How Bad Is Trump’s Iran Deal?

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You look like OGN and OB and good morning America. I am actually still hungry because in addition to the game, now I can drink while watching Nick's content, which has been a deep reservoir, including OG's. Yeah, Ben, which is telling us that he's been gooning to Nick's content.

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“Like he's got to be up in that kind of pantheon, right?”

He's up there, and he's in the argument for number one, because the Yankees have won so much. Like he delivered the nicks from like purgatory. Yeah. Um, and he did it in the most insane way, 45 points in a close-up game.

Uh, it's guys barely six feet tall. Like everything about him is perfect. It's crazy. 33rd overall pick. I mean, so many guys won't before him.

Yeah. Yeah.

And all these guys, I mean, like, and a guy took $100 million less money,

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Ben's doing his Midwest tour.

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That's what it feels like. I'm just an Iowa New Center. Yeah. You and Gavin Newsom. We book of any Iowa New Hampshire, South Carolina.

Maybe Nevada. Just, and it's a good way to see some people take the temperature out there in the country. No, it's a lot of fun. I'm listening to her. It's good to get out of the road to a listening tour.

If we're going to Mark Zuckerberg did a listening tour, he thought he was going to run over the internet. Yeah. No, it's like a way to everyone's fun. Oh, God.

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All right. We have a great show for you guys today. We're going to cover what we think is in Donald Trump's deal with the run. Like, they won't release the deal text. Really speaks to them and confidence in whatever it says.

But we'll tell you what we know, what is leaked, what we assume is in the deal. We'll try to assess whether it's a good deal or a bad deal. We'll talk about where things go from here in, in particular, the ways that is really Prime Minister BB Dennyah who could try to blow this whole thing up. So one to watch there.

We're also going to talk about how we think Democrats should talk about the deal and just diplomacy, generally, because there's some great Democrats who are very sure footed on these things and then some who are clearly waiting for a poll to come out. And we want to speak to them as well. We'll tell you about a huge election coming up in the UK

and how the future of the country could be decided by about 75,000 voters total. We'll also touch on some interesting developments in the growth of the far-right far-right political parties in Europe. We have some good news for you about Trump's selection to be the director of national intelligence. We have some terrible news about the catastrophic impact of the destruction of USAID

And then finally, we're just going to talk about the joy that is world cup soccer.

I've been just inhaling it here, Ben. It's on at the office all day long.

“I think the guys are getting sick of me.”

They want the news back on, but I'm not going to do it. I just want to watch Senegal on France. I will be at the Portugal DRC game tomorrow. I can see where all those abs in person. Yeah, so I'm looking forward to that.

You lucky guy. Apparently you can see him from space. And then finally, you're going to hear my interview with Fred Pleiken from CNN. He just completed a reporting trip to Iran. I think he said he's been to Iran 40 times total in his life, like reporting trips mostly.

We talked about what he heard from kind of average Iranians about their views on the war, their views on the government, the economic impact. He went to an IRGC event, imagine going to a sort of Iowa event spend, just like an IRGC rally, and that that's a good time. Yeah.

I bet those guys are feeling pretty good right now. Fire it up and ready to go. Fire it up. I mean, collision a cause. We talked about how you'd the process for setting up a reporting trip to Iran.

So just honestly fascinating guy. I can't wait to listen to that and good for CNN and him for still doing that reporting. We need more foreign correspondence in this world. Yeah, we really do. Just be going to independent media.

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Dan Fyford does a deep dive into all the polling information. Again, it's, you get a lot for your money here. It's like 999 a month, crooked.com/friends and it's the best way you could help us build this whatever this thing is, crooked media. All right, Ben, let's turn to Iran because like we said, there's a deal, but we don't

want to know what's in it. Apparently Trump won't even share the text with BBN and you can see that. Yeah, so like BBN and young Congress, it's a, it's a junk through. It's kind of perfect. Didn't have a copy of the deal.

So again, sure seems to suggest he's thrilled with the deal.

We go shaded, but never fear.

We have painstakingly crawled through all the news reports to find what is leaked and we'll talk you through what we know. So here's the gist. There's a 60 day ceasefire. It's a real one this time, not a ceasefire name only where they're just shoot at each other

and bomb shit all the time and call it a ceasefire. This ceasefire will also include fighting between Israel and Hezbollah and Lebanon, which these Israelis are not happy about, but also Israel says they will not withdraw troops from Lebanon, which will complicate things. The Strait of Hormuz should open up, starting on Friday.

It's going to take some time to get all the mines out of the Strait of Hormuz, maybe up to a month and a half. It will slow down the traffic, but the U.S. is also going to end its blockade of the Strait. It sounds like going forward, Iran will charge ships to transit the Strait.

Trump, well, you know, he's been trying to claim that the, the Strait will be permanently toll free. But JD Vance basically said it was up to negotiations in Iran said they will be charging for, quote, navigation services, environmental protections, and ship insurance. Sure, sounds like you told me, the Wall Street Journal reported that Iran will immediately

be allowed to sell oil, and that the agreement will wave the relevant sanctions to facilitate those payments. So that should net Iran a lot of revenue very fast, and, by the way, conveniently helps Trump with gas prices to get the nice of oil down. The U.S. is going to withdraw troops from the region.

I assume that means just like assets brought in for the conflict to not dismantle all the bases. You know, the U.S. and its partners in the region will fund up to $300 billion for Iran's reconstruction. Think Reuters reported that half of that money has already been committed, and then on

the nuclear front, the most important front, Iran says it won't produce a nuclear weapon,

but all the hard details about how you ensure that actually happens are TBD. Because that will be negotiated over the next 60 days. So that includes the fate of Iran's highly enriched uranium stockpile, the rules around its enrichment activities. That's all got to be dealt with now. So again, they have 60 days to negotiate.

I think you can extend it another 30. I'm sure they'll just extend it a bunch of times, because this is complicated. And then the U.S. is going to facilitate the release of frozen Iranian funds. So then just to be clear, I genuinely believe that the best deal available to Donald Trump was the one that happened to the Sunist, because we are on the cusp of a global famine.

It's a straight home, it was remained close for much longer. But objectively speaking, like it does feel like Iran got a lot here, and Trump got very little of what he had set out to accomplish.

“That's right. I mean, Iran made no real concessions as of yet, right?”

Because opening the straight of our moves is not really a concession given that it was open before the war, and so you're looking at what did this war achieve, and it achieved precisely nothing, because he could have gotten a nuclear deal before the war without launching the war, Iran was negotiating to a nuclear deal. So we reopen a body of what are those already open.

for Iran, because there's the potential to toll the straight.

There's this $300 billion fund, which must include, I would assume, frozen Iranian assets

to get that number of that high.

“I don't know if it does, I think it might be private funds, and then golf countries.”

Yes, we're from the golf world. They all got stuck in hit with ballistic missiles by Iran, now they pay to rebuild it. That's a hell of a deal, and then also they're selling the world, and they're getting revenue from that, they're going to get on frozen assets. I say this to me, because I've seen this kind of anxiety, we should not attack the terms

of the deal, because we don't want to seem like we're against diplomacy. No, let's focus on the fact, here's how I do it. Trump tore up the JCPOA. So let's compare these terms to what the JCPOA said, because the revenue envisioned under this deal, dwarfs what was in the JCPOA.

The pallets of cash that Trump always talks about was $1.7 billion.

And then the unfrozen assets that Iran was able to retrieve as part of the sanctions really fund the JCPOA, which involved them only getting that money after they'd shipped their stockpile out, after they destroyed the Coral Plutonium Reactor, after they ripped that most of their centrifuges and after they'd accepted all these intrusive inspections,

“then only then did they get on order, I think we estimated about $55 billion.”

So we're talking like the $3 billion fund alone is almost 6x what they got under the JCPOA. And then they're getting all this other revenue that we hear about from other sanctions really for toll on the straight. And so you're just pouring in fusion of tremendous amounts of money to the Iranians. And we don't even know, in the nuclear terms, if they get there, seem like they'll basically

be shipping out the stockpile and having limits on enrichment, which is again a version of the JCPOA. So the point is, this war was absolutely the biggest self-destructive stupid, costly, pointless self-owned that, you know, for America, that's saying a lot, given our recent track. We've got a lot of those.

Yeah, I think we have to drive home in the point that like, this is what happens when you launch dumb wars, and this is what happens when you get led around by Benjamin Netanyahu. And this is what happens when you like ignore the law, which would have required Congress to vote, and Congress wouldn't have voted for this war. Like this is what happens when autocrats launch dumb wars, you get bad terms.

And that's, you know, they may be the best we can get, which means rather, they were and then it continued, full stop, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't point out that these are, like, laughably absurdly bad terms, if anything near what is leaked out turns out to be the case.

“Yeah, like, I think that the people on the left who are saying, let's not attack Donald Trump”

until this deal is done, let's not attack him from the right and sound more hawkish than him. They're saying that from a good place, right, because they don't want Trump to in any way be baited back into a war and to resume the conflict, because of the catastrophic humanity and consequences. But I think like, I don't think Donald Trump gives a shit what we think, and I think

we should not hesitate to be honest about what happened here and to criticize it, because we're not just trying to message this deal, we are trying to kill forever. This insane hawkish, neocon, FDD driven worldview that the United States can bomb its way to peace. And that's what happened here, right?

Like somehow, Donald Trump got talked back into doing another insane Middle East war regime change war, and it was a catastrophic disaster. And so I think we have to say, yes, this is the best available outcome to Donald Trump, but he lost the war. Iran now knows it can control the straight and can charge fees and will make a ton of revenue.

Trump achieves and none of his core objectives, Iran still possesses its highly enriched uranium. Most of its ballistic missiles, its drone arsenal, they will almost certainly continue to support the proxy groups that they were supposed to stop supporting. The regime change strikes were a disaster for the Iranian people, first and foremost,

they now have a younger, more hard-line supreme leader in place, and they have a more powerful

IRGC that's cement to control. And then, you know, like you said, if the report's about the unfreezing of these assets, the $300 billion fund, all of this money, Iran will have access to far more money that have ever gotten to the JCPOA to fund its military. And I firmly think that if we could go back in time, and it was 2018 in Donald Trump,

it just tried to renegotiate a strengthened JCPOA and called it the Trump Nuclear Agreement. He could have had that. You could have had it in a heartbeat. But instead, we went down this insane regime change war path. We did enormous damage to our standing in the world.

We devastated economies in Asia. Sudan could have an even worse famine because of what we did. We don't know the scope of the damage to US military bases in the Gulf area. Like, we should be skeptical of every single claim that the Trump administration make about what they accomplished here.

And I think we have to say as much.

That's right.

“And you did the cost, well, the only cost I'd add, you know, which we've talked about,”

but the how many Iranian civilians died, how many Iranian girls died in that school, how many Lebanese have died because Netanyahu had to make this a two-front war. I will say on the messaging point to like build on something you said, the idea that we're going to like, jidjitsu and flatter Trump on social media into like doing this deal, that's the wrong way of thinking about this.

Trump needs to be so thoroughly humiliated. And the FDD Lindsey Graham faction of Americans National Security Salvation needs to be so thoroughly discredited that we just don't do stupid wars again. These are people that have told us for well over a decade that it would be easy to deal with the Iranian nuclear program and to remove the Iranian regime with some kind of military

operation. We've tested the proposition of a diplomatic deal under the JCPO that Iran can apply with. Now we've tested their way of doing it. And their way of doing it was a catastrophic failure with huge economic and human costs. And this is the moment for Democrats to be the actual anti-war party and say this was a

dumb and pointless war from the beginning and we don't have to throw clear forever about how bad the Iranian regime is, which makes it sound like you're actually for the war. This was dumb, illegal and pointless and destructive and costly. And we lost. And what this deal looks like are the terms that are dictated to the losing party of a war.

And absolutely we want the war to end because we want the straight-of-war moves open and we don't want bombs to fall on people anymore. But that doesn't mean that we have to gaslight everybody and be like, oh, this is a good deal. I mean, like I, and by the way, like to your point, the nuclear deal is not reached yet.

There is quite likely scenario in which there is never nuclear deal in which Iran gets

some revenue, they open up the straight and it's kind of a frozen conflict. And I guess the question for the Iranians, because they seem to be in the driver's seat is, do they want to make a bunch of nuclear concessions, which frankly they may cheat on anyway, because we'll see what the inspections regime is. And exchange for essentially getting more revenue and more sanctuously.

I actually, I hope they do. But the, because the other thing that Tommy I was thinking is, the 60 day clock, like, takes you into the fall, essentially, there's zero percent chance Donald Trump is going to start a war with Iran again. No.

Right before. And the Iranians know that. Yeah, so they're either going to like drag the negotiation out, or maybe they'll decide to do a deal, but like this is just not how you do foreign policy.

And we shouldn't give participation trophies for someone accepting that they lost a war

when they need to open a body of what did they open before it. And Democrats shouldn't be afraid to make that case. And then they're like, and we can't wait to try to message this, because the narrative gets set now. And the Trump, the White House is out there.

They're trying to spin this as a victory. And again, just to reiterate what Trump's own goals were.

“Remember, they wouldn't, he wouldn't do like a live speech before the war.”

He put out a video. But this is what he specifically said, where the goals were. He said, quote, we're going to destroy their missiles and raise their missile industry to the ground. We're going to annihilate their navy.

We're going to ensure that the region's terrorist proxies can no longer destabilize the region or the world and attack our forces. And we'll ensure that Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon. So I put a maybe at one for four there, because it does sound like they sank a lot of navy boats.

They're still able to close this trade over moves, but I guess they did that. But even if we wanted to be extra generous and like kind of judge him on what was realistic or feasible, like you said, we just have no idea if it was a good deal or not, because all the nuclear stuff was punted going forward. I agree with you, Ben.

Trump has been hinting that he's just going to let this go away. He keeps Rubio and Scott Bessent will be like, we must get the nuclear dust out of Iran. This is a core objective in Trump's like, I don't know, we got satellites watching it and

“it's kind of obliterated under a mountain and so who gives a fuck?”

He's sort of like messaging that he's ready to move on and not actually worry about getting the highly enriched uranium stockpile out of Iran. So, you know, I think that's the most likely outcome as the Iranians, just as he would say tap him along and play for time. Maybe they do cut a deal that some sort of like JCPOA adjacent deal, but Vance and Trump

they're out trying to spin this thing. We just want to play you a couple examples of JD Vance and Trump's arguments, and then how it is being received among some of the most hawkish neocons who were like the cheerleaders for this war when it started. Let's watch.

We're dealing with the death cult that is seized control of Iran and is more blood on the tans than we can measure. They're not radicalized. It's different people, but it's the same kinetic regime. The coolest thing about the progress we've made over the last few weeks is that you

see people within the Iranian system, senior leadership, even IRGAC officials say, you know what? We may have some animosity, we may have some mistrust, but we recognize the way that we've

Let's try something else. Why do you trust the IRGC? You're the one negotiating with the IRGC.

“What makes you think they are going to keep their word?”

They were nice to deal with. They were strong people, smart people.

Once you have invested in the Y that a bunch of million-nerian psychotics who believe that

they are going to take over the world on behalf of Shia Islam, our irrational negotiating partner, you are already operating in the wrong frame of mind. So Ben seems happy there. Okay. Ben Spiro, that is Ben, JD Vance's comment that the process was cool because of the Iranian

friends we made along the way is one of the most naive, fucking moronic things I've ever heard in my life. I get JD Trump, they could have had some meetings with the Iranians like they did with the North Koreans instead of bombing their country to Shia. I'm just like, I'll try to imagine if you had made a comment like that about how the best

part of the Cuba reproachment was all the cool relationships you built up with the Castro family. You would have been drawn in quartered on Fox News. But anyway, I've glad you had a good time, JD Vance. Yeah, I have a couple of reactions to this.

The first is, and as again, listeners know, we are more than willing to be self-critical

of Obama. So this is the less a point about Obama and more point about kind of Democrats or people who are anti-war or people who are sick of American foreign policy domination. The reason to point out how full shit they are in terms of saying, like, wow, we actually have talks to these people, is it like we did that, we did that in the Obama administration.

We did have negotiations to the Iranians, and we reached a deal with them. And so the fact that JD Vance is now just discovering, because yes, it's been this deal, that it's better to talk to people and said bombing them. No, like the point is that that was, this is entirely preventable war, because there was a negotiated deal that was made by Democratic President, a deal that said in paper,

because the other in Trump always says, they're finally committing to not build a nuclear weapon. Will the preamble to the JCPOA said, Iran reaffirms it under no circumstances, will Iran ever seek to develop or acquire any nuclear weapons? And they wouldn't even like aware of the terms of the JCPOA, because they demagogued

it so hard and lied about it so much. And frankly, I had a media that was compliant in repeating their lies without fact checking them. First point is, like, these people should not get away with suddenly discovering diplomacy after this without being held accountable for the insanity of both pulling out of that

deal and launching this war.

“The other thing that I think is interesting about the juxtaposition of the clips is”

look. I don't, the way Trump talks about the Iranian regime has kind of strange, like I'll say, and he likes him and they're strong and all the rest of it. But the way that, because let's be clear, he's talking about a regime that brutalizes its own people, right?

So you don't necessarily need to like glaze them that hard. But the other side of this coin is what Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro are saying is actually part of the problem, because just because they're brutal regime doesn't mean that they are intent on taking over the world on behalf of Shia Islam or they're like, you know, one of them, man, and one of them, I think what we've just learned is even though they're

murderous, they're quite sophisticated. They were very smart in how they dealt with this. They attacked our allies, they paralyzed the global economy, they made Lego movies. Yeah, they made Lego memes, you know, like, so let's, can we not like just go around telling everybody that just because we don't like these people that they, they want to conquer

the entire world or their complete psychotic, because no, like, they're sophisticated people

“that you need to deal with with a mixture of strength and diplomacy.”

But part of what's happened is there's been this like demigogery about Iran for like decades in this country that helped plow the ground for this war, because essentially you're dehumanizing the entire country of Iran, they're casting their leadership as no different from like suicide bomber terrorists, and that's just kind of not the reality. We need a farm policy that is rooted in facts and reality, and somewhere between Trump and

J.D. Vance's spin and Ben Shapiro's apocalyptic view is like the actual truth here, and that's where we need to center our policy going forward. Yeah, look, I would agree with you on the media point, I would also add Congress in there because Congress is willing to assert itself and pass a law, the Iran nuclear agreement review act of 2015, and makes it harder to cut an agreement or do a diplomatic deal with

Iran, and they never assert themselves when it comes to, I don't know, starting wars.

They've sort of given up on that whole part of the job of being a member of Congress. So, yes, it would be great if everyone was a little less critical of diplomatic agreements which we know are going to be imperfect and are going to require some given take on both sides. And we're a lot more critical and did more to prevent presidents from starting wars, which are have ended in disaster.

And by the way, in agreement, that was co-authored by Ben Cardin from Maryland, the senator

a lot of support from APAC and ended up not supporting the Iran nuclear deal.

So like this is the stuff the Democratic Party needs to leave in the past. And it passed 98 to one, only Tom Cotton voted against it for some reason, I'm going to make sure why. Pots of the world is brought to you by Quince in the summer. I don't want to overthink what I'm wearing.

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to someone about it because you don't have to do that. You don't have to say yes to everything the summer, fine support and therapy, sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/cricketWorld, that's betterhlp.com/cricketWorld. So Ben, the big x-factor here in whether this deal can hold, I think, is the front of the war and Lebanon and the fighting between Hezbollah and Israel, and the ways that that

could kind of blow everything up. These really defense forces are currently occupying a strip of territory to Southern Lebanon that reaches at least six miles over the border. As we've discussed before, like Hezbollah was formed to resist Israeli occupation and there's no reason to believe that they will stop now that the Israelis have taken more territory.

Of course, we fully concede like Hezbollah is firing rockets and drones into northern Israel. It's terrorized innocent people in northern Israel and all parts of Israel. Because they've terrorized large swath of Lebanon, they've helped Assad, butcher, peaceful protesters in Syria. So like Hezbollah is a terrorist organization, they absolutely fucking suck, but they're there

and they will be part of the problem you are going forward. Netanyahu is used, but also Netanyahu is used as conflict, as an opportunity to just grab more and more territory. And in Israeli air strike and they root almost blew up this diplomatic agreement that Trump just forged at the last minute.

So Trump got asked about Israel in Hezbollah at the G7 France on Tuesday. Let's listen. And this deal survives Israel at high level. It can, and I consider that the minor war, the Iran is a big one, but we have that little pin prick out there that constantly rears its head and that says we're alive.

Are you afraid of Netanyahu, sir? No. We have a great relationship. I didn't like that he did an attack based on a, you know, there's a very minor little thing with some drones that were released and he ends up doing a very, I saw that

attack.

“I saw where that bomb went, did you see what happened?”

That was not, that was a vicious, that was too much, you know, you can do too much also. You don't have to knock down an apartment house every time you're looking for somebody,

people that I can tell you, BB has to be more responsible with respect to Lebanon.

I would say of all countries, they've been treated the worse. They should have been able to do this, you know, it just goes on forever. And when that happens, it throws a negative light on the big deal and that's a deal with the red.

“I think yesterday, Israel, to let Syria take care of Hezbollah, is to be honest with you,”

I think they do a better job of doing. If Israel can't do the job without killing everyone else, he'll do the job, Syria will do the job. If it weren't for the United States of America with me, because Obama was the opposite, Israel would not exist right now.

Israel would have been blown off the face of the year, 100%. OK. So, I'm glad you're Trump's having some belated concern about civilian casualties.

It's better to leave the never.

Though, I have to imagine that those comments about Hezbollah being the minor war and that Hezbollah's just a little pin prick out there that constantly rears its head is got to go over pretty poorly. And Israel, as is the suggestion that the Syrian should deal with Hezbollah. I don't even really understand what on earth he's talking about there, but it felt like

designed and allowed to create a massive political problem for BB Netanyahu. It did. And I do want to say something about Hezbollah. All the things you said are true. These are people that are willing to take innocence in civilian life, and not only have

they proven that in Israel, but even more so in scale and Syria.

“At the same time, I think Hezbollah, if it would abide by terms of Hezbollah.”

They have in the past, like they function as a terrorist organization, but also as a political actor. And frankly, this latest round of fighting took place after Israel talked down Trump into launching a massive war against Iran and then just started bombarding Lebanon, right? So Israel is the one that has created this crisis inside of Lebanon.

And I truly believe that if Israel stopped bombing Lebanon, Hezbollah would stop firing rockets. They tend to do what the Iranians tell them to do. And the Iranians are clearly invested in the ceasefire that has as part of its terms and end to the war in Lebanon.

That's the first thing. The second thing is it's offensive to Israelis, to describe it as a pin prick. But how do you like to be in Beirut, right? And he's calling this like a minor conflict. And meanwhile, these really have been leveling as Trump himself acknowledges a part of

the blocks in Beirut. A million people. I'm not a displaced. I'm a million people.

And yeah, a million people will displace, that's not a minor war.

And look, I'm glad that he's like calling this out, but to your point, they've been doing this the entirety of the Trump presidency between Gaza and Lebanon. And so clearly, I don't think this is some genuine interest in civilian casualties. This is frustration when Beirut and Danielle potentially perpetrating a war that Trump very much wants to be over because it's been terrible for him politically.

And he's undercutting Beirut politically inside of Israel. And he probably knows he's doing that.

“I think it's more a manifestation of two things.”

One, growing public opinion, both Republican and Democratic Party against Netanyahu and Israel, and their foreign policy, particularly when their foreign policy involves war. And two, Trump having massive buyers or more, of letting Beirut and Danielle talk him into this war in the situation room. And frankly, if I was in Israel, and I disagreed with the majority of these really

population about most things politically in recent years, Netanyahu by being the dog that caught the car with this Iran war has just left Israel incredibly vulnerable because the United States is politically done with this relationship of subsidizing endless Israeli wars. This Iran war, which everybody knows Netanyahu, like, has this fingerprints all over, has been an absolute catastrophe.

And at a certain point, Israeli voters need to hold Netanyahu accountable. Like, I'm not looking to sit here and say, this is all on Beirut and Danielle. He's been elected the fucking Prime Minister of the country for almost every year, except for about one, I think, since 2009. Okay.

So if you want a different kind of relationship with the United States, then you have to elect a different kind of Prime Minister. And I think that that should be the message. Yeah, this doesn't start with the war and Gaza doesn't start with the war. And they're like, Netanyahu has led the Israeli public into a political crisis, starting

back in what, 2009, 2015, where do you want to start it? When he decided to go all in with the Republican Party, attack Barack Obama, attack the JCPOA, go to Congress without telling the administration, launch a major speech, like a broad side against a popular Democratic president, and then go all in, push all his chips in with Donald Trump, and just align himself with the Republican Party.

And now, Democrats have moved away from supporting Israel, they detest Netanyahu, and Netanyahu has no backs up, he has nowhere else to turn. By the way, Ben, I don't know if you saw this polling of Trump's approval in Israel.

is now 38 approved, 54 disapproved.

“His approval went down 20 points since May 25th.”

And also, I don't know if you saw these, like Netanyahu aligned pundits are just ripping Trump to shreds, which I understand why they're mad in the moment, but it's so self-defeating. I mean, one guy on Channel 14 said that Trump was a loser. He called Jared Kushner and Steve Whitkoff, quote, "Jewboys who were bought by Qatar and sold out their brothers in Israel," and he called JD Vance a skumbag.

I'm at Seagull, who's a right-wing pundit, said Trump had completely surrendered to Iran. I quoted Kissinger saying it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but America's friend, but to be America's friend is fatal. There was another pundit on Channel 14 news who said Trump and Vance are becoming the modern Neville Chamberlain.

So I mean, this is, I don't know if Netanyahu was kind of like blessing this kind of commentary or think that's going to be effective with Trump, but it feels like a very dangerous game they're playing.

It just feels like a shrinking island, because it's basically people like that, and

it's really right, Mark Levin, Ben Shapiro, like there's no political constituency for this anywhere in the world, except like Israel, like elements of the American right, and I don't know, like that's maybe some, some of the extreme Hindu nationalists, and you know, who don't like Muslims, like this is, there's just, I don't know who they, they constantly act like it's permanently 2015, right, when they're trying to undermine

the JCPOA, because we've tried it their way for a decade, under Trump, and Franklin or Biden, with Gaza, and then under Trump again, like the world is sick of this shit, you know, they're sick of the bloodthirsty rhetoric, they're sick of everything being compared to Munich, they're sick of the idea that we have to like fight wars in seven Middle Eastern countries at once, like this is not working, like there needs to be a different

paradigm for creating a peaceful framework for life in the Middle East.

Now, to get to the core issue, we'll see, I don't think Netanyahu can afford to lose Trump,

because he's nowhere else to go. No, he can't. Democratic Party's gone. Not politically, you're also strategically, right, because like when you look at kind of, when you total out the actual, like missile defense expenditure, or who was shooting down

the missiles and drones flying at Israel, it was often the United States, it's like direct action by the United States to protect Israel, like Netanyahu can't lose that, he also can't lose Trump's political support.

“Yeah, so I think what we'll see is like they won't probably leave seven Lebanon, and”

they'll probably try the Gaza thing where they say it's a ceasefire, and then like periodically like they bomb something, but I don't know, like that's a dangerous game for them to play. I think it's more likely they try to act tough and talk tough, but like talk their tail between their legs and hold on to seven Lebanon, which is already something that's illegal under an international law.

And it's more likely that this thing does just kind of limp along as it kind of frozen conflict, while this nuclear stuff gets negotiated. Oh, yeah, I just hope these really is decided as time to Genesis and Netanyahu, because there could be a better relationship that is just like on firmer footing, that is not all the things we've just tested about it going forward, but you just got to vote the right

way, guys. All right, Ben, speaking of elections, there's a big election this week in the United Kingdom, that could change the course of history for the United for the UK. But interestingly, this is not something like major national election. We were talking about one by election, which is in the US we call it a special election,

for just one seat in the 650 seat House of Commons in a place called Maker Field. But the reason this Maker Field bi-election matters so much is because the Labor Party candidate, Andy Burnham, if he wins, he will almost certainly then challenge Prime Minister Kierstarmer to be the leader of the Labor Party, and if he wins that, he will become Prime Minister.

So Burnham is a well-known figure in British politics. He once served as a Cabinet Minister. He was like one of the more senior members of the Labor Party until he decided to quit parliament

“in I think 2015 or 2016, move back home to Manchester, and then run for mayor, which is”

like sort of it seems as a shocking decision at the time to move from national politics to more pro-co-politics. But it seems to have suited him quite well, stylistically, and for a lot of other reasons. He's like good at the kind of back slapping day-to-day work of politics, you know, you hear journalist talk about when you go out with Andy Burnham or you talk to people in Manchester,

like a lot of them have an experience with him, he's gone to their event, he got funding for their thing, you know, their community center, whatever. He also got credit for kind of pushing back on and questioning COVID, era lockdown restrictions. He just seems like more charismatic and likable than Kierstarmer, which I know is not the highest bar, but, you know, it's something.

So again, like winning the seat, though, will still be tough. Like a lot of Europe, the far right is ascended in the UK. We have talked many times about natural forage, kind of like cigarette come to life, and his far right anti-immigrant reform UK party. Other isn't even further right, alternative to reform UK called Restore, which launched

by an MP named Rupert Low, Restore is called for the nasty rotation of immigrants. They talk about the great replacement theory, they have embraced these like far right violent

activists, like this guy Tommy Robinson, who's basically a soccer hole again, turn political

activists, who even Nigel Farage has held at arms length, and by the way, of course, Elon Musk is now a big fan of Restore. He tweeted the other day, "Only Restore can save Britain." So back to the Maker field race, Ben. The irony here is that Andy Burnham could win and benefit if Restore does well and appeals

often of votes from the reform candidate, which would help him win. But Ben, regardless, it's pretty crazy that there's an election happening this week, we're only 75,000 people, we'll get to vote, and they could have such an enormous impact on the UK's history, global events, all of it, but I guess, you know, here we are. This is similar to, like, you know, precincts in Iowa, New Hampshire voting for the

presidential nomination, or something.

“Yeah, I think that what it tells you is that the labor party probably very much wants”

to move on from Kirstarmer, but that nobody in Westminster, nobody currently in the parliament,

was able to muster the coalition to do it. And so they cast around Andy Burnham, has a reputation, as you said, as a charismatic politician, he's to the left of Starmor, and that gives him more of a base of support than Starmor has in this kind of squishy center. And so it makes sense why they might want Andy Burnham, not having found someone else

kind of in the House of Commons, or the House of Ward to that matter. But yeah, it speaks to the dysfunction in British politics that we had, I don't know, five Tory Prime Ministers in about five years, and we maybe, you know, this may be like the six or five lost track, I mean, that just tells you, you know, there needs to be some stabilizing.

I see why, and I argued the case for why they need to move on from Starmor, but if they do, the goal should be, like, stability through the next general election here, but it gives them a chance. And we'll see what happens. It's, I mean, you know, boy, I don't know what the big board is going to say in the

election, but it's, it is pretty wild that, you know, people are going to be voting that kind of probably tactically, like a, maybe I want to vote for Burnham because I want Starmor out, even though I might not normally vote there, it'll be interesting to see what the kind of exit polls in the British version look like.

“Actually, I think it's probably benefiting Starmor that the Tories were such a basket case,”

and that's so much turnover. Because I think there's an argument within Labour that's like, come on, guys, we can't be like them. We can't be constantly like replacing our leaders, but again, Starmor had a tough week. I mean, John Healey is defense minister, quit last week.

They had a dispute over defense spending, Starmor promised to do, uh, spend 3% GDP by 2030 on defense, but all the planning has sort of fallen short. And it's a real problem, I think, for the UK, I mean, the BBC did a comparison of British defense capabilities. Now compared to 1990, the numbers are not good for them, in 1990, they had 153,000 soldiers.

That's been cut in half in 1990, they had, like, 48 major combat ships that down to 13. So they are really limited if there were to be some sort of, you know, conflict that was Europe-wide with Russia, for example. Starmor's, you know, still doing this thing. He's trying to introduce a social media ban for kids under 16.

That would apply to like Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, everything. It's worth noting that we covered the Australia social media ban a couple months back. That is not going very well. It seems kids are just finding ways around it, like, using their parents' ideas, using

“different accounts, fake ideas to get on, I think the Wall Street Journal found that seven”

out of 10 kids under 16 have social media accounts anyway, and maybe, you know, this generation won't benefit, but the next generation will, yeah. But, you know, sort of an interesting backdrop to kind of like, the way is Starmor's focused on to try to convince the public that he is doing his job. Yeah, well, I mean, the stories do connect in a way, because the social media ban is not

something that requires money.

I mean, I think, first of all, the Australia thing is going to be probably the first

in a series of experiments on this front, and we've already seen some Democrats running for President, or probably running for President, kind of proposing this. And I do think it's probably more the next generation coming up that you've got the impact. I will say on the defense side, the couple things that jumped out to me are, or one, like,

Starmor's in a possible position here, because they just don't have a lot of money, and they've been making cuts to popular things, and they've kind of, you know, raising taxes isn't ever popular, and sometimes you just don't have enough to pay for all the things you promise. But there's a bigger story, Tommy, if you talk to people across Europe, too, Trump likes

to tout, and this isn't me sort of going to pick on Trump, but this is me pointing out facts related to defense spending. There are these all these wild pledges, you know, 3% to 5%, nobody is building up hitting these targets. So like, it's all made up.

These are just people got together in NATO summit, and they all pledged to do something, and then Trump rags about it, but like, I mean, yes, they are spending more, but they're

investing in capabilities, and specific capabilities, rather than just kind of throwing arbitrary

“numbers out there, because you end up in situations like this, when you set some arbitrary”

target that you know you can't hit in your budget, well, this ends up happening. And Starmor's bigger problem is the economy is just stuck, and he has not been able to get it going into years, and government spending can help with that, but by the way, government spending on defense is not going to help at all there, because what's going to happen is the Brits will go and buy a bunch of U.S. weapon systems and money into Raytheon's pocket

and not help anybody in the UK. One last thing, man, just on this far right, sort of political movement issue, this is something we've been tracking periodically, and it's just interesting to see like the far right splitting in the UK. That is also happening in Italy.

There's a new party there called National Future. They don't think that Georgia Maloney is, you know, far enough right for them, so they have announced this new party in France, the National Rally Party, is still the main event, but there's this kind of growing leadership struggle between Marine Le Pen and her protege, Jordan Bardella, who's doing like big interviews of Politico this week for some reason.

I don't know if you've caught that one. And then also one lesson that we noticed was Switzerland had a vote on capping the population

of the country at 10 million by 2050.

Now this was rejected. It was 55 to 45 as brought forward by this right wing party called the Swiss People's Party.

“A lot of people voting to cap the population of the country, and I think it just shows”

you the power of anti-immigrant messaging in Europe in particular, you know, I think that one in three people in Switzerland or foreign borne, there's led to a backlash. There's been huge protests in riots and bell fasts because of, you know, a migrant tried to stab somebody or almost bad them, but it's just like a very important political undertone and driver of the vote that we're watching.

Yeah. I mean, there's obviously the ugly undertone of extreme anti-immigrant politics. I mean, you could debate border policy. I think the one thing I'd say that you pointed out, as these far right parties kind of smell actual power, you are likely to have more fracturing among the far right.

Because all of a sudden, we're not just like some fringe movement that has to all back the same leader because we're just trying to get attention or we're trying to get over the threshold just to get into the parliament, it actually gets a little harder when you get closer to the actual thing. And we could start to see this kind of fracturing in country after country, like we're, you

know, like we are beginning to see in the UK. It takes a politician like Maloney who kind of managed to kind of tame her rivals and, I mean, incredibly skill politician, but it's no guarantee that that will be the case in these other countries. But the French election will be a huge test of it next year. Obviously, the next British

election will be a test of Farage, so a lot to watch here, but including whether as in the US, where you have these kind of fractures in maga, where maga is starting to be like, "Well, Trump's not far right enough for me, I'm going to go off and listen to this podcast." Well, you're seeing that in European politics, too. Yeah, for sure.

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we sounded the alarm about Trump's attempt to install this guy named Bill Pulti is director of National Intelligence. Bill Pulti is a fucking moron who's currently in charge of the federal housing finance agency. He was using that position to pull confidential mortgage enemies, try to manipulate it, set it over to DOJ, to manufacture prosecutions of Trump's enemies. The good news is that Trump faced bipartisan and very intense pushback on the Pulti nomination

he ultimately caved in withdrew Pulti although he still trying to install him on an acting basis

for a short period of time. The new nominee to be the director of National Intelligence is Jay Clayton, who is the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, which sees a lot of counterterrorism work. He's a former SEC chairman. So this guy might be a maga hack. I don't really know that much about him but at least he has a lot of relevant experience to bring to the job on like Bill Pulti who was like a couple of weeks ago we played a clip from him on a podcast about HVAC systems.

So, you know, there's also a him at a conference where the guy got slapped in the face of the Dildo because he was pumping. Yeah, I'd like to think that that's my stock segment that we did is

“probably what killed the Pulti nomination. Yeah, I think I heard it got played in the Oval Office,”

Maggie, and Thomas and Swan, for sources. So rare good news, also interestingly, like so there's sort of two debates around the DNI that have been kicked up. The one is whether Democrat should vote to reauthorize Section 702 of FISA, which allows the intelligence community to get without a warrant intercepted communications of foreign persons outside of the United States from American social media and tech companies. I over, you know, in the past, I think I've defended 702 as the most

defensible, even though there were abuses. Now, I feel pretty firmly in the camp that if I were in Congress, I would not reauthorize any intelligence collection program because of Trump things it's such, this is such a game that he could install Bill Pulti as the DNI, then we shouldn't give them any more authorities, but also it's kicked up this conversation about whether the DNI position should be eliminated entirely. It sounds like that might be where Trump is, some members of Congress

are. I don't know if you had to take on that ban or if you've been tracking that to bake, so I know, you know, you were part of like kind of the post 9/11 work of that lead to the

creation of the DNI, but that was sort of a new one to me. So first of all, I think the killing

“of the Pulti nomination, you, you, you have to think that what happened is, Zimba,”

Republicans called Trump and said you just can't do, you know, it's a sign that there might be some healthier pushback, then say, "You're a go" from Republicans, and maybe they tied it to 702. Then, I, the other two things, I'd say, on 702, the Intel people create this binary where it's like, "You either reauthorize this or the sky's going to fall," but the point is it, like, even if you're in a better governing situation than Trump, I think you don't

reauthorize it, and you kind of have to recreate all these Patriot Act authorities and narrow them in scope and put in more safeguards. Like, that's the conversation we should be having about reform, and the DNI itself, the reason I continually believe that you should have one. I mean, Trump hasn't really used the office in the way it should be used. I mean, Tulsi Gabbard was in there doing raids down in Fulton County, like Rick Griddell was in the first term during

gotten us what. The only reason I still think it's worth having is what is the alternative? Like, someone has to run this kind of sprawling apparatus in terms of someone has to help set intelligence priorities, someone has to help kind of prepare the information flow to the president of the United States, like the presidential daily brief. And in the past, before there was a DNI, the director of the CIA did that, and it just kind of created this like turbo charged

empowered figure who was both operational running all DCI operations and overseeing the budgets of all these other agencies. I don't know. I still think that, like, if anyone was actually interested in, like the intelligence community functioning properly, it would help to have someone in that role. It's just said, oftentimes, you've had presidents who didn't take that seriously, and, you know, preferred to turn to their CIA director, or their NSA director, and kind of

just someone helping mine the silver aircraft. Set priorities, yeah, exactly. I mean, it's a good

government position. And so one example of how the DNI can work is Avril Haines, when she was the DNI, was the person who drove the entire strategy to declassify intelligence about Russia and building Ukraine, which helped get everybody on board and get prepared for when that happened. I don't think that can, that kind of thing could have taken place without Avril Haines doing that.

“And so I think Avril is a good example of what you can do when you have a competent person”

in a role like that. So two more things. So we wanted to flag a report about just the ongoing humanitarian disaster that is resulted from Donald Trump, an Elon Musk, congrats to being a trillionaire, by the way, sir, destroying USAID. So this comes from someone named Sam Vickersky at the Council on Foreign Relations, a great report. It de-the report details the Trump administration's complete mismanagement of food for peace, which is a program that was transferred from USAID.

So the Department of Agriculture after USAID was gutted despite the fact that the agriculture department has zero expertise in disaster response or like the administering global humanitarian aid. So just didn't make any sense to put it over there. So even more problematic then is that food for peace is currently distributing American grain to seven countries, two of which Rwanda and El Salvador don't meet any sort of emergency standard. So clearly this is just a favor to countries

that did something that Trump liked, specifically on immigration for El Salvador. And then other countries in severe crisis are just not getting anything. So the biggest one, the biggest red flag on this list is Sudan, which has the world's worst hunger crisis. And then there's a bunch of other countries with Muslim populations like Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Yemen. But again, the scale of the crisis in Sudan is something hard to overstate. The World Health Organization

reported at the beginning of this year that over 20 million people required health assistance at

21 million desperately needed food. 13.6 million people have been displaced and 40% of Sudan's community kitchens have closed since the beginning of the year presumably because they don't have anything to give out because USAID has gone. So then it's just one of those examples like where you read about the impact of USAID getting gutted. It's hard to keep it on the front pages. It's hard to sort of like help people understand the impact without specific examples.

“But I honestly just don't know how any other word to describe what they did here other than evil.”

There's just like millions of kids are going to starve period. I think the Elon comparison is apt here, Tommy. I just say like at these events I've been doing, I've had like over, I think 15 or 20 people were Doge and USAID. And you see the loss in terms of the funding to places like Sudan, the people that want to have a channel for doing something good in the world. I think the split screen of Elon Musk becoming a trilliner at the same time

that we see these kind of shortages in places like Sudan says something pretty profound about the world and its priorities. And we just have to keep beating this drum. I honestly, Tommy like this may not this may be far too punitive. I don't know like a special tax on that trillion dollars to create the next international development agency might be like if you look at such a fraction. The USAID budget is such a fraction of just this one human being's wealth. And it says something

about our priorities that like we exalt Elon Musk for being a trilliner while we don't pay arounding era of his wealth to help save hundreds of thousands of lives around the world. I do think that Democrats cannot forget that there's a responsibility on the back end to build a better development agency frankly that's more fit for the purpose of the 2020s and USAID necessarily was. It did great work, but obviously it could have been reformed. And yeah, maybe maybe that is like

a one piece of the kind of wealth tax that needs to be put in place. All for the wealth tax, I can't believe that Elon becoming a trilliner is not like kind of the moment when the pitch works come out in the populist outrage of the bubbles over to a new place. But here we are finally been. We're just kind of some fun. So the the FIFA World Cup is happening as we speak. I don't

know about you. I spent the morning watching France versus Senegal is an incredible game in

Bob Bay's unbelievable. It's like went off in the second half. Last week we covered a lot of the issues with the World Cup, some of the terrible things that the Trump administration is doing around the games. Today we're just going to have some fun. How many games have you caught? I know you've been

“on the road. I've got part of like three or four games. Yeah, I think I've had it on all day”

every day at the office and then I'm like laying in bed at night streaming on my phone as I go to sleep. So I've been pretty, pretty obsessed. I also went to see my next content. Yeah, you were doing it. I can't get in the middle of all my nicks podcasts. Well, you also had the UFC fight on the south lawn. I went to the USA Paraguay game on Friday and NLA. It was a shout out Ben and Vicki my buddy from college for getting us tickets. It was one of the most fun sports experiences I've

super patriotic, fun people chanting just like psyched on the way in and then you know in typical

“American fashion you just beat the brakes off of some country of less than seven million people”

and celebrated. But everyone's cool about it. It was a great thing to like see the team playing that well and these young stars. And one thing I just want to say to listeners like in the discord community and stuff, get a lot of people being like, how can you root for team USA when Trump is president and in this moment? And it's like, I just want to say, don't let them take this from you. You know, like this is all of our country,

be patriotic, like root for your teams, be psyched at the diversity on that team. And the fact that like a guy who scored two goals would be described by the Ben Shapiro's of the world as an anchor baby. You know what I mean? Like the immigration is made us a better team. Right? Like there's a lot to love about this team. A lot to celebrate about these players. Like I don't know. I just I hate when liberals or progressive like let Republicans take patriotism and cheering for

your country away from us. Because I like, first of all, it sucks. And also I think like people

want to be part of a political movement that celebrates their country that loves their country despite its flaws. Yeah, I'd add to that in two ways. The first is the same progressive impulse that I like, which is like, why are we punishing their rainy and team? Why are we not letting you know, them stay in the United States? I agree with all that. I don't think we I think they're

“raining teams to be treated like everybody else. I think you should be able to say where the”

fuck they want their coach to be able to come, all those things. Well, that applies to our players too. Like just like I don't include, you know, hold the Iranian soccer players responsible for the conduct of their government. Why should we hold our players accountable for what Donald Trump said? I mean, that kind of plays into the idea that Donald Trump is America and, right, and that

what, like, you know, every one of these players is playing for Donald Trump. And then the second thing

is we should call out and we have called out and we'll call out any like ridiculous xenophobia and racism in terms of like not letting certain people into this country and all these other things. But actually, once the game start, I'm not seeing that that's how American fans are acting. No, like the opposite. Seems like people are pretty, I was it. I was down on Venice Beach of the day and there was a huge fucking Argentina show of strength. They had all the flags out.

They had like beach tents and the Argentine flag and people were loving it. They were like dance into the music and it's a fun to have people from all over the world here. And Americans, most Americans, not all Americans obviously, we like to Trump twice, but like most Americans are kind of psyched to have the rest of the world here. Like let's let ourselves, you know, even if you're not like the most raw, raw, patriotic person fine, but like let's let ourselves like feel good

about the players. Because I just don't, I just don't agree with like punishing athletes from the conduct of their government. It's stupid. And also, I agree with you. Like I think it's been really fun seeing all these clips and social media of foreign visitors to the United States

experiencing like waffle house for the first time and losing their mind. And you kind of feel like

you're experiencing your country all over again through the eyes of someone else. And it makes you it reminds you of all the things you love about it and why it's great. And like, yes, you see these cultures converging in host cities. You see like Korean fans getting shit face with Mexican fans and like, I love that. Going to the club and making out. This is so great. Like, yeah, there's just so much joy. And so what we did is actually we brought you guys a super cut of some of our favorite moments

“of these clips. Again, this is a reason why you need to subscribe to Potsay of the world on YouTube”

because you can see these clips. Be as if not a lot of dialogue in this. It's just like lots of fun stuff. But we'll play it and then I'll tell you where's what we just watched. up in Mexico. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

All right, so we played a lot of stuff there, because Vaj can't get off of it. So I think we had some, the fans from Norway just kept like pretending they were rowing things. There's videos of them on an escalator, the Scottish fans took Boston by storm. They were dudes playing bag pipes at 6.30 in the morning.

The entire Scottish fanbase apparently, they must have just bought tickets to go see a Red Sox game at Fenway Park. Then they took the place over, they were literally hanging from the rafters. They were singing songs, like people who went said it was the most fun Red Sox game. They had been two and years in part, because the team sucks right now, but we won't

talk about that. You had Mexican fans doing dancing, Gangnam style, with South Korean fans. You had the ESPN Mexico post to this video, the Mexican fans sharing their tequila bottle with the Koreans. I should know as the Koreans sharing it with the Mexicans, because they brought a bottle of

You couldn't bring it to the stadium, and then just decided to take shots with all

their counterparts.

“My favorite people in the entire video been were the Nigerian dudes who were such haters”

of the South African team that they traveled all the way to Mexico to watch the loose. Love those dudes. It's Senegal fans in Times Square. Then you had Ecuador and Ivory Coast plans, playing flip-cup against each other, outside of a game in Philly, apparently Philly is the only place where you really allowed to tailgate

hard. I don't know. How do you not love this? I love, they are simply our culture, we're sampling their culture, it's blending together. I also love, I love written for the USA, I love finding these teams that I fall in love

with growing the way.

Sometimes you fall in love with the teams, because they're fans.

How can you not root for the Koreans? They love their teams as much as they're getting wasted on tequila shots. It's great. Like we're being versus Cape Verde, like somehow and probably played them to a tie, there have been a lot of great gutty games.

Yeah, Cape Verde. Yeah, I was really Cape Verde there. I like the underdogs. I like the underdogs too, buddy, mine went to their Ron game in LA, the other night that it was packed.

I watched it on two. Yeah. Anyway, lots of great stuff happening, watch the World Cup games if you are not, it will bring you great joy. Okay, then I'm going to take a break, but when we come back, you're going to hear my interview

with Fred Plankin from CNN, we'll talk about his recent trip to Iran, what he heard from average Iranians from the Irish to see officials he talked to and much more so stick around for that. Pot tape world is brought to you by fast growing trees. Did you know the fast growing trees is America's largest and most trusted online nursery

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Quick question, are you politically engaged and spiritually exhausted? If you said yes to both, welcome home, I'm Erin Ryan, and I'm Alyssa Mastermonico, and we're the host of his story of the podcast for women who care about democracy culture and not losing their minds in the process. We break down the news, call out the nonsense, and spotlight the women actually fighting

back on Capitol Hill in classrooms and everywhere the stakes are high. It's sharp, honest analysis, featuring women's voices, with humor and zero handholding. Listen to hysteria wherever you get your podcasts and watch full episodes on YouTube. Joining me today is Fred Pluttkin, he is the senior international correspondent at CNN 's base in Berlin, but until last Friday he was on the ground reporting from Iran.

Fred, thanks so much for making the time. Yeah, thank you for having me. So I want to start with the news and get more into the experience of being in Iran. The US and Iran have reportedly cut a deal to end the war. We don't know what's in the deal because they won't tell us if they won't release the

text. The gist seems to be reopening the Strait of Hormuz and the two sides tried to negotiate some sort of follow-on about Iran's nuclear program.

able to talk with people you met in Iran about the gist of this sort of agreement and

get a sense of how they felt about it. Yeah, certainly. I spoke with Iranian officials and sort of everyday people on the streets as well. And I think especially if you spoke to local shop owners, folks on the street and stuff, there were a lot of them who were saying that they really wanted the conflict to end and

they're really hoping for some sanctions relief. One of the things about the past couple of months, especially, but really the past years in Iran, is that they have had some economic problems. And if you look at the time since the war started, the internet was shut down for an extended period of time.

And they are really a very linked up society. They do a lot of online business and that made it very difficult for them. So a lot of folks were saying they were persevering, but they were kind of happy to hopefully get a break.

And if you look at the Iranian officials that we spoke to, we actually spoke to a lot of

officials, including two advisors to Iran's Supreme Leader. One of the things that was very important for them was getting some of their frozen assets.

“And that's what they kept talking to us about.”

They said, look, there's about, you know, they were talking about 24 billion roundabout. They said they considered a goodwill gesture by the US if the US were to give that back. How and what sort of mechanism there could be for that was unclear, but that was something that was really key for them and then obviously lifting the blockade was the other thing that was key for them as well.

But I think that this whole thing, the idea of that way we were just talking about of making this a two-step process. We're on the one hand, they stopped the hostilities. The Iranians open the street for moves. The US lifts the naval blockade.

The Iranians can start exporting some of the oil that's obviously caught up there in that area. I think that, you know, that's something that they are latching onto as well.

Like, always said, they wanted to keep the discussions about their nuclear program out

of the first memorandum of understanding and then move that into a later stage. Yeah, I could totally understand the kind of basic Maslow hierarchy of needs, like ending the conflict would be number one for everyone. But I also wonder if there are people who feel like Donald Trump is just, look, he is just cutting a deal to get gas prices down in the US and all this talk early on of, like,

riding to the rescue of protesters who were killed seems to be gone and he seems to be just happy leaving in place this new regime, which looks a lot like the old regime, but Trump down describes them as pragmatic. So I don't, I could imagine it cutting both ways, but it sounds like people just wanted it over.

You know what?

“I think one of the things, it's a really, really interesting question.”

And I was actually, I was in Iran also in February of this year, before the war started, but also after the demonstrations that took place there, that, you know, obviously ended very, very violently. And I have to say that when I was on the ground back then, I was speaking to people and a lot of people back then were asking me, is, is the US going to bomb us?

Is there going to be war? And I said at that point, you know, I think about 80% yes, 70 to 80% yes, and there were actually some people who then gave me a thumbs up because they were so angry at the government. But then I was also in Iran after the bombing started and a lot of those same people were like we could not imagine how bad this was going to be.

And having been there when that happened at the height of the bombing campaign, it was definitely one of the toughest experience I have to admit that I've ever had because the thing is that, like there, you know, there's no real place to seek shelter, there's no bomb shelters, there's a subway, but, you know, there's not that many subway stations also, and, you know, when, when a military uses 2,000 pound bombs in an urban area, it, it, it just, you know,

there's going to be what people call collateral damage is going to be civilians who were harmed.

“And I think a lot of people were just downright shocked at what was going on.”

You know, and I can tell you from us being there, there really wasn't an extended period of time that we went anywhere that there wasn't a bombing nearby. So I think for a lot of people having experienced that, you know, they're like, we really want to go to something different. You know, we would like to have a chance economically, and, and I do think that right now,

the leadership is definitely, you know, very emboldened and, and fields very entrenched as well. Yeah, I would imagine. So again, you're one of the very few Western reporters who's managed to get into Iran since the war started.

You just tell us, like, where you went, what you saw, and what the general impact was on the average Iranian person. Well, the impact was huge. I mean, so the way that it worked this time, normally you fly into Iran by, there's international airlines that fly into Tehran Airport.

Obviously, that wasn't going on this time. And I have to say, I've been, I've been traveling Iran for a long time. I think I've been there like 45, 46 times, a lot of Iranian cities. But this time, it was, it was Tehran and the Greater Tehran area while the war was going on. And what we did, because we'd heard that a lot of the border crossings were closed as we flew

into Armenia.

You know, they were very, the security guys there were, were nervous to let us in.

And then they did. But we had, so we had like a 14-hour drive then to Tehran. And we were already, as we were driving in, this is in the really early stages.

“Like I think three or four days after the war started.”

We were already going past industrial areas that had been bombed. We saw plumes of smoke. And then we actually, we stopped shortly before Tehran, because there was bombing going on in the west of the city that we would have had to drive through. So we didn't do that.

But while we were going down for the night, they bombed an area close to us as well. And I woke up in the morning. They were jets overhead. It was, I mean, the impact was felt by everybody. You know, it was, it was a big bombing campaign that was going on.

And, you know, for a long time, I think in the cities, it was mostly the Israelis doing

the bombing. So it's really, but also American jets were almost flying at will and just taking out a lot of places. And it was, it was difficult for a lot of people, you know. And they were, they were afraid to go to work, to go about their lives.

Because a lot of security installations were hit, military bases, police stations, government buildings. And, you know, if your business is close to that, then, you know, there's a, there's a good chance that you could be hurt.

“There was one place that we went to where they took out, I think it was a police station”

and the local folks that were telling us that got taken out. But the bakery across the street, pretty far away, got, you know, got badly damaged as well. They're local baker got killed.

Yeah, I mean, it was, it was a huge impact, and on top of that, of course, you know,

a lot of people lost their work, a lot of businesses were destroyed, like, for instance, the almost the entire steel industry, you know, if you recall, that there were big strikes against the steel industry. So it's, it's a big economic hit, and I think it was at the, the bombing was pretty shocking for a lot of people around.

I think. Well, so, you know, you, you talked about how before the war started, the other was this massive protest movement followed by a massive crackdown on the protesters. Yeah. Were you able to get any sense of support for the Iranian regime after that protest movement

was crushed? Yeah. The bombing rates started.

“I think that it took a big hit, but I think that it was still, there was still a degree”

there. And, you know, one of the things that I said after we got out in February, this was again, this was before the war, but after the, the, the crackdown that happened is I felt that, you know, the support for the government was, was, was pretty weak before that already, you know, it was, you know, the economy wasn't doing very well.

There was a reason why the protests had happened. And I think that that, you know, obviously took another hit again. But I said when I came out that I didn't think that there was going to be an uprising against the government, if the U.S. starts bombing simply because there were so many security forces on the ground at that point.

You know, everywhere you went, there was a checkpoint everywhere. And, and these are, these are, you know, local militias that are very much entrenched also in the community. You know, there were dudes with their sons at the checkpoint, since it was like more of the siege than like military.

It's very, yeah, it was a lot of besieged, but also on top of that, like local militias that, you know, I couldn't define. But anyway, there were a lot of guys out with guns on the streets, patrolling the streets, motorcycle groups patrolling the streets. So I said, it, it would be very difficult even if people wanted to do that.

And on the other hand, also, there really, I didn't really see very much as of an organized movement, you know, because obviously the opposition was really organized to begin with. There, you know, they came out and there were demonstrations for the government. And I think the government's support certainly increased as the bombing went on, because a lot of people didn't want intervention from the outside.

But of course, that discontent was definitely, in February was very much there. Yeah. One last question on the process. I mean, the estimates for how many people were killed in the protests seem to range from 5,000 to 40,000, is there anything else?

I think it's from like 3,000 to like 40,000. It's very, it's super difficult to ascertain, also because we obviously have very little, even when you're on the ground, you know, I don't, I don't, I don't report to know what every Iranian thing, you know, or what the public opinion there is. But it is quite difficult.

I think the government has some figure of like 3,000, something. I would assume it's, it's higher, you know, maybe considerably higher than that. I was actually, um, when, uh, when I was there in February, one of the things that we did do is we went to the big, the main cemetery of Tehran, it's called Behesh Dizadra. It's, uh, in the south of the city near the Imam Komeni shrine.

And there were a lot of fresh grapes. And there were a lot of fresh grapes, and there were a lot of families crying there, you know, and then we wrote an article about it. There were a lot of people who were like, "Please don't put me on camera," um, but yeah,

the sense, something very, very terrible it happened. And a lot of people had seen very terrible things happen, yeah. I bet. You also managed to go to an IRGC event. Uh, can you tell us about the event?

“It's like, what's, what's the vibe, the IRGC event?”

I went to a couple of IRGC events actually. Um, yeah, so, um, I was at one, I think it was, I don't know, this is Friday over the Thursday, I think. Um, so basically, it's also the one year anniversary of the Israeli attacks, um, in last June.

And so they were basically, you know, where a lot of senior IRGC leaders were killed in the early stages of that. So they basically had the morning ceremony for one year on for that. Um, and, you know, the, the, the IRGC right now, I think, uh, from what I gleaned, feels as though it's much more in control, um,

and in command and stronger than it was maybe even a year ago. I think one of the things that that they sort of pride themselves on is that they got hit

by two of the most powerful air, if not the two most powerful air forces in the world,

they stood, they reconstituted themselves, they struck back, they managed to project power into the Gulf region, into the straight of four moves. Um, and, and, and that obviously gave them a big internal boost. So from what I saw, um, their morale was pretty high. I mean, we were at an event, you know, where they were screaming death to America and death

to Israel. They're kind of things that you very often hear, but you could tell that their whole vibe seems to be, uh, I would say, you know, a lot more confident and a lot more nimble than maybe you would have seen before. It's one of the interesting things that, you know, with with so many senior all sort of

evolutionary guard leaders who were killed, um, in the early stages of the U.S. Israeli campaign of the Israeli campaign, that it's, it's actually kind of rejuvenated the military leadership, um, to a certain extent.

“And I think that you also, you saw that also as the war went on.”

I mean, one of the things that was really a standout moment for me as I, you know, observed the war was, there was, there was an instance when the Israelis, well, into the war, hits the Natan's nuclear facility, and it took the Iranians only a couple hours to go back and strike at Dimonah at the Israeli nuclear facility.

And that to me made very clear that first of all, their command and control structure was

still very much in place, and that also they're able to point their missiles in very different directions, maybe then before and still project power even all the way into Israel. And I think that's something that really, for them, I don't know if it was surprising, but certainly something that to them showed that their sort of strategy of asymmetric warfare to an extent at least was working.

Yeah, I think it definitely worked. I mean, yeah, you got to my next question, which is, you Trump keeps describing the new leadership in Iran as more pragmatic, more willing to make a deal. There's this question of whether most Hamanai is sick or injured or really

“calling the shots. What's your sense of the leadership structure these days?”

So I think to a certain extent, they are definitely, I would also say, they're still, they're quite pragmatic, actually. I mean, I do have to say that the fact that they were in this war, which they defined

as a war of survival, but at the same time, they also, first of all, managed to reconstitute

pretty much all of their, it's not the state institutions, but it's the system. You know what I mean? The thing about Iran is that you can, you can kill a lot of guys, but the system survives, you know? It's, it's almost like a blob that just keeps coming back. And, and they did that very quickly. I mean, if you think about it, I told Ali Hamanai, who's killed in the early hours, he'd been a supreme leader, I think,

for 37 years. So that was a very, very long time. And it looked like that, that rain, you know, was going on forever. It took them three days to get a new supreme leader going, you know? And that, that, in itself, shows that the system was working. Then there's the Supreme National Security Council at the military, obviously, leadership, a lot of guys were killed as well. And then they managed to put that system back together. And then also,

that led to new sort of emphases in many of these places. You know, the military, obviously, had that very important role for them, the Supreme National Security Council, a lot of guys who were taking on more prominent roles. But to get to the question, so I started for many, I know that the American Intel assessment is that Muchitaba Hamanai is getting more and more involved, is calling the shots that he might have been severely injured.

My take that is that it really doesn't matter. But, you know, to what extent he's fit or not fit, because you see that the Iranian leadership is able to make decisions. They're able to make strategic decisions. They were able to cut deal appears with the United States. They were able to put together a strategy for the straight-of-form moves. They just put together this new straight-of-form moves authority that they want to establish with the Amani's. So clearly, this is a functioning

state that, you know, with the state institutions, still work. And that is also able to define,

I don't know if you call it pragmatic or nimble. But, you know, if you look at the military now, they're making Lego movies. They're sort of messaging is very different than it was before, it addresses younger people. So, yeah, I mean, it's by all accounts, you know, in the ways that they need to function, they are functioning. And the presidency is functioning as well, you know, it's like the state institutions are all working. Do you think the elected officials have any

power, you know, the foreign minister, like, or they just kind of fake leaves, you know, the IRGC calls it shots? Well, I don't know, I think, I don't think that they're fig leaves. It's a really interesting question, because I think a lot of that also, you know, a lot of that's changed over the time this conflict has gone on. I mean, obviously, right now, the military is a lot more powerful than it was before, you know, because they, from what I can see, they've been

given the authority or if taken the authority that, you know, with, if the US, for instance, strikes, anywhere in Iran or Israel, strikes, Beirut, the responses up to them. And no one is going to stop right, you know, they can ask them to stop them, but they're going to do whatever they want to do, right?

And at the same time, the Supreme Leader's office obviously is always very important as well.

But if you look at, especially the foreign minister, you know, he was by this system, I think, defined as the guy who's going to talk to the Americans. So he's the entry point into that system for them, because he speaks the language of the Americans and he can speak, then translate into

“their system. So I mean, I think he's got a very important function actually, but they all,”

nobody is, you know, you know, one of the things that we kept hearing from the Trump administration was they, they, they kept talking about fractures in the leadership. And I think that that's because maybe because they had this experience with Venezuela where they got Delsea Rodriguez. You know, remember how they were talking about how the, the, the parliament, the president of the Iranian parliament could be the next Delsea Rodriguez. That's not how Iran works. And so I think,

except for them, they were always looking for that guy to talk to. The guy where they're like,

this is what we want from you, but it's a system, you know, I think any guy that you talk to, he's going to tell them the military needs to sign off, the spring leaders office needs to sign off, spring their security council needs to sign off. The presidency needs to be informed. The president there is more like a domestic guy, but it's not one guy that you talk to. And I think that, you know, the fact that they in the end got an agreement going is because the US probably realized that, you know,

“and there's one thing, if, if, if I can say it, I know, if I'm going overboard. But I think one of the”

really interesting things that I sort of observed in this conflict is that, you know, the Islamic Republic on paper has the Supreme Leader who is the final authority on everything. But if you look at the sort of way that the US and Iran dealt with each other, the US seemed to be much more the country that had an absolute leader rather than Iran. You know, whereas the US is like Trump's going to make the decision, he says this or that, whereas the Iranian is saying this has to go through

all of our institutions and all of our institutions have to sign off. It was that, that was one of the things that I thought was really interesting to see that they really have this very continuous process, which takes forever now also because of all the security mechanisms that they put in place after

so many of their leaders were killed. Yeah, it's always funny to hear Trump bitching about the delays

and hearing back. It's like, well, you did try to kill almost all of these people that you're trying to email now. So, you know, I can understand why I might take them a minute to get back. Yeah, it takes a long time. I mean, it took them two weeks to sometimes to answer to some of these things. Yeah, it's crazy. Last question. I just, like, he tells about the process for setting up a visit to Iran. I mean, like, you have a minder while you're there. Like, I'm good friends with Jason

“Rizayin who has taken prisoner by the Iranian regime. Is that in the back of your head?”

Not really. That's not really in the back of my head. I mean, sometimes it is, yeah. But not normally. We don't have a minder. We have a sort of translator with us who we've been working with forever. Who's, you know, we hire him freelance. The way that I said that you set it up, there's basically there's several government bodies that have to sign off on it, right? So, you apply for a visa. There's a website, EVs, Iran, anybody can, can go on it.

For journalists visas, the foreign ministry needs to sign off. So, you basically you apply your local embassy for meets Berlin. And then that goes to the Ford Ministry. They then deal with it. And the other ministry, it's the most of the culture ministry because they are responsible for media affairs. And then they all have, at some point, they meet, they discuss everything. And they say whether or not they give you a visa. But there's actually that that's for, for

American media. Because America doesn't have diplomatic relations with Iran. But for instance, there's a lot of, you know, German media, French media that actually have permanent force bonds in Tehran. That is something that's possible. But, you know, sometimes when I, when I spoke in the past two officials, and I was like, you know, you want to grant us better access

And, hey, bring 'em over. Do you feel like people are willing to speak honestly with you?

“I mean, I'd be terrified. I think some of, it's an interesting question. I mean, obviously,”

there's a lot of people who don't. And I don't, I don't, you know, pretend that I really understand all of Iranians aside. I try to learn from them. And I, and I, you know, every time you take in something new, the way that we do it at our network is that I do my part, you know, I talk to the people that I can talk to there on the ground. But you also other people, you know,

who anonymously speak to folks who are on the ground there, who contact people, and then try to

get the different perspectives. But I think all of us, every network, we're sort of trying to put together the puzzle of what public opinion might be like there. But it's a big country. It's a big country. And it's a very diverse country, also, you know, with, with, with, with a lot of different cultures, a lot of different types of folks, you know, and, and, you know, they have big, our

“meaning and Christian community. They have, they have this, I think, the second biggest Jewish”

community in the Middle East after Israel. So it's, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a very, you know, it's not a monolithic country at all. No, of course. Yeah, it's silly for, in Americans. I mean, imagine if you're a foreign correspondent and you go New York City or you go to Dallas, right? It's going to be a different five or some rural area. It's going to be a different five. Exactly. And things that people underestimate also how big Iran is, you know, it is absolutely massive.

I mean, we drove from the border to Tehran in, like, 13, 14 hours. And if you look at it on the map, it's not that much. You know, there's a lot, there's a lot of stuff south of that. And so down to Golem, you're going to have a very different experience of, um, exactly like that. Well, listen, I think what the

reporting you do is like essential and fascinating. I wish there was a bunch of Iranian correspondence

coming over to Washington and like some a little more connectivity. Hopefully the new administration policy will maybe get us back to having embassies and diplomatic relations and something less insane. It could be. I mean, I mean, the, the, I was in the US embassy there a couple of times, uh, the old US embassy that got stormed, uh, which is now a museum actually, um, who knows if they'll ever get that back. I mean, you know, yeah, and they might be holding on to that one

“one. But if you want to tell them back, well, Fred, thank you so much for doing the show. It's absolutely”

fascinating. I really appreciate your time. Thank you very much. Thanks again, Fred, play again for joining the show and, uh, Ben, good luck on the world tour. And we'll, uh, we'll see you guys next week. See you in Chicago, actually. Yeah, man, I'll see you soon. The positive world is a quick immediate production. Our show is produced by aluminum and coffee, Michael Voltsmith and Nisha Bonnergy. Our team includes Matt to grow and have coat Jordan Cantor, Kenny Muffett, David Tolls and Ryan Young. Her staff has

proud the unionized with the writer's guild of America East. Quick question. Are you politically engaged and spiritually exhausted? If you said yes to both, welcome home. I'm Aaron Ryan, and I'm Alyssa Mastermonico. And we're the hosts of his Staria, the podcast for women who care about democracy culture and not losing their minds in the process. We break down the news, call out the nonsense, and spotlight the women actually fighting back

on Capitol Hill in classrooms and everywhere the stakes are high. It's sharp, honest analysis, featuring women's voices with humor and zero handholding. Listen to his stereo wherever you get your podcasts and watch full episodes on YouTube.