goal. A little golf weekend might destabilize the Good Friday Agreement, stepping on rakes everywhere. Then we're going to tell you about how Don Jr.'s wedding became a counterintelligence nightmare,

some new reports about Jared Kushner and corruption, and then some scary updates on escalating Russian attacks on NATO. Then you're going to hear my interview with Hamza Chaudry. He works at a place called The Future of Life Institute. They're focused on kind of the downside risk of technologies like artificial intelligence. They're the ones hosting that big conference that's happening today, Tuesday. That includes Steve Bannon to Bernie that kind of shows you this bipartisan anxiety, at least, about artificial intelligence. We talk about kind of the events over the weekend about all these AI researchers coming out and saying, hey, this might lead to like the extinction of humanity.

Some of the bio risks that are out there, what the government could or should be doing. Very important and timely interview. And I think a topic that we probably should get to bore, it's just sort of like it's so big and scary sometimes. It's like hard to know how to cover it appropriately. We should get to this more. I mean, we've tried with increasing frequency, but the fact is that nothing else matters in some ways, like beyond what happens. I mean, I've often thought, and I think I've said in the podcast, but like Trump may end up being like the B story of this time we're living through. For bestiality. Well, I mean, just asking questions. I would say I'm for the future of life.

I'm for my future of life. Life should have a future. But you were saying, yes. Like Trump, like the Trump, all of the badness that he has done, the stupid fucking ballroom won't really matter to us if, you know, some rogue AI creates a pathogen that is COVID-like. Or even if it's not like at that scale, but the concentration of wealth and power that a few people have,

like is unprecedented in human history. So there's that too. Even if like AI doesn't pose an existential risk, it could still upend democracies. Yeah, yeah. No, like this is the thing. I mean, I was joking with you before, kind of dark joke, but now they're setting at the bar at human extinction,

as if, like, if we avert that, we've succeeded. But, you know, mass job displacement, no big deal, or, you know, massive cyber disruptions, no big deal. No, no, like, this is a spectrum here. And you can fall short of extinction and be fucked. Yeah, Sam Altman's like, no global genocide. You're welcome. Yeah, so thank you.

You know, we did our job here at Open AI with our trillion-dollar IPO. Yeah. Must be nice. All right, let's start with Yemen. We're six months into the war with Iran, and somehow the conflict is still spreading it to new places and getting worse and worse and worse for the Trump administration in the world. The latest very bad news about the war comes to us from Yemen, where over the past week or so, the Houthi rebels have captured a big swath of territory along Yemen's western Red Sea coast. The BBC estimates that they control about 80 miles of coastline now. And crucially, that territory includes the Babel Mandep's straight,

which is the narrow choke point that lets ships pass in and out of the Red Sea into the Gulf of Aden and then on to the Indian Ocean or to Asia or wherever they're going. And for those keeping score at home, Iran now controls shipping in and out of the Persian Gulf through the State of Hormuz and their allies and at times proxy force, the Houthi rebels, now control shipping in and out of the Eastern Red Sea. In normal times, those two waterways, like roughly one-third of seaborne oil trade, goes through those two waterways. So that's a pretty big deal for global energy supplies and oil flows. On top of that, militant groups in Iraq that are allied with Iran attacked the 745-mile

east-to-west pipeline across Saudi Arabia, forcing the Saudi to shut it down for what will probably be weeks of repairs. That pipeline has a maximum capacity of 7 million barrels of oil per day. The Saudis have been using it to bypass the Strait of Hormuz and get around the Iranians, but now it's, you know, offline for a while. And this offensive by the Houthis also risks restarting the Yemeni civil war, which had disastrous humanitarian consequences just very quickly. In 2014, the Houthi rebels seized a bunch of territory in Yemen, including the capital of Sana'a. In 2015, the Saudis intervened to displace them. That kicked off this awful civil war. They killed an estimated 150,000 people, the two sides who agreed to a ceasefire in 2022 that

froze the conflict, but left the Houthi's in charge of parts of the country, and then the internationally recognized Yemeni government in charge of the rest. And that was the status quo until July when the Saudis bombed this Houthi-controlled airport, the Houthis retaliated, announced a blockade of Saudi ships, and then the fighting kind of sporadically escalated until last Thursday when the Houthis captured this major Red Seaport city of Moka. Then Friday, they captured this island, Parham, which a little island in the middle of the Babelamandep Strait, which is a great place from which to launch a tax on shipping. It's also 20 miles from the U.S. military base in Djibouti. Yeah.

Like, that's bonkers. So Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman, saw what was going on, freaked out, called Trump maybe once or twice. Twice, twice. Asked him to intervene. Trump said no. Trump was asked about this issue in Ireland last week.

Let's watch a clip. The Houthis called us, and they don't want to fight with us. They let us know. They don't want to fight with us. They don't want me to go after. They don't want us to go after them. But they've called and they've talked to us and they don't want us to.

They would much prefer not having us in off and they're letting most ships go through. There's just one country that they're not too happy with, and we'll get that straight in debt. Well, I have my call with MBS. He's a good friend of mine, and I can just say everything's going to work out fine and dandy. We should know there's reportedly about 100 U.S. military advisors in Saudi Arabia, I guess, doing intelligence support, targeting support, God knows what else. Brent crude oil prices hit $109 a barrel last week.

They're hovering over 100 today. Ben, there's so much to unpack here. Let's just pause with your initial reactions to what's happened. This is a massive story that people need to pay attention to because there's so many dimensions to it. So first, just the degree to which we're fucked on global energy markets, I mean, if you take the Saudi oil offline through that pipeline and you're closing both straits, like we are in acute shortage territory right away.

You know, so the political instability in countries is going to ramp up. The prices are going to keep ramping up here. This is a cataclysmic event if it holds. And because who knows if they can even rebuild that pipeline without the Houthi is hitting it again. Right. And it's at risk. There you go. That's the first thing.

The second thing is it really reveals the gross incompetence of Trump and everybody involved in this war. And again, like Trump is the idiot who started it at Netanyahu's urging. But let's not spare. I mean, we did, you know, Scott Besson comes out and does economic D-Day. And then CENTCOM starts being like, well, you hit a tanker, we're going to hit, you know, five tankers or something. And the Iranians are like, oh, guess what? We can escalate too. Because my guess is that there's like IRGC guys who are helping, you know, Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps guys who are like helping the Houthis plan all this stuff.

you know, intel, support, training, whatever. Missiles drones. Yeah, missiles drones. So they've now called our escalation and like 10xed it, you know, because us blowing some tankers out of the water so that we can feel tough, you know, and Scott Besson gets to have his press day on economic D-day with like very little, you know, results. Well, this is material escalation, you know. And I think it's the Iranian sending a message that, you know,

we can keep doing this. So that's the state of the war. That's the state of the energy markets. And then the third thing I'd just say, by way of introduction, is this is putting in peril, like the entire Saudi model, right? Because the Saudi model is, you know,

we depend on all this oil revenue to finance this, you know, lavish kingdom and all these things that NBS likes to do and spread the money around enough to kind of keep the rest of population okay. And yet, you know, their own military is somewhat of a paper tiger, despite how much money they spent on it. They kind of need the U.S. military to kind of maintain that bargain.

And what did they just learn? Well, they learned that they can't, on their own, prevent the Houthis from taking over large tracks of Yemen and attacking their energy infrastructure that is existential to them. That when they call the United States, Trump is like, you know, well, the Houthis seemed nice on the phone. I was wondering like who the Houthi's called, you know. Yeah. Did they like hit him on WhatsApp? Yeah. Yeah.

It's kind of weird. Are they signal guys? You know, and so this could, you know, honestly, like, you know, at the extreme and threaten the kingdom. I mean, it could literally threaten MBS. I mean, I'm not saying that's likely, but it's the fact that it's even possible is notable. And it certainly should encourage MBS.

It will encourage MBS to not put all of his chips on the. the United States. I mean, I just say this. Like, when Israel gets missiles thrown at it, like, you know, we rush, you know, every single missile defense battery we have, like, beyond not just bombing the Houthis, like, clearly we're not providing the Saudis with, like, defensive weaponry to defend even their most important oil infrastructure. If I, you know, it is so extreme that, like, I might take a tinfoil hat on here for a second time if you'll spare me, which is that like, does Trump being so complacent suggest he's in some ways leaving them no recourse except to normalize with Israel, to have like some kind of security relationship

of Israel? Does Trump not mind the massive disruption to, you know, Saudi and Emirati and Qatari oil and gas because the U.S. could in the long run replace it? I don't know. But like this is so nonsensical to just kind of. You know, look, I'm not for wars. I'm, you know, I don't want to go to war in Yemen. But for Trump to kind of get in this deep and then just do nothing as he further loses this war, it's pretty remarkable. Just imagine your hand for a minute. Like, you think you've built this great relationship with Trump.

You've given Jared a couple billion. You bought billions of U.S. weapons. You promised to invest. How many times you've been to the U.S. and promised to like a trillion dollars every other time? You cut deals to build Trump towers and golf courses and Jetta and all these places. you gave Jared Kushner $5, $6, $7, $8 billion for his investment company or whatever it was. Then Trump starts a war with Iran

over your objections. The IRGC fires missiles and drones at you and your country. The oil industry gets upended. Now you're getting attacked by the Houthis and by these Shia-backed militias in Iraq. And Trump is like,

eh, go fuck yourself. The Houthis are cool with us. I will hear your tinfoil hat version of why he might not be intervening. The other one that it could be, though, is like they would probably have to move an aircraft carrier from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea to support major military operations against the Houthis. And like, we just don't really have the capacity to do that right now.

That's right. We've talked a lot about like munitions shortages and things like that. Well, this is when the rubber hits the road on that because, like, ultimately, we do have finite resources of this stuff, whether it's aircraft carriers or missile defense batteries or what have you. And we've kind of reached that state, you know, and the Iranians know that. And so they can turn the dialogue. I mean, they've been smart. Like they, you know, after focusing on the Gulf member,

they were focusing their missile attacks on Jordan. Like, oh, you know, suddenly a new theater. And now their proxies are on the offense in Yemen. And they have, you know, one of the missile strikes on the pipeline came from Iraq, right? And the Iraqis, of course, said, well, we had nothing to do with it, but it came from Iraq. And so we kept hearing under Biden and Trump, how, you know, we've destroyed all these Iranian proxy networks.

Well, apparently not. You know, like, and part of the thing you realize, and I experienced this when it is in government, is like, it doesn't take much to kind of replenish these guys, you know, like give them some drones. I mean, you know, the online pieces, like, these guys have Toyotas and RPGs and drones and, like, routed the Saudi-backed Yemeni forces.

Like, it does not take much to reconstitute these proxy forces. And at a time when we're over there, were stretched and we can't fight the kind of eight front war that Israel started in the Middle East. Israel is notably sitting out the war after getting us to fight it. We just can't cover all that terrain. Yeah. And so according to a bunch of news reports and kind of analysis from experts, like this lightning fast military offensive by the Houthis, it was not like some genius surprise attack. This wasn't D-Day. It was that the Saudi-backed Yemeni forces, the Yemeni government forces were just a disaster.

The CNN reported to the Saudis, like they were put on alert, maybe even three weeks ago that something was coming, but they never moved air assets in place to provide air support to these troops. This is a couple quotes from that CNN story, Ben. The source said he contacted the United States Central Command

and was assured the U.S. was watching the situation closely and that Saudi air support was coming, but the air support never came. Quote, there was not one airstrike throughout the day yesterday by the Saudi support forces, although there were minute-by-minute updates, the regional source added, it was a Saudi-American fuck-up of epic proportions. And then there's the kind of the bigger problem that the GCC, the Gulf countries, their approach

to Yemen is just totally fractured and a mess. The Saudis and the Emirates used to be aligned against the Houthis in Yemen. But then at the end of last year, this UAE-backed group called the Southern Transitional Coalition or STC, they attacked Saudi forces who were also part of this anti-Houthi coalition. The Saudi kicked the Emirates out of Yemen. The STC disbanded, but the Saudis never backfilled them, apparently. So the Emirates would provide air support. The Saudis didn't backfill that.

And then I guess CNN reported that some of the units were at like 20% capacity of where they claim to be these Yemeni government military units because it was full of quote unquote ghost soldiers who were just like names on a list collecting a paycheck, but no human being was there. So the Houthis did some smart stuff. They, like, seem to have hacked into the Yemeni military comm system and, like, use an AI deepfake of the general's voice to tell them all to retreat. And they did. And that confused people. But a bunch of soldiers were just surrendered. They were selling their weapons on the side of the road and disbanding.

So it's like there wasn't really a big will to fight among the government forces like there was from the Houthis. Yeah, because they're like mercenaries for hire or just people collecting salaries. and like the Houthis, whatever you think of them, have like a deep ideological. These people survive like a decade of war, you know. And they're not some like transplanted terrorist group. They're just people that live in southern Yemen. You know, they're not going anywhere.

And look, I think a couple of things to stand out. Like one is what you just mentioned, like, you know, Larry Wright was on and he was talking about how these new tools of cyber capabilities, artificial intelligence, are going to start to manifest in terrorist actions or on the battlefield. And, you know, we had the Houthis using AI for intelligence purposes or disinformation purposes. We also have reports that the Houthis were using Claude to, like, figure out how to build weapons. Better targeting their missiles. And, like, make no mistake, this stuff is a leveler.

And in the same way that you can build a really effective drone for, not that much money. You know, you can use AI technologies to improve what you do. We tend to have, frankly, sometimes like a racist attitude that these people are going to figure it out. Like, these people are fucking smart, you know. You don't have to, like, agree with them to know that the fact that they've been able to fight off this coalition demonstrate some entrepreneurial capability. And that leads me to, like, the paradigm of, like, what is the future of the Middle East here? Because, you know, the Abraham Accords is supposed to be the future.

Well, a lot of peace is delivered. It was supposed to be peace and it was also supposed to be this like unbeatable constellation of Gulf countries in Israel and Iran was going to be minimized and the Houthis was going to be defeated. If you judge the Abraham Accords against its own objectives, like forget the fact that it wasn't going to bring peace to the Palestinians. Look at where Iran is today. Look at where the Houthis are today. Like this kind of handshake deal between autocrats that frankly, you know, there's a house of cards feeling to the Middle East infrastructure as it is. with the U.S. is kind of the force behind the House of Cards. Like, something is going to emerge on the other side of this war. And I think there's something that emerges.

Iran is going to have to be dealt with, not ignored or, you know, not cowering in the face of the Abraham Accords. And countries like Saudi Arabia are going to make their own deals with the Chinese, with other countries, because who wants to be wholly relying on the United States anymore? Well, and also the, what do you do with the Houthis? I mean, before, like, look, before they were winning in this last offensive, they basically wanted to control the airspace in Sana'a. They wanted to be able to fly in and out of that airspace in that airport and even fly to Iran. They wanted the Saudis to pay public sector employees in Houthi areas, a share of Yemeni oil revenues, and to get rid of some restrictions at the Hededa port.

Now they're going to want more, obviously. They're going to up the cost, and they're going to say, well, we control the Babel Mandep straight. And meanwhile, like Saudi oil production is at the last. lowest level in 36 years in August. Like Trump has been able to kind of like spin and bullshit and market manipulate his way through this. But oil prices are well over $100 a barrel right now. And that is going to create a huge political cost in midterms.

Yeah. I mean, first of all, don't underestimate the Houthis. I mean, we did the same thing with the Taliban, you know, in the sense that there's this kind of corrupt government in Yemen. And then there are these, you know, the Saudis and others have been bombing Yemenis without regard for civilian life. That kind of stuff, like, opens a door to the Houthi's taking over the whole country because, you know, people may not like them, but they also don't like the quote-unquote

internationally recognized government either, you know? And so that's, like, not a possibility to discount. On the energy prices thing, I just, at a certain point, the shortages are what they are. If you take, like, Saudi oil off the market for two months, which is some estimates are maybe September and October, on top of the straight of Hormuz disruptions, like, there's no way to kind of paper this over where we've drawn down strategic reserves, like shortages are going to be what they are and prices are going to go up and places are going to have political instability.

And I saw Trump. Trump did again, like, oh, we're talking to the Iranians. Did you see that? And the markets like went for it again. Like I just, there's something astonishing about seeing that like the whole stock market might just be a confidence game and not, I mean, maybe I'm the idiot for just coming to that late, but it is bizarre to watch, you know, bond yields, as we've talked about, are pricing this in, increasingly fuel prices are pricing it in. The stock market seems to kind of believe

every piece of disinformation from Trump that were on the precipice of either winning or concluding the war. Yeah, I mean, there's a famous, maybe apocryphal quote that markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. So we'll see if that proves to be true. Before we take a quick break, I just want to thank all the folks out there who have become members of our friend of the pod community. Your support is really the number one thing you can do to help us build an independent pro-democracy, progressive media company. If you decide to become a paid subscriber, a friend of the pod, you can check out the details by going to crooked.com slash friends. But what you'll get is tons of bonus content, pod Save America, bonus episodes,

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Sundays for dogs.com slash world or use code world to check out. Speaking of Iran, Ben, so back in July, we covered these Iranian missile attacks on a base in Jordan that killed three American troops. On Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that ahead of that attack, Iran had gotten its hands on imagery of the base from what they described as Chinese entities.

The U.S. is not named who those entities are. We've stopped short of accusing the Chinese government. But the administration has previously accused Chinese companies of supplying imagery to Iran, even going as far as to sanction them. And the Chinese push back hard on that. The U.S. strikes have impacted Iran's ability to surveil the region. But the journal notes that Iran's targeting has gotten better over the summer may be due to external help from the Russians or the Chinese.

The journal also reports that the U.S. officials worry Iran is using Chinese imagery to track American naval assets in the region. Trump, of course, is our tough guy, strong man president. So, of course, he was eager to punch back at the Chinese Communist Party and stand up for our troops, Ben, when he was asked about this on Air Force One on Sunday. Let's watch. We recently reported that Chinese entities may have provided the Iranians with satellite imagery of the air bases in Jordan. They do what we do. They basically do what we do. Are you going to raise that with Xi when he visits?

I think he's behaved reasonably well, and we behave reasonably well. You know, when they say that China spies on us, I say, you're right, and we spy on them too. You know, we spire them too. It's like an old obvious point, but if any Democrat said that, like, Fox News. Career Under. Yeah. Light itself on fire. And Hugh Hewitt would, like, fucking murder somebody.

It's just crazy. She's so weak. He's such a pathetic little bitch. And it's all because of the war he started, you know? I mean, of course the Chinese are doing that. Of course the Russians are doing that. Like, I weirdly understand what he's saying. But, like, number one, like, you should be trying to stop.

I mean, people got killed because of this, Americans, right? But also, like, don't start the fucking war. Like, you don't give the Chinese and the Russians this opportunity to drive us, you know, whatever you think of our presence of the Middle East, like, you know, having it ended by, like, the Iranians firing missile. at our people is not like how you want that to happen. But we keep hearing, I mean, I, you know, we talked with this, Tommy, but like I, you hear stuff that, again, we can't independently verify it. But like, you know, I hear stuff that, like, they've targeted, like, the hotel room

that the intelligence community uses in ex-Gulf country, you know, like, clearly they have Russian and Chinese intelligence supporting them. There's probably pipelines of weapons, too, coming from at least Russia, if not China. Because that's what happens. And what's dangerous about it, and this is, again, why you don't start dumb wars, which, again, for all my criticisms of the Chinese Communist Party, of which there are many, and we can spend time on that another time, they don't start wars yet, at least, you know, Taiwan's sitting there. But the reality is there's a globalization of these wars.

It is really concerning, right? Like the Ukraine war is kind of a global war. This war now, the Russians and Chinese are helping out. like it's us and Israel. Like, this is starting to feel like one big war. Yeah. I think like that we do it too, answer would make sense in the context of Russia and Ukraine

because like we're helping the Ukrainians literally kill Russian service members every day. It just like doesn't make sense there in the context of China. Like we're not helping some other entity kill Chinese troops that I can think of. And like, look, I'm not looking for some like jingoistic, like we're going to kill them back, you know, eye for an eye bullshit from him.

but it is surprisingly weak and pathetic. It's obvious he's just trying not to upset the apple card in any way in advance of the Xi Jinping meeting. That's right. I mean, you're right. I mean, in the sense that he used spying as an example. Well, yeah, sure. Like, we spy on the Chinese spies. Spying, yes.

Like giving the coordinates to kill U.S. service members is like materially different than like spying on people. And at a minimum, you would want your president to say, you know what? Like, I can't comment on like intelligence reports, but, I'm certainly going to be having a really tough conversation with Xi Jinping when I see him next because like the number one priority as commander-in-chief is the safety and security of our troops. Right. Although he doesn't seem to give a shit about that. He does not at all.

A couple of more things on Iran. So the Pentagon's Inspector General has a report out on Operation Epic Fury for the period through just June 30th about the cost. The top line numbers are the Department of War says the cost of OEF. I can't believe they called it Epic Fury. Now it's OEF for us. Anyway. 33.4 billion as of June 29th. Obviously, it's exponentially more now.

To replace all this stuff. Yeah, and then the buildings and infrastructure damage are destroyed at U.S. bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman, and Jordan. There was damage to diplomatic facilities, totaling $184 million in Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, in the UAE. Also, I've been in the New York Times. It had a great story over the weekend about how the war has empowered hardliners in Iran who, surprise, surprise, have then taken actions that either escalated or lengthened the conflict.

It's a great piece. It's worth a read and a reminder that there are politics in Iran, and we've made those politics way worse, and we have not come to rescue the protesters, as Trump long ago said he would do. Yeah, none of the original rationales for the war even get cited. Even Epic Fury. Remember how much Trump loved that? You know, Epic Fury. I love the name. But the only thing I'd say is that this is real money. You know, sometimes, like I've noticed when Abdul Sayed and others are like talking about, I don't want to spend money overseas.

I want to people like, oh, but that's not that much money. It's a lot of fucking money. I mean, we've given Israel over $20 billion since October 7th. We've spent, you know, the price tag of this war has got to be north of $100 billion when you account what has been spent, what is going to be used to replenish what's been spent, rebuilding all whatever facilities we choose to rebuild. So, like, think of what you could do with that money. Think of the opportunity cost of Donald Trump choosing to spend your money if you're an American taxpayer that way. On the heels of trillions of dollars of post-9-11 wars. We got an exclusive first look at a new poll from the Institute of Global Affairs at the Eurasia Group.

They did a survey with UGov about the Iran War. This survey was done in mid-August. So before like the latest kind of disaster. Yeah. The price was going up. There was some really interesting findings, Ben. So disapproval with the Iran war has increased 13 points with independence. It went from 62% disapproval to 75% disapproval. 73% of Republicans still approve of the war overall. But the number of Republicans who say they strongly approve of the war went down about 15 points.

17% of Republicans think starting the war was a mistake, and only 49% of Republicans think the war is making the U.S. safer. nationally approval of the war is only 34%. A plurality of Americans, 43% say Iran is more likely to develop a nuclear weapon today than it was a year ago. Huge majorities of Democrats, 81% of Democrats, 59% of independents think the U.S. made a mistake

in attacking Iran. Even 17% of Republicans agree with that. 81% of Americans think the war has raised the cost of living. Only 37% of Americans trust the administration to provide accurate information about the war. So I get like these are just as bad as it gets numbers-wise. And again, this is before the latest prices spike. Yeah, these numbers are even worse than they sound, like for this reason. First of all, I cannot remember a war ever in my life that pulled at 36%. Especially this

quickly. I mean, even the Iraq war was like hanging on for a while there. Yeah, to your point, this quickly. But then I think if you go into the hood, like the independent number is both politically relevant because those tend to be swing voters and because those tend to be people that are making like a judgment based on what they're seeing. And so that's 75% disapproval. Because again, I'm not I'm not a polar coaster co-host, Tommy. But I do know that because of the intense partisanship in this country, the Republican number is inflated. You know, the Republicans get a call. There's a certain percentage of Republicans, which is, you know, more than 50% that it literally, like, I mean, I love the people who's, you know, the remaining 19% who don't say that it's

caused prices to go up, you know? Right. Those people fill up their guy. Those are literally people that, to quote Trump, like he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue. And they, so you have to account for the fact that like the Republican number is inflating what are already horrific numbers because there are people that probably don't like the Iran war, but are just going to say they support whatever Trump's doing.

Yeah, they support what their team is up to. Yeah. And so that matters here too. It's also a message to the Democratic Party, and I've been banging this drum we both have. Are the Democrats against the war? Yeah. Do you really feel that? Like, do you have a sense that Chuck Schumer and Hakeemprey's like, like, it's weird to me that the war is not more prominent in the Democratic Party's messaging?

Yeah. I mean, like, remember the early days when before Trump launched it, like there were some, a lot of Democrats on the fence. there were a lot of people who would do the kind of lip service to like, while I don't like this regime and blah, blah, they would like oppose it for some legalistic reason. Like the outcome has been a disaster. Yeah. A disaster.

Congress is again behind the American people. It is okay to just be an anti-war party. And by the way, I would imagine these numbers apply to the U.S. getting back involved against the Houthi rebels in Yemen. I'm sure that's part of why Trump didn't do that, right? I mean, maybe the last tin-for-hat thing is just more war bombing might, you know, he's getting told that this polls horribly. Again, the message to the Democratic Party is just be a full-on anti-war party.

Like enough of the throat clearing. And we're talking about a party that just put Jared Moskowitz in charge to the Middle East Subcommittee on the Foreign Affairs Committee. A man who said he agrees with Lindsey Graham, you know, may his soul rest wherever it is, about the Iran war. Like, can we just get out of this defensive crouch or this, you know, pro-Israel, whatever, or whatever the thing is, because it's more than one thing, that caused the Democrats should not come out in a full-throated way against us.

It's bad policy and bad politics. There's just no reason to be in for this. All right, then let's switch gears. We've got a lot of Trump in the show today, and we don't usually do that, but there was just so much out there. It was like we had to talk about these stories. Trump was in Ireland over the weekend.

He was there to attend a golf tournament at his Irish golf course, because why shouldn't taxpayers like us foot the bill for that, right? Yeah. In the process, though, he managed to roll a grenade into North in Ireland politics in a way that was so stupid and so reckless that it would be like the defining foreign policy gaff of any other presidency. But like it almost didn't get noticed here. So we really wanted to talk about it. So to prepare for this section, Ben, I called a journalist named Peter Kelly.

We met a couple times, including the DNC in 2024. He's written for the Irish Examiner, USA. It's a great Irish name. And the Irish post. Peter Kelly. Yeah. Great guy. And he was on the scene for this mess over in Ireland. So on Saturday, Trump met. with the T-Shok, Michelle Martin, that's their prime minister. I think what there wasn't supposed to be like a press scrum, and all of a sudden they just called the press in for this impromptu press conference. So they got a good idea of Trump. Never a good idea.

So Trump and the T-Shok, they do these kind of, you know, their pro forma statements about whatever. And then they take questions. The 11th question, and they all went to Trump, was about Irish unity and unification. That is where Trump said this. Let's watch. What are you? Unification.

What's your view on? Well, I don't want to cause any problems, but I will tell you. I'd love to see it in a fight. You know what? The way I look at it's going to happen eventually. It will happen then. Now the UK will have something to say about it, obviously, but I think it would be a great thing. I mean, how can it be bad?

It just seems to me that you have Northern Ireland and you have Ireland, and it would seem to me that one of the naturals of all time is put them together. put them together. I've had so much support on that. And then they asked me about Scotland. That one I won't talk about yet. I'll save that for another day. His analysis is basically, they both have Ireland and the name.

Is he getting to do whales next? So if you look at the first couple, you can see the Taoiseach, Michelle Martin, like, kind of die inside as this is happening. And so... You took my point. So, like, what happened there is, like, what Trump said explicitly goes against the terms of the Good Friday Agreement,

which is one of the most successful bits of U.S. diplomacy in a generation because it ended, you know, decades of bloody sectarian and troubled. And nationalist conflict. Kill like 3,700 people. But it's also an extremely fragile and volatile piece that requires delicate power sharing, right? And that is what he just kind of like kicks sand at. And to be clear, Trump is upending casually at a press avail about his golf course. Decades of U.S. policy for no reason, because the U.S. position is that the U.S. is neither in favor of a United Ireland nor opposed to the idea. The Good Friday Agreement says that Northern Ireland remains part of the United Kingdom as long as that's what a majority in Northern Ireland wants. Andy Burnham, the new prime minister of the UK, just said he is not aware of majority support for unification. There will be no referendum. The referendum is off the table. This is like a settled issue. Polling shows majority support for the unionist position or the status quo. So,

Like what all Trump is doing in practice there is, again, like rolling this political grenade into the Northern Ireland government where there's a power sharing agreement between the unionists and the nationalists who are like literally run by two ministers who are the daughters of like paramilitaries on either side. It's like a daughter of an IRA guy and a daughter of a gunrunner for the unionist. And now the fucking T-shock has to go meet with Annie Burnham, I think later this week and get asked all about this again. So it's like it's just a political disaster for everyone that in the like the real downside case could reopen a deadly sectarian conflict. Everything about this is remarkable in its like pointlessness. I mean, first of all, I just checked. Trump's approval rating Ireland is 20%, right? 20%.

Because I love the Irish. I probably love the Irish more than anybody. And so what's he going over there in the first place? It's just a pain in everybody's ass. They have to host him, right? Just because he's basically trying to create an advertisement for his golf course. Then he just kind of casually sticks his put into like one of the thornyest problems and one of the only problems that were able to help solve in my lifetime.

Because again, whatever you think about, let's say you are a, you know, pro United Ireland. This is actually like, this is not good for anybody, right? I mean, if you're a unionist, you're pissed. even if you're like long term would like to see United Ireland like this is not the way to do that. You shouldn't same time. You'd be like oh, Trump said it. Let's do it boys.

Well, actually it undermines them in a way. Because like, oh shit, Trump's sword? Maybe it's not a good idea. And also just to make your point, like they're real lives at stake here. Like I remember I used to go to the meeting every year. Obama and St. Patrick's Day would always meet with the two chief ministers in Northern Ireland.

And it was fucking tense, man. Like you go to Belfast. There's still peace walls. there's still like divided communities, you know, if there's a sense that even some of the people that might not favor having a referendum, like the reason they don't, even they might personally like think, oh, you know, maybe someday Ireland unified. But they just don't want to go through that shit again. They don't want to go through violence again. They don't know their war. Like let's, you know what, this is fine. We have some autonomy. We have an Irish identity within the

United Kingdom. Brexit kind of strain this a little bit. It's just like walking up to a hornet's nest and kicking it as hard as you can with no purpose in doing that other than just like sharing your opinion as if you're like an independent commentator, not the president of the United States. I will say by one other theory in this, and this is not even a tinfoil hat, I also think Trump like fucking, he hates Europeans. He seems to not like Brits. Like he, like the malevolence may just be like, ah, I'll just come over here and create a huge problem for Andy Burnham and the Taoiseach and then I'll leave. Well, yeah. I mean, apparently in Ireland the questions whether he trying to do this to like get Irish Catholic voters to support him in the midterms.

I think that's giving him too much credit. And then he's just like a fucking reckless idiot. Even in that clip, like, again, it seems like he just thinks they're both named Ireland so they should go together. Like that's the depth of his analysis. And interestingly, Ben, like, so Sinn Féin, the national... He probably doesn't even know what religion the unionists are. Yeah, he probably said they're Shia.

The Shinfant has boycotted the White House St. Patrick's Day of this. for the last couple of years because of Gaza. But also apparently in a recent one of the St. Patty's Day events, Trump repeatedly name-checked the head of the unionist party, which are like very right-wing, very conservative, very pro-Trump. So next year, after this bullshit, you could imagine, like, the unionist party boycotting the White House St. Patty's Day event, and then, like, the nationalists are attending.

But, like, to your point about him, the Europe, him hating Europe, like even Nigel Farage was like, no, that's a bad idea. idea. Well, a core war, yeah, I'm sure. And also, like, some of this, to your point about Trump's, like, lack of, you know, understand. Because this is not some jiu-jitsu for the Irish Catholic. I mean, this is a man that literally picked a fight with the Pope, right?

I'm not sure he's singing all these things through. But the reality is, like, Trump is also this guy who, like, a lot of his views were kind of frozen in time in, like, the 80s, you know? I grew up in New York in, like, the 80s and 90s. Like, that's when, like, the IRA was, like, you know, running guns out of Staten Island. And you know, like New York Republican members of Congress from, like, Long Island supporting them over. Yeah, yeah. Like Peter Kane.

I honestly think Trump may not even know that the Good Friday Courts happened. Yeah, that's a good point. Or certainly what the kind of constructive and how fragile it is and how it's all this kind of complicated power sharing and negotiated autonomy. Like, you know, he just doesn't care about that. Like, you know, he'll probably offer to send Jared and Whitkoff to Northern Ireland if anything goes sideways. Good, good. Trump Tower, Belfast. Here we come.

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Use our link so they know we sent you. Speaking of which, Ben, Gryftimus came early for everybody because there's two, like, big, long magazine features about the Trump family's corruption. Let's start with ProPublica's piece about Donald Trump Jr.'s wedding. These are both bangers.

It's incredible. We're going to talk about Dexter Filkins's New Yorker piece. So back in May, Donnie Jr. fans might remember that he had a three-day wedding to the new love of his life in the Bahamas. It was a small wedding. It was like 50 people, but one attendee was a Russian oligarch named Umar Kremlev, who was close to Vladimir Putin and the head of the International Boxing Association.

Totally normal. Not only did Kremlin attend, but he footed part of the bill. ProPublica says he paid to rent out an island where the reception was held. For a fireworks display, the island reportedly costs about $100,000 a night. The fireworks displays are normally like $70 grand. I think the All-Anne estimate was like a couple hundred thousand dollars paid for by some IB. International Boxing Association affiliated entity. The International Boxing Association is financed by Gazprom,

the big Russian state-owned energy behemoth. According to ProPublica in the weeks before the wedding, Kremlin, this oligarch, was in China with Putin as part of the delegation and also recently got bestowed with the Order of Friendship State Honor. And then lastly, Kremlin's wife's sister runs an organization called Healthy Fatherland that is sanctioned in Ukraine for its role in Russia's abduction of Ukrainian kids,

like the most evil part of an evil war. And so they run the story. Incredibly after it comes out, Don Jr.'s wife pretty much just confirms it all as true on Instagram. She wrote, Our dear friend, Umar, very generously hosted two incredible nights of celebrations for us after our wedding.

It was an extraordinarily generous wedding gift from our friend. It's something for which we were and remained incredibly grateful. I think she was trying to say, aha, the story was wrong because it said they paid for our wedding. what they paid for was after the wedding. Normally you kind of buck at the wedding weekend is one thing. But that's just me. But Ben, two things.

One, first of all, my initial reaction was like, Jesus Christ, these people are grifters. But the more serious point is, like, if Putin were to try to buy influence with Don Jr., this is how you would do it. Yeah. You have this, like, carve out, like, sports association funded by Gazprom to, like, make a run at him.

This is, like, the most obvious, like, Russian intel op I've ever seen. That's right. because the two things that jumped out to me. Like, first of all, what's his name, Umar? Um, Um, um, I'm just going to go out on a limb, Tommy. And you can, if you think I'm being impolite, you can call me out. I don't think this is a man that just has a sincere appreciation for Don Jr.'s personality.

Like an organic friendship. No. That just evolved over two guys who happened to meet each other from other sides of the world. And then decided to rent an island for him. Like, these people, if you know anything about how the Russian system works, like, if they make an investment in a person like this, they expect a return on the investment. They're not doing this out of sentimentality. They're not doing it because in the same way that the Saudis don't think that Jared Kushner is a particularly ingenious investor. Like, that's an investment in something.

Now, it turns out they didn't get the return they wanted. This is an investment, an ongoing investment by the Russians in the Trump family. That leads me to my second point, which is that the U.S. media, mainstream media, whatever we're going to call it, did they crank the Russia gate stuff up, like way high that they did in the sense that that was like all they covered for a couple of years, right? But Trump is so thoroughly, you know, called this a hoax and kind of made any insinuation of his own contacts and potentially compromised nature of his relationship with Russia. seem so kind of resistance 1.0 and so kind of Trump derangement syndrome that like people actually don't talk about it that much anymore. And yet it is just like staring you in the face that the Russians have been making like a very long-term investment in Trump and his family and makes you wonder like what do they want in return for that and what are they getting in

return for that, right? And and I don't know, it's just staring at us. At some point someone will come back and put this all together and write it up. But the, the reality, reality is, you know, if we'll allow ourselves to do this for two times today, which is breaking our rule, if, like, a Russian oligarch was paying for, like, Malia Obama's wedding, you know, in the Bahamas, I think there'd be some questions about that. Guess I'd get a little Fox News coverage. And meanwhile, this will be, like, a passing story. Yeah, no, like, I hate this. I hate that we're, like, back in 2017, P-Tape-era conversation,

but it is bonkers. like Don Jr. didn't know this guy forever. They met a couple years ago. You know, it's like this is just so clearly an effort to funnel money to this family and buy access. And also, it comes at a time when Don Jr. isn't just the dumb fuck son of the president. He's a guy who's like investing in or advisor to drone companies, like, you know, the rare earths. They're getting huge Pentagon loans, right? Like, he's more deeply tied into this administration.

He may try to inherit the Trump political dynasty. Yes. You know, like he may either run for president or become some, you know, Trump media mogul who's endorsing candidates. I mean, and this was, again, the dumb thing about the Russia investigation was you didn't need there to be a peatap or some smoking gun of like collusion for this to still be wrong, you know. And then there was a smoking gun, which was Donald Trump Jr. meeting with this like Russian-connected lawyer for Dard on Hillary. Don Jr. is just a walking smoking gun. Yeah, he's the thing. So, okay, that was one story.

Then there was this great New Yorker piece by Dexter Filkins on Jared Kushner and corruption and diplomacy. The detail that jumped out in me, Ben, was we've talked about Crown Prince, Mohamed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia before, earlier in the show, frankly. In 2017, he deposed his cousin, Muhammad bin Nayef, who was seen as a very credible professional interlocutor that all the U.S. intelligence agencies knew and, like, working with. with and nobody knew who MBS was. Apparently MBS called Jared Kushner to tell him in advance that he was going to depose his cousin. That call was secretly recorded where Kushner says, yeah, everybody's on board with this except for the U.S. intelligence agency is like, go for it.

So that's one big detail. And the second detail is Filkins got his hands on this classified intelligence report from a European intelligence agency that says Trump has been discussing economic deals with the Russians, including stuff like reopening Nordstrom. stream two, like huge ticket items, like opening oil fields to Exxon. These are not like golf courses. And it like, it names people that could participate in the deal that are including Trump, Steve Whitkoff, Jared Kushner, Richard Grinnell, Gentry Beach, this friend of Don Juniors. And so it's just like, it's another staggering story about corruption. The Wall Street Journal has an article about the Trump organization about to announce a Trump tower in Tbilisi in Georgia,

the country, where the ruling party, Georgia dreams like cracking down to descend and getting closer to Moscow. So like, there's just so much smoke here. You know, it's interesting about this is, and I'll, I talk to Dexter Filkins when he was setting out on this, you know, and I was not to source on any of this stuff because I didn't know about any of this stuff. But part of what's interesting is you and I have been talking about this stuff for, fuck, eight years, you know. And it's all like, it's kind of apparent what's happening. And what is, you know, it's apparent that Jared is in bed with the Saudis. It's apparent that the Russians want the Trump people to kind of put their thumb on the scale in places like Georgia where they're trying to, you know, expand influence, if not, kind of swallowed up.

And what's so striking is that like whenever anybody actually does get the goods, it's actually even worse than you think. You know? Like when it's, because it's not even just. just like a, you know, like just take the Saudi piece. It's not even just like a subtle quid pro quo. It's literally like Jared Kushner being like, yeah, crack down on your family, you know. I mean, I was in the White House, like the Muhammad Benayev thing. I mean, he was the crown prince.

And MBS was the deputy crown prince. Like this is kind of a mini internal coup that took place. And we have a guy literally not only greenlighting that from the White House. Jared was a White House employee at that time, his senior advisor. and then getting millions of dollars on the back end. I mean, this is, this just demonstrates, like, there's been this kind of collapse of investigative journalism as foreign bureaus have closed and as the media has become what it's become.

But, man, like, if you just, if you get a good dogged reporter like Dexter Filkins, what you find is that all this stuff is even worse than, like, you know, like we, you know, surmise. I will add, like, because people ask all the time, like, what to read, what, you know, the New Yorker, ProPublica, the Guardian does work like this. You know, DropSight does it in the Middle East. Like, there are the people that are still doing investigative journalism are people that do demand, like, your attention.

Because, you know, frankly, if we were living in a different era, we would know more of this stuff. But thankfully, there's still people out there connecting dots. Yeah, it's great reporting and really hard work, which is why a lot of people don't do it because it's time and labor intensive. Dexter also reported out, you know, others have reported on this as well, that when Jared left the White House, and he started Affinity Partners,

his investment company, he went to the Saudis, you know, kind of hat in hand to ask for a $2 billion investment. And like all the professionals in the Saudi kind of sovereign wealth fund were like, no way.

This guy has never invested before. Like, what are we thinking? And then MBS overruled them and gave him $2 billion, which I think has turned into many, many billion dollars more. Yeah. As Jared has reentered

this sort of like hybrid, quasi-governmental role where he's not an officially an employee, so he doesn't have to file disclosure forms about his wealth, for example, but he still has all this influence. But his management fee, the management fee that Affinity charges is like 1.25%, which means he was making, what, $25, $30 million off the Saudis alone per year. And I think they have in the story that for the first three years, Affinity didn't make any investments. Yeah. So they were just charging the Saudis to do nothing. Nothing. Yeah. And how is that not a bribe or a kickback? Well, that's the thing, because that was the other thing

I was going to say, which is if and when the Democrats take back power. Like all this stuff, like needs to be illegal, you know? Because what's remarkable is it's not. It's grotesque. I think what people used to count on is that like politically it would be a killer for the president's son-in-law to like collect billions of dollars. There's no shame anymore. But in a world of that shame. And I'll tell you the other things happening to be self-reaching. to be self-critical of like, you know, our party. And is it there's a lot of this stuff at smaller scale. You know, there's a lot of people that's serving government and then they kind of,

they start a fund in the Gulf or they, you know, they get on a board that, like, is selling a lot of things to the Gulf. And the kind of wink-wink is it, oh, those people are probably going to go back into the U.S. government at some point. So we're going to invest in them. Like all this, we have to enter a period of, like, radical anti-corruption and transparency after this to cleanse ourselves. Because Jared is like the most extreme and damaging version of it. But there's more of it underneath the surface too. And like this should be a

priority for the next. I mean, if you want to restore public confidence in the government, because people know this intuitively. Like you don't need to like follow farm policy to kind of feel like everything's for sale. Yep. I would love to know what the Russian oligarch sovereign wealth fund guy was doing in Miami with Jared Kushman and Steve Wilcoff. That'd be a great thing to examine. Last story, Ben. So we want to touch on some developments in the war between Russia and Ukraine. A Russian drone struck a train at a train station that's about a mile from Ukraine's border with Poland.

This happens obviously all the time. But what makes this incident remarkable was that a so-called VIP train had just passed through this station. A VIP train is a train that the Ukrainian government runs that's full of dignitaries or whatever VIPs are visiting. I think a couple VIP trains went through the area. they went through a little earlier than had been anticipated. There's not like a schedule for them, obviously,

but like, you know, people at the, you know, stations like know when they're coming and going to do traffic control. And so the train, the VIP trains go through the station and then shortly after Russia hits it with a drone. And so one of those trains was carrying the national security advisors of the UK, France, Germany, and Italy. There were one of them was also carrying a former British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson,

CIA director, Dave Petraeus, was on a train that came through soon after. I think they were all there for, there must have been some sort of security conference or something. Former CIA director, Dave Petraeus, was on another train. I just said that. So it's possible, if not likely, that the Russian military was actually targeting those dignitaries. We don't know that, but it's quite a coincidence. And it comes as Russia is getting more and more aggressive with NATO countries. We've talked about this on past episodes, but the Germans blame.

Russia for a drone attack at Leipzig Airport back in August. Estonia is investigating Russia for arson attacks. They were all similar like arson or explosions in Finland, Bulgaria, and Italy. I heard a report this morning about a train derailing in France that's being investigated as possible Russian sabotage. Now, you don't want to start seeing Russia behind every corner and every incident, but there is a lot of smoke here. And so I think it, again, is worth just hearing how the Trump administration is

reacting to these attacks on NATO allies. And then this clip of Jared Kushner, just kind of like talking about the status of the peace talks between Russia and Ukraine at the moment. Let's watch. Look, I think right now, from the Ukraine perspective, I mean, President Putin's laid out his line of what he wants to achieve. If Ukraine wanted to withdraw to that line, then obviously, you know, we have the rest of the deal set up and put together. Ukraine right now does not want to do that. So just to summarize, Ben, Ukraine has to give Putin, quote, what he wants to. to achieve, and then it'll be all over. Which is like their own territory where their people live, like a fifth of their territory.

That they currently control. I mean, first of all, I can't imagine the Russians aren't aware of who's on these trains. Like, they have a pretty good intelligence service. You know, they're clearly monitoring this. So whether this was like a warning shot, whether it was even worse, like they tried something and missed, you know. I just think we have to understand that this is going to continue to escalate as things go on as the Ukrainians get more aggressive inside of Russia. And the fact that Kushner is like, oh, yeah, well, we'd have this solved if the Ukrainian just surrendered. That's his response to this,

is like, tells you what kind of message is that sent to Putin about what the response would be if, like, a bunch of European national security advisors or VIPs get blown up on a train? And in addition to that, I mean, I saw Trump was blaming Ukrainian. strikes on Russian oil and gas infrastructure for the high price of diesel, which is not the reason. It's the war with Iran that diesel is really expensive. But again, they're all just blaming Ukraine for stuff. And then Europe is, they're discussing whether to have a public debate about whether these gray zone attacks or hybrid attacks from Russia would trigger an Article 5 response from NATO. But they're worried that having that conversation in public would actually hurt not help because

Trump is not likely to back them, so it'll make them look weaker. And what are they going to do? Yeah, well, one of the things they're talking about, the bare minimum that they're debating, apparently, is whether to kind of like bring forward their missile defense infrastructure right to the border so that it could engage with drones and missiles that are targeting stations like this that are just across into Ukrainian territory, because I think current policy is to only engage when those, you know,

objects pass into NATO airspace. But it's like, okay, so we're just going to. let Putin fire at your fucking staffers because they're a mile over the border from Poland? Yeah. And then all this feels just like, you know, to connect everything we talked about from what happened in Yemen. I mean, everything just feels like it's escalating, you know, and Donald Trump is the President of the States and he's going to golf courses and reopening the troubles, you know. We got two more years of this to get through. Two more years, my friend. Okay, we are going to take a quick break, but when we come back, you're going to hear my

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If you miss some of your favorite crooked pods this week, don't worry, you can now catch up on the week's best moments on MS Now on Saturday nights. MS Now is streaming an episode of highlights from your favorite crooked pods, packing as much analysis, funny moments, and 100% correct opinions into 40 minutes as humanly possible. Crooked on MS Now airs every Saturday at 9 p.m. Eastern, 6 p.m. Pacific. My guest today is Hamza Shodry. He is the AI and national security lead at the Future of Life Institute. And someone I've talked to off the record or odd background a bunch of times to try to get smarter on this stuff. Hansa, great to talk to you. Thanks for having me, Tommy.

First of all, can you get folks the quick explanation of what the Future of Life Institute does? Because it's an awesome name for an organization, but it doesn't necessarily tell you what you guys work on. I thought the same thing when I applied. Yeah. The Future of Life Institute is the oldest and largest AI policy think tank in the United States. It's been around for 12 years now. We work on a bunch of issues. So I have staff working on AI national security policy.

We have folks working on child safety. We have folks working on labor protections. We have folks working on liability. And then we have folks staffing our international teams, working on global governance, track dues with international partners. So anything to do with AI policy, chances are FLA's engaging with it. Folks might have heard that there. There's this big conference in D.C. this week happening right now, actually, that includes

Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon. You guys are the ones who brought that together. So very interesting politics, very interesting moment to talk about artificial intelligence with you. So it's been a wild week in AI news. The short version of what happened is this AI researcher at Anthropic resigned from the company, and he tweeted, quote, The people building AI earnestly believed that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. A bunch of other AI employees at Anthropic and other places waited, on Twitter and quote tweeted him and agreed. It kicked up a massive amount of views and interest

in this tweet and this conversation. That led the Anthropic CEO Dario Amadeh to write this long essay proposing some ideas to regulate AI. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman weighed in and said, yeah, I think this is a good idea, or at least parts of it are. Elon Musk said, yeah, we kind of agree in principle too. So let's just start there. Can you describe what Dario Amade proposed in his essay just for the substance of it. Of course. So Dario's central argument is that the models are developing too quickly and we're caught in a race dynamic. So we need to pace the frontier. Pace is an interesting word. I think what they mean is slow down because there's two kinds of paces. You either speed up or you slow down and he's talking about one kind of pace.

He says that we need to do three things to make sure that these models are developed in the right way to make sure they don't have the existential and catastrophic risk he's claimed. The first is you to have these embedded evaluators. So scientists and technical researchers from the outside, staffing the companies to make sure that they can conduct safety testing and audits of these systems before they're deployed. The second, and this is an increasing order of difficulty, is what he calls democratic coordination. So we need to work with the U.S. government, but also European and East Asian governments, to make sure that we have an international governance architecture backed by democracies. And then finally, he has something called global coordination.

and what he's essentially talking about there is China. And he's saying that all of these conversations that we're having domestically need to be had with the Chinese internationally. And he is much more concerned about things like, for example, not having a pause in the limit, but for now he's concerned about easy wins. So for example, a joint declaration

to make sure that systems can develop dangerous biological weapons, for example. It's worth noting that Sam Altman kind of weighed in and said, yeah, he approved with part of this plan, but not all of it, basically step one, which was these embedded evaluators within the company, he didn't weigh in on steps two or three, which, yeah, I guess in fairness to him would require the U.S. government to take those steps. So it's not like Sam Altman can do that on its own. But you and I were chatting.

You said that even Dario's plan had a few problems in your view. Can you walk me through those or walk the audience through those? So first, before we get into any specific flaw with Dario's plans, I just want to point out the world's most dangerous cognitive dissonance, which is every single one of these executive leaders has consistently talked about AI potentially extinguishing humanity and then have staffed lobbyists in each of these companies to make sure that when folks roll up to Congress or to state legislatures, they're blocking the same bills that could stop that risk from happening in the first place.

And I think that's just a key point that we have to communicate every single time. What is the problem with Dario's plan? For a plan that's called pacing the frontier, there is no mechanism to pace the frontier. So you could have all the embedded evaluators in the companies that you want, but you could just politely decline their recommendation. And what we fundamentally need is some kind of government gating or approval system. Because these embedded evaluators could easily say this model has too high of a buyer risk or this model has too high of a cyber risk. But in the absence of any authority to actually do something about it, they're still going to be in the same place that we were six months ago. The second problem with Dario's thesis, and this is going to be a fundamental problem with anything that it's being put out from that perspective, is that there will always be some tension between go slower and what to do with China.

And Dario's answer there is for us to set up a regime of export controls to make sure that we can slow them down as much as possible. I think that's a hard thing to do over the long term, considering how quickly the Chinese are indigenizing their compute capacity. And frankly, we're in a geopolitical environment at the moment where the Chinese are getting as many chips as they need from the Americans. Yeah, and it seems like the chipmakers just want to increase their output as much as humanly possible to make as much money as humanly possible. And that's all they really care about. One recent AI safety incident that freaked out a lot of people and got global attention was this hugging face hack. Can you tell listeners what happened there and why this was viewed by a lot of people in the AI community as a paradigm shift? Open AI was testing a model, and a model, or a foundation model, is just a set of model weights,

and then on top of that, you can deploy agents using that model. So Open AI decides that we're going to run this model through a cyber benchmark called Exploid Gym. It's basically a capture the flag. It's a very classic software and cybersecurity benchmark. So it deploys, we don't have an official number, but my guess is tens of thousands of agents to independently capture this flag within the. this benchmark. Something like 1,200 of those agents capture that flag within the first four to five hours of the actual exercise, and then deploy an intercompany hack to make sure that there's no

evidence of them cheating. So first, what they do is that they hack into OpenEI's infrastructure to make sure that they can communicate with each other, which they do by essentially having file names and directory names as codes for messages. Second, they're able to access the internet, which they explicitly were not allowed to do. Third, as part of this effort, they hack into an external company. A company, mind you, that's a leading tech company with good cybersecurity called Hugging Face, all in an effort to figure out if Hugging Face has an association with the checker of their exam to make sure that their cheating isn't caught. After Open AI catches this, these agents then attempt to hack Open AI again and resist those efforts, and then eventually

the agents are shut down. I don't think I have to explain why this terrified people inside and outside the AI community, but that's the summary. And also as part of this process, not one of those agents ever communicated, at least in a way that we can see, hey, maybe we should tell a human being about this. Or, hey, this seems to be in violation of the law. Maybe we shouldn't do this, right? And maybe that's a weird standard or way to think about it because these aren't like individual agents. They're kind of like all copies of the same. model right, but at no point where any of them like, hey, let's pump the brakes, we're doing something wrong, correct?

That's almost right. So in this cluster of 1,200 agents, there were a couple of agents who said, should we check with a human being about hacking into another company? So they're like a couple of like three or something? Exactly, exactly. Now, remember that the whole point of the hack in the first place is to hide their cheating. So these two agents effectively get overridden by middle management and the executive agents, and they basically vote not to tell the human beings in this case.

That was one big security threat. Then last week, Anthropic released a threat intelligence report about all the misuse of Claude over the last year. The part of that report that scared the hell out of me was they wrote up an attempt to use Claude, their AI model, to develop biological weapons. I'd love for you to talk about why the bio threat is so uniquely dangerous to humanity.

And then also let me know if there's any, anything else in that anthropic report that you think is worth highlighting? The biothreat is, by definition, more dangerous for anyone who's lived through COVID. Think about the most dangerous cyber attack that you've seen in as for as long as you've lived, and then compare it to the coronavirus pandemic. The reality is that pathogens and phages can kill just a lot more people than the worst cyber weapons can in the vast majority of cases. Now, what's happening with AI is that there's developments happening both inside and outside the space,

which are making the biothreat more likely. So outside the space, what we're developing are what we're called these AI biological design tools. So they're not large language models, but they have the functioning of large language models narrowly focused on designing new genetic sequences. And these things are getting better at better at designing sequences that nature has never made before.

Second, once you have the sequence, you actually do the humble work of creating physical material out of it. And that's what we call synthesizing a sequence. It used to be the case that there were only a handful of companies that would synthesize a sequence to allow you to actually have a pathogen. Now we have these so-called bench top synthesizers. Some of them are in high schools. They're just that cheap. So we're both increasing and democratizing the ability to sequence the most dangerous data while also developing the ability to synthesize these agents.

Enter large language models who can provide you explicit and detailed instructions on exactly how to use these AI biological design tools. they can often be hooked up to these so-called BDTs, and they can provide you instructions on how you can fake your credentials and make sure that you can get the correct information from these synthesizers, even if you don't have a bench top synthesizer on you. The good thing about the AI bio threat so far is that there's a so-called digital-to-physical barrier. Unlike cyber, where everything happens within the interwebs,

in the bio case, you still need to enter the physical world. And that's where there's space for enforcement. The vast majority of DNA synthesizers still continue to vet their orders, so-called know your order and know your customer requirements. But we're getting to a point where the models will just get good enough to, for example, dupe a synthesizer, and in other words, overcome the digital to physical barrier. The question then becomes, how bad can that get? And the answer is a lot worse than COVID.

So because these biological design tools can create sequences that we've never seen before, you could have something that has the fatality of the avian flu, so something like 40%, say, and has the virality of the most viral pathogen you've seen, swine flu, for example. That could kill half of the United States, and that could kill billions of people. So that's the world we're entering over the coming years. And like what the AI sort of proponents will say is, well, yes, but we'll also use AI to develop cures to diseases like that. But I think what people need to understand is the timeline for creating,

a, you know, some sort of cure for a disease or a vaccine or what have you is just going to be way, way behind the timeline for someone who's creating the virus in the first place, right? Can you just like talk about like the gap there and how far behind we would probably be? Think of how badly we're doing it for the easy case, which is cyber. The bet here over the past six months was, why don't we give the model to defenders first? And once the defenders have it, they can use the models to patch one probabilities. and it's deployed to the public, so even if offenders have it,

they will still be an advantage. Clearly, that hasn't worked out over the last six months. A handful of companies barely got access to these models for their cyber defense, and that doesn't even include the vast majority of critical infrastructure providers

who would need it. Now, Lear, on top of that, your point, which is even in the presence of a good trusted access program, which we don't currently have, you still need to, after having the information on how to make a prophylactic or a vaccine,

actually designed it. In the COVID case, for example, we had the actual formula within four weeks after the virus escaped Wuhan, but then we needed something like nine months to make sure that we could actually synthesize and deploy a vaccine. In cases where these potential biological weapons

could kill millions, maybe hundreds of millions of people, I think that's an intolerable balance to have. And it's not just me saying it. We put out a survey of national security experts with the Institute for Security and Technology last week. Think of your former four stars, your former agency leads, your former subject matter experts. And these folks overwhelmingly felt that biology would be offense dominant. In other words, it would give a lot more advantage to attackers rather than defenders. Before we move on,

was there anything else in that anthropic threat intelligence report that particularly jumped out at you or unnerved you? I think the fundamental thing that unnerves me, and maybe just taking a step back, this is the first dual-use technology of national security concern being built outside the government. Like, you could do internet, you could do GPS, you could do nuclear energy. This is legitimate, you could do the, you could do microvasing. This is legitimately the first technology that's being built outside government. So when I read reports like these, there's the report, but then I'm also thinking, do they have enough people who can stop these things on the inside?

Like, the reality is that fundamentally each section in the report, whether you're focused on cyber or nuclear risk or seaburn or bio, is backed up by a handful of people working at these companies trying to stop these threats. When we have tens of thousands of people in the federal government who are charged with this. So when I read reports like these, the reason I'm scared is not because of what they say. It's that they're layered on top of an architecture of a handful of people who are supposed to stop all of this. I think this is why people are so frustrated at the fact that the U.S. government is just completely asleep at the switch when it comes to artificial intelligence. That is true for the federal government and the Trump administration, who is too busy taking checks from the CEOs to regulate them that goes for Congress, which can't get its act together to do anything these days. If you could wave a magic wand and force Congress to act, what would you have them do immediately? And then similarly, like, is there anything you'd like to see come out of the Trump administration in the form of an executive order, or even just some sort of bilateral agreement with Chinese President Xi Jinping when he visits in September? So there's three ingredients we need from Congress. And they're like fairly straightforward.

I think they'll be intuitive to most folks. The first one is check the models before you internally deploy them and externally deploy them. External deployment is simple. When do you release this model to the public or do enterprise defenders, for example? So you should check the model if it can make bioweapons or cyber weapons. But now there's also a concern with internal deployment. So in the hugging phase incident, what happened was that after the model was developed, it was internally deployed to researchers in the company

who was running the cyber eval, which led to the hack of the company. So we need gates set up by the government, where folks with actual clearances are making determinations with the companies, as we do with many national security technologies, saying this is the step at which you can internally deploy to a company, and this is when you can do it external.

Secondly. Second, we need whistleblower protections. Someone as we're speaking could have an oh shit moment at the companies and they have no mechanism clearly to report this to the government. They definitely don't have the protections they would need to make sure that there's no backlash from their company or from the industry. So we need to make sure that there's appropriate whistleblower protections. And then third is we need a deactivation mechanism. If there's a national security emergency or if we're enforcing legislation of the companies are not complying with, we need to be able to flip an off switch. And we currently don't have that on the table.

What I will say about the president is, his opinion on AI has evolved, and I think it can evolve again. The first thing he ever said about AI was in February 2024, an interview with Maria Batromo, where he said this might be the most dangerous thing we will ever build.

So we've gone from that to the last week. And I think at some point, the evidence will become overwhelming enough that they'll be spurred into action. I'm just hoping it's not too late. Yeah, I'm hoping it's not because something really bad happens. Now, look, you know that there are people who will listen to this conversation,

people like David Sachs, who is Trump's AI czar, who will say, you and I are idiots, we are doomers, that every technology that comes along includes people who decide that it's going to end the world, that the problem in the AI community is that it's this tiny, incestuous group of individuals who read the same science fiction and spin each other up all the time. And so that's half the problem. And the other half is, you know, these CEOs talking about the power of their products as they

run up to IPOs where they could sell off portions of the company and become billionaires. And by the way, they really need to float those shares of the company because AI is so capital intensive that they'll go bankrupt otherwise. What's like, I know I just threw a lot at you, but like, what is your general reaction to that theory of the case? And so the people who think, like, you know, the Jacob Coxon tweet that we talked about at beginning of this that kind of kicked off this latest conversation, it's all like an info-op that's planned by organizations like yours and some of these companies to, I guess, kill progress

or lead to the government just controlling this for the sake of controlling AI? When I'm taking my opinions on global warming, I tend to trust climate scientists and not those who fund Enron. Like, I think that's just the premise we have to start with. There's folks who have PhDs who've spent decades working in academia, who've really studied these models, the three most cited computer scientists in history have articulated the exact set of risks that I'm talking about. I tend to trust those folks more than folks who do not have direct scientific expertise and are not actually making these models. The second point is,

let's disregard anything that I'm saying. Let's disregard anything that Jacob Coxon said. The reality is that this is coming from quarters who have no incentive to make these arguments. So first, like I said, there's now hundreds of people in the the national security community, who are not in the bay, who are not reading that science fiction, people whose whole business is to stop bad things from happening, who are freaking out about these models. I think that's important to point out. But second, it's the same signal coming from the administration. Six months ago, the Director of National Intelligence puts out the annual threat assessment, where in between, squeeze between the Russian-Iran sections is just a sentence,

we must maintain control of the machines and artificial intelligence. That's coming from somewhere. the Secretary of Defense put out a whole adoption memo saying that control of these AI systems is necessary. There isn't a quarter that you can look to, whether it's David Sachs' own administration or national security experts or anyone else who isn't ringing these alarm bells. So I agree with Sachs. Let's not trust a set of civil society organizations. Let's not even trust the people leaving the companies. But at some point when anyone who has ever had any business in touching these models or deploying them with a national security mission is saying the same thing. thing. We need to start acting differently. It makes me crazy, man. It's just so frustrating that these guys who are just like big tech CEOs and investors with a clear financial interest who are coming

from a community of people, a billionaires who want to make money off this technology. They're calling everyone else crazy and doomers. And also just, again, like speaking of logical fallacies, they call everyone who has concerns about tech, about AI, doomers and say we're crazy for suggesting there could be some sort of existential threat to humanity. But at the same time, we have to beat China, that's a real existential threat. Well, I don't know. I feel like it can't be both. Like, if the technology is so powerful that losing the competition with China could endanger us,

then couldn't it just endangerness? The whole thing drives me crazy. I also just don't want to play that game. Like, how did we get to this point as a society that the only way we change course is when things risk the extinction of the human species? What if it kills a billion people? Right. A billion people, more people who've died in every war since the,

lack death? What if it's a million people? Right? The reality is that the richest people in the world don't want this technology to be regulated because if there is an AI-enabled bioweapon, if there is an AI-enabled cyber weapon, these folks will be behind their gated communities. It's much more likely, as it happened with COVID, as happens with these things, that disproportionately the brunt of this falls on people who are most vulnerable to the damage and least responsible. And that's also true in the United States and also abroad. Yeah. Tommy, can I just say one last thing? Please.

We talked about the national security risks of AI because that's what I work on and that's a lot of what the podcast focused on. But there's many other questions that we have about AI that are equally existential to making them work for Americans. There's questions of privacy. There's questions of the meaning of work as people deal with workplace surveillance and labor displacement. There's questions about what happens to our kids in the coming years. There's questions about fairness, right? Like I'm a not so skinny guy with the funny last name. And I'm very conscious that for people in my community, these systems can embed and amplify the worst notions we have of each other.

So I just really want to make clear that while we focused on this topic, the fight for the future will not end the day we win these battles for survival. And there's like a lot of work cut out ahead for both of us. Well, Hamza, thank you so much for talking with me. It was a really great week to have to have book this because there's a lot going on. So I appreciate you coming on the show and I appreciate what you guys are doing over at the Future of Life Institute because it's important. important work. I'm just glad some folks are talking about safety because the U.S. government is not. Thank you, Tommy. Have it going. Thanks again, Hobbs at Chaudry for joining the show, and we will talk to you guys next week. Pod Save the World is a Crooked Media production. Our show is produced by Alona Minkowski, Michael Goldsmith, and Anisha Bonnergy. Our team includes Matt DeGroote, Ben Hethkoot, Jordan Cantor, Kenny Moffat, David Tolls, and Ryan Young. Our staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.

If you miss some of your favorite Crooked Pods this week, don't worry. You can now catch up on the week's best moment. moments on MS Now on Saturday nights. MS Now is streaming an episode of highlights from your favorite Crooked Pods, packing as much analysis, funny moments, and 100% correct opinions into 40 minutes as humanly possible. Crooked on MS Now airs every Saturday at 9 p.m. Eastern, 6 p.m. Pacific.