Pod Save the World - Why Trump Might Send Ground Troops to Iran

Episode Date: March 11, 2026

Tommy and Ben unpack the latest twists in Donald Trump’s chaotic regime-change war with Iran, which eleven days in is still plagued by shifting goals, contradictory messaging, and rising regional consequences. They break down the White House’s confusing claims of victory despite unresolved threats—from the hundreds of pounds of highly enriched uranium still loose inside Iran to signs that Tehran may be mining the Strait of Hormuz. The guys discuss the war’s mounting casualties, environmental devastation from Israeli strikes on Iranian fuel depots, and the dangerous escalation of attacks on desalination plants across the Gulf. They also dig into what we know about Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, explain why sending troops into Iran to secure its nuclear materials—or seize the oil hub of Kharg Island—would be a massive and risky military mission, and why Democrats in Congress must refuse to authorize more funding for the war. Plus: Israel’s widening war in Lebanon, the U.S. military’s new role in Ecuador’s fight against drug cartels, and the election of a GenZ rapper-turned-politician in Nepal. Then Tommy speaks to Michael C. Horowitz, Senior Fellow for Tech & Innovation at the Council on Foreign Relations, about the Pentagon’s fight with Anthropic and how AI is being used by the military.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.For Friends of the Pod the guys answer questions about whether assassination-as-foreign-policy is making a comeback, which US military interventions were actually successful in the post-WWII era, and, like…dude, what the fuck.Preorder Ben’s book All We Say: The Battle for American Identity: A History in 15 Speeches and subscribe to his Substack here.

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restrictions, and important safety information. Actual price will depend on product and subscription plan. Welcome to POTSafe the world. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. How's the Iran war insomnia for you? I do have this kind of habitual fall asleep and wake up at 3.30 in the morning and I was right at 4. Mine racing and then start reading stuff and then you're up. So Yeah, not a good idea to look at your phone these days. Not a good idea to look at your phone ever in the middle of the night. I break that rule frequently. And I do think there's like a weird, instinctive, you know, I'm not trying to over dramatize this,

but, you know, having in eight years, like, had to kind of feel like you had to work when something terrible... Monitoring a situation. Yeah, I mean, you just kind of like, there's this weird instinctive thing in my body that's like... Do you see the thing where the, when the war started about... all these dads who were saying they had to monitor this situation. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I did. Watch CNN all day or MSNBC or whatever. Yeah, well, that's basically us.

Well, by the way, it's an interesting war in that regard because, I mean, I hate to say this, but I don't find CNN's coverage to be particularly illuminating. Look, I got that guy in CNN. That guy's good. But some of the, let's just say, some of the guest choices and the panels are pretty 2004 feeling. You kind of have to really search for your content on the. this war. You know, it's a weird mix of outlets and social media and people in the region. There's clearly censorship happening.

Out of Israel. Why does Al-Zerah have all these images that don't seem to appear on other stations, you know? Yeah, a lot of people covering it from Israel are probably having to deal with censors. The guy's name is Frederick Plikin. Plikin. P-L-E-I-T-G-N. He's doing great job. He is doing. Frederick Plitkin. Search for him on Twitter, if you want to see what CNN's doing, actually, in Iran. which is, I mean, it's pretty fucking brave to get in a car and drive into Iran as it's getting bombed. Can't get into Gaza. Right. You can get into Iran.

That's a very good point, Ben. We're obviously going to focus much of our time today on Iran. We're going to talk about the total incoherence of the White House's messaging. And we're going to try to figure out genuinely whether this war is about to end, whether it's about to escalate something in between. Like, I genuinely don't know. I'm excited to hear your opinion because we have not talked about this. We'll tick through some of the latest developments from the last week, including casualties, all things oil. and then some scary signs of escalation.

We'll tell you what we know about the new Supreme Leader of Iran and what his selection signals from the regime. We'll also talk about what a ground operation to get Iran's nuclear materials would actually entail the latest on the bombing of an Iranian girl school and then what's happening in Lebanon. And then finally, Ben, we're going to talk about the U.S. military's new counter-drug mission in Ecuador

and then the Gen Z rapper, who is about to be a prime minister of Nepal. That's actually a fun story. That's a fun story. Then you're going to hear my interview with Mike Horowitz. He's been on the show before he is an expert on how the Pentagon adopts and uses new technology. So we talk about the fight between the Trump administration and the AI company Anthropic over the use of its model, Claude, as well as growing concern about this munitions shortage, especially missile defense system shortages,

and how the U.S. is now turning to drone technology from Ukraine to close the gap and counter these Iranian drones. So very interesting conversation with him. Yeah, there's a lot there. I do think, again, I'm glad you did that because the anthropic story is not getting the attention that it might otherwise get, but for the future of humanity, it's hugely important. Yeah, I'd love to know what the Pentagon is doing with super powerful AI systems. Why they need autonomous weapons and mass surveillance capabilities. Yeah, it seems like something to be easy to say no to. Also, for those of you who are friends of the pod subscribers, you're going to hear Ben and I do a Q&A where we take some questions from the Pod Save the World Discord.

By the way, if you like Cricket Media, if you like this show, if you like what we're doing here, please become a friend of the pod subscriber. It is the single most helpful thing you could do to us as a progressive independent media company. And our promise to you in return is never to book Lindsay Graham on any of our shows unless we are going to be really mean to him. We promised to play clips of Lindsay Graham and to react to them and make fun of him. We also no-fly zone for John Bolton. Although it would be fun to yell at him. Mike Pompeo.

He's insufferable. I just love how much he's disappeared. Yeah, he's gone. Yet another proof point that sucking up to Trump does not save you the humiliation that always comes at the end of it. But somehow Graham is just like a barnacle on the ass of like whatever person he thinks is in charge of John McCain for decades, now Donald Trump. Now he seems to have real influence. I mean, it's just terrible. So I don't know.

We're not going to talk to that guy or take him seriously. But please become a friend of the pod subscriber. Also just subscribe to Pod Save the World on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast because it helps the show grow and it helps us displace all the propaganda that's floating around on the internet about this terrible war. All right, Ben. So we're now 11 days into this regime change war with Iran. The goals and the broader strategy are like somehow less clear, I think, now than when they started. We'll do a broader update in a minute on like major development since our last recording. But we just wanted to like recap this, this head spinning messaging shift from the White House this week.

So the quick version is, at the end of last week and over the weekend, Trump was suggesting, like, really maximalist goals for the war. He posted a message on truth social where he said, quote, there will be no deal with Iran except unconditional surrender. That freaked out the oil markets, understandably, to the point where on Sunday night, you saw the price of oil hitting above $120 a barrel, just like exploding. So it seems like Trump freaked out. The Wall Street Journal reported that his advisors were telling him, like, find an off ramp. This is going to kill us in the midterms. So he made this call to CBS news while markets were still open. The U.S. stock market was still open.

And basically it was like, oh, yeah, the war's about to be over. Everything's going to be fine. And that seems to have worked in the near term. Remember, because the stock market has this taco phrase, which is Trump always chickens out. So it folded into that. But once the markets closed, the messaging changed again. We had Trump, like, talking to Republicans at this retreat. We had him doing a press conference.

And then Pete Hegseth was out this morning, Tuesday morning, doing another press conference. And this is a super cut. that our team put together of Trump and Heg Seth's messaging from Saturday through Tuesday that I think kind of gets at the incoherence. Let's watch. We're winning the war by a lot. We've decimated their whole evil empire. It'll continue, I'm sure, for a little while. We took a little excursion because we felt we had to do that to get rid of some evil.

And I think you'll see it's going to be a short-term excursion. We've already won in many ways, but we haven't won enough. You've said the war is, quote, very complete, but your defense secretary says this is just the beginning. So which is it? And how long should Americans be? Well, I think we could say it, we could call it a tremendous success right now. As we leave here, I could call it. Or we could go further. And we're going to go further. You promised the Iranian people you would help them.

But it sounds like you're willing to end this fight after your military objectives have wrapped up. Isn't that a betrayal? Will I help them? I'd like to. If they can behave. but they've been very menacing. Today will be, yet again, our most intense day of strikes inside Iran.

The most fighters, the most bombers, the most strikes. I see in the media banners that say, you know, war expanding or war spread. It's actually the opposite. It's actually quite contained. It's so, again, I think excellent super cut there. So let's just like, let's just take on this idea. First of all, quite a message to the Iranian people. Like, if you can behave, maybe I'll consider supporting you.

What is that? I mean, this idea that the war has been a success. First of all, the nuclear material has not been secured. We'll get into what that would entail in a bit, but it's 900 pounds of highly enriched uranium sit in Iran. The ballistic missiles are diminished, but not gone, right? The U.S. and Israel are not saying they've gotten all their stockpiles. Before the war, Iran was on the cusp of a leadership transition, but by killing the 86-year-old Ayatollah before he could regime change himself. We were so tough. We killed an 86-year-old man about to die. Now we installed his much younger son, so that's great. And we might have taken out Iran's Navy, but there are some reports we'll get into in a minute that they're mining the Strait of Hormuz as we speak. It really took out the people who are 1,000 miles away who were defenseless with no weapons and killed them without saving them.

Yeah, we should talk about that. Because, right, there was an Iranian ship in the Indian Ocean that I believe was unarmed that had been invited as part of like a parade of military assets that we sank, which is probably a war crime. Ben, is the war over? Is it just beginning? Like, what's happening?

Trump talks about a war literally like it's a football game. You know, like, we got a big lead in the second quarter. You know, we're winning. And we can call the end of the game whenever we want. And I think what those clips confirm, I mean, there are a number of things. The first thing is that he literally started this war with no idea what its objective was or what it was going to lead to or how it was going to end. I mean, because he himself never defined it.

And we talked about that, but he essentially came out, made it sound like regime change. Iranian people rise up, you know, the language of regime change, the language of unconditional surrender. He, I, B.B. Netanyahu, Lindsay Graham, whatever small number of people convinced him to do this, clearly made him think that this was going to be very easy, that the regime was about to collapse. Because by the way, that's the kind of arguments they've been making for years. Like, if only you bomb them, this will be easy and they'll all collapse. I actually think Bibi Nain Niao knew full well that this wouldn't happen. Oh, yeah. Bibi Nanyahu knew full well that this would not be quick and easy and simple.

And frankly, because he wants to destroy Iran and have it be a violent, chaotic place. That's fine with him. But Trump cannot say what he talks about winning and, you know, we're achieving our objectives, but he doesn't say what they are. Look, what our military objectives are. I heard him say in the club, you know, we're achieving our military objectives. well, what are the military objectives? Because we're not achieving any clearly defined objective

that you or I could understand. And he's got his finger in the wind here. And it is just appalling, and we should say it's appalling, that he seems to care the most about the markets, you know, not the human beings who are being destroyed, not the geopolitical consequences to the United States, US service members dying, Iranian civilians dying, Gulf state security being completely punctured,

you know, instability that could be unleashed for years to come. He cares about like the price of gas tomorrow and the stock market because that's the only kind of metric that he knows how to pay attention to. That's appalling. It is absolutely appalling and we should not get accustomed to the fact that he just lies to us relentlessly about war. Like he is no different than Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong-un.

I think we as Americans, even when we don't like our president, tend to think of him as a, like a bad, a really bad version of a bad U.S. president, you know, so like we've had presidents live at wars before, you know, pick, take your pick, LBJ, Nixon, whomever. He's in a whole other category of he'll just make stuff up out of whole cloth, you know. I don't trust anything he's saying.

Not a word. And we probably get more, not what he said, but the girls' school, those types of things. Oh, yeah, we have another clip of that. Yeah. Well, so. Show you that. Yeah, unfortunately.

So then there's that. And then the last thing I want to say about Heggseth is, again, to take a historic analogy, remember the body count, you know, in Vietnam? The only way that we could kind of try to quantify the success was like the number of people he killed. He's taken this to the level of, like, the number of bombing that we do every day is somehow a measure of our success. or that that is an insane way to talk. Today is going to be even more bombing. You know, okay, what are we bombing?

Why are we bombing it? Where is this going? Like, he can't answer those questions. And he just goes out there and brags about how many bombs were dropping and missiles were firing. We don't know what the target set is. We don't know what we're degrading to what end. He certainly doesn't seem to know.

And he's the Secretary of Defense. And he does it in this like a. annoying cat-in-a-hat rhyme scheme, which is really great. Yeah. Yeah. And so, like, what you have is a kind of clueless U.S. government that has no idea why it's doing this other than maybe Israel was going to do it and we had to come in or what I just don't know what we're doing. Why now?

And we can go through, like, they can blow up some more nuclear material. The Iranians will regenerate it because they know how to do that. They can blow up a bunch of ballistic missiles. The Iranians will regenerate their body. ballistic missile program. They've killed the Supreme Leader, now the younger Supreme Leader. Like this, this is making everything worse. It's not making anything

better. And it's creating all these risks, you know, some which we'll get in here. And they don't even know why they're doing it. Yeah, there's a big picture strategy piece missing here. So we're going to go deeper on the Supreme Leader in a second, the

ground operation, how Democrats should respond, and then the latest on Lebanon. But just some of like quick kind of news updates in the last week, Ben. So in terms of the casualty count for the broader region so far, these are from official government sources. So for the U.S., it's seven U.S. service members have been killed, but today we learned that 140 have been wounded, including eight who are seriously wounded. So that is new information. Iran says 1,255 people have been killed and 12,000 have been injured. Obviously, that number is probably growing as we speak. Israel says 12 killed over 1900 injured.

Lebanon says 486 killed, over a thousand injured. UAE's death toll is six. Kuwait reports six dead as well, and Bahrain reports one. And then on the sort of oil front that Trump seems to primarily care about, as we're recording, oil is back down to about $86 per barrel. But the Strait of Hormuz is still effectively closed. And there are reports right before we started recording that U.S. intelligence is either starting to see indications that Iran is taking steps to deploy mines in the Strait of Hormoons

or CNN went even further and said that Iran has begun laying mines. They said it was a couple dozen in recent days. So after those reports, Trump posted something on true social saying that, quote, we have no reports, end quote, of Iran mining the straight, but that if Iran did do it, he wants them removed or else there will be a major military response, which as far as I can tell, we're already doing. Yeah, so that clears things up. But if the straight is mined, it would be a disaster for shipping.

And if shipping is shut down in the Strait of Hamos, the oil producers in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iraq, they can't ship their petroleum products out. They will have to either further cut production or fully stop production in ways that could permanently impact supply. So, like, watch this space, as people say. And also, like, congrats Vladimir Putin. You're now getting in a bunch of more revenue because the price of oil just went way up. So first of all, we heard in that clip, Hexas, say this war is contained. and getting smaller, even though the bombing is getting bigger. There are 700,000 displaced people in Lebanon because of this war.

Like, the violence being unleashed in Lebanon would normally shock of the conscience, the front page news. I'm sure the reason Israel is doing it is because they know that the tensions on Iran. But the war is in Lebanon. It's in every Gulf state. They're firing missiles in Turkey. Like, this war is not contained. No.

It's a further thing you can change. And part of what is so frustrating is that the people, those of us who've been warning against this type of war with Iran for 15 years, all of these things were very predictable. These are the things that were going to happen. And they seem caught off guard that they're happening. And it is, it's horrible that we should just pause for the people of Lebanon that there's a normalization and a routinization of, oh, Beirut's being bombed again for the umpteenth time, right? then if you get to the Straits of Formuz, again, any Iranian wargame scenario knew that the extreme version of what the Iranians could do is mine the strait.

Because, you know, if they threaten the Straits of Formoos, even if they blow up a tanker, you know, it has a huge impact for a period of time. But then kind of once the hostilities seem like they have diminished, that traffic begins. It takes months and months and months to demine the Straits of Formoos. And so if you are disrupting or halting the traffic of 20% of the world's energy, the oil and gas coming out of the Straits of Hormuz, the economic consequences of that could be absolutely catastrophic and go far beyond high oil prices and gas prices. It could be a seismic shock to the global economy. Again, very predictable. I'm not sure why Trump is surprised by that. And he has no strategy to deal with it other than to bomb them more.

That is the logic of escalation, of a regime change war. Oh, I'm not able to get you to do what I want by bombing you. So I'm just going to keep bombing you more, which is going to make you want to do more to hurt me, i. You know, keep mining the Straits of Hormor's, keep shooting at the Gulf states. And this is the other crazy thing I see in how Trump talks about this. He thinks he controls the timeline. He doesn't.

No. He can like stop bombing in two weeks. The Iranians could still mine the Straits of Hormuz. They're not going anywhere. They could still launch supercell attacks. They don't give a shit about Trump's timeline. the Israelis certainly don't seem to care. And so this idea that he's in control of events is such a fiction.

Like he has taken a war to, like this is not the assassin of Soleimani where you can calibrate or even the 12-day war. We, by going for regime change, by killing the Supreme Leader, who's also the religious leader of Shia Islam, whatever you think of the guy and he was a creep. During Ramadan. Yeah. Like the idea that you can like neatly say this is a, you know, we had a 12-day war and it's a nice. 19-day war this time. No, it's one big war. This is the same war as the 12-day war, too, by the way. Like, you don't have multiple wars with the same country within a year and get to call them different wars because you want to have shorter timelines. We are at war with Iran on an open-ended basis,

even if we stop bombing in a couple weeks. Yeah, this is not terrorists where you can turn it off. Speaking of oil, I mean, over the weekend, the Israelis bombed 30 Iranian oil depots. I'm sure folks saw these images. There were massive fires right into Iran. It created these apocalyptic scenes of these massive black clouds, like it was dark during the day. And then you had literally had oil raining down on an entire city of 10 million people that could create health problems for generations. The Trump administration leaked to Axios that they were mad about these strikes, that the Israelis did this. But like, it's not really clear to me if they were mad because this is oil that will be needed by the Iranian people or if Trump was just mad that it spooked

to the oil markets. The other kind of major escalatory development from over the weekend, Ben, was the targeting of desalination plants. So Iran accused the U.S. of hitting one of their water desalination plants. So in return, they targeted a desalination plant in Bahrain. And if that kind of like escalatory tit for tech continues, it could have devastating consequences. Because Bahrain is basically totally dependent on desalination for its freshwater.

I think Israel gets 80% of its water from desalination. Quake gets 90% of its supply. So, I mean, that's people just like literally not being able to drink. They'll die. on Monday, as we mentioned, NATO defenses shot down a second missile from Iran over Turkey. U.S. diplomats were pulled from a consular facility in southern Turkey, so back to this thing being contained. And then finally, Ben, there's some data out today indicating that the UAE's missile defense systems might be degrading. On March 10th, 25 percent of Iran's drones made it through the UAE's missile defense systems.

The previous high was 10 percent on March 3rd. So it's like it's not clear if the Iranians are learning or, if the UAE is running out of missiles or if the radar is being gone or something's impacting it. There's also reports today that the U.S. is taking missile defense systems from Asia and redeploying them to the Middle East. So again, so much for dealing with the threat from China. Well, first of all, on the oil strikes, beyond the horrific scenes and potential horrific human cost of those strikes, what does that have to do with degrading the ballistic missiles? What does it have to do with degrading the nuclear program? Don't tell me that this is about

degrading Iranian capabilities. Israel is trying to destroy Iran. They're trying to destroy the Iranian regime. But they're also just, I mean, what is that? And so they're going to try to spin their victory as, you know, we took out this many ballistic missile sites. Well, then why are you bombing desalination plants? Why are you bombing energy infrastructure, right?

The U.S. is doing that, too, with the desalination plants. By the way, on the oil piece, you mentioned this earlier, but it bears repeating. And I have a sub-stack out on this, if you want to check out my sub-stack. Putin wins because energy prices are higher and Russia benefits from that. Putin wins because Trump even acknowledges and gave India a waiver to buy more Russian oil because they know that they can't get the energy from the Middle East. In the long run, Putin wins if other countries, including in Europe potentially, are like, well, we can't rely on oil and gas from the Middle East, so maybe we have to go back to buying Russian.

By the way, these are all these countries that shifted from Russian oil and gas to Qatar. Yeah, yeah. Now the Qatar shut down. And by the way, that takes a while to turn back on if you shut it down. This is not like a 12-day war kind of situation. Putin wins, by the way, because Ukraine has to send anti-dron technology and personnel down to the Middle East, which they're doing to help protect the Gulf states against Iranian drones. Like Putin is such a big winner of this war that he could have designed it in a laboratory. Now, he's, of course, he's giving targeting to the reports are that he's giving targeting to the Iranians to...

Steve Wickoff says that he's not and that we take them at their word. Is there more credulous idiot on the planet than that guy? No. You know, and so, like, the oil piece is a sign that this is not just about ballistic missiles. It's also a huge boon to Putin. The desalination thing is existential to the Gulf. It's going to accelerate them thinking that the U.S. cannot be relied on because they put our security in existential. risk. Again, like, even if he calls the end to the war tomorrow, the geopolitical cost of potentially

endangering the whole global economy for an insane war, endangering the security of the Gulf states, they're going to look for their own nuclear weapons, they're going to look for their own security guarantee. Like, across the board, they just so comprehensively didn't think through the consequences of this. Again, I can see it might serve Israel's interest to unleash this kind of violence and chaos in Iran, eliminated any potential competitor, have regional hegemony. By the way, the UAE, which had been Israel's biggest partner in that effort through the Abram Accords, is clearly being targeted more than the Gulf States by Iran for that. So the UAE didn't get security from the Abram Accords. They got... Or from our bases. Yeah, or from our bases.

And so this is going to reverberate for many years to come if it ended today, you know. And I think that is what is not being told to the American people by their political leaders sufficiently that this has already been like a catastrophic decision by Trump. Yeah, and like Trump might say, well, you know, we've blown up the entire Iranian Navy, and maybe that's the case. But like you don't need the naval ship to... Was that causing you a problem? I was really worried.

Was the Iranian Navy causing you a problem? I live in L.A. Was the Iranian Navy going to come invade California? No, they were not. And also, but like getting rid of the Iranian Navy doesn't mean they can't mind the straight over moves. You do that with small boats. These little boats can carry like two to three mines. The Iranians are estimated to have a...

a stockpile of between 2,000 and 6,000 naval mines, which they bought from the Russians and the Chinese, by the way. And a friend of ours is an expert in this stuff pointed out that even if they have decided to do this, like whether or not they're successful is a pretty clear indication that they are all in on this war and that they are not seeking peace. And we'll talk about the new Supreme Court. Well, and just real quick, because the reason that they wouldn't do it, right, is because they sell their energy through the history, so Firmuz.

but if Israel is bombing their oil facilities, they can't sell it anyway. So in a way, you're lowering the price tag for them to sabotage the straight because they're just fucking over the Gulf states and not themselves because their shit is getting blown up anyway. Yes. Positive World is brought to you by Incogni. Have you ever wondered how a random company you've never heard of got your personal cell phone number? Yes. It's because data brokers are constantly collecting and selling our details behind the scenes. It's invasive and honestly, it is exhausting to manage.

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Remember, early in the war, Israel killed the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali-Hamene in an irstrike. That was with U.S. intelligence to help that. Hamene, Ali-Hamane was 86 years old. He was about to regime change himself or be regime changed by nature. But now, thanks to Trump, Intent Yahoo, his son, a younger, reportedly even more hardline figure is now in charge. This selection reportedly went against Ali Hamine's written will and desire because he did not want Iran to become a dynastic country again. Like that was part of what the 1979 revolution was all about.

But 56-year-old Mustafa Hamini was the IRC's choice to lead Iran. because that's the best way to give the middle finger to Trump and Netanyahu and, like, the military goons like the Mustaba. So here we are. We don't know much about Mushtaba Kamenei. He's, like, been a behind-the-scenes player in Iranian politics. A lot of Iranians have remarked that they've never heard him speak in public. He doesn't have much of a public profile.

But he does seem to have operated as kind of like a chief of staff, maybe for his dad. Maybe he's like a liaison between his father's office at the military and the intelligence leaders. So we know that they like him. We know that like the IRGC goons reportedly wanted Mushtaba to be selected. He doesn't have all the religious credentials that you were supposed to have for that job. But now he's in charge. He's the spiritual leader of the country.

He's the commander-in-chief. And he's the final decider of all political decisions. And again, like time will tell. But it seems like he won't want to make nice with the U.S. and Israel since so far in this war, the U.S. and Israel have killed his father, his wife, his mother, and his son. So that doesn't seem like someone who will want to. sue for peace. Of course, he may not last long in the job. The Israelis already try to kill him, according to news reports. The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump would be cool with killing him.

But for now at least, he's the guy. Ben, thoughts on this new Supreme Leader of Iran. I think what I would say to people who sincerely want a better future for the Iranian people, a lot of people in the diaspora, other people, is that you would have had a better leadership transition if we had not bombed and killed the Supreme Leader. that regime was beginning to change not because it wanted to it did not want to but you saw again the women life freedom movement it made the it forced some societal changes right people were beginning uh women were beginning to appear in public uncovered there was a sense of like prying something open that was closed if in a if in the normal course of events which would not have been much longer homene had died of natural causes the ability to force his son on the country would have been, I think, much more difficult. Yeah, there'd be protests. There'd be mass protests. There would be competing people. There'd be processes that would have been under huge pressure because of the rally around the flag that happens, particularly

among the IRGC and the hardliners in the country, when they're under attack, you have the most hardline possible succession, because that's what this is. And it just puts the lie to the idea that bombing a country and assassinating its leader is a way to bring democracy to the country. No, it's a way to ensure that the people with the most guns in the country are the ones who choose the successor. Now, he may not last. He may be killed. But I think what we learn is, if he's killed, it'll be another IRGC-backed person because they're the only people with power left. When you are under assault like this, the people with power in the country are the people who are armed. And the people who are armed are the IRGC.

and we can keep killing one after another. I just think this is why, even in times when there were no laws of war, we didn't assassinate the leaders of countries. Again, that doesn't mean you like Haminae, but we don't just get to go and choose that we assassinate the leaders of places we don't like, in part because it ushers in a very dangerous new world

where that may become normal and suddenly you have more and more assassinations. Trump is reportedly very angry about the Iranians, plotting to assassinate him. Well, I mean, yeah. The other piece of this. They're going to be trying to kill a U.S. president for a long time, including after Donald Trump's president.

And very senior generals and people will work to this. They will do that. They will be, this is why you don't end the war in 12 days. Like, they might try to assassinate the next U.S. president because of what Donald Trump did. But the reality is that we've made this situation internal to Iran worse by bombing and killing them, but also by empowering. the absolute most hardline people in the country.

So that part's going good. The other thing that I imagine, like the actual national security experts, both in the U.S. and the Israeli government, are probably the most worried about, is this 900 pounds of highly enriched uranium that is, we think is buried under a mountain at one or more sites, but we don't really know. And securing those materials will almost certainly require a sending in troops to get them. That's why I suspect Trump has. repeatedly refused to rule out putting boots on the ground.

And Iran, here's a couple examples of him kind of dancing around this. What are the circumstances where you'd send it ground troops? How are you thinking about that? I don't even want to talk about it. I mean, I don't think it's an appropriate question. You know, I'm not going to answer it. Could there be possibly for a very good reason? I'd have to be very good reason.

And I would say if we ever did that, they would be so decimated that they would be able to fight at the ground level. Do you need ground troops to secure the enriched uranium at the nuclear sites? We'll find out about that. We haven't talked about it, but it was a total obliteration. They haven't been able to get to it. And at some point, maybe we will. You know, that would be a great thing, but we haven't gone after it.

But, you know, something we could do later on. We wouldn't do it now. Maybe we'd do it later. Okay, so let's dig into what this kind of operation would look like. because I got very triggered over the weekend then. I was reading this Axios report that said the White House doesn't view a mission to secure Iran's nuclear materials as boots on the ground or an invasion, which is just like insane on every level.

Are they going to be wearing socks and not boots? Yes. We're just torturing the English language. So this would be a major military operation that by any definition is men, boots on the ground and an invasion. So there's been some good reporting on what this operation would look like. A lot of these plans existed when we were in government. We talked to experts about them.

So we got a good window into this one. So long story short, like you were talking about sending hundreds of troops into Iran. You would need a specialized team to find secure and store the nuclear materials. That might be like a highly trained Delta Force team or a Navy SEAL team. And then on top of that, the Pentagon would almost certainly send troops to secure a big perimeter around the sites where the guys are digging up this shit. You might have to send in like earth moving equipment and stuff, right, like specialized equipment. And that's why a lot of people's heads perked up last week when the Washington Post reported that the 82nd Airborne was given a change in its planning seemingly to be more ready to deploy because they do this kind of stuff like they go in behind enemy lines. They see airports.

They see strategic areas. The Pentagon would also need to figure out how to get those materials out of Iran, hundreds of miles. That would either be by air or ground. You would need like missile defense, drone defense during the operation throughout. And so this would not be a small operation by any stretch of the imagination. nation. I just like don't get why a news outlet would repeat this absurd spin that it wouldn't be boots on the ground. And then finally, Ben, earlier today, Tuesday, Richard Blumenthal, Senator Richard Blumenthal came out of an Iran briefing and said, quote, we seem to be on a path

toward deploying American troops on the ground in Iran. He also added that Russia seems to be aiding our enemy, so he seems to be confirming that, even though Steve Wickoff doesn't think that's the case. But he takes Putin at his word. Yeah, he takes Putin as a word. He also said China might be aiding them too. So I guess we'll find out. But like, what do you think the odds are that there is this kind of like H-EU-focused ground invasion? And like, how is leaving this material in Iran not like a red line for Netanyahu? This seems to be the thing he cares about most over the last, what, three decades. There's something surreal about, you know, the fact that Trump has to simultaneously affirm his lie that he obliterated the Iran nuclear program

while leaving open the door to the fact that we may have to do an incredibly complex and risky operation to actually clean up the fact that we didn't obliterate the Iran nuclear program because as many of us have been saying for 15 years, you can't bomb a nuclear program and obliterate. It's physically impossible.

So that just shows you the kind of danger of having someone who's this dishonest making decisions because you can't really explain anything because he's trying to keep these competing narratives from bumping into each other. Look, yeah, we've been there, we've studied this, we've followed this, because you can't bomb all of the nuclear program away, there has always been this idea that if you were truly going to try to take out as much of the Iranian nuclear program as possible, by the way, you can't eliminate it entirely, they know how to do the nuclear fuel cycle.

So you can't bomb the knowledge that exists inside of Iran how to do this. But if you were to do this, you would need a very complex special forces operation with close air support and lots of personnel. I will tell you this, Tommy, too, that in some of the kind of wargaming on this, and I'll say, like, even out of government, right? So this is not anything sensitive. You might want the element of surprise. You know, like, pop up, here's the team to get season materials. This is the most telegraph punch, you know, possible. So I imagine that that will make it harder, that wherever this is buried and whatever, you know, things that they put in place to try to protect against this operation, doesn't mean you couldn't do it, but it'd just be incredibly risky.

And whether it's Israeli commandos or U.S. Commandos and Special Forces, joint U.S. Israeli military operation, it's complex, it's risky. It introduces ground forces into Iran. Even if you get some of these materials, it still doesn't eliminate the nuclear program. because again, they know how to do this. There are people inside of Iran, like not even Israel and the U.S. can kill that fast who know how to do this. Just sets them back a couple years.

It sets them back, and we've told them that the only way you could ever survive is get a nuclear weapon. So I guarantee you, if we seize this, whatever we do, they're still going to be trying to build a nuclear weapon there,

you know, on the back end of it. Yep. So here we are. The other kind of like invasion option that I think people are talking about and worried about is the U.S. or Israel seizing a place called Karg Island, which is this little island. It's about 25 kilometers off the coast of Iran,

which is a key transit point for the export of about 90 or 95 percent of Iran's oil. So that would be a way for the U.S. or Israel to essentially take control of Iran's oil industry. It would again be very risky. You would be shot at. There's troops there. It would be a big, big deal. But that's the thing. I think nerds will tell you that like, CENTCOM has had that plan on the shelf for a long time. There's probably people in there who want to do it. But it's amazing. And we're back in the 19th century here. This is where we're at. I saw some people on Fox who'd never heard of Carg Island a week ago.

We're like, oh, we're going to get the island and get the oil. Like, we're back in the empire business. By the way, that would be the biggest terrorist target in the world if we were like seized some island and try to like run the Iranian oil industry from there. Like, this is how we got an Islamic Republic of Iran in the first place. Yep. Because we overthrew a democratically elected leader of Iran in 1953 because that leader was nationalizing the U.S. Iranian oral resources. And lo and behold, you know, within 25 years, we get the Islamic Republic. So the reason we've had an Islamic Republic in the first place is because we tried to do this.

Disagree, then. We are always the victims in these stories. You can't, you can't ever make us the protagonist. The one, like, little bit of good news is that last week, there were all these reports that the U.S. was arming Kurdish militia forces, especially in Iraq and encouraging them to go into Iran and try to topple the government. Trump now says he doesn't want the Kurds to go into Iran. Hopefully that's true when he's being honest, but like, I guess put a pin in that one. I always say about that is it seems pretty clear to me that at least the Iraqi Kurds said no, because they were saying it very publicly. Yeah, there's one of them was on. They were raising their hands, you know, the people that are in the Kurdistan regional government

in Iraq were like, we don't want any part of this war. So I don't necessarily give Trump credit for that. I actually think the Iraqi Kurds would be like, this would be an insane thing for us to do. Yeah, I saw one of them was interviewed on Fox News and was just like, this is a really bad idea. I don't think this is worth doing. Also, I just, one last thing, Ben, I mean, I just think it's very clear. There's been a bunch of really good reporting now about the nuclear negotiations that took place between the Trump administration and the Iranians, specifically what Wickev and Kushner were doing.

And it's just so clear to me now that Jared and Steve Wickev, like fundamentally didn't understand the subject matter, obviously, right? They're not nuclear experts. They're not scientists. They're not PhDs. But there was a transcript of a call that those two bozos did for. for press. And like, you can just tell, like, they keep misstating the name of the IAEA. Like, they're getting basic facts wrong. And like, maybe, look, maybe Trump never wanted to cut a deal

and there was always going to be a war. But those idiots definitely didn't make it better. And it's kind of terrifying to think that they're handling Gaza negotiations, Iran negotiations, and Ukraine. Like, no shit that nothing's going well. There are two scenarios. One is that the entire diplomatic effort, both, last summer and this time were a facade, a deception operation so that we could bomb Iran, that is outrageous and dangerous thing to do because no one will ever trust U.S. diplomacy again if it's just meant to be a deception. If they were sincerely negotiating, we make fun of these people.

We have a laugh about them, particularly Jared, because he's a moron who was born with a winning lottery ticket and thinks that he like earned all that money. But the reality is sending two complete idiots into the most sensitive negotiations in the world over and over and over again is not just embarrassing. It is terrible for U.S. interests. Like an Americans sometimes make this mistake, particularly right-wing Americans, they think other people are stupid, you know, or they're particularly brown people like the Iranians. These are very smart, sophisticated people, right? The Russians, These are the Russians are the toughest negotiators in the world, you know. They are eating these people for lunch every day in every negotiation.

The Russians are. I mean, such that Steve Wickoff is reporting propaganda that Putin is somehow not doing things that he's clearly doing, right? Or the Iranians aren't going to figure out that these guys aren't serious, and so it's not worth coming back in the talks of them. Trump would clearly like to be able to say we're back in the talks of Iran because he's dangled it a couple of times and the Iranians keep shooting it down. So this is, this is, this Jared Whitkoff. show is an abomination from a corruption standpoint, but from a pure competence standpoint, as well. Yes. And speaking of U.S. credibility, Ben, so it's just increasingly clear, as you've mentioned, that this air strike on an Iranian school full of young schoolgirls that killed 168 children

and 14 teachers was an airstrike conducted by the United States military. Iranian state media release footage that has been confirmed by major news organizations as authentic. It shows a U.S. Tomahawk missile hitting a naval base that is directly adjacent to this girl school. There have also been a number of news reports that the Pentagon like has been doing internal investigations. They believe they were responsible for this strike. But Trump, of course, is refusing to take responsibility. He is instead trying to lie and spin his way through this one.

So here's a couple examples of his shifting story on this. Did the United States bomb a girls elementary school in southern Iran on the first day of the war and kill 175 people? based on what I've seen, that was done by Iran. Is that true, Mr. Hexon? It was Iran who did that? We're certainly investigating. Still investigating. But the only side that targets, the civilians, is Iran.

The Tomahawk missile likely destroyed that Iranian girl school. So will the Americans, will the U.S. accept any responsibility? Well, I haven't seen it. And I will say that the Tomahawk, which is one of the most powerful weapons around, is used by, you know, is sold. and used by other countries, you know that. And whether it's Iran, who also has some tomahawks, they wish they had more.

You just suggested that Iran somehow got its hands on a tomahawk and bombed its own elementary school on the first day of the war. But you're the only person in your government saying this. Even your defense secretary wouldn't say that when he was asked, standing over your shoulder on your plane on Saturday. Why are you the only person saying this? Because I just don't know enough about it. So, like, we don't sell Iran tomahawk missiles.

That's crazy. Like, my understanding is that only the U.S., the U.S., the U.K. and Australia currently have Tomahawks deployed, unless the Iranians broke into a British submarine, stole a Tomahawk, and then dropped it on their own IRGC naval base slash girls school. Like, this story is bullshit. So Trump, like, he clearly thinks he could deflect and, like, wait for this story to go away, Ben. But, like, when you combine those lies with Pete Hegzath bragging about getting rid of, like, woke rules of engagement. Yeah. It sends, it's hard to like think of a way to make the U.S. military look worse than that. And all of us.

You and I paid for that bomb that killed those girls, right? We American taxpayers paid for this. Those girls are dead today because of decisions that Donald Trump made and because of the way in which, you know, we spend our tax dollars. And look, just to take a couple of these pieces, the investigations that are very thorough that are out there that this is our missile. I just point out a couple of things. The idea that these are the children of IRGC people that went to the school. Right. They were to kill their own kids.

The idea that they got this conspiracy theory that is all over the Internet. The reason we have to address this is because this is all over the Internet. I assume the Israelis are supercharges. Yeah, the bots are out there with this. I had Iranian woman come up to me in L.A. I was like hanging out with Lizette. Lovely woman. Couldn't have been nicer, but it was like spouting, like, insane, made-up propaganda about the war and be like, tell everyone that, you know, know, Iranians like the war.

I'm like, well, not the one's getting bombed. And she was like, well, the IRGC is the one who bombed that school. I was like, man, that's not what happened. It was 100% us. If you think that, I feel sorry for you because you're unwilling to look like truth in the eye. And here's the other thing. We gave a lot of shit to the Biden administration during the Gaza war for defending the IDF, right? And every time there was some horrific incident in Gaza, which is very regular,

member was always this is being investigated or this was the Hamas Pentagon you know every hospital had the Hamas Pentagon under it there's there there's a way in which we are becoming like that like the Trump response to this and even the Hegset response which weird the Hexat is actually not going as far as Trump he's more reasonable than because the US military I believe there are still some people with some honor I mean this I'm not trying to I'm saying this as a compliment who have some honor in that institution who are like we do not lie about our mistakes. Most of the military is horrified that they did this.

This was a massive intelligence fuck up. And I'm sure that people are like just devastated. Devastated. But this is why you don't do what Biden and Trump both have done with the IDF, which is go along with this bullshit that every single child who's killed is like a Hamas terrorist or every single hospital that's blown up is a secret target, you know, or secret Hamas command center. or every single one that you can't possibly defend, you just say, we're investigating it, but we never get you the results of the investigation. And oh, by the way, it's Hamas's fault. We are now doing that about Iran.

We're doing the same language. We're investigating it. We'll get back to you. But maybe they did it. They're the only ones who kill civilians. Not us. Like, we cannot become and should not become that kind of country, but I fear that with Trump as president,

like that's where we're at. But that is a dangerous, dangerous, dangerous place to be. Not alone because of what we saw already with these. girls, which the whole war is not worth it. I'd rather have those kids back than all the missile launchers that we've blown up. Like, that's why we have to be an anti-war party in this country, because this stuff can't happen. Let's talk more about that. Let's talk about how our tax dollars should be spent in the Democratic Party, because as listeners probably know, like last week, the House of Representatives voted down a bill to stop the war in Iran. Not Trump would have vetoed it,

but it was important symbolically. Four Democrats voted in favor of a allowing Trump and Pete Hexeth to continue this regime-change war of choice in Iran, which is just insane to me. But Politico reported that the next step in Congress will be the administration coming back to them to request an estimated $50 billion in additional funding for the war. That's on top of the nearly $1 trillion Pentagon budget for 2026. Over the weekend, CNN's Jake Tapper asked Senator Chris Murphy about this request. Let's play that exchange and then talk about it. The administration is reportedly weighing Congress to approve an additional $50 billion in funding for these operations. You have said you're a hell no, not just a no, on funding the war.

We have seen this movie before. We know that that vote will be cast as, especially if you run for higher office, you voting against the troops. Oh, come on. I mean, the American people don't want this war. They don't want this war. They have seen what happens when American troops go into places like Iraq. places like Afghanistan. Ultimately, we get a lot of people killed.

We waste a lot of dollars. The one thing the American people are clear about is that they do not want the United States dragged into another long-term war in the Middle East. If you support the troops, then you should be voting against funding this war so that we get our troops out of harm's way. Virtually nothing good happened from sending thousands of Americans

to die inside Iraq in the 2000s. And if we don't learn that lesson, then shame on every single one of us. It's a good answer by Murphy there. So I teed off on this on POTS America on Monday, so I'll be quick. But I want to make sure that every Democrat listening understands that you cannot oppose the war and then vote for funding. That is not a position that exists in the real world. That's a thing people in Washington convince themselves is rational and it's actually incoherent. Also, I just want them to understand that opposing funding is the right thing to do strategically, morally, and politically. This is not 2004. Jake is wrong. We're not going to watch. the same movie like the Pentagon doesn't need more money to sustain operations they have a trillion dollars there are not guys sitting in Fallujah waiting to get an MRAP that might not show up if you vote against the 77 billion or whatever the hell the funding request was in in 2004 like trump could end this war tomorrow he has basically declared victory a couple times suggested it might be over

tomorrow and I also voters will reward you if you say let's not spend 50 billion more bombing girls schools in Iran, let's spend it on education, healthcare, literally anything else. That will be, like, the most popular thing you ever do as a lawmaker. Absolutely. And first of all, you're right. The Jake Tapper from 2002 doesn't need to, like, conduct that interview. I mean, we have, Barack Obama, the very first meeting I was in with him, the first time I met him was in 2007 when he decided to vote against the supplemental that funded the surge. And the argument that was cast at him was that he was voting against the troops. And lo and behold, if it wasn't for his opposite to the Iraq war, he never would have become president of the United States. This political

thinking is so outdated that it's astonishing to me that it still gets currency in the kind of media framing around these issues. I also want to say you covered the argument well about the obvious political point that people don't want to be spending this money, that this war is not popular. I also think that one of the things that drives people crazy by the Democratic Party is it seems like it's a party that is constantly got its finger in the wind and is trying to figure out like what it stands for, what it actually believes, what will be the most politically fruitful argument. Are we tough? Are we tough? Can I afford to piss off these donors?

Look, if you vote for the funding of this war, you should be primary. I don't want you in the Democratic Party. And I'm not trying to be, you know, obtuse or stubborn, but this is a threshold issue. Like, I would like to have a big tent on this party. I think there should be people with different ideas of how to get health care, different ideas of taxation. To me, this is not a left-center issue. This is a right and wrong issue. Morally, what do we stand for as Democrats?

If you as a Democrat can't say that I'm against a war and I'm not going to fund a war that is being launched by an authoritarian president illegally with no rational basis that has explained to the American people that has already unleashed these consequences, if you can't stand against that, you don't stand for a fucking thing. okay and everybody can see it how is anybody going to trust you to fight for their health care if you're too afraid to cast a vote that someone might call you weak or some donor might call you and complain so i'm sorry i got a little hot today i came in hot but this is you know i don't know what to say anymore it's it's an astounding lapse in judgment i think to trust donald trump and pete heggseth to lead a regime change war of choice with iran along with bivinette

and yaw and like like we didn't put it on the rundown today because it's just like uh The things to be mad about are endless. But Trump, like, wearing a hat to the dignified transfer ceremony, like, really bothered me because, like, I know you've been, like, I'm sure you've been to Dover. Like, I never went to Dover with President Obama, but I went to Walter Reed with President Obama in, like, 2000. So, like, 2009 or 2010, it was like me, Reggie, Matt Flavin and Obama, like, in Marine One on the way there.

And then, you know, like, I chilled out with the press while he went and met with wounded service members for, like, three, four hours, whatever it was. And then we all flew home together. And like my memory of flying there is talking and people like, it was fun, right? It was cool. And on the way back, it was like the heaviest situation I've ever been in. Like you could feel the weight of what Obama had just experienced on his shoulders and the devastation he'd seen and the families and the people's lives were just ruined.

And he didn't say a fucking word, nor did anybody else. And just like to see Trump kind of winging it out there, doing press events, goofing around. Like he's talking about the Iran war in front of the. like the Miami inter-Miamy soccer team, cracking jokes about the renovations at the White House. He's just like a fundamentally unsurious person who is not conducting this war for a serious strategic reason. It's all about his politics. It's all about Lindy Graham fluffing him 10 times a day and like doing whatever Netanyahu

tells me to do. And it's a fucking embarrassment. It's a vote no. Yeah. And to your point, I mean, the guy is showing up the dignified transfer of caskets of dead service members coming home because of decisions he's made. and he's wearing a USA hat that looks like the kind of thing

that you could buy like a gas station restop, right? Which, no offense against those. Those are great hats. I bought these hats there. But the point is that were afraid of being called weak? Right.

We're afraid of being called unpatriotic. Sad old man and a weird hat. We're afraid of like that we're against the troops. The guy against the troops is the one who's getting them killed for no reason. Exactly. And he was showing up in a fucking baseball cap

for a dignified transfer ceremony. Like this is not a hard argument to make. Very easy. I just couldn't agree more. Ben, speaking of our feckless Congress, as we did a minute ago. So November is going to be a huge election. It'll decide if Democrats are in control of the House, maybe we can take back the Senate or if Trump just maintains his iron grip on the trifecta, winning the House is going to be

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to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's Squarespace.com slash world. Let's end this around section by talking about, like, Hezbollah, Lebanon, and, you know, the fact that the country is once again getting hammered by the IDF. So the numbers are really grim, Ben, as you mentioned the top, like we're talking about nearly 500 people dead in Lebanon, and nearly 700,000 people have been displaced. So, you know, Hezbollah entered the conflict. It started firing rockets at Israel after the Supreme Leader was assassinated. The Israelis leapt on this opportunity to retaliate and just destroy them again. whatever was left to the 2024 ceasefire agreement is now just fully eviscerated.

And the IDF has both been conducting massive airstrikes in southern Lebanon and the parts of the suburbs of Beirut, but also the IDF ground forces have pushed into southern Lebanon. Last week, the French offered to like intervene and maybe support the Lebanese military. Manuel Macron like kind of jumped into the fray here. I think the Israelis basically told him to fuck off. I can't tell if anything came of that. You're not exactly showing a lot of strength on this Iran war in general. No, not much. I think my concern, Ben, though, if I were Lebanese official, like, beyond the immediate security and threat to people's lives and the humanitarian situation and humanitarian crisis that could develop, if this many people are displaced for this long, like, I would wonder if Israel is going to use this opportunity to just permanently capture parts of Lebanon while the world is kind of focused elsewhere.

I think that's what's happening. I mean, I think that they want to permanently occupy, if not end up annexing southern Lebanon. Some Israeli political leaders talk about that openly. They know that this is a chaotic and violent time in the region so they can kind of ratchet it up in Lebanon without getting as much scrutiny. They have not announced kind of what their endgame is in Lebanon other than just destroying things. And I think people have to realize that these people have been through hell in Lebanon. And, you know, 700,000 people being told to evacuate is, I mean, just think about that. Where are they supposed to go? And many of them are going to come back to homes that are destroyed. And we've so thoroughly normalized that level of destruction with the, you know, and this,

with this idea that it's somehow like about Hezbollah. I mean, this is so far beyond Hezbollah. This is like breaking Lebanon completely yet again. By the way, what always ends up happening, I'm not defending corrupt Lebanese politicians because there are plenty of those too. But like, they'll bomb Lebanon for, you know, however long they bomb it and destroy all this stuff and displace people. And then nine months in it'll be like, oh, the politics in Lebanon are so dysfunctional.

Like, what the hell are these people supposed to? do. Right. Yeah. That's like a city the size of Denver just being pushed out of their homes in this place. Yeah. I mean, it's staggering. I guess we'll just keep an eye on it. Like, I don't know. The world is just kind of asking. And then you'll get these people, you know, who will like be posting pictures from like 1984 of like women in bathing suits in Beirut and be like, this is what it was like before Hesbo or something. No, no, this is what it was like before the place got bombed, you know, however many times I've lost track of it. It's a nightmare. Okay, so a couple more things from us. So while the world is focused on Iran,

the U.S. military has been expanding its activities in South America. Specifically, the U.S. military is now conducting joint military operation against drug cartels in Ecuador. So this is on top of the boat strikes off the coast of Ecuador and in the Caribbean. The New York Times reported that U.S. Special Forces are, quote, advising and supporting Ecuadorian commandos who are hitting drug facilities. U.S. Southern Command, Ben, I don't know if you saw that they tweeted out this weird video. I saw that. The helicopter taking off, right?

And then it was like a drone feed of like U.S. troops getting into the helicopter. But the way they filmed it, it made it look like there was about to be an airstrike on our own helicopter. It was all very, very weird. As we've discussed on the show before, Ecuador went from being one of the safest countries in Latin America to becoming one of the most dangerous and becoming a major transit point for

cocaine coming out of Colombia and Peru, usually to Europe. There's also these Albanian gangs in Ecuador and there's sort of like facilitating those cocaine flows into Europe. in 2024 the president Daniel Naboa declared war on the gangs

and on the cartels that set in motion this huge crackdown in a wave of violence does not solve the problem but has led to a lot of deaths and now apparently involved the U.S. military

Ben, I was just you know reading about this sort of marveling and how little attention it's getting and then remembering back in 2018 when Trump said quote we more and more

are not wanting to be the policeman of the world. It feels like that's kind of. That's at the window. And again, another thing that we're doing with no public discussion, he clearly has this idea that there's this collection of right-wing leaders across Latin America. It's kind of his team. I think Christy Noem is now, like, isn't she the envoy to the... Envoy of the shields of the America or something. Absolutely made up. Curious if that actually happens. Yeah. If she gets a plane to go down Ecuador. But the reality is

this idea where the U.S. U.S. becomes like the... Corey down Ecuador? I mean, like Lewandowski would last long down to

Ecuador. Eric Prince could could probably put him to work. Yeah. See, Eric Prince, opposed the Iran

war? I think I saw him quoted. He went on banning, you know, and he opposed it. And part because this is the kind of

war he wants to fight. He's like, I want to be in Ecuador. I want to pay for this. But the reality is we just going to become the security force for every right-wing

autocrat in Latin America. What's the goal here? What's the end state? If we lose personnel down there, Americans are going to know why they're there. You had Ricardo on, like the way to deal with these drug cartels, first you have to go up their money because they're multi-billion dollar enterprises

and instead of skipping right ahead to like some military operation for ambiguous purposes. So yeah, we are on this kind of slippery slope to being the kind of military force for the shield of the Americas, you know, and I just, that's yet another thing. How much is this operation cost? Good question. Because they're not free, right? So yet another argument to make that that's not lowering prices. That's not. doing anything to solve problems in Americans actually. Because it's not even doing anything about the fentanyl problem, which is what Americans are most

concerned about. It's just buttressing some right-wing autocrat who tells Trump what he wants to hear. It's not great. Okay, let's end this by talking about the recent election in Nepal. So, this, ladies and gentlemen, is Nepal's next prime minister. Let's watch. I go hard like a blastist.

Akech shot fire is the closest on my wax mix. Get inside my seamen of the closet full of rap. This is I do hallucinate like a Baptist, like a Baptist. Jop. Jop. Jop.

Jop. Jop. Jop'i. And got the Kailish. They're saying they fly and got no miles. They're saying they fly in private. No Kylie's Jenner.

And got no hummer. Next time you show up you get beat like a drummer. Give all that pipe. Pipe like a plumber. I put you in trauma. I shoot like I'm gunner. I mean. Collab was all right.

I'm Donnie. I mean, Michael had a better time watching that. That guy's just in a list of trust show. Fucking finally. Okay, so that's a rapper. It's not bad. He's pretty good. I know he's laying down the beats too.

It's pretty good. That's Belendra Shah, a rapper, civil engineer, turned politician. People call him balin. He's the former, he's balin. He's balin out there. Also, I'm pretty sure Kirill has that same code. I don't know if Kirill's lying in here. Anyway, he's the former mayor of Kathmandu.

They're still counting ballots, but so far he's leading in what looks like a landslide election. This election is the result of these Gen Z-led protests from last year that brought down the former government. The protest kicked off. Remember, there's the social media ban that seemingly was just a cover to hide that the children of the elites were just like spending money in Paris and pissing away government money. But those protests exploded in size because of deep frustration about corruption and lack of economic opportunity. Because Nepal is a very young, highly educated population, but it also has a 21% youth unemployment rate. So there's a brain drain and a lot of people leaving to go work abroad.

19 people were killed during those initial protests last year because the government, violently cracked down on them, then 70 more on the unrest and chaos that followed. So that forced out the prime minister at the time. So Boland is part of the centrist party. He has campaigned on anti-corruption, on creating jobs. He says he's going to double per capita GDP to $3,000 within the next decade. Nepal is landlocked between India and China. They have very limited manufacturing. They rely on a lot of tourism to Mount Everest for their economy and its current GDP per capita is about $1,500. So delivering on that promise will be quite a challenge. But Ben, thoughts on our new Gen Z rapper King.

Yeah, look, I can't really vowed for Ballin. And I spent a bunch of time reading up on this because it's fascinating. We'll see how it goes. Here's the main thing that I think I take away from this that is hopeful. Clearly people across the world, particularly younger people, are absolutely fed up with the corruption and the kind of rotten establishments that govern their lives. And I do think that there is a connection between, you know, the Zoran Mamdani campaign and what he did. Did you see the Hannah Spencer Green Party campaign in the UK?

This is this, I mean, if people haven't watched Hannah Spencer, she was a Green Party member who won a by-election recently. She's 34 years old. She had a very Zeran-esque kind of message in campaign. Did Morris go over there? Morris cats go over there and meet with some of those kids? Morris is kicking the tires. on taking over European politics.

Morris Katz is a friend of ours who works for Osoramamadani, like a kind of young, brilliant communication. Brilliant, brilliant guy. Yeah, absolutely. Good for him going over to Europe. Good for him. Some of these progressive parties, because we need to trade best practices. My advice to Europeans, and I know we have a lot of European listeners,

is like talk to Morris Katz, right? Because it's not just about having clever social media. It's about having a smart message. But Ballin, you know, he capitalized on the fact that Gen Z, I don't think it's some irrational thing. Oh, we like the rapper. it's that they're so comprehensively fed up with their political establishment that they kind of ousted them in this protest movement and they're like,

you know what, let's put this guy in charge because at least we know he's different, right? And at least we know he's not been tethered to the same corruption. At least we know he hasn't kind of taken money from the same crowd that's been around. And so I actually think the warning to politicians everywhere in the democratic world and the non-democratic world is that this is kind of what where people are at right now, particularly young people. And actually think it's wrong to say that Gen Z, they're disengaged.

They seem pretty fucking engaged in a lot of these places. They're pretty engaged over there. They're lighting some fires, but they're engaged. And they've been engaged. We've seen it in Africa. We've seen it in the Middle East. We've seen it in this country. We're seeing it in Europe.

And if you, again, I'll just talk to the places where if you are a smart politician trying to appeal the young voters, you've got to get to that mood, you know, maybe not the ball and video we showed. But the anti-established mood. the end of the established mood of like, this is different. This is a clean break. This is a, this politics is going to look different. It's going to feel different. It's going to be funded differently because I think that is increasingly where the mood's going to go, given the direction of events in the world. Yeah, people don't like elites. Get inside my

seam in all the closet full of rap tapes. This is how I do hallucinate like a Baptist. That was a V-Tor joint. No, that was a ball and joint. He also dropped Kylie Jenner's name. Whatever. I heard the Collie Jenner in there. Yeah. There's a, There's a logic train I'm trying to follow with the lyrics, but, you know, hey, sounded, sounded good. It was more of a slant rhyme, which, you know, Bob Dylan would tell us is an art form. Ballon seems to not do a lot of media, too. Like, I was trying to, like, it doesn't give a lot of interviews, let's just say. So, like, it's a bit of a mystery.

Whenever I hear someone named Ballin, I think, of the big baller brand. Yes. You know, but. Well, I saw them, by the way, just to, you know, we, I heard you guys on PSA readily complained about, like, the video game message. But I also hate them expropriating, like I saw, I don't know, one of their, Dan Skivina war porn post said, like, if you don't know, now you know. Like, Biggie Small's RIP does not want you taking, like, his potentially best catchphrase from, you know, like, the one of the greatest.

Biggie was not reping the military industrial. Yeah, Biggie was not. Complex. You know, now you know. Give me a break. Shut up. Dan Scavina or whatever, like, 23-year-old white nationalist groopers, like now become a war porn addict. What's funny is, I think.

actually, like, they are trying to appeal to the kind of Nick Fuentes, young, white, angry, like, in-cell crowd with this kind of content. And I think it's falling on its face hard. Yeah. Because those guys actually listen to Fuentes, like Tucker Carlson, a bunch of right-wingers, who were opposed to the Warren-A-on before and now we're opposed to it after, and they seem consistent at least. And, you know, Fox News might fall in line, but, like, who cares what they say? Yeah, I will say, I have some notes for the kind of anti-war maga crowd. like and Tucker's among it, because I've,

you know, I sample this to see where things are going. It is remarkable the lengths they go to somehow like... Solve Trump. Yeah. Like,

like, like we should need to call this out. Like, you can listen. Like, listen. I mean, actually don't listen.

Like, we'll listen to it for you. But like, they didn't have a two-hour conversation on like Tucker McGon Kelly. And like, you would think that this happened to Trump.

Yeah. They'll blame like the undersecretary for something, something over the Pentagon. Or, by the way, they'll blame Netanyahu. I,

like, I blame Netanyahu, but that doesn't absolve Trump. I blame Netanyahu, too, but I blame Trump for being too weak to stand up to than Netanyahu. Of course. To be very clear. He's the American president. He's more powerful.

He's the American president. He made the decision. Every other American president of 21st century said no to this. So it just this, all the more reason for Democrats to borrow on this, because just because there's some anti-war mega influencers, they won't call out Trump. And Americans are not stupid. They know that Donald Trump either, A, shouldn't have done this, and B, could have said no to B, B, Nanyahu.

Oh, Jesus. Okay, so Trump trothed as we were recording, Ben. I'm pleased to report that within the last few hours, we have hit and completely destroyed 10 inactive mine-laying boats and or ships with more to follow. I'm not really sure what that means or does exactly. That means he's trying to tell the markets and the oil futures to not price in a mining of the Straits of Hormuz. It's Google priceable. All he cares about is that. Now it's up at 8771. So you don't really want. the crude oil futures to rip like Bitcoin. You know what I mean? I just, yeah, and you also want, like, and not to get too heavy here, but like, I kind of like a commander chief who cares more about the lives of U.S. service members and Iranian schoolchildren than he cares about tomorrow's oil futures, which is clearly the

only thing that can get his fat ass, you know, in gear to like truth social something. Until Lizzie Graham gets him on the phone, gets him all hot and bothered again for another regime change. Okay, I think that's it for us for this week. Anything else pissing you off? I will say the only thing pissing me off is that I had two my best friends coming to town. I got banger tickets to the Knicks Lakers game on Sunday and the Knicks Clippers game last night.

I got to both games half an hour early. And in the two games, the Knicks led once by a single point and just fucking mailed it in. I'm sorry, man. Except for cat, except for my guy, Carl and Anthony Towns who showed up. The rest of these guys, not much. I love them, but they just didn't show up for me. I bet when you're playing away in L.A.? It seemed like, so the Saturday, we were taking an Uber.

It was a Saturday game? So we're at 12.30 p.m., 1230 start. So we're in the Uber over because we're going to pound some beers of the game, so responsibly took an Uber. And I said to these guys, I was like, hey, I'm worried that our guys are out last night. You know, like, it's L.A. you know, we got OG, we got Josh Hart, we got these guys, maybe they wanted it to go out.

No, no, no, like, our guys are serious. Our guys look like they went out Friday night. I think a lot of players go out every single night. If you're young and rich and a great athlete, you're probably having a good time. Let me just say that Nick did not come out of the, you know, blocks running at full speed on Saturday at 1230. No.

Luca looked like he was hungover, but Luca always looks like he's kind of hungover. He does look like he's hungover. And it doesn't matter. It's a little bit hungry. CNN headline U.S. intelligence. community ramps up warnings of possible retaliatory attacks by Iran. That's great of cyber attacks.

I don't know, everything's really great. Yeah, I came and kind of hissed off today. Sorry about that. It's hard to be light about a war, though. It's not fun. It is not fun. Okay, we're going to take a quick break, but when you come back, you're going to hear my interview with Mike Horowitz. We're going to talk about the Pentagon fighting with AI companies, drones, new drone technology that will help us take out Iranian drones.

that's we're getting from the Ukrainian. So very important conversation about the future of warfare and technology. So stick around for that. POTT of the World is brought to by Built. No one likes paying rents. But Built makes it feel a little better. Built is the loyalty program for renters that rewards you monthly with points and exclusive benefits in your neighborhood. Let me explain. With Built, every rent payment earns you points that can be used towards flights, hotels, lift rides, Amazon.com purchases, and much more. Here's something to get excited about. Now, Built members can earn points on mortgage payments for the first time. That means you can get rewarded wherever you live and unlock exclusive benefits from more than

45,000 restaurants, fitness studios, pharmacies, and other neighborhood partners. Personally, I think I'd redeem mine for fitness classes. They've got a travel portal. You can just do it on Amazon. There's lift rides. There's gift cards at like 120 or more brands. So you have a ton of options. It is very simple. Paying rent is better with built and now owning a home can be better too. Earn rewards and get something back wherever you live. Join the loyalty program for renters at joinbuilt.com slash world. That's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T.com slash world. Make sure to use our URL so they know we send you. I am very excited to welcome back today's guest to the show. He's a senior fellow for technology and innovation at the Council on Foreign Relations and a professor at the

University of Pennsylvania. And then from 2022 to 2024, he served as U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for forced development and emerging capabilities. Mike Horowitz, great to see you again. Thanks so much for having me. Not like anything's going on in the world. Yeah, slow week. Also, it's very funny. We booked you twice and you've been on vacation twice.

I love to just ruin whatever you're doing in your real life. But given all the fighting between the Pentagon and these AI companies and then what's happening in Iran, it seemed like an amazing time to get you back on the show. So before we get to this big fight between the Defense Department and Anthropic and AI company, I was just hoping you could understand. how AI is being used in warfare. Because we've now seen reports that AI was used in the operation to get Nicholas Maduro

in Venezuela. There's lots of reports that AI is being used in the Iran operations, including Claude Anthropics model. The reports that the Israelis were using AI with targeting both in Gaza and now again with Iran. What does that mean in practice to the best you can kind of help us get it? Yeah, absolutely. So when you think about the integration of AI into warfare, you separate it into three buckets in your mind. The first are the kinds of uses of AI that any company might do. Think

like HR, payroll processing, basic logistics, like that kind of thing. And the Pentagon should be full speed ahead at that, although frankly, that has taken a lot of time to get moving as well. The second bucket is in what's called intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance. So that is all the data and information that, say, the American military gets about the world, whether from satellites, whether from human intelligence sources, whether from truth social or X or whatever your like poison might be. And trying to aggregate that all together to separate the signal from the noise. The third, and this is both where the current operational context discussion is, and where the dispute between Anthropic and the Pentagon goes, is closer to the battlefield.

And those are essentially AI decision support systems that help commanders, in theory, make better decisions about how to use force within operations. then autonomous weapon systems that can involve AI actually on the edge, selecting and engage in targets. And it's that third category where people have really raised lots of questions about how much, how much that integration is happening today in the Iran context, how much it happened to the Maduro operation, and then where it may go, where it may go from there. So I can imagine a scenario where over Iran, the U.S. and Israel have so many satellites or drones or things bringing in imagery that it's almost impossible to monitor them all in real time.

And you could imagine an AI that's trained to notice the second that a shape that looks like an Iranian ballistic missile launcher shows up on the screen and then you immediately move to target that. It's like that the kind of thing we're talking about. And maybe that data is cross-checked with some other Sagan thing that's happened. Like, it's just, I think it's hard for people to understand like the volume of data that's coming in to through intelligence channels and how quickly we need to. to move to kind of act on it.

So there's two different categories in which I put some of the things that we have heard about in the Iran context. The first is this, that AI decision support category I mentioned before. And that is often using a platform built by the tech company, a tech company Palantier called Maven Smart System. And what that's doing is aggregating all of this data together to try to give advice to the U.S. combatant commander in the in central command. So the head of the U.S. military in the Middle East who has, and there are all these processes

for how the Pentagon selects targets, makes decisions to engage them, legal reviews, checks, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There's lots of really fantastical descriptions out there. But imagine what Maven essentially does is kind of the way a paralegal would support a lawyer, where they're doing all of this research and analysis to simplify all of these sort of different tasks, all the sort of staff work that would normally happen on the battlefield. Now, it's still the lawyer that goes to court in argues and still the lawyer that takes responsibility, but that paralegal or team of paralegals or whatever is doing a ton of the back

office work to sort of queue things up. That's the way that that Maven essentially works and the way that Claude then is integrated into Maven as one of many different tools to simplify those data processing tasks even more. So that's category one. And then category two is more like that missile defense scenario that you're talking about. Frankly, you don't need large language models. Like, you don't need Claude to do this. But like good old fashioned computer vision sort of algorithms can do this sort of thing. And that's just about detecting launches and then moving systems in position to shoot them down,

which say like Israel's Iron Dome, for example, has proven to be exceptional at. And the Patriot missile defense system for the United States is much more expensive, but also very good at. Got it. Okay. Okay. So we've talked on this show about this dispute between this AI company Anthropic and the Pentagon. The gist for those who have enough follow of this is Anthropics model, Claude, was at the time the only AI model cleared for use on the Pentagon's classified systems. The department wanted Claude to sign a contract that allowed them, quote, all lawful uses of the model. But Anthropics said, no, we have some red lines and they don't want Claude used for mass surveillance of Americans or fully autonomous weapons. yet because they say the software is not ready yet. The two sides couldn't come to an agreement. That led a bunch of people, the Pentagon, to absolutely flip out on Twitter a couple weekends ago. And then Hegsef, Pete Hexat, the Secretary of Defense, declared Anthropic, a, quote,

supply chain risk. That is a designation normally reserved for companies like Huawei, which has ties with the Chinese military. Mike, what do you think happened here? And can you explain the impact of a supply chain risk designation on a company like Anthropic, who I just noticed, as filed suit. Yeah, that's not like the least surprising thing this week. The, I think this to me is a dispute about vibes and personalities masquerading as a policy dispute. And what I mean by that is Anthropic, as you said, was the first company in the door to work

with the Pentagon in a classified environment. And there were no things that Anthropic was doing with the Pentagon that either were, either side had objections. Furthermore, there were no asks of the Pentagon of Anthropic for the future. that Anthropic had an issue with. Essentially what happened is after the Maduro operation, it sounds like somebody from Anthropic called somebody from Palantir. Since remember I said that the way that Claude is implemented operationally for the military right now is through this Palantir platform called Maven Smart System. So someone from

Anthropic calls somebody from Palantir up to be like, hey, did they use Claude in the Maduro operation? And that they even asked the question, apparently like really such a off alarm bells at the Pentagon and they were, you know, essentially to like really simplify a bunch of things. They're like, why are these woke doomers asking all of these questions? Like this seems, like this seems problematic. And the dispute really escalates from that given the fact that there's no disagreement between the company between the company and the Pentagon about any current use cases. And the Pentagon is using Claude in Iran, as has been like widely reported in the media. Calling them a supply chain risk, calling Anthropic a supply chain risk like Huawei,

means that the parts of any company that work with the federal government, say like the part of Microsoft that works with the government, the part of Google that works with the government, et cetera, isn't allowed to use Claude. So any company, that part of the company that works with the government, it's now illegal in theory for them to work with Anthropic or certainly to use Anthropics technology directly. I mean, that seems like a big, big deal for Anthropic, right, going forward. I mean, that could kill off a lot of contracts for them, no? I mean, it could be worse, I guess.

I mean, they could have made it so that it was illegal to do business with Anthropic at all in that the, say the part of Microsoft that doesn't work with the federal government still could work with Anthropic. And don't get me wrong, this is a big hit to Anthropic. And this is a bad move in my view from a sort of free market kind of perspective because it means that the sort of best technology in the world from an American company is no longer going to be available either to the Pentagon in that, like, they gave a six-month time frame for this to sort of happen.

And with other, and for contractors who also are seeking to like work with the Pentagon, like, from where I said, that is a win for China and a loss for America and problematic from a free market perspective. I mean, just from the anthropic perspective, of, don't you understand why they would maybe have some questions? I mean, like, this sort of like all lawful uses provision, what federal laws are there regulating AI use right now? Right? Like, isn't that part of the problem is that the federal government is completely asleep at the switch when it comes to the use of artificial intelligence?

And then you have all these, you know, nerds out there telling us that this could be more powerful than the atomic bomb. I mean, like, I don't understand what these companies are doing in practice or the technology itself. but like the combination of those two things controlled by Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump, like it doesn't make me feel great. Totally fair. Just to be perfectly honest, comparing AI to the atomic bomb is vaguely triggering. And so I'm going to leave that one aside for the moment. But the, I think that the, what this really reflects in some ways is a breakdown in trust

between Anthropic and the Pentagon. And that the Pentagon didn't trust that Anthropic would be there to, Anthropic would be there for important national security use cases, and Anthropic didn't trust that the government would use their technology responsibly. I will say, I think one can have some sympathy for the Pentagon, actually, on parts of this. I certainly would have when I worked there, at least. And here's why. When Lockheed sells like an F-35 or a missile to the Pentagon, it's not like Lockheed gets to say,

like, hey, you could use this against, like, Cuba, but like don't use it against Iran or something, or something like that. These companies sell a product to the Pentagon and the Pentagon then uses it the way that it sees fit. I think Anthropic is thinking about this more like terms of service

in a software contract, which is a thing in contracts with the Pentagon. And they think that once they sell, that they have the right to tell the Pentagon, like, hey, we want to sign a contract for X set of use cases, but not why, of use cases. And Anthropics even said, we will work with you on something like how to make

LLMs ready for fully autonomous weapon systems. But I think that it is not true to say that there's no law or policy that governs these topics. And there's two layers of this, one that has nothing to do with artificial intelligence. So there's federal law and international treaties that require the U.S. to use force in ways that comply with international humanitarian law using things like... Which we're ignoring left and right. Fair, but like, but in theory, but like those are... We're bombing the fuck out of boats in the Caribbean like on the regular. It's just a total violation of international law. Yeah. No argument. Absolutely no argument. Okay. I just mean that in theory, when it comes to like AI, like the way that that boils down is essentially all uses for any use

of force, whether it's a bow and arrow, a radar guided missile or an autonomous weapon system. there has to be human responsibility and accountability for the use of force. Like, for example, in that first boat operation back in September, that was really, I mean, not that they're not all controversial, but in the first one, that got a lot of public attention, attention focused on the specific military commander that authorized the second strike. Like there's always responsibility, human responsibility. And that is true, even in the case for an autonomous weapon system,

and that has nothing to do with any policies surrounding AI in particular. It is also true that there is not law governing the Pentagon's use of AI for the most part. Well, there is policy. Like the office that I used to work for in the Pentagon wrote the Pentagon's policy on autonomy and weapon systems. It's called DoD Directive 3000.09. And more people have probably downloaded and read that directive and became experts on it in the last like two or three weeks than probably read it since it was like re-released in January 2020. and the and that does sort of set out pretty clear guidelines at least on the autonomous weapon system side for when it is that you could use them it's not law and anthropic did have questions

i get yeah i mean i hear you on the compare like look if i were a combatant commander the idea of calling over to a tech company to say hey can we do this thing you're right on some level it's untenable and unworkable on your lockheed comparison i mean this is very imperfect i do think like Lockheed probably sells the U.S. military F-35s, assuming they will not be used to bomb Boston, right? And that's sort of like a bit of what Anthropics getting at, which is like no master's balance of Americans. I'd like to think so. You would like to think so. Not necessarily bomb Americans.

Well, so let's get at this other piece of this, because then a competitor to Anthropic OpenAI, they sweep in, they can deal with the Pentagon to replace Anthropic. You wrote in your Financial Times piece where you also got into these sort of bigger picture philosophical questions. that they got 99% of the deal Anthropic wanted. What does that mean in practice? And what's the 1% that they didn't get? And how relevant is it? Sure. I think it's really interesting

that Open AI has gotten so much heat for this. I think that it's a timing question in some ways, as much it is a substance question. So like here's why. The Open AI deal says that their technology can only be used through the cloud. It couldn't be used on the edge. And so you couldn't put an Open AI model,

say, like into a weapon system directly. and use it. If you were, now you could in theory, then put an open, I guess in theory, put an opening eye model in, you know, in the cloud and have it be like directing a weapon to the target. But if you did that, it wouldn't be an autonomous weapon system. The thing that makes it an autonomous weapon system unless it's human supervised is that there is no data link. And that's because autonomous weapons systems are designed for say, I don't know, like a war in the Indo-Pacific where you might not have access to satellites and all of that data and you need and you want the weapon system to keep operating.

And so if opening eyes technology can only be used in the cloud and not on the edge, then actually it means that an autonomous weapon system without human supervision that their model simply can't, wouldn't work for. On the surveillance side, it sounds like, and that I'm personally a little less expert and there are, there seem to be concerns that the technology, that the sort of deal that opening eye side might not be quite as restrictive as what Anthropic wanted. But some of this, I mean, to kind of like the back and forth, we were having about international, about international law and about the Pentagon sort of in general, at some point, like if you do business with the

Pentagon, the business of the Pentagon is war. And if you don't trust that the Pentagon will follow its own rules, sort of or laws, then you, then you shouldn't, then, you know, it's like, it's like a tough look then to do business with the Pentagon. And perhaps one shouldn't. Yeah, no, look, and I think that's sort of a very real part of this. It's getting less attention, which is like if Anthropic has, I don't know, yeah, if they're so concerned about how the Pentagon might use the models and maybe they shouldn't do business with the Pentagon, period.

Look, I think the reason Open AI got so much blowback is because Sam Altman looked like a total scumbag and he swept in at the last moment and swept up a contract from his competitor. And he's seen as someone who has been willing to kiss Trump's ass more than. than any other AI CEO, and therefore he made a deal that it seems like Anthropic didn't want. It's also my understanding that maybe Anthropic was looking for their concerns to be handled in the contract where Open AI is now saying, actually, we're just going to kind of like hard code the restrictions into the model. And I think experts will then point out, well, then you can update the model down the road

and maybe we'd probably never know about it, right? Not wrong. I mean, like, I think that that that, that's in some ways because there is, no, if what you are worried about is that the Pentagon's going to misuse your technology. There's like two scenarios for misuse. One is that your technology would actually be very good at the thing that the Pentagon wants to do, in which case there's actually, there's probably very little you could put in a contract that would stop them from doing it if they wish to violate the law. The second, and this is actually why I am personally less concerned on the autonomous

weapon system side, is that the Pentagon could attempt to violate your contract, but if like you're correct that your technology isn't ready to do the thing, that will come out in the Pentagon's own testing and evaluation process. Like the worst thing, like the last thing you would use an LLM for, like a large language model that like Claude or chat GPT or something like that is to put into an autonomous weapon system. If you want to build an autonomous weapon system, you should do that with a bespoke algorithm trained on a data set of very specific things like say Russian tanks or Chinese fighters or something

like that. The idea that you would take a large language model trained on the slap of the internet and like plug it into a missile and like send that missile off, like, what are we even doing here? And I feel like either the Pentagon's testing and evaluation process should clearly reveal that, like, or we've got like bigger problems that have nothing to do with AI. Yeah, that's where like sometimes I've just confused about this fight. Like the mass surveillance piece of this really worries me because one major limiting factor when you talk, about, you know, preventing the mass surveillance of an entire population, let's say all Americans, was that it was prohibitively difficult to work with that much data. And I think AI has fundamentally

changed that. But I guess my concern then would be more about like contracts with the NSA or the CIA or other intelligence community components than the Pentagon. I was wondering what your read was on that kind of piece of this fight. Yeah, I'm still, look, I'm super, worried about mass surveillance in the context of AI technology and the way that it could help de-identify a bunch of data that law says that you're not supposed to have on the American people. I'm not worried about the Pentagon is the locus of the American mass surveillance state. I would be much more worried maybe about like other departments and agencies that are in the news sometimes. And the and so like I and I think the and I think the reaction of the

Pentagon is telling in this context and that on the mass surveillance side you can I mean to whatever extent one like views them as credible like on this and you know like mileage will travel for different people the like the Pentagon on the mass surveillance side is essentially like how could you ever say that like we would never do that that violates the Fourth Amendment and I suspect that they probably genuinely think that because again I think other departments and agencies are a higher risk or maybe like an in between like the NSA I guess if you really wanted to worry but man does the NSA have rules the, if it wears their response to the autonomous weapon side, it's like, well, we totally wouldn't do that now. Like, we agree with you. The tech isn't ready, but it might be at some point. Right. And Anthropics, like, yeah, that's why we want to work with you on that. Like, why are you kicking us out? Yeah. It's all, yeah, it just feels like the Pentagon, the Trump administration, they have one speed, which is to punch back. It's hard as humanly possible. And in so doing, escalated this fight. Yeah. I mean, look, this is like the Hegseth Pentagon is on full send all the time. Like, no matter.

matter what. And in that case, like, this is like going back to what I said before, that this is like really about vibes and personalities, which I think our, at least to me, like our discussion in some ways has illustrated the, and that kind of like breakdown and trust, like, how do you crawl down from here there? And how do you climb down from here then in some ways? If like, if we're talking about a pedagon, that literally will never admit that it's wrong about anything. Yeah. And it's like rage tweeting at 5 p.m. or like 10 p.m. on a Friday night for no reason about this issue. Last sort of topic I want to talk about is a lot of experts are very concerned about U.S. weapons stockpiles, in particular interceptor munitions that are being used in the Patriot

missile systems and other systems to defend from Iranian missiles and drones, and then also some offensive U.S. missile systems that you can get into. That is a problem in the near term with the war in Iran, especially for some of these Gulf states, which news reports there are like within a week of running out of some of these interceptors. But more broadly for our readiness as a country to fight the next war, especially one with China, how worried are you about these stockpiles? And what do you make of these efforts to use new drones developed by the Ukrainians to defend from these Iranian drones, which have been used by Russia, as a solve or a fix?

That's a, oh, what a short question. The, I mean, like, call back to the last time I was on. I, you know, I talked about how we are in the age of precise mass in war, where advancing is an AI in autonomy and commercial manufacturing. And the fact that precision guidance is now a 50-year-old technology means everyone can now access precision strike. And now we see that on display in Iran sort of every day when Iran fires these Shaheed 136 weapons. You know, like the Shaheed 136 is arguably the best precise mass system in the world. It can go like 1,500 to 2,000 kilometers. It can carry a, you know, 50 to 150 kilogram warhead. And unless you shoot it down,

like depending on build quality, we'll like hit the thing that it's aimed at. They can produce that for an average of $35,000. A Patriot missile costs about $4 million each. So now we're using like two Patriot missiles to shoot down a Shaheed. And like we're trying to be better about that with a bunch of different kinds of things. And like the unit costs for say like Israel's Iron Dome is a little bit, is a little bit lower. But because Iran has thousands of these Shaheeds and it's just firing them off, everybody in the region with Patriot missile interceptors is now using them.

And so the U.S. is in a position where and Iran is starting to target the radars that try to track those that we use to ensure those missiles hit their target, which would mean, and if those get really damaged, you would need to fire even more to intercept a single thing and add all of that up. And the U.S. is running short on missile defense interceptors, especially for the Indo-Pacific. but even in the context of the Middle East, if the U.S. wants to sort of re-up the stockpiles of all of the Gulf states that have had our back in the context of this conflict. And so guess what? In some ways, like China wins again. And while you focused more on the missile defense question, I'll note that the U.S. has produced about the premier U.S. cruise missile for like both of our professional lives. It's been called the Tomahawk missile. The U.S. has produced about like 9,000 plus of them, like over that time period.

There, if you look at like inventory based on uses over time, retirements, tests, etc., the U.S. inventory might be like around 3,000 or even below, frankly, at this point, and decreasing rapidly given the hundreds that the U.S. has already used against Iran. And so we are running out of weapons. And in this age of precise mass, like that's a big problem, which is a big problem, which is a is why the U.S. needs to be producing itself, then a lot more of these low-cost weapons, our own precise mass systems, like the Lucas, which the U.S. debuted against Iran for the first time. And it's actually reverse engineered from an Iranian weapon. So like a little bit of irony there.

Yeah, yeah. Sorry, when you say low-cost weapons, you don't mean the T-Lams or the Tomahawks. You mean these new modern drones? No. So like the Lucas system, what the Lucas system essentially is the U.S. equivalent of the Shaheed. So the Lucas system, cost. the US like $35,000 to $50,000 a pop, which is really different than a Tomahawk missile that cost about like $2 million each on average. And because you can produce them with commercial manufacturing, like the Lucas that the Lucas of rounds that the US is using in the Middle East were produced by like Spector Works, like a tiny company in Scottsdale with like 13 employees, not like Raytheon or Lockheed shows you could really scale production of these kinds of things

in a way that would give, you know, future American leaders like a lot more, like, depth and a lot more, and a lot more options. And so on the Ukrainian front, I mean, the Ukrainians have been dealing with, the Iranians provided Russia with the Shahid drones, and now, you know, the Ukrainians will have swarms of them fired at Ukrainian cities, you know, maybe dozens, maybe even hundreds of them at a time. And so one option they have evolved to deal with that threat is low-cost drones of their own, which basically hunt these drones.

Can you talk about bad technology, how effective it is, and how quickly we might be able to put that to use in this conflict with Iran, if at all? Yeah, absolutely. Like, you think about, like, if we have currently been using, you know, four million-dollar interceptors to shoot down, like not just Shaheeds, but things that are slightly more expensive, but still maybe like a running ballistic missiles that might be, say,

I don't know, like half a million dollars each or something like that. The, you need something cheaper then. otherwise the cost curve just isn't in your favor. You've got a couple of options if you want the cost curve to be really low. The first, and this has been like the dream of the 1980s, like on repeat, is lasers. Like you could use directed energy, microwave weapons, things like that, where the cost per shot is super low. And now you've got options to try to take down these systems. Like Israel used iron beam, which is their short-range laser defense system, I think maybe for the first time, operationally, in the context of this.

Pretty recently, right? Yeah. Yeah, this particular conflict with Iran. Your other option is to try to come up with a really low-cost interceptor. And there are a bunch of different companies that have been working on this, including companies like Andrell, some of the new defense tech companies in the United States. But like you said, look, the Ukrainians live this every day and no one has been more incentivized to do it. And so the Ukrainians have these sort of hit a bullet with a bullet really inexpensive,

like a thousand to $10,000 apiece defense systems. They have a bunch of different kinds of them. And it looks like the U.S. is now importing a bunch of them because the U.S. actually purchased some of them from Ukraine to test them out and see how they work. And so those that the U.S. purchased are now heading to the Middle East. But now there's a prospect that the U.S. will get even more from Ukraine and that Ukrainian trainers are going to come help those people.

And that's actually really promising. But again, remember I said, like China's the winner and all of this before? It's hard to see, I mean, unless this makes the Trump administration feel really favorable toward Ukraine and then re-up them from a weapons perspective, the like Patriot missile interceptor inventory going way down around the world, it's really bad for Ukraine, who needs more of those interceptors for when their, their inexpensive solutions fail to protect them from, Not like the Russian Shahid variant necessarily, but say like Russian hypersonics and Russian ballistic missiles that they also fire at Ukraine on a regular basis. Well, yeah, I know it's, I'm glad we've kicked off this Iran war to just inject more chaos and dysfunction and horror into the world. It feels like that's what we're missing.

It was just another theater of war. You know, we really needed this right now. We're off to a great start in 2026. What can I say? Being a great start, bomb in eight countries. And in 15 or 16 months, President Trump, the President of Peace, the FIFA Peace Peace Peace Peace. prize winner. I can come back when Cuba's next. Yeah. Listen, there

might have been a deal cut. Hopefully, maybe that won't happen, but I know, we've got to get Lindsey Graham off TV. He's talking about invading literally everything. Mike Horowitz, thank you so much for doing the show. Really appreciate it. You've made us a lot smarter on this topic and many other things. We appreciate your time. Thanks for having me.

Thanks again to Mike Horowitz for doing the show and see you guys next week. Unless we record something sooner. You never know. It's quite possible. Pod Save the World is a crooked media production. Our senior producer is Alona Minkowski. Our producer is Michael Goldsmith. Our associate producer is Anisha Bonnergy.

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